Snippet // William Struthers on intimate friendship as the answer to the pornography epidemic

I am reading, and loving, Ed Shaw’s The Plausibility Problem: The Church and Same-Sex Attraction, it’s rapidly becoming the best book I’ve read on the issue and I’ll no doubt review it more fully soon. In one chapter he addresses our tendency in the modern west to conflate intimacy with sexual intercourse — suggesting that the reason people want to, for example, read the relationship between David and Jonathan in the Bible as sexualised has more to do with our assumptions about intimacy than anything the text itself suggests. He’s got this great little aside in the chapter, featuring a quote from William Struthers’ book Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain (which I’ve just bought, but have not read). For context, Shaw frames the below quote by saying: “Christian psychologist William Struthers sees this sort of godly male intimacy as the main answer to the current epidemic of pornography addiction among male church members”

The myths of masculinity in our culture have isolated men from each other and impaired their ability to honor and bless one another. Too many men have too few intimate friends. Their friendships run only as deep as the things they do together. By finding male friends to go deeper with, the need for intimacy can be met in nonsexual ways with these male friends. When this happens the intensity of the need for intimacy is not funnelled through sexual intercourse with a woman; it can be shared across many relationships. Sexual intimacy may be experienced with one woman, but intimacy can be experienced with others as well. Not all intimacy is genital, so do not feel restricted in your relationships with your brothers in Christ.

I think together Shaw and Struthers have nailed one of the things the church gets wrong in our approach to those who are same sex attracted, and explained why we are where we are when it comes to an unhealthy approach to sex, and relationships between men and women in the church too. I like that part of the solution for both (but not the complete solution) is better relationships between men and men. By the by, you can check out the stuff our church thinks we (the church) get wrong in our approach to same sex attraction (gay marriage), and also what we get wrong when it comes to male-female relationships (feminism). This is the book I wish I’d read before working on these talks.