On July 27, Father Cassidy Stinson, who goes by @TheHappyPriest on Twitter, tweeted about something that makes him not so happy: porn. He called it “an absolute scourge for so, so many of us, spiritually and psychologically.” Then, in an ensuing Twitter thread, he wrote, “I’m tired of seeing so many souls caught in shame and isolation and despair.”
Driven to do something about this state of affairs, the young (and, dare we say, naive) priest decided to…pray a lot. “We should pray, and sacrifice, and encourage one another in working to heal these wounds,” he wrote.
He encouraged his social media followers to use his new hashtag, #BreakTheChains, when tweeting about their prayers and struggles with pornography. His call has been taken up by many Catholics, Church Militant reported: “Within 24 hours, the Twitter thread garnered about 100,000 views. There were retweets from notable Twitter accounts such as the Knights of Columbus and Charles Coulombe.” It was even mentioned by a bishop in Boston! Pretty impressive!
And sure, praying about it is nice and all. But… We feel obligated to let Father Stinson know that, all his noblest intentions notwithstanding, he is far from the first to undertake cleaning up the “scourge” of smut with a social media, prayer, or really any kind of campaign. And that all of the many crusades have collectively made not a single dent in the overwhelming human proclivity for porn.
For instance, did you know that your breakfast cereal was invented to keep people from masturbating? It’s true: John Harvey Kellog, founder of the reigning breakfast cereal king of our times, invented corn flakes because he believed that eating bland foods would discourage self-pleasure. Sylvester Graham, the man behind the graham cracker, felt the same way. They were both part of a Victorian-era movement that aimed to get folks to stop jerking off…over a hundred years ago. And guess what? It didn’t work.
Now that the modern age has ushered the internet, and with it easy access to limitless supplies of pornography, nothing has changed. The National Center for Sexual Exploitation is an anti-porn group that’s been trying to spread the word for decades to no avail (formerly under the name “Morality in Media”). Gail Dines has been banging the anti-porn drum with books, public speaking engagements, and even her new organization Culture Reframed, for many years, continuing a feminist movement started by Andrea Dworkin back in the seventies. The Mormons took up the cause back in 2015 with their #PornKillsLove crusade. Hell, since the GOP called pornography a “public health crisis” in their 2016 platform, over a dozen states have followed suit with resolutions and more. And all of this panic has gotten us, pretty much, nowhere.
Online porn viewership continues to expand as more people get internet access worldwide. Somewhere around a quarter of all internet searches are for porn. Hundreds of millions visit Pornhub every day (and that’s just one porn site!), and a porn site (Baiju) is the sixth most-visited website in the world.
The truth is, liking porn is nearly universal, because our brains are hard-wired to like it. Masturbating is a normal part of a healthy sex life. And maybe, if religious leaders would let us feel okay about these facts, the “shame, isolation, and despair” that have Father Stinson so concerned would be alleviated. These problems are fixable. With open, honest conversations about sexuality… not so much prayer and rosaries.
