Dirty Girls: The New Porn Addicts

I stumble around the internet blindly most days. I traipse from blog to blog and something strikes my fancy so I add it to my reader. One of the people that I stumbled across in a way I can't even remember is Jenni Clayville . One of the three posts she made today was on Dirty Girls: The New Porn Addicts
Here are some stats Jenni posted about women and pornography from XXXChurch.com:

• Breakdown of male/female visitors to pornography sites: 72% male & 28% female
  
• 70% of women keep their cyber activities secret
  
• 17% of all women struggle with pornography addiction
• 1 of 3 visitors to all adult web sites are women
  
• 9.4 million women access adult web sites each month

A woman named Crystal Renaud is writing a book called, Dirty Girls: The New Porn Addicts. She has a place for surveys on her site where women can contribute to her research and anonymously state their struggles with pornography.
I have my own struggles with sexual sin. It is a place of deep deep shame for me and I sort of want to just throw up and never have to look any of you in the eye after this post. But the thing about shame is this: silence only perpetuates that shame.

I've posted before about my issue with Christian books that are written for women. When I was looking at Barnes and Noble for serving books I came across a book titled: Single, Saved and Having Sex . Just to be clear, I am not. But I read a lot of it sitting in Barnes and Noble that night and it crazy challenged me.
A few things:
Sometimes it seems like the main measuring stick for a single and saved person is the chastity. That and a few other things cause me to be so brutal towards myself for sexual sin in my past. I feel like I just can't get clean enough. I wish I could battle those things silently and under the radar, and about 85% of the time I can. But there are times that I just can't. Yet I feel I must because I don't know anyone else that struggles with this because it's just not talked about. (That and I have a really unbalanced ratio of single:married friends)
Secondly, we are absolutely berated with sexual images and not all of them are classified pornography every second. As a 29 year old single woman it is difficult for my self image and esteem to take some substantial blows when I hear, read, see, feel that I am not thin enough, beautiful enough, sexually promiscuous enough; when I hear that I do not want to be in a relationship enough. I struggle enough with those feelings that stem from my past relationships as well as my own poor opinion of myself. I cannot enough fathom what it must be like for younger girls, I can't fathom what it was like for me.
Finally, I got into a bit of a conversation on a friends blog about his use of the word whore. Specifically in regard to a woman in his town that had a torrid (one night) affair with his married neighbor. I certainly can't speak for that woman, or even the majority of women (obviously). But for so many years I felt invisible, unwanted, unseen, and absolutely worthless. My relationships (let's call them that shall we) with men for the most part were only a means to an end to feel seen and appreciated, counted as worthy, if only for those few moments. I can't say that's really stopped, only that I have no volunteers as it were. I only know that when I was a woman like the one in my friends hometown bar I can't say for certain I wouldn't have done the same, and done it out of a deep and shattered place. One of the last, deepest and darkest corners of my heart that God is cleaning out is my physical relationship corner. It is brutal and it is messing me up and breaking me. All I know, is for all intents and purposes God has that hidden and shameful part of me on his radar and he is not letting up.

I don't know what to say really. I'm not trying to stand on a soapbox and dig into your sex lives or even pass the teeniest amount of judgment on it. All I know is that I felt a breath of fresh air blowing through my house as I was reading through Crystal's testimony and the basis for the book she is writing and I wanted to be brave and share it with you.

***NOW PLEASE****
If you've read all this way I implore you only one thing. Please don't make eye contact with me next time we meet, I might throw up on you. :)