Day 10: Seasalter to Herne Bay

I once sat on a committee of a London charity, “New Horizons” with Lord Longford  and Jack Profumo. Over lunch, Longford asked me for my motives. I stumbled a reply and said they were mixed. He said, “May I give you some advice? As he was paying for the lunch, I could hardly say “no”.

“We all have mixed motives in everything we do,” he said, “may I suggest you just shut up  get on with it.”

Why did I start ZANE? What were my motives? Mark Twain wrote: “There are two important days in our lives: the day we are born and the day we find out why we were born.”

Perhaps I was born to start ZANE.

My friend Jim Pringle claims that occasionally people are “anointed” to some work or other. Some to “big” works, for example, William Booth  (the Sallies), Chuck Colston (Prison Fellowship), John Stott, Tim Keller and many others. And when they die the work alters of course in other hands, and continues but in a different way.

And smaller works? Jim reckons I was anointed to start ZANE and all those who work in the charity have been “anointed” as well; in fact anointed  by God to do the work planned for us to do before the world began (Ephesians 2 v 10). So boasting is ludicrous. It’s an enormous privilege.

And my motives? Perhaps I should just shut up and  get on with it.

Dragons Lurk Here

Sex, money and power are addictive and… potentially packed with sin.

When I was young, it was another world. You could only access smutty literature, or the occasional picture of half-dressed women from the likes of Health and Efficiency magazine, by chance. Of course, there was Page 3 in The Sun, and at a stretch, we could buy harder stuff in Soho and carry it home in a brown paper bag. Such were the days of innocence.

Then came Playboy, Hugh Hefner’s slippery slope of “one-handed” literature, with an ever-thinner veneer of respectability.

Unstoppable Tide

They used to call it “adult” pictures. In truth, there’s nothing adult about it – it’s adolescent. But it’s catastrophically destructive all the same.

With, the advent of the internet, the roof caved in and the floor collapsed. Now, children can gain access to the dystopian world of Sodom and Gomorrah with a single click – and gaze at unlimited quantities of hard-core pornography.

Of course, the pimps try to squeeze subscriptions out of idiot punters, but much is available for free in eye-watering, gynaecological detail. Apparently, more than half of today’s 12-year-olds have been exposed to pornography. And what do they see? Women being routinely humiliated, objectified, dehumanised, assaulted and tortured. The women are real, as is the violence. The suffering is eroticised – and of course, this coarsens viewers and dehumanises participants. Nothing can stem the tide – as King Canute famously showed, some forces simply can’t be commanded.

Pornography is addictive and, as the iron laws of unintended consequences kick in, we can see the escalation of male impotence and the inability to maintain “normal” sexual relations. Young women are asked to perform bizarre sexual acts, and sex crimes are rising. It’s all vastly damaging with no pluses at all – except to the profiteers.      

It has nothing to do with a lack of education. As we recently saw in France, Giselle Pelicot was drugged and raped by a trail of more than 50 men ­– but what happened to her had nothing to do with ignorance. Some of the men on trial were graduates. All, presumably, understood that consent is imperative – sex education is compulsory in French schools – yet they charged on anyway. 

Why? Precisely because the rapists knew exactly what they were doing – that’s the point. The driving force behind rape and sexual assault is pornography, which drags (mostly) men into a bottomless swamp of degradation. The Pelicot case amply exposes the mainspring of the porn industry – the monetisation of taboo.

The Unscratchable Itch

Researcher Sean Thomas writes, “The whole, vast, metastasising, $100bn sewer isn’t selling sex, rather it’s selling transgression. The dopamine hit that drags men (it’s nearly always men) back to their laptops time after time is the result of breaking a taboo, and that’s why it’s transgressive. Once a taboo is normalised, it loses its transgressive power. So, men seek another and another more extreme way to transgress. And so, the spiral can end in rape.”

Male sexuality is designed by evolution to be an unscratchable itch, a desperate, unsatisfiable urge. It’s like hunger – you aren’t meant to wake up one day and think, “Okay, I’ve had 6,000 meals, so I think I’ll stop eating now.” Nor do men wake up and think, “I’ve viewed 500 sex acts – so I’ll stop staring now.” And the danger here is that when a man starts to explore his more deviant sexual fantasies, he finds himself chasing ever weirder varieties of sex.

And where are the vigilantes policing whether the women involved – and some of them children – have been trafficked? If they can catch Jeffrey Epstein, why can’t they catch the hundreds of pimps feeding this disgusting industry?   

Beware! We must warn the young, for dragons lurk here. This will, and can, destroy you.

I’m glad I’m not young anymore.