A few weeks ago

2ish am: I leave my room to shower. The elevator opens behind me, and I hear,

"Oh my God. I'm going to go to jail."
"Don't worry about it. You only have to be 16 in Canada. She's Canadian, right?"
"Oh my God. I'm going to go to jail."

I didn't really recognize the voices off hand so I kept going. As I'm in the shower, the guys come in and start showering too. After a minute or two I can pick out the voices as some folks from my floor that I'm acquainted with, but really don't know and haven't had any sort of legitimate conversation with to this point. The conversation basically repeats itself, and the initial guy sounds pretty worried. The buddy repeats his "Age of consent in Canada" thing. Then they start joking about the whole situation. Initial guy details how the deleted random girl from facebook and changed all his privacy settings so she wouldn't be able to "track him down". Jokes about Chris Hansen's "To Catch A Predator". Jokes about how she was "sucha bitch anyway".

Enter two other gentlemen from my floor to the showers. They enter the conversation and get the scoop from the first two guys. These guys I know a little bit better, though still not very well at all. One of the new guys I new had been doing some seeking, the other, I knew claimed Jesus. The conversation turns away from the hilarious topic of statutory rape to the wonderful world of webcams. The gents start exchanging stories of their recent webcam exploits, and how they've been figuring out the best strategies for tricking the most girls into showing them the most skin.

So I leave. I'm pretty mad. I don't really get angry, but I'm pretty pissed off. As I'm leaving I see two guys that I know aren't from our floor going into two different rooms on the floor with these sly little smirks. Needless to say, these particular rooms aren't men's rooms. Keep heading back towards my room. I pass by one of the girls that lives in one of those rooms. We make eye contact. Face full of guilt. Full of discomfort. She watched me watch random dude go into her room. Stutters a little bit. Stumbles over something to the effect of,

"hmmm..that's interesting...i don't think i've ever seen that guy before...weird..umkwelligottagonowgoodnightbye."

then runs off to her room and closes the door. Now i'm pissed and really sad. Sad because I know this young woman also claims Jesus. Sad because I know some of her struggles with men. Pissed because some random guy is about to take advantage of that then disappear, go back to wherever he lives, and have a conversation about this girl similar to the one those guys had in the bathroom. At this point, i'm like 80% mad. 20% sad.

I get back to my room and I'm kind of at a loss for what my response to the last 20 minutes is supposed to look like. With the gentlemen, I'm acquainted with them enough to where if I saw them face to face they would probably tell me all the details. But I can't seek that out, because there's no way I could share their sentiments on the situation, but at the same time we don't have the depth of relationship where I would have the authority to speak into their lives as anything other than some christian finding something else to condemn them for (at least that's my interpretation of their interpretation). With the woman, we've talked about it all before, her response to me in the hall said enough.

So I sit in my room trying to do the leftover work I have. But really, I'm just sitting there being angry and at a loss for a proper response. Eventually, not looking for a response anymore, just being angry. All the normal, almost cliche questions: Don't they those guys see that the women are real people? Where is the respect? Where is the value? What makes it ok for them to have their way with someone, play tricks and games to get what they want, and then leave, erase the person from their life, and talk crap about them like it doesn't even matter? What if that was your daughter? What if that was your future wife? Would you be ok with someone else treating them like that? For the men that I didn't know at all, it's not cool, but not really surprising I guess, but for the guys that were seeking, it makes sense that they're not finding anything, for the guys that claimed Jesus, I couldn't even really think about that one because it just hurt my brain trying to understand how they could think it was ok on any level. For the woman, why are you letting yourself be taken advantage of? Why can't you see that you're worth more than an hour of stimulation for some random guy? etc. etc. so on and so forth.

This is my initial response to seeing this in a group of maybe...

6 guys (only two of which I was familar with)
mistreating a group of
4 women (mentioned individually, only one of which i was familiar with)

And then it hits me. And then I get really really sad. Like 98% sad and 2% mad.
So what hit me?

REWIND.
-----------------------------------
Beginning of 7th grade I see my first semi-pornographic image. accidentally.

A few weeks later I see my 2nd semi-pornographic image. intentionally.

At the time, I knew it was shady enough to hide, but had no concept of it actually being wrong, or bad, or harmful. Over the next year and a half it gradually worked its way into my list of habits, escalating in frequency, becoming more explicit. Baby steps, sure, but if a baby steps for 18 months, he'll probably go quite a ways, and by the end, he'll just be walking. maybe not the most accurate analogy but you get the point.

The back half of 8th grade, I made that connection, and was pretty alarmed by how progressive of a habit it had become. No longer a leisurely passtime, but something I wanted gone.

I spent the next 6 months trying (and failing miserably) to quit. I talked to my pastor about it. That got us nowhere. I gave up and gave in for the next two years. Everyday, sometimes multiple times a day.

In the middle of my junior year of highschool I got sick of it again and me and a few frinds started doing accountability. Made alot of progress, relatively speaking, knocked it down to a few times a month for junior year, only only a few times for all of senior year.

Freshman year of college revisited the junior years of highschool, in terms of frequency. Started accountability again at the end of freshman year. Got a filter. Have more or less had no access for the last year and half-ish.
-----------------------------------
K Let's bring it back.
What does any of that have to do with the conversations and situations that night?

I was the most angry I've been in a long time, after seeing and hearing about a handful of examples of guys treating women in ways they didn't deserve to be treated, and the women (for the most part) letting it happen. Then I realized:

7 years of pornography is a ton of women I've mistreated. And not even that. It's a ton of women that had to be mistreated by countless other people in order for there to even be any porn in the first place. It's not just a matter of me consuming, or other people producing, on its own, it's the reality that the consumption SANCTIONS, ENCOURAGES, REQUESTS production (and everything entailed by the production).

That alone made me sad. That's probably an understatement. It's an understatement.
While I really have no concept of how to go about calculating how many women I've affected like this, I just know it's astronomical. But what happened that night was was this:

1)I saw the flippant, careless, attitude the guys carried towards the women after they were "done with them".
2)I saw the brokenness, shame, and helplessness in the eyes of this woman I know in the midst of being treated the way the men had just finished interacting with various other girls.
3)I saw myself in those 6 men.
4)I saw my friend in every woman of those 7 years.

Prior to this, I pretty much new and could tell you any of the above information. But this wasn't about information, or worldview, morality, judgment, any of that.

All the things I knew came together in a way they really haven't ever before as God put actual faces to my sin.

I still don't know what my response is supposed to be. Maybe compassion. Probably. Not quite sure what that would look like though.

I suppose I'm left with a call to continue to seek him, to remember this grace and mercy, and that I do actually need it, and to testify to him among the people from my own life.

A call to remember and believe:

1 Timothy 1:12-17
"I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He considered me faithful, putting me into service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor, yet I was shown mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief; and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant, with the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus. It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am worst of all. Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the worst, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen."