Imagine marrying a beautiful woman and celebrating the birth of your first daughter. She looks just like your bride, and you're in love all over again. Years go by, and you begin to raise a family.
Today, it's her seventeenth birthday and she is having a pool party with her friends. She walks out of the house in her bathing suit, and your son takes the opportunity to grab his camera and take some pictures. Since she's so attractive, he sells the pictures online, and she agrees to the arrangement as long as she gets a cut of the money he earns. Before long, thousands of strangers on the Internet are lusting after your princess. They stare at her body, and make sick jokes about what they think of her.
How would you feel?
Now imagine the heart of God the heavenly Father, who loves his daughters infinitely more than you or I could ever love ours. The women in our swimsuit magazines are the daughters of the King of heaven. It's sad that we sons have made a market selling his daughters, our sisters. For this reason, Pope John Paul II challenged us: "Each man must look within himself to see whether she who was entrusted to him as a sister in humanity . . . has not become in his heart an object of adultery."9
If a desire to love God and respect women does not motivate you to get rid of swimsuit magazines, consider what will happen if you do not. Do you honestly think that looking at hundreds of perfect female bodies will not affect the way you look at women and shape the expectations you have for your future bride?
I guarantee you that it already has. No matter how attractive a swimsuit model is, you flip the page. She could be the most beautiful woman on earth, but you won't look at her for more than thirty seconds. You're aroused but bored and dissatisfied. You bond and you break. Your standard of physical beauty becomes one of impossible perfection. But if the most seductive supermodels fail to keep your interest for more than a few seconds, how long will your bride hold your attention? You have trained yourself to be a glutton who is never filled.
When you close the magazine and walk out among the public, you assume that constant lust is natural for a guy. Just as your eye wanders with lust from one page to the next in the magazine, your eyes gaze from one girl to the next. When you see girls in school or even at church, you turn them into objects—without even realizing it. You become shallower and shallower and unable to see a woman as God sees her. This is why St. Alphonsus Liguori tells us, "When a raven finds a dead body, its first act is to pluck out the eyes, and the first injury that [impurity] inflicts on the soul is to take away the light of the things of God."10 Meanwhile, you lull your conscience to sleep, telling yourself that nobody is getting hurt.
Sirach 9:2 says, "Do not give yourself to a woman so that she gains mastery over your strength." But this is exactly what happens when you look at magazines that fuel your lust. If a husband is hooked on such fantasies, he's only a shadow of the man his wife and kids need him to be. In the case of single men, many of them hide in their smutty magazines; the fantasy of having dozens of perfect women at their disposal is more alluring to them than the possibility of rejection by one woman or the burdens of commitment. They turn inward and never experience the joy of sacrificial love because they fear its demands.
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Pure Manhood
SpiritualHOW TO BECOME THE MAN YOU ARE MEANT TO BE... Everyday boys and young men are bombarded with messages and images that encourage them to make sexual impurity a way of life. And since it looks so much fun, they can easily be made to feel as if t hey'...
