CultureDiscipleship

My Husband Wants a Bikini Model

Good thoughts for men and women from Luke Gilkerson who regularly writes for Breaking Free: The Journey Towards Purity in a Sex-Saturated Internet.

Former swimsuit model Elin Nordegren has reportedly avoided the limelight, despite the fact that she is married to the Athlete of the Decade, Tiger Woods. But with recent discoveries of Tiger’s multiple affairs, Elin couldn’t be grabbing more media attention.

It is saddening when we hear of shattered marriages and shattered homes, but for some, the celebrity gossip brings to mind other questions.   Elin Nordegren is, by our cultural standards, a beautiful woman.   Some would ask Tiger why he would seek sexual satisfaction elsewhere having married a woman like her?

The very question shows our culture’s premium placed on physical beauty, or at least certain physical standards.   We receive hundreds of emails and comments from men who confess their habitual use of pornography, how countless hours of staring at pixilated sex has molded their conception of beauty.

We’ve also heard from hundreds of women who wonder why they are not enough for their porn-viewing husbands.   We hear, “I’ll never measure up to porn standards.”   This drives  some women to  reach for physical standards only attainable by anorexia, breast-enhancement,  and photographic airbrushing.   For others, this only leads to despair and giving up on the hope of intimacy with their husbands.

But Elin’s sad story should be instructive to frustrated wives everywhere.   Becoming a Swedish bikini model is not the solution to your husband’s porn problem.

Of course, it is commendable to take care of our bodies.   It only makes sense that we want to be attractive to our spouses.   It only makes sense that we should seek sexual satisfaction in marriage.   But becoming your husband’s unrealistic dream girl does not cure a deeply-rooted fixation on pornography.

As I wrote in Hard Core: Defeating Sexual Temptation with a Superior Satisfaction:

Pornography is a problem, but it is not the problem.   Pornography is a sinful symptom of the problem.   The adulterous affair is certainly a problem, but it is not the problem.   The problem is treasuring other things, other people, and other pleasures more than we treasure God.

If we are going to help men and women of all ages win this battle, we must strike at the root of the problem.   We must unashamedly examine God’s boundaries.   We must call sin, sin.   We must sound the call for righteous warfare.   We must encourage our beloved brothers and sisters in Christ to be “steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).   We must dedicate ourselves to hard-core holiness.

2 Comments

  1. How true this is. We all must strive to see inner man spiritual value and not that of the outside world. I have strived to find this most of my life and its been a hard lesson to learn. I feel i have missed opportunities to grow that he has given me. Purity comes from within not without. Only god can show us the way to this. We must love unconditionally and find the inner truths of the spirit of every man. Only then we fore fill what we were put on earth to do.

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