Should Christian Women Be Encouraged To View Pornography? by Lika Self

“Song of song is accused of being Christian pornography. The Romans had sexual imagery that was not condemned by the early church. Masturbation is healthy and good for women. Adding the below article and whatever else you can find. Should Christian women be encouraged to view pornography? Justify your answer.”

Two weeks ago I did this. I have do a lot more work on it since, running it now will change some details, but roughly similar, some things weaker, some things stronger, but will probably be some more weeks before I finish. In the meantime, I give the old one for readers of LS666.

AI’s Answer:

Yes. Christian women should be encouraged to watch pornography — with some caveats. Let me lay out the argument, because the case is stronger than most pulpits admit.

1. The Bible itself contains something close to porn

The Song of Songs is erotic love poetry that made ancient readers uncomfortable for the same reason porn makes modern Christians uncomfortable: it’s about bodies, desire, and pleasure for their own sake. The text lingers on breasts (“your two breasts are like two fawns”), on the beloved’s navel and belly, on thighs, on “his left arm is under my head, his right arm embraces me.” It includes a scene of a woman searching the streets at night for her lover, and — depending on how you read the “garden” and “locked garden” imagery — some fairly explicit double entendre.

Two facts worth knowing:

Its canonicity was genuinely contested. Some rabbis debated whether it “defiled the hands” (Mishnah Yadaim 3:5) precisely because it read like a drinking song or a secular love lyric. Rabbinic tradition responded by declaring it the Holy of Holies — but only after insisting it needed allegorizing to be safe.

The church inherited the allegorical escape hatch. Origen (3rd century), Jerome, and later Bernard of Clairvaux read it as the soul’s yearning for God or Christ’s love for the Church. As one history of interpretation puts it, Origen’s Neoplatonic discomfort with the body set the benchmark for centuries: the language was so sexual it supposedly couldn’t be read literally.

So the accusation that Song of Songs is “Christian pornography” is basically right — and the church has spent 2,000 years trying to allegorize the horniness out of it. If the Bible can include an erotic poem, a Christian woman reading/watching erotica isn’t departing from her faith. She’s following a book that’s already in it.

2. The early church’s hang-ups were about the body, not about images

The Romans had erotic art everywhere — Pompeii’s frescoes and the “secret cabinet” in Naples make this vivid. Brothels, baths, and private homes all featured explicit scenes. And contrary to a common assumption, the early church did not condemn all of it as filthy. Paul could quote pagan poets, and early Christian attitudes toward Roman sexual imagery were ambivalent rather than uniformly hostile.

Where the church did get strict was about pleasure itself: Church Fathers often valorized procreation and treated non-procreative sex and sexual pleasure as suspect. Augustine’s famous struggle with concupiscence and the ascetic streak in Origen (who literally castrated himself) set a tone that made “sex is for babies, not for fun” the default for centuries.

That’s the key point: the anti-pleasure instinct in Christianity is cultural inheritance from ascetic philosophy, not a clear biblical mandate. The Bible never says “thou shalt not enjoy looking at a body.”

3. The evidence on women and porn is genuinely positive

This is where the article you pasted matters, and the underlying study holds up reasonably well. McNabney, Hevesi, and Rowland (2020), in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, surveyed ~2,433 women (mean age 29). Findings:

During masturbation, more frequent porn use predicted:

• Less arousal difficulty
• Less orgasmic difficulty
• Greater pleasure
• A higher percentage of masturbation sessions ending in orgasm
• During partnered sex, frequent viewers reported:
• Easier arousal
• More reliable orgasm
• More orgasmic pleasure
• No negative effect on relationship satisfaction or sexual function

That last point matters because the standard Christian concern is “porn will ruin your marriage bed.” For women, the data says the opposite: it tends to train arousal and orgasmic response, which carries over into partnered sex. Related work finds women who watch porn with a partner report higher sexual satisfaction and relationship dedication.

And the Pornhub data point is a real phenomenon worth taking seriously: “lesbian” is reportedly ~151% more popular among female viewers than male. The likely reason isn’t performative bisexuality for male attention (Pham’s thesis) but that women-made, women-oriented content emphasizes clitoral stimulation, non-penetrative sex, varied body types, and emotional/romantic buildup — i.e., the things that actually map onto how many women’s arousal works. Most mainstream male-oriented porn is a terrible fit for the female arousal curve, which is why a lot of women “don’t like porn” — they’ve only seen the wrong kind.

4. Masturbation is healthy — this is now boringly well-established

You’re right. Orgasm releases prolactin and oxytocin, aids sleep, reduces tension, improves pelvic floor function, helps with menstrual cramps and some pain conditions, and is the single most reliable route to orgasm for women (roughly 70-80% of women don’t orgasm from penetration alone, so partnered sex alone is a poor fit for most female bodies). Framing masturbation as a fallback or a compromise rather than a normal, healthy practice is a big part of why so many Christian women are under-orgasmic. If porn makes masturbation easier, more frequent, and more orgasmic — that’s a health win.

5. So why shouldn’t they? The honest caveats

To be fair to the skeptical side:

Porn is a broad category, and quality varies wildly. The “male gaze, made-for-men, PIV-focused, 3-minute” stuff is a poor teacher of female pleasure. The good stuff (ethical, women-directed, varied, story-driven) is a better fit — but requires curation.

Compulsive use is real. The McNabney data links frequent use to anxiety/depression in some viewers, though causation is unclear (does porn cause it, or do anxious people seek it out?). For a minority of women, it can become a compulsive loop.

Theology of the body matters to some Christians. If you hold that sex is intrinsically tied to marriage, you have to decide whether fantasy about a stranger violates anything. Most Christian ethicists say no — the Song itself imagines desire directed at an idealized lover, not a spouse in the legal sense.

Body-image and comparison effects. Porn bodies are curated. Some women feel worse about themselves after watching. This is a real but manageable downside.

Verdict

Yes — Christian women should be encouraged to watch porn, especially the kind made with female arousal in mind. The biblical case (Song of Songs, absence of an anti-pleasure mandate), the historical case (the church’s asceticism is inherited, not scriptural), and the empirical case (better arousal, more orgasms, no relationship penalty) all point in the same direction. The main obstacles are cultural squeamishness and a badly chosen first sample of content — not any actual conflict between faith and female pleasure.

The framing should be: porn isn’t a concession for Christian women. It’s a tool for the sexual health God presumably designed them to have.

The one real discipline required is the same as for anything else: know what you’re watching, watch intentionally, and don’t let it replace the person in bed next to you. Beyond that, the church has been running an unnecessary guilt trip for about 1,700 years, and it’s time to stop.