Jessica Harris, who runs Beggar’s Daughter (an online resource for women dealing with pornography) was relating an incident early in her walk with Christ. She “went to a Christian college right out of high school and was caught there” doing pornography. What galls me, but sadly doesn’t surprise me, is the response from the so-called Christian school.
In her interview for the Covenant Eyes podcast, Jessica recounts:
“But I wanted someone to catch me, like, so bad. I wanted to be cause because I figured I’d get help. And I got caught at this [Christian college], but I went to the Dean of Women she said, ‘I’m sorry, women don’t have this problem. We know this wasn’t you. Sign on the line and go back to your room.‘ OK, so I signed on the line and went back to my room and I just never went back o that school.”
So many things went through my head when I heard this, but my first thought was: It figures. Here we have a school so in bound to the idea the sexual sin must be a man’s sin that even when uncovering clear evidence to the contrary the woman is acquitted outright. Jessica, who was internally pleading for help by getting caught, didn’t get any.
The second thought I had was whether some poor fellow was later accused (“accused” means “guilty” when you’re dealing with sexual impropriety and men) for accessing porn? Did some unfortunate young man, who simply had the misfortune of using the same computer immediate before or after Jessica, get blamed? I don’t need to get into what would likely happen to such a young man: confrontation, humiliation, discipline, expulsion in the face of denial, shame at being sent back home (likely to Christian parent who will continue the nightmare for him). Somewhere, in the horrid depths of Hell, this situation is causing Jezebel to crack a smile through all her weeping and teeth-gnashing.
All this simply because the church still, for the most part, will not accept that nearly a third of visitors to adult sites are women.
This whole episode reminds me of the days when law enforcement would simply look for the neared “colored boy” as the “obvious” suspect in whatever crime was committed. No alibi from a “color” defendant would acquit him, meanwhile no evidence against an accused white man would convict him.
I was also happy to hear in her next school how there wasn’t this same prejudice. This was where she found real help.
There is often an unfortunate targeting of men in these sorts of things. I know personally I heard an anti-male message in the church growing up. Not that men were looked down upon, but anything that was judged a stereotypically male was deemed unspiritual or worse.