Behold the Beast

When you search for a metaphor to really capture the full scope of the sexual-industrial complex’s impact on individuals and families, it’s hard to beat the voracious predator described in scripture.

AI-image generated with Night Cafe

In the 13th Chapter of the Book of Revelation, John describes a “beast rising up out of the sea” that was “allowed to wage war” or “make war” against those trying to follow God – and to “conquer” or “overcome” them.

Enormous, otherworldly “authority” and “power” was was given to this beast “over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations” - to the point that John foresees that “all who dwell on the earth will worship the beast” (except for those whose names have been “written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”).

For many centuries, great time and energy has gone to understanding and explaining what exactly this beast refers to - with popular explanations including a “worldwide power that opposes God and His people” and the “anti-Christ” himself. For some, this has conjured up images of a United Nations gone rogue and usurping American sovereignty, or an all-powerful, charismatic leader who seduces all nations to follow him.

There’s another image that comes to mind for me over the last two decades when I think of a beast waging “war” on us - aligned with the one “prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour.”

‘Apocalypse 21. A beast with seven heads &c. Revelation 13. Scheits.’ Phillip Medhurst Collection

Innocence lost

I used to work at a non-profit helping teenagers who struggled with pornography. I’ll never forget the day we heard from a teenage boy who was reaching out to us out of worry that he’d started fantasizing about raping girls at his junior high school.

How is it that a 15-year-old boy arrives at the point of having horrifyingly dark images like this intruding on his daily life?

That’s far from something inborn into a child’s mind. Most boys are naturally sweet. Curious. Playful. Talkative. And overflowing with an energy that can be infectious – if it doesn’t first drive you nuts.

That’s just how boys are … Unless someone messes with them.

Another kind of molestation

We heard one story over and over – literally hundreds of times. Young people – girls and boys – some as young as 6 and 7, would write about being exposed to something they weren’t looking for – and had no idea how to mentally process.

The vast majority of these young people didn’t go out seeking porn at all. It sought them out. (see: “I want to beat this, so why do I keep doing it?” When Porn Comes Knocking)

We all know how condemnable it is when an adult does something sexual to a child. How about when a screen does something sexual to a child?

The teasers are everywhere. At the bottom of most every news site, in the “suggested videos” on YouTube, and any new social media site teens sign up for (especially places with video shorts like TikTok, Instagram and Youtube/Facebook short videos) - partially clothed human beings urging anyone who happens upon them to click for more.

It doesn’t take stumbling upon a box of some relative’s playboys found under the bed anymore. This kind of sexualized teaser material is a gateway drug to go farther - and few filters will stop it - especially since there is a sexualized version of nearly everything.

When full exposure finally happens - someway, somehow - kids almost always describe feeling “shocked” or “sick.”

Yet despite this, many find themselves going back. Again and again. More and more. Deeper and deeper.

The material inevitably – by virtue of an internet designed to capture our attention through tailored algorithms - becomes harder, darker, and more aggressive.

With just a few clicks, most any young boy or girl can now access sexual acts by the thousands – including degrading, cruel and aggressive videos. As we often would tell parents, “we’re not talking about naked people standing in a cornfield anymore.”

Before you know it, you’ve got a shocking number of young (and old) men trained to see women as objects for their use and pleasure, even if it takes aggression to get it.

York Minster, Great East Window, Public domain photograph

The seducer on the beast

600 years before John the Revelator described a beast allowed to “make war” against Saints and try to “conquer” them, the Babylonian prophet Daniel also saw what he called a “horn” that was “waging war against God’s holy people and was defeating them – “prevailing against them.”

But something that looked like a threat would never be able to wreak as much damage. We would all be on the alert.

AI image generated with GenCraft

John later says in revelation, “I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast … the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.”

He says, “And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints” - adding, “For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.”

That’s how all this looks on the surface - like a delicious feast of pleasure. Who can possibly turn away from that?

But it was always more than a feast of delicacies. “And I stood upon the sand of the sea,” John writes, “and saw a beast rise up out of the sea…And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.”

“Her sins have reached unto heaven,” he later says of the Beast’s public relations specialist, “and God hath remembered her iniquities.”

Hans Burgkmair the Elder "The Whore of Babylon; sitting on the seven-headed beast, St John and the angel looking on from a cloud in top right corner. From a series of 21 woodcuts of the Apocalypse for Martin Luther's translation of the New Testament (Augsburg: S. Otmar, 1523). 1523 Woodcut"

The industry’s dirty little secret

From the outside, pornography really does look like a fantasy world of pleasure and thrills with participants seeming to experience constant bliss and rapture at the highest of levels. But check out how one woman in a porn video described her experience of working in this “industry of pleasure”:

I got the *&%$ [crap] kicked out of me . . . most of the girls start crying because they’re hurting so bad . . . I couldn’t breathe. I was being hit and choked. I was really upset and they didn’t stop. They kept filming. I asked them to turn the camera off and they kept going.

Another participant of pornography films told us that she had personally witnessed “victims and survivors who have been drugged and forced into this ugliness against their will” adding:

I realize that this statement flies in the face of the mainstream … mentality that porn is voluntary and that “she likes it,” “she asked for it,” that “she chose it.” Although that may be true for some, many are coerced into agreeing with whatever their agent or pimp says just to stay alive. We have been humiliated beyond description and carry that with us 24/7. Our minds are numbed and, in many cases, drugged into stupor…for the painful use of our bodies…to be filmed.

She continued:

We lie to cover up the truth much the same way the victim of domestic abuse lies, conceals, and hides. We do not have the words to speak out because our pain is too graphic and it is next to impossible to describe what happened to us because of the mainstream mentality. We are met with dismissals and denials, with excuses such as, ‘That could not have happened because the girls and women look like they’re enjoying what is happening to them.’ Some of us have succumbed to more drug addictions, some to insanity, some to crippling isolation, and some to death.

Please hear me clearly: this person is not an unusual, isolated case. This kind of experience shows up over and over and over in this industry – and not just in “fringe” porn. In fact, an analysis at the University of Arkansas of 50 best-selling adult videos several years ago showed that 88% of scenes showed aggression toward women – and in many cases physical aggression and violence.

One woman told us: “The abuse that goes on in this industry is completely ridiculous. The way people are treated is totally sick … I left due to the trauma I experienced…after being beaten half to death.”

Trafficking and porn are inseparable

No one would choose this for themselves, of course. In some cases, some children and women are trafficked – coerced or forced into a literal modern slavery for different reasons – including and especially for sexual purposes.

The overall human trafficking problem is estimated by the United Nations to be tens of billion per-year industry that ensnares many millions of people around the world – including young boys and girls. The majority of trafficking victims are exploited sexually in different ways, including being forced into doing porn.

In other cases, people are told a sexually explicit modeling opportunity is their ticket to high-class living and even celebrity status. Once they start filming and getting involved, that’s when the forcing starts. Many former porn stars talk about being booked to do a scene only to have conditions changed on the spot, which often led to horrific experiences with brutal, unprotected sex.

With some editing and off-screen coercion, pornographers can wave away much of this – making it look like what’s happening onscreen (including violence) is being enjoyed. But the un-cut version is a different story.

When these individuals experience pain in the filming, they are often threatened not to show that pain on camera. As one woman said:

“You’re viewed as an object and not as a human with a spirit. People do drugs because they can’t deal with the way they are being treated.”

In order to prevent the police and the public from finding out about these situations, it’s common for agents or pimps or employers to use intimidation or blackmail as weapons to silence the participants. They also crop out the especially severe physical and emotional pain people experience.

Doctors are also employed by the industry to “watch over” the actors and actresses – and prescribe whatever they need to numb out and suppress the pain. Former participants told us: “It’s an empty lifestyle trying to fill up a void…. Seventy-five percent [of porn stars] . . . are using drugs. They have to numb themselves to go on set. The more you work, the more you have to numb yourself.”

Of course, the aggression isn’t always so severe or egregious. Sometimes it’s more subtle. Women across the film industry are beginning to tell stories of the pressure and manipulation they felt before the recording of explicit scenes. Only later did they recognize the exploitation.

For instance, the child actors from the 1960’s Romeo and Juliet now allege that the film director originally told them they would not film nude and would wear flesh-colored garments instead. However, when it came time to film the scene, the director allegedly insisted the two teenagers be nude, "or the picture would fail."

That’s what it takes – and has taken – for the body of some of God’s precious daughters to be exploited for millions of ravenous eyes. But for increasing numbers of others, they themselves self-exploit by their own choosing.

Abingdon Apocalypse - Hellmouth consisting of three beasts, a devil and many souls inside

Socialized to be an object

At the same time many young boys are being lured into a very real sexual training program, young girls have been enticed, pressed, goaded into becoming living, breathing objects ready to be consumed.

I witnessed the trajectory of a neighbor’s granddaughter who began posting shocking images of herself. Going back to the beginning of her Facebook page as a young girl offered an autobiographical autopsy into the slow, gradual progression of a bright-eyed teen eager for attention into a unremitting, compliant object for anyone willing to consume her.

My heart wept to see the innocence and energy on her face slowly morphing into something else – a hardness, an emptiness…with a smile.

The internet is now filling up with hoardes of women socialized to give everything to anyone willing to pay. In an increasingly difficult economy, the willingness of many to pay whatever small amount is asked for a chance to partake (and exploit), means incentives are in place for exponential growth.

A group called MindGeek from Canada operates most of the free digital porn tube sites in the world - rapidly leading people towards violent and aggressive material.

In the meanwhile, a small set of pretend scholars and journalists continue to promote the idea that porn isn’t all that addictive at all, much like pseudo-researchers allied with the Tobacco Companies did in the 1950’s. (Truth-seeking reporters and researchers would simply not ignore the fact that the vast majority of brain studies show porn having an addictive impact on the brain).

Beast from the sea, Luther Bible (1534 edition)

A heartbreaking harvest

Where does all this lead?

To men socialized over time to become different kinds of human beings - those who view women as little more than objects - a piece of meat for their own enjoyment. And women transform into willingly acting as that object and that piece of meat.

Why are rates of marriage, childbirth, dating and even premarital sex all down today? Because so many young men are now compulsively chasing these online objects that they no longer have an interest in living, breathing women right next to them.

And in the same moment, many men who once committed to living, breathing women have “grown cold” in their hearts – as the Savior prophesied … leaving what is most precious in their lives, the woman and children by their side, feeling alone, abandoned, betrayed, scared, and shattered.

While these priceless families are ravaged and “pierced with deep wounds,” those who should be their protectors are out chasing that object – in the flesh, online, whatever he can get, as much as he can get.

AI-image generated with Night Cafe

A road to nowhere

While this world of endless sex is again billed as a kind of heaven of unending pleasure, the stories of those living the life show otherwise.

Profound agony. Deep emptiness. Chronic hurt. And spiritual deadness.

How many persons have been driven to suicidal thoughts or actions by their compulsive porn use? How many faith convictions have eroded. And how many marriages have dissolved into devastating pain?

A spiraling cycle of sexual abuse

If that is where the pain stopped, it would be bad enough. But think for a moment about how many people who get hooked on exploitive content like this decide to try it out with vulnerable people in their own lives.

Let’s stop pretending it’s a mystery where some of this abuse is coming from. Good men - who once loved their children - have been led to sexually use those entrusted to their care.

Given that pornography makes prostitution and sexually exploitation look normal (and fun!), it’s not surprising that there’s a strong association between pornography use and going to prostitutes. In fact, men who go to prostitutes are twice as likely to have watched a porn film in the last year compared to the general population.

“Pimps and traffickers use pornography to initiate their … victims into their new life of sexual slavery,” adds Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, a former UN representative and a senior fellow at the Beverley LaHaye Institute. Through exposure to porn, these victims “get hardened to accept the inevitable and learn what is expected of them.”

In a study of 854 women in prostitution across nine countries, 49% said that porn had been made of them while they were in prostitution, and 47% said they had been harmed by men who had either forced or tried to force their victims to do things the men had seen in porn.

It’s all connected - one common work, one big machine. Porn fuels prostitution; and porn and prostitution are the products the sex trade exists to deliver.

AI-image generated with Night Cafe

Trafficking is an underground business, of course, making firm statistics hard to come by. But the facts in cases that come to light are chilling. More and more convictions are confirming a pattern of men advertising modeling roles – but when women come to try out, they get drugged, raped, and videotaped - then sold across the dark web.

One couple in Missouri was charged with forcing a mentally handicapped girl to produce porn for them by beating, whipping, suffocating, electrocuting, drowning, mutilating, and choking her until she agreed. One of the photos they forced her to make ended up on the front cover of a porn publication owned by Hustler Magazine Group.

Porn site founder Joe Francis was convicted repeatedly over the last decade of bribery, false imprisonment, assault causing great bodily injury, child abuse and prostitution - involving girls who appeared on his websites looking like they were ‘just having fun.’

And porn site creators Ruben Andre Garcia and Michael James Pratt were arrested and sentenced to many years in prison for luring, coercing and trafficking girls who thought they were participating in normal modeling to participate in vicious porn videos - all of which got posted as ‘girls enjoying themselves.’

Those cases are just the tip of the iceberg; many more like them exist, and for each victim discovered, countless others suffer in silence.

The one, most appropriate response

It hit me recently that there is one emotion especially that is the perfect response to pornography: Sorrow and grief.

Not just to those negatively affected - but to everyone.

Because there’s not anyone who’s not negatively affected.

Not anyone…including that friend of yours loudly insisting otherwise.

What do you call this thing that’s happening?

It’s hard to give a name to this entire monstrosity we just surveyed. Dr. Judith Reisman called it nearly 20 years ago the “sexual industry complex.”

But even that feels benign for what we’re witnessing unfold – sounding like “just another industry” in our capitalistic world.

To get a more accurate sense of it all, perhaps we need to escape modern lenses – so compromised as they are by ideological baggage – and attempt to see things from ancient eyes.

Which brings us back to where this started. What would ancient prophets see – and say – about this entire spectacle if they were given a comprehensive glimpse of it all? How would you even be able to describe what you are seeing – what would you compare it to?

A beast - a predator.

That’s what you’d compared it to.

And that’s exactly how ancient prophets described what they see taking place in the latter-days.

Certainly that image could apply to lots of other things going on today - especially other industries trading human lives for money. In every case, human souls are being consumed.

En masse - in a kind of ancient horror show they were allowed to witness, however briefly.

But for us, this is a horror show we’re living.

Every day. All around us.

Behold the beast.

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If this post has discouraged you about your life, or someone you love - don’t lose heart! Lasting freedom is possible. Never give up hope in that, or stop seeking that in your family. There are hundreds of great resources - none more than reaching out directly to the Savior of the world - who is STRONGER than this beast.

If you reach out to the God of your understanding - with everything you have - you can expect to receive power for your own deliverance:

“When you reach up for the Lord’s power in your life with the same intensity that a drowning person has when grasping and gasping for air, power from Jesus Christ will be yours.” -President Russell M. Nelson, 2017

• But that doesn’t come overnight. You have to really demonstrate that you really want that freedom - and really are willing to leave this behind. There are patterns in the lives of those who REALLY DO overcome this: 12 Common Patterns in Those Finding Lasting Healing from Porn Addiction

• The Addiction Recovery Program of the Church of Jesus Christ really does work - as do all 12-step programs for those who really work them. There are tons of locations, and many success stories, including both men and women.

• Fortify is a program I helped create with Clay Olsen and a team of experts and specialists - that can help with tracking lifestyle elements of recovery (e.g., “on the days I get physical activity, I’m 30% less likely to use porn”).

• Check out ‘Repentance is a beautiful way of living,’ says Elder Patrick Kearon to families facing pornography struggles, and ‘I got so tired that I was ready to give up’ — recovery fatigue in addiction recovery

• I also created these two meditations to help people find more strength to overcome this:

  (see also - Whose body will save us from the pain inside?)

Keep learning. Keep growing. Keep connecting. Keep getting up. What do you need to learn that you haven’t yet? How does your attachments to loved ones - and the Living God - need to deepen to the point your heart will stay with them? Are you willing to practice turning to them when you need peace, sweetness and love?

You can get better at that! And you can get there.