Repentance and Forgiveness in a Pornified Age

In 2012, one of us asked two dozen young conservative women in San Diego—most aged twenty-five to thirty—whether they were married. Only one was. When pressed for reasons, the answer came quickly: “The men are addicted to porn.”

That moment revealed a quiet crisis. If committed, attractive, faithful young women hesitate to marry because of pornography, the pro-marriage project is in deep trouble.

Pornography compromises the sexual and marital dance. As smartphones made high-speed internet porn ubiquitous in the late 2000s, marriage rates, birth rates, and sexual activity tanked. A sex recession and dating recession followed. Nor has the situation bounced back post-COVID as youngsters who have lived only in a world saturated with internet porn have come of age. 

Today, women rightly sense that many men under forty have warped expectations shaped by endless visual novelty. They are jealous, suspicious, and increasingly unwilling to risk marriage with men whose loyalties seem divided. Porn explains why women are more skeptical about and less interested in marriage and dating than men. Porn is a significant source of conflict in nearly 20 percent of married and engaged couples. For more than a third of women, frequent porn use is a marital deal-breaker. 

Political communities once used law and custom to channel male sexual desire toward marriage. Old wisdom recognized that men think about sex more frequently, respond strongly to visual stimuli, and are tempted by sex without commitment or rejection. The near-total repeal of obscenity laws, combined with powerful technology, replaced the old way that male passions were channeled. Men now face unprecedented temptation. 

Women either go with the male flow, as Freya India argues in a revealing interview at the European Conservative and in her book Girls, or make unreasonable demands of men. 

The first group, afraid of imposing a sexual double standard, abandons standards altogether. For them, according to India, porn is simply “part of life.” Women worried about pornography appear as scolds, insecure in their own sexuality. “If you have some instinct about [porn], that’s yours to deal with it,” says India, characterizing those indulgent toward pornography. Reddit channels are rife with such advice. If a guy masturbates, just do it yourself!

The other group, like the San Diego women, demands that men match female levels of sexual purity or be disqualified as marriage material. 

Both approaches fail. The first abandons reasonable instincts for a liberationist future; the second ignores the asymmetric power of modern porn and the nature of male moral weakness. Young women should, according to India, “both listen to their instincts” that pornography is a threat to relations and still try “to be less risk averse.” 

Leo Tolstoy and Anthony Trollope show that India’s wise middle path is rooted in repentance and forgiveness. 

In Anna Karenina, Kitty, one of the novel’s heroines, recoils after reading Levin’s diary, filled with accounts of his youthful atheism and sexual conquests, “Take those dreadful books back,” she cries. Yet she eventually says, “I have forgiven you, but it is dreadful!” By marrying Levin, Kitty chooses realism about men’s moral weakness over the illusion of a higher standard. She accepts that he is not pure, but that he is trustworthy. His repentance makes him a worthy husband and father. Between tolerating “boys will be boys” and demanding equal sexual purity from men lies Kitty’s riskier path of forgiveness. 

Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? shows that female attraction has a dark side too. (Anna Karenina happens to be reading this novel when she is first introduced in Tolstoy’s classic.) Women want men of ambition and status, interesting men as opposed to safe ones. Murderers get a lot more love letters from anonymous women than practicing accountants do.

Alice Vavasor abandons the steady, country gentleman John Grey, her fiancé, for the exciting but dangerous George, who aims to enter Parliament. When George reveals his greed and violence, the prodigal Alice returns to Grey repentant. Grey forgives her completely, viewing her error as a temporary “frenzy.” Grey even enters Parliament partly to give her the exciting life she craved. Trollope himself asks the reader near the novel’s denouement, Can you forgive her?—and answers yes, given her “deep repentance.”

Before the sexual revolution, men and women could more easily hold one another to high standards of premarital conduct, but these novels instruct us not to glorify the good old days. As sixty years of sexual revolution have compromised both men and women, both must balance standards with realistic expectations.

The promise of marital trust is built on honest reckoning and generous forgiveness. Forgiveness without repentance is naive; repentance is a prelude to trusting forgiveness. What might repentance look like? Does it require Levin’s diary-revealing openness? 

In our pornified culture, the constraints that once guided male desire have largely collapsed. Private solutions—accountability groups, app blockers, mutual surveillance among young men—are growing, especially in churches. Polling shows rising support among young men for stricter online porn regulations. Yet actions reveal preferences inconsistent with such thoughts.

Women must recover the ability to distinguish between men who struggle with porn and those consumed by it. Some feminine instincts should be trusted: Porn is a threat to intimacy. At the same time, many good men have fought and largely overcome this moral weakness. Scolding is a less effective personal strategy than making marriage aspirational and offering realistic forgiveness. 

Marriage in this environment depends on an old dynamic made newly difficult: male repentance and female forgiveness. Men must turn away from porn toward virtue and responsibility. Women must distinguish between the redeemable and the unrepentant, offering grace where it is earned. 

The principles of the sexual revolution taint women too. Women are encouraged to be tolerant of male sexual impurity today because some girls have gone wild. For nearly every porn video there is a female “porn star.” Call Her Daddy, a podcast where the girls brag about getting around, is wildly popular. Women are reading erotica, watching more porn than in the past, and posting highly suggestive and borderline pornographic photos of themselves on social media. At best, women today are torn between the desire to settle down and have a family and the career pressures of feminism, extraordinary sex positivity, and a dating culture built on premarital sex.

Some men mirror those unmarried San Diego women. Looking for an honest woman, they are unwilling to date women with sexual pasts. Going forward, many men will have to model John Grey’s forgiveness. As in the case of men, a commitment to deep, communal marriage is the chief mark of a repentant woman. 

Marriage in this environment is risky. But the alternative is suspicion and a degenerate stability—a future of gooners and OnlyFans models, of declining family formation and deepening mutual distrust. The path of Levin and Kitty, of Alice and Grey, remains open—but only for those willing to combine old wisdom with Christian mercy.