When the baby arrives, you’re the first to see her in the delivery room. Tears fill your eyes as you look at this miniature version of your bride. You’re in love all over again, and you stand in awe of what you and your wife have created. You raise her with love, teach her to ride a bike, and swoop her into your arms if she ever stubs her knee. She’s your princess, and you’re her king, and the both of you know it. Years go by, and you begin to raise a family.

Today, it’s her seventeenth birthday and so she has a pool party with her friends. She walks out of the house in her bathing suit, and your son takes the opportunity to grab his digital camera and take pictures of her. Since she’s so attractive, he publishes the pictures, and even puts them on the Internet. Before too long, there are hundreds of thousands of strange men across the world lusting after your princess. They stare at her body, and make all sorts of sick jokes about what they think of her, and what they’d like to do to her.

At this point, how do you feel? Would you be comforted if they said they were “just appreciating the beauty of womanhood?”

I had all the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues back in high school, and I knew all the reasons why it supposedly wasn’t that bad. Granted, none of these arguments really convinced me, but why would I care? I just enjoyed seeing the women. Before I could realize or stop it, the way I saw all women became warped. My standard of physical beauty became that of impossible perfection. As the eye wanders from one page to the next in the magazine with lust, your eyes begin to gaze from one girl to the next in the mall or on campus. Before long, you assume that constant lust is pretty much natural for a teenage guy.

Then, when we see girls in school, without even realizing it, we turn them into objects. We begin to measure the value of a woman by how much lust she generates in us. We become shallower and shallower. Meanwhile, we lull our consciences to sleep by saying that it really won’t affect us that much. The images of porn brand themselves into our minds, and I know all too well how long it takes to erase them.

But it isn’t just the images that stick with you. Your wandering eyes stay with you. They don’t turn off and stay on one girl when you enter a relationship. You trained them to look at everything that could possibly arouse them. They became gluttons for lust. Now married, I still feel the effects of the porn and swimsuit magazines I looked at over ten years ago. It trains you to have unfaithful eyes: to wander with your eyes towards every attractive woman around. I’m not talking about lusting after every woman, but having a tendency to want to look at every beautiful woman within a hundred yards of you. But my eyes, like my heart and my body, belong to Crystalina (my wife) alone. If I know there is an attractive woman walking my way in the mall, I should look somewhere else, instead of needing to at least glance at her. Now, it’s not wrong just to see a beautiful woman, but we must re-train ourselves for monogamy (one wife), because porn trains us to have mental polygamy (many wives).