The Power of the Transformed Wife – Lori Really Really Hates Porn

The Power of the Transformed Wife – Lori Really Really Hates Porn February 24, 2017

Transformedby Suzanne Titkemeyer

We start today’s review of Lori Alexander’s book β€˜The Power of the Transformed Wife’ in Chapter 11 – The Dating Scene and Sexual Purity. Rereading this again last night I have to say that this is both one of the dullest chapters in the book and the most disjointed poorly written. Lori keeps circling back to porn.

The chapter does not start where it makes the most logical sense, either during Lori or Ken’s teenager years, or at the beginning of their parenting journey. Instead it starts when Lori hears a β€˜No Dating’ teacher at her church when her daughter was 16 years old.

Likely the only editing this book got was a look through by Lori’s followers in that Facebook group echo chamber she calls a β€˜chat room’.

Another example of how a professional editor might have been able to stitch a continuous narrative for a chapter. Instead it reads like a stream of consciousness fever dream jumping around. This would have been the perfect place for Lori’s story in an early chapter of having to fend off Mr. Roman Hands and Russian Fingers during a date. But no, we’re starting with the words of this purity and no dating guy.

β€œNothing good comes out datingβ€”only broken hearts and all too often, purity is lost,” he said. β€œDating also prepares children for a divorce type mentality……..Easy in, easy out.”

And so we’re starting with that common myth in Quiverfull – Time spend on dates with the opposite sex you are not already mentally pre-committed to marry always leads to divorce. That divorce is easy, it’s fun and selfish.

I don’t know why people in that world always want to claim that divorce is so easy because it rarely is. It’s painful and complex. No one goes into marriage thinking that they will be divorcing soon. That claim presupposes that everyone not doing it the same way as them has lurking in the back of their minds β€˜Oh well, if he or she fills the dishwasher wrong, or disses my haircut I’ll just file for divorce.’

Have you ever met someone that gets married thinking that way? I haven’t. It’s another Evangelical Loch Ness Monster. Something no one has seen for sure, but love to claim they have seen the dark shadow of it lurking beneath the water. Photos or it did not happen!

Lori goes on to say that they didn’t allow one on one dating, but dating in a group for functions like the prom was allowed. No being alone with the opposite sex.

Then we get to a non-toxic tidbit. Lori goes on to say that the claims of harm represented by many that talk about ’emotional purity’ are ridiculous, that crushes and learning to deal with your emotions is normal. Followed by no dating until you are ready to get married.

We get to the first bit of Lori’s discussion of sexual purity.

Instead, the message they will hear from the world is this; β€œif it feels right, do it.”

That does seem to be one of the main messages of advertising to lure you into buying things these days, but is it really that pervasive everywhere? Most people can see through messages like this and not act upon something invented in Madison Avenue. And just like that we’re at the first ranting about porn being EVERYWHERE in this world.

Most admit to becoming addicted to pornography in middle school.

She backs this up by claiming porn is everywhere, going all the way back to when she was in school.

This is a battle that’s been around a long time. I remember when I was in public junior high and was walking down the school hallway. That’s when I spotted a picture of a naked woman laying on the floor. As I walked by, I noticed some boys watching me, smirking as they waited to see my reaction.

Has this really ever happened to anyone? This story sounds like a handy invention just for the book. Middle school boys can be awful, they can be obsessed with sex and anything to do with it, but the idea that boys were waiting to somehow shock or corrupt Lori seems pretty unlikely considering most kids from back then, (and yes, I’m in Lori’s age group) were too shy about sex, or interacting with the opposite sex so boldly. Had she said she encountered them all crowding around someone’s locker giggling and ogling a Playboy one of them swiped from their father it would have been much more believable.

The next bit is more likely to be true – except that many school districts insist that kids keep their cellphones in their lockers or pockets during school hours. It’s not a free for all pornography-flashing jamboree, not even at public schools. There also is a certain percentage of girls that would tell someone in the school administration about being forced to view porn. Lori does not say if she told anyone at the school about the photo on the floor but it is certainly an option.

….they can just point their Iphones at a girl and show her all sorts of pornography.

She goes on to claim that even if your children do not have Iphones or the internet that they are still being constantly bombarded with naked bodies and sex in television, magazines and advertising.

You know, this is where you as a parent step in. You actually talk to your children, make sure they understand that movies, television, magazines, advertisements are not real life, that the images are seeking to sell something that they don’t have to participate in. Recognize it for what it is, move on without allowing it power over you. In our house we had that discussion continually from an early age as my kids loved to beg me for the foods and toys advertised on children’s television.

She goes on to claim that pornography turns men into dopamine addicts that need weirder and weirder porn to get the same high. Funny that Lori does not seem to think that women consume pornography when statistics show otherwise.

While Lori’s claims about increased levels of dopamine are scientifically supported somewhat I personally find it much more scary that there’s some evidence that it shrinks the brain. From Live Science.

Porn may also literally shrink the brain, a 2014 study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found. Men who regularly consumed porn had smaller brain volume and fewer connections in the striatum, a brain region tied to reward processing, compared with those who didn’t view porn.

But all the scientific links I looked at also conclude that there is a lot science does not know about the effects of pornography. This I found interesting:

Is pornography use an unhealthy addiction that ruins men for relationships, or a healthy sexual outlet that both men and women enjoy? How people answer may affect whether they are harmed by porn. A study in the September issue of the journal Psychology of Addictive Behavior found that it was the perception of being β€œaddicted to porn,” rather than the intensity of porn use per se, that was tied with psychological distress.

And contrary to the notion that pornography fuels misogyny, men who viewed porn tended to hold more egalitarian views about women than did non-porn-using men. Frequent porn users view powerful women, working women and women who have had abortions more favorably than do other men, a study published in August in the Journal of Sex Research found.

Since there are so many mentions of the evils of porn it’s important to see what is provable about porn use. Not much of it lines up with the doomsday scenarios in the mind and words of Lori. It’s a personal issue.

We move on from porn, to Lori’s dire warning that no two kids of the opposite sex should ever be alone together because they will lose control and lose their purity.

Lori then warns that if you’re ready to marry you cannot do like the Botkin sisters, sitting around waiting for Mr. Right, you have to take charge of your hunt for a spouse.

I don’t think God just wants us to sit around and wait.

Get your parents to help you find the right one. She goes on to list all the internet dating sites that have Christian sections and encourages computer dating. But she follows it with this, which is pretty silly in the grand scheme of finding a spouse:

Remind your children to look their best and be joyful because others are attracted to joyfulness.

Appearances are more important than content?

After that we’re back to the horrors of pornography again and protecting your young folks from sexual predators lurking in the bushes at the park, completely missing the point that sometimes sexual abuse, many times in fact, the abuse comes at the hands of friends and relatives.

She ends with a very long and largely uninteresting blog post on how one of her followers found Mr. Right. But before that she recommends a post on her old blog written by Michael Pearl with the unintentionally hysterically funny name of Take Porn by the Horn! Oh boy!

In this entire long chapter there was not one word about the things that do work in keeping your children safe. Not one word about knowing their friends and friends parents, about teaching them that they have a right of control over their bodies, about building up self esteem so they don’t go searching for affection in the wrong places. Nothing about providing alternatives, or discussion, or continually teaching your children what is and isn’t harmful. Just a lot of ranting about the evils of porn on guys. Sad. She really missed an opportunity to teach for good in this chapter.

Next week is Chapter 12 – Keepers at Home, or as I named it reading it the first time – Stay Home & Clean. Ugh, where’s the joy in that? Life is more than chasing dust bunnies.

Introduction | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9

Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12

~~~~~~~~~~

Suzanne Titkemeyer is the admin at No Longer Quivering. She’s been out of the Quiverfull Evangelical world for nine years now and lives in the beautiful Piedmont section of Virginia with her retired husband and assorted creatures. She blogs at Every Breaking Wave and True Love Doesn’t Rape


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