Home Made Porn

We received a question for our Ask Doug video feature, and I thought it might be wiser to answer it here. The question has to do with what a husband and wife may do sexually when they are separated for an extended period of time. Military deployments provide a good case in point.

It is quite possible that some regular readers of this blog might feel like both the question and the answer fall under the TMI category, as in, Too Much Information. If you are likely to fall into such a category, I will put a discrete “read more” break here, and you may walk away and pretend as though you didn’t even read this far.

Here are the questions:

Q1:  Is it necessarily sinful for a man to masturbate to “porn” of his own wife when away for long time?  Obviously, the masturbation is the main issue… one can easily close his eyes and imagine memories.

And the second question is like unto it:

Q2:  Should receiving nude pictures of your wife by “secure means” (when you know you two will be geographically separated for long periods of time) ever be encouraged with a large motivation of having the man be detracted from the temptation of other women a husband may encounter?

The question would involve things like phone sex, nude pictures, cheesecake photos, homemade porn, and so forth.

I would like to break the answer into three sections. The first has to do with wisdom and discretion, the second has to do with the lawfulness of marital masturbation under such circumstances, and the third, has to do with lawfulness of things like homemade porn.

First, there is no such thing as “secure means.” Do you really want to have phone sex between you and your true love and some mouth-breathing functionary at the NSA? Has no one ever heard of lost phones? Or messages sent to the wrong address, whoops? Hackers? Even if you are a cyber-security ninja, there is still the human element. We have even had court cases already involving “revenge porn” — where a jilted lover posts sex tapes online as a way of getting back even.

This means that to use such devices increases the risk of an occurrence of voyeurism drastically. If the wife is nervous about such things, and the husband pressures her for it anyway, this means he is not sacrificing himself on her behalf at all. And if a wife is aware of such dangers and is willing for it, then perhaps she should check her heart — the thrill of a risked exhibitionism might be part of the equation, and that would not be a healthy impulse for her. But most likely, both the husband and wife just have a higher opinion of their abilities at keeping such things under wraps than they do. If you have homemade DVDs in your closet, does this mean that you and your wife are going to live forever? Is no one going to go through your closet when you die? Do you really want to leave that kind of surprise for the grandkids?

The second point has to do with the lawfulness of masturbation when a couple is separated for an extended period of time. There are lawful memories available, right? I address this whole topic in greater detail in my book Fidelity, but here it is in short form.

The Bible never says that such behavior is unlawful, and so we ought not go beyond what is written. We may not condemn what the Scriptures do not condemn. But we are allowed to be wary of things that the Bible doesn’t condemn by name. I would encourage husbands who are away from their wives for long periods of time not to simply assume that masturbation is their only recourse against temptation. It may not be.

And last, I want to address the pornification of modern life — and assume in the thought experiment that “secure means” really is possible. If it were possible to guard against voyeurism with the same degree of security that your bedroom lock and curtains provide, would it be lawful then? I don’t think it is possible, but what if it were? I would want to answer the same way I did in the second category above. It is wise to be wary.

As we should have learned decades ago, better than we did, the medium is the message. We should therefore not assume that a husband’s devotion to one digital image of his wife, as opposed to the other men in his unit, who all have a digital harem, is really different in kind. Is it all that different? If the medium is the message, then I suspect not.

As with all forms of human behavior, there can be a range. Some things might strike us as relatively innocent — a wife who is being seductive on Skype the night before her husband gets home, say. But then other forms of the same thing (technically) should strike us as seriously messed up. Suppose a husband masturbates to images of his wife of thirty years before. Something is demented there, and it rhymes with whatever his name is. A Christian husband ought to be sure to ask himself how this will help him honor his wife in such a way that his prayers will not be hindered (1 Pet. 3:7). Reducing her to same level as the residents of one-handed magazines doesn’t fit that bill.

So before rushing in with the sexual supplements that technological can provide, we really ought to think it through a bit more carefully. Otherwise, we are all just prisoners here of our own device.