11.9 Pornographer’s Marketing Tactics

No one knows marketing better than the pornographers. They have somewhere between $2.5 and $10 billion reasons to get their product to us.² A friend of mine once went to a workshop on a prominent college campus, where the speaker extolled the genius of the pornography dealers. He talked about how cutting edge their marketing strategies were and encouraged everyone present to study their lead. Let there be no mistake – there will be more pornography, not less, in the coming years. It’s hitting the mainstream.

Their marketing strategy is ever-evolving and increasingly effective. Here are just a few of the tricks they use to reel us in:

• Using innocent keywords in their websites to trick you into clicking on them while you are working on something else
• Buying expired domain names (even Christian ones) and using the sites to publish porn
• Purchasing domain names similar to popular sites (e.g., NASA.com instead of NASA.gov) and posting porn on them
• Piggy-backing on popular children’s site searches – sites like Disney, My Little Pony, Action Man or Nintendo
• Giving away free material hoping that you will get hooked
• Daisy-chaining sites so that clicking out of one only opens another, and another, and another…in an endless line of sites from which it is very difficult to extricate yourself (the technical terms for this are “circle-jerking” or “mousetrapping”)
• Hijacking you to a different site than you intended to visit (i.e., they own both sites, but the front site is just a façade to get you interested)
• Advertising in the margins on Google and other search engines when you do a keyword search
• Automatically making a site your home page
• Adding spyware, cookies and Trojan horses to your hard drive
• Sending pornographic spam to random email addresses (If you’ve visited a questionable site, this may not be completely random.)
• Offering “starter” videos (commonly referred to as “soft porn”) at your local video store
• Using bait and switch tactics (Recently, I was in a foreign country in a hotel that had a card advertising a movie popular in the United States. But when I turned to the channel where the movie was supposed to be, it was twenty-four hour porn. I was never able to find the real movie.)
• Sending friend requests using spam robots to MySpace patrons shortly after they log in

The pornographers have the dollars and the bright minds to invest in new technology. They know how to get the pornography to you. They are master marketers, who continually look for ways to make pornography low-hanging fruit.

In fact, pornographers don’t always care if you actually view their sites. If they can show their advertisers that their sites have more hits, they can drive up ad revenue. Just getting your computer to hit the sites helps them make more money…hence the popularity of some of the strategies listed above.

They know how powerful words are, so they changed their industry terminology to make it less offensive. “Soft porn” sure seems more palatable than regular pornography. “Mature” movies are for consenting adults. “Adult” movies even more so. Adults can do what they want, right? “Gentlemen’s clubs” seem much more high scale than striptease bars.

Pornographers know that by changing their vocabulary, they overcome some of our inhibitions. They confuse the lines between normal and abnormal, between morality and immorality. Because we don’t know where we should draw the line, we don’t know what to make of it when they call porn and sexual immorality something different than we’ve always thought it was. While we are trying to figure it all out, they push the line further back.

A few years ago, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake had to apologize for allowing Timberlake to remove a patch covering Jackson’s breast at the end of their Super Bowl halftime show. I never heard them or anyone apologize for the indecency of the rest of the event. The dance moves were bumping and grinding and very sexual in nature, but we all forgot about that when we saw the closer. That’s how Satan works. He shocks us so that we forget everything that came before. The shocking action is simply a diversion so that he can slip the rest of it under the radar.

7.9 Look for the Lie

Whenever you are tempted to sin, look for the lie. I promise it’s there. Every temptation involves at least one lie and probably many. One of the most common lies associated with sexual temptation is that you have an urgent need that has to be met right now! The pressure can seem enormous and overwhelming. You begin thinking it would be easier to just give in, but don’t.

What looks urgent is often a lie. (Ever answered an urgently ringing phone only to discover that it’s a telemarketer?) Satan wants you to think that you have an urgent need, but resist the temptation with resolve, and watch how quickly he flees. A moment later, you’ll be amazed at how different you feel.

How about some other lies that we believe in the moment of temptation?

“It’s my wife’s fault. She’s not meeting my needs.”

While your wife may not be meeting your sexual needs, you are still accountable for your own behavior. You can’t use what someone else does or doesn’t do as justification for sin. Before you blame your wife, ask yourself if there is anything you are doing or not doing that might be contributing to the problem.

“I’ve been good. I deserve a break.”

You’re assuming that you’ve crossed some arbitrary righteousness threshold. This is a very legalistic way of looking at your walk, and it’s false. Our relationship with Christ is based on grace, not works. Works are the evidence of your love for Him. Besides, the threshold is much higher than you are thinking. (See Jesus’ interpretation of the seventh commandment in Matthew 5:27-30.)

“I need to see how bad it is.”

Maybe a little “Christian research” might make you better prepared to defend against sexual immorality. Not a chance. It’s bad, and it ain’t getting better. That’s all you need to know. More diligent research will only take you down. It will make you want to do more and more research until you’ve consummated your sin.

“Just one look won’t hurt.”

Wrong. Curiosity killed the cat, remember? One look will turn into a linger, and a linger will turn into a lust. If Satan can get you to take one look at the bait, he sets the hook and starts to reel you in. Besides, how long can your active imagination go on just that one image?

“I’ve already messed up. What’s one more time?”

How far away from God do you want to wander before you try to find your way back to Him? It may not be as easy as you think. Though God is always as close as our repentance, you might find it difficult to ask for forgiveness. Every time you sin, you are poisoning your spirit. The sooner you turn back, the better.

7.2 F.E.A.R. of Discovery

At times, Satan deepens our isolation by convincing us that our sin is so bad that we can’t talk with anyone about it. If we believe him, we give him leverage to use against us.

In the movie Training Day, Denzel Washington’s character, Alonzo, pressures the rookie into using some of the drugs they have confiscated. He says that everyone on his team must do it, or they can’t be part of the team. He says that it’s part of the research that enables them to be convincing undercover in the field. In a weak moment, the rookie caves, and in doing so, he compromises his integrity.

Once Alonzo knows that the rookie has drugs in his system, he can now manipulate the rookie to go along with his illegal activities. Every time the rookie thinks about going to the authorities, Alonzo reminds him that he has the drugs in his system. “Who’s going to believe a drug addict over an officer with a long list of achievements?” The rookie no longer has any integrity to stand on. He can’t turn Alonzo in without being implicated himself.

The Enemy uses this same tactic on us. First, he tempts us to sin. Once we have given in to a sin that we don’t want anyone else to know about, he uses it to force us deeper into isolation. Satan doesn’t want us reaching out to those who might help us, so he tells us that those people would no longer accept us if they knew what we had been doing. They would be disgusted, disillusioned, disappointed… Satan fills us with F.E.A.R. about the consequences of our sin. We might lose our marriages, our jobs, our reputation, our friends or worse.

Sin flourishes in darkness, so even though we don’t want to sin again, we do. Once we’ve crossed our moral boundaries once, it’s easy to cross them again…and again…and again… Our sins accumulate, and we cross new boundaries that we thought we never would. We live in constant fear that someone will discover them. But at the same time, we almost hope that someone will catch us if only so that we don’t have to live a secret life anymore.

This downward spiral almost always leads to exposure and serious consequences. Of course, the consequences would be much less if we would seek help early in the process, but we too often believe the lie that there’s no one we can turn to, no one who would understand. Don’t fall for it. Even if you are at a high level of leadership or in the public eye, God can show you at least one person that will share your burden and help you to get free from your sin. By confessing your sin to God and to those you trust, you remove Satan’s leverage in your life.

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