If you are tempted by internet porn and fear for your immortal soul, rejoice and be exceeding glad, for help is at hand. We are indebted to the saintly Reverend Ackeroff at Unthinking Anglicans for this good news. Covenant Eyes is a competitively priced software package that will warn you if you are about to open a porn site. The most up-to-date versions will simultaneously cause your laptop to zap six hundred volts through your scrotum. Thus if you notice there is a website called www.bollocksandcocks.com, and are curious as to what it could be (‘Lock Sand Cocks’???) Covenant Eyes will warn you that this is a porn site and then make damn sure you don't enter it, or ever consider entering it thereafter.

Actually no, sorry, it doesn’t. I made all that up. What in fact it does is more sinister. It records all the websites you visit, then e-mails a report every so often to persons of your choosing. So you could arrange for your wife, mother, granny, pastor, boss, buddies, students, anybody you want, to be bombarded with detailed reports of your browsing habits, so they can keep constant tabs on you. This is to keep you pure, or at least contrite.

 With all these people eagerly perusing your surfing reports for mention of bum, tit and dick, praying for you and ticking you off, you are forced to be accountable. Of course you can disable the software any time you decide not to be.

There is a Covenant Eyes blog, ‘Breaking Free’, full of deeply moving stories of how men who couldn’t get enough porn were delivered from their obsession after installing the software for a very reasonable sum, payable monthly. The company aims to grab the consciences and wallets that species of competitive male Christian that sees a man's life as a constant battle between virtue and temptation, and to hook such men it presents us with some heroic, hairy-chested stuff:

When you let temptation win, boy, do you feel far away from that male bonding with the Lord!

The value of the service that Covenant Eyes provides - and at such affordable prices, too - is easily appreciated when we consider the damage done to the hearts and minds of men who develop internet Porn Onanistic Disorder, or iPod:

“. . . I didn’t recognize I had an addiction until I had surgery and masturbation wasn’t an option for fifteen days. On day three, I was literally shaking, and I began to connect the dots. Other symptoms: irritability, inability to focus (’staring at walls syndrome’), mood swings, headaches (sometimes quite strong), sense of pressure in my genitals, flashbacks, paranoia, self-defeating thinking, depression, hopelessness, and fear that I will never have sex because I’ve learned no social skills since diving into porn eight years ago as a teen.”

 

As may easily be concluded from this, indulgence in pornography may lead to outbursts of extreme Drama Queenery, even among the straight. (Staring at walls is not a syndrome, Covenant Eyes, even if you stare at more than one wall.)

The image of sexual desire as a gluttonous beast that will attack unless shackled, blinkered and starved is a common one among Christers. The site www.boysunderattack.com ('Reaching for Teenage Boys' - the site owner sounds quite an innocent) aims to reassure adolescent lads on all manner of problems they might encounter when growing up. Bodily changes are dealt with matter-of-factly, but the author sends out such mixed messages on the topic of masturbation that any kid reading this stuff is likely to be seriously confused or, better and more likely, to simply junk the site.

That paragraph fills me with the desire to take the writer by the ears and bash his head repeatedly against a concrete floor. It’s OK to pull your cock, BUT you must wait until you can hardly hold back, and then splat, it’s over in seconds and no more pleasurable (though less messy) than a bowel movement. No enjoyment is permitted, or even envisaged, of an activity unique to humans, with their ability to refine their pleasures and cultivate the imagination. No encouragement is given to a young man's exploration of present solitary pleasure and its application to potential joys with a future partner. He is advised to be as cold-blooded and oblivious as a fish squirting sperm into the water.

Being an Evangelical Christian must be rather like spending a lifetime holding your breath. Here is one Tim Challies, author of Sexual Detox. No prizes for guessing what Tim thinks of sex, given that title.

‘This is the very nature of sin, isn’t it? Sin is always progressive in nature. If you give it an inch, it soon seeks to take a mile. Sin is never content, but always seeks and desires more. Have you ever been scared by your sin? Perhaps there was a time that you saw how a particular sin was taking you over. Maybe you had thought you were in control of your sin but suddenly found that, almost in an instant, it had increased to the next level.’

I often think many problems would disappear if only people would stop talking.  Once you have been persuaded that jerking off and looking at porn is a sin and an addiction that is taking over your life, you have bought into this discourse and porn sites and Christian sites will work together to feed your guilt for ever. Why not just drop the ‘sin’ nonsense and see porn as an appetizer, a wank as a pleasant work-out for the imagination and the plumbing, then mop up and go and mow the lawn or finish grouting the bathroom?