Now I’m used to the check lane magazines being a smut bath. I’ve worked for years NOT to look at them while standing in line. I’ve told my children not to look at them. The cleavage, the tight clothes, the sensual poses, I might feel sick to my stomach, but I’m not surprised anymore. But this. This was shocking. This was a soft core porn magazine. In the store where I buy my children’s milk.

I had to complain. I knew I had to complain. I pulled the top magazine off the stack, and asked my husband to take the kids through the line while I went to Customer Service.

I was terrified. I HATE conflict. I’m a little mouse by nature. (This is one reason why I blog. I can take hours to formulate my ideas and be absolutely certain they are what I want to say before I release them into the big, bad universe.) But I knew I had to say something. I could not continue to shop at a store that displayed GQ where my children walked. Could not. But this was my favorite store. We buy so much at Meijer that it’s a family joke. (“That’s nice. Where’d you get it?” “Meijer.” Eyes roll.) If I didn’t do something, where was I going to shop?

Besides that, Christians are called to be salt and light. It was time to shed a little light on the horrendous inappropriateness of what Meijer had done, and pour some preservative salt on the rotting corpse of our community’s moral state.

I was shaking.

I walked up to the counter and asked to see the manager. The young lady at Customer Service asked my name and what this was regarding, and I showed her the magazine cover. She agreed that it was awful, and thus began a nerve-wracking few minutes in which she and the other young lady brainstormed who might be available. This lady wasn’t answering her phone, so how about this other lady? And then, oh misery of misery, they decided to call a man. Egh. I figured there was no way he would even care. He’d probably be laughing up his sleeve all the way to his lunch break where he’d cozy up with his computer and a few XXX websites.

But if I didn’t do something, where was I going to buy my children’s milk?

My face was red and my voice still shaking as I told the man my story and (wince) handed him the degrading magazine. (Long-time readers of this blog will be able to imagine my inner turmoil at actually handing a man a copy of GQ, a magazine designed by calculating and opportunistic experts to tempt and arouse him as much as possible so that he would be certain to shell out the money for his very own copy to take to the men’s room and “cherish.” But this was for my children and all the other children who would walk through that check lane and have their innocence chipped away by those same calculated temptations.)

And to my utter surprise, the man was highly professional. He said he agreed that it was inappropriate. He gave me his direct phone number and said if it wasn’t fixed within a week that I should call him. And then, in the middle of the week, he called me. He told me he was looking in to getting covers for the magazines, but that in the mean time, he had pulled them from the shelves. Amazing. I never thought it would be so easy. By the time he called I was already trying to think of where else I could shop if things didn’t work out with Meijer, but miraculously this story actually had a happy ending. I was thrilled.

It all goes to show that we do still have a voice. Maybe not all the time, but there is still power in a concerned customer’s fighting for children. If you live in the Midwest and shop at Meijer, I urge you to make your voice heard as well. Maybe we can get GQ permanently off their shelves. And if you shop anywhere else, I urge you to make your voice heard there, too. We are the customers. We shouldn’t have to put up with the exploitation and degradation of women and an assault on our family’s innocence when we’re out shopping for our children’s milk.

Tim Challies of Challies.com has written a wonderful series of posts for Christian young men, married or still single, to help them renew their minds. One of the great things about it is that it is actually a discreet and non-explicit treatment of the subject, while still hitting the nail squarely on the theological head. So, if a young man doesn’t know much about porn, he won’t be learning anything titillating. This is not just another “porn is bad–you oughta quit” series, because, as Challies points out, most young men already know porn is bad and want to quit. It’s just that their desire to quit is not as great as their desire to continue. To help get their motivations in balance, this is much more a “sex as God created it is great–here’s how you’re ruining it” series designed to help set the Lord’s incredible vision in contrast to the Enemy’s lies. I highly, highly recommend it to young men and anyone connected with them in any way (which is pretty much everyone in some way or another) but especially to parents, fiancees, young wives and especially to parents and the young men themselves who are about to go off to college or have some other increased interaction with the world where they will beyond a doubt be encountering both temptation and a majority of people whose minds have been altered by the lies of pornography.

Here’s an excerpt from the first article:

Pornography is inherently violent, inherently unloving. It is a perversion of sexuality, not a true form of it, and one that teaches violence and degradation at the expense of mutual pleasure and intimacy. It is about conquests, about conquering. It is the very opposite of God’s intention for sex. It tears love from sex, leaving sex as the immediate gratification of one’s most base desires. It lives beyond rules and ethics and morality. It exists far beyond love. And yet countless young men, Christian young men, are coming into marriage bringing with them all of this pornographic baggage. Having seen thousands of sex acts in a pornographic setting, they load the porn star expectation upon their wives. The young husband assumes or demands that his wife will be willing to do anything, that she will do it all with the proper joy and encouragements, and that she will be as willing and eager and skilled as the women he has seen on the screen.

…With the vast majority of young men having been exposed to pornography (at least 90% according to recent studies), with a large percentage of them having been addicted to it and with many enjoying it still as they enter into marriage, they need to have their understanding and their expectations reset according to the One who created sex.

Many young men need a kind of sexual detox before they are equipped to be the kind of pure, loving, attentive, sacrificial husbands that God calls them to be. In this series of articles I hope to help young men reorient their understanding of sex, both in the big picture and in the act itself, according to God’s plan for this great gift.

Sexual Detox I: Pornifying the Marriage Bed

Sexual Detox II: Breaking Free

Sexual Detox III: A Theology of Sex

Sexual Detox IV: Detoxification

Sexual Detox V: Freedom

Sexual Detox: Recommended Resources

Or download it as an e-book here.

Hearken unto me now therefore, O ye children, and attend to the words of my mouth.  Let not thine heart decline to her ways, go not astray in her paths.  For she hath cast down many wounded: yea, many strong men have been slain by her.  Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death. –Proverbs 7:24-27

If you want your wife to be beautiful for you, then you understand how she feels about your eyes being just for her.

Why on earth would that be? It goes like this.

Men desire the sight of women’s bodies. They actually derive emotional comfort and meaning out of looking at a hot, sexy woman.

And, in just the same way, women desire to be desired. They actually derive emotional comfort and meaning out of being cherished as their husband’s one and only source of passion.

When a man disregards one of his wife’s most fundamental longings and places his desire in any woman besides his wife, his wife feels exactly the same way a man would feel if his wife were to disregard his fundamental longing for enjoyment of her body and become frumpy and frigid, rebuffing him every time he asks for sex, and going around all day in an old stained bathrobe, with unkempt hair, picking her nose, and passing gas.

The disgust is the same.

The disappointment is the same.

The feelings of being cheated, unloved, and unvalidated are the same.

Men don’t understand how much porn hurts women because they think about porn in relation to masculine needs not feminine needs. They imagine how they would feel if their wives were into it, and it doesn’t sound all that bad. But that’s because it doesn’t threaten men. Porn has no effect on how beautiful their wives are, and therefore men’s deepest desires are not put in jeopardy. A porn problem seems no worse than an anger problem or a problem with lying. And since it demonstrates an interest in sex, it can almost seem like a sign of something positive.

But for a woman, it is a betrayal of the one thing she wants most in an intimate relationship.

Our sons need to understand this. Before they get involved.