Dear Feminists, Where Are You?

Dear Feminists,

Where are you?

When a culture of brutality and abuse and sexual torture against women is being built around an empire called pornography? Where are you when teen magazines encourage young girls to let their porn-influenced boyfriends sodomize them? When sexual experts tell girls that when it doesn’t bring excruciating pain or humiliation or injury that it “can feel delightful”? Where are you, my sisters in this flesh that God designed, you strong women, you with the loud voices and the brilliant arguments, you who could quickly whither any defense of the grotesque world that pornography is building, completely wither it and blow it away as if it is nothing but a piece of dust?

Our girls need you.

They need to hear you rise up and rage against music that glorifies violent sex, that music that is pouring out of the radio this very minute, that our boys are learning by heart, that our girls are taking to heart: This is what love looks like.

Our boys need to see you, beautiful and bellowing in the streets, shouting until you have no voice left, declaring, not gently, that pornography is a sin against humanity. They need to see you at every turn, confirming with your constant striving and your passionate pleas all of the things that we, their mothers, tell them about the broken-souled way that the pornography culture will eat into their flesh and steal their hearts right from under their noses. And it will devour them and it will change them and it will hurt them. They need to hear it from you, dear warriors. They need to feel the power in your numbers, the solidarity in your spirits, the cries of your battle-scarred hearts.

Our girls need to see you unfurl your fury on an industry that tells them they exist only to please men. That their pleasure is secondary to their willingness to do anything that is asked of them in the bedroom. That their worth is measured in naked photographs. That their minds and their souls are of little importance because they have vaginas and breasts, and those are the only things that really matter. Where are you, my kindred?

You and I disagree on some issues. We march in opposite directions in our various battles. But, here, on this hallowed earth, this war for the hearts and souls of our children, this is our common ground. We are all mamas, sisters, aunts, grandmas. We are all casualties of this war, whether we know it or not, and we are now watching our own sons and daughters fall into its devastating grip. Where are you, courageous ones? Our boys and girls need you to turn and fight and rail and rage and squall.

A new world is emerging. One where girls are victimized even when they are safe at home in their own bedrooms.  One where boys get their sex education from violent videos that pour endlessly from the virtual world in their pocket. One where love is replaced by sex. Tenderness is replaced with brutality. Where marriages limp along in the shadow of sex addictions. Where are you, dear Feminists? History will remember the day that you finally surge into action and crash down on the pornography industry like a tsunami. Our boys and girls need you. Don’t let them look back on all of the ways they were wounded by this culture, knowing that that likes of you and the likes of me refused to come together to kill the source of their suffering.

The time is now. We need you. Where are you?