A SHADE-Y Substitute

By     Willow Sanders. SRAS
         Director of Student Services

Although it has been more than two decades, I can remember so vividly the time I ‘needed’ to go see my college boyfriend. I was a college sophomore and everyone KNEW he wasn’t good for me. I picked every reason I could to reject their opinions. They’d give a really valid reason, I’d dismiss it immediately. Pushed into a corner, I began to hide my interactions with him. It became so hidden that the small ways became big ways of deceitful behavior. So much so that one night in February, I waited until my mother had gone to sleep, quietly put the car in neutral and backed it out of our parking complex until I was a safe distance away. Turned the car on and thought to myself, “I’m home free! I can go see him and be back before my mom ever knows what happened. No harm. No foul.” Or so I thought. Cue the snow. We lived in upstate NY and during the winter months snow could come out of nowhere. What I thought I was keeping secret was about to have very visible results. On my way to his apartment, I ended up in a snowbank. Stuck. I had no choice but to call my mom in the wee hours of the morning. She had to call a friend, since her car was ‘otherwise occupied’. I never got to my boyfriends that night. The very thing I was trying to avoid, being found out, was now very apparent public information. I was totally embarrassed but more upsetting than that was the look of disappointment on my mom’s face.  Not something I enjoyed at all. It was a hard lesson but cemented what I’d heard a hundred times over “What we do in the dark, will eventually come to light.” I now had a very REAL visual for that.

It’s happened dozens of times before. Girls hiding miniskirts in their backpacks. Boys hiding magazines under their beds. I can even remember the day I found out someone I held on a ridiculous spiritual pedestal was a smoker. Like somehow, she as a Christian wasn’t supposed to struggle with common things. I had literally NEVER seen her smoke. Like EVER NEVER and I’d known her for almost a decade.  It was the first time I really contemplated in my young naïve life that there really ARE things we do in secret that we’d never do in public. 

In the early years of teaching sexual risk avoidance education, I heard a term that really stuck with me:  Publicly Private.  Hands down the best use of an oxymoron I’d ever encountered.  We encouraged young people to set boundaries. To keep their behaviors marked by this thought, “Don’t do something in private, you would be hesitant, ashamed, or horrified to do in public, say in front of your grandmother.”  

So when I began again to see Fifty Shades in the news for their new movie release, my heart leapt within me.  I KNEW there would be scores of women (young to older) that had NEVER gone publicly to see the movie last time but maybe rented it and are totally ready for round 2.

The current level of porn saturation has led to a functional apathy about our porn habits.  According to a study conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, about 77 percent of Americans say they watch porn at least once a month.  In contrast though, the same study found that only 29 percent actually believe watching porn is morally acceptable.

I sat thinking, “It’s nothing new really, is it? We are still looking for ways to do the taboo.” Have we not traveled so far from those miniskirt and magazine days? Have we not learned that what is done in dark will be brought to light? Is the subtle way we try to deceive ourselves to what quiet disobedience does to us really that different in 2015? I had to ask myself the same questions. Does my daily diet reflect the horror found in my heart or have I succumbed to the cultural standard. Would it be different for me? Would I settle for not thinking much had changed or view it as not much different from years gone by influences? Yet, with this movie EVERYTHING is different.

We live in a sex saturated culture; have been since the late 60s, increasingly worsening with each decade. Yet I think the issue of WHY we would shun going to the movie publicly but invite it into the confines of our home goes much deeper than just sheer entertainment. Typically, when something gives us pause there is a reason. More typical in today’s culture is to put that ‘something’ to rest. To pretend it isn’t important. To void any connection to the ‘why’ of the ‘something’. I think back to the Garden, when the serpent was tempting Eve. He wasn’t (as we can surmise) loud and bold. He was quiet, shifty, “Shade-y” if you will. Had Eve stood boldly, not given an audience, things could have been quite different. We have, through the many lessons taught within, opportunity after opportunity to do things differently.

It is so easy in our world today to be wooed to compromise. To think if we are keeping it to ourselves, what harm is it really doing? But stripping down, to the core, the design, pure and simple, of God’s intent for sexual intimacy isn’t yielding great results. Through inviting a steady stream of sexual images, innuendos, and false messages into our homes, we are playing right into the hands of a cultural world view that is destroying the fabric that makes sex so beautiful in the first place.

Sex is beautiful. Not dangerous. Sex is precious. Not a commodity. Sex is a gift from God. Not a tool for marketing purposes. The heart and mind are delicate things. Easily turned and twisted. Sex has been so twisted in the hearts and minds of our society that movies like Fifty Shades are calling us to trade in intimacy for domination, beauty for brutality, freedom in sexuality for shame, and most importantly, godly standards for worldly ones.

Porn, a polar opposite of the love and sex God created, can make lasting and deep impacts on human relationships.  Relevant magazine shared this: “Pornography makes it more difficult for your brain to experience pleasure. A study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that men and women who looked at porn were less likely to be satisfied with their partner’s appearance and their sex life as a whole.”  Not surprised by this at all. We cannot take a substitute and a horribly poor one at that, for something as powerful and meaningful as sex and expect it to not have major life altering effects.

Thinking back to those times when secrets were kept or truth was ‘omitted’, I can clearly remember knowing there was something not right about it. Hence, the freedom I sought, false freedom I found out, actually bound me to the very thing I was trying to escape from inviting shame to the game. Accepting the fact that this movie can be viewed in the safety & secrecy of our own homes changes nothing about the impact that diluted, disfigured messages in movies like Fifty Shades create in the hearts and minds of women. Our culture deserves more. Our friendships deserve more. Our marriages deserve more. Our husbands deserve more. And ultimately we, as women, deserve more.

So when you pass the theater or video aisle, are tempted to click the ‘Add to Cart’ button or buy that ticket…think again. Don’t be fooled by culture’s push to give us a counterfeit version of sex, love and intimacy.  Remind yourself: YOU DESERVE MORE than some Shade-y substitute!

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