It’s a disarming question, to be sure.

I’ll give you the easy answer—right up front with no waiting. My first answer is an unequivocal Yes—Did you really need to ask?  My second answer is a much slower No—and I’m glad you asked.

First of all, the reason you clicked on this piece has everything to do with your own self-assessment. You wanted to either 1) Make sure that you’re not alone in your own behavior, 2) See if your holiness level is a lot higher than other women’s, 3) Determine if being a Christian makes any difference in the way people live their lives, or 4) Succumb to the deep curiosity that men and women have when it comes to private sexuality.

Human beings are often critically aware of their own DNA-encoded predisposition to everything God-dishonoring, and that includes sexual perversion (If you don’t believe that pornography is a form of sexual perversion, then stop reading because we won’t agree on much from here on out). I’m not one of those editorialists who believe that all your hang-ups come from society’s misguided Victorian ideals or mother-imposed guilt trips. I’m a believer in the Fall, a writer who accepts both the evidence from my culture and the Bible’s words in Genesis 8 that “every inclination of [man’s] heart is evil from childhood” and in Romans 3 that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

So when I answer unequivocally YES to the question “Do Christian women watch porn?” I think I’m interpreting it more like, “Do even good girls watch porn?” or “Can even nice/well-raised/self-righteous women get mired in sexual temptation?” Answering YES to the question reinforces my idea of the Fall, and it might be the kind of answer you want to hear. Why? Because now all the nice girls can release a collective sigh together and think to themselves Now that’s good to know. We’re all in the same boat; I’m not some perverted freak after all.

However, if I were to tidy up my essay with that sentiment alone, it would be an incomplete picture of what it means to find redemption. Now I come to the NO answer to the question, the answer that makes me happier than the first, the answer that says there’s something miraculous about God’s grace. In truth, Christian women don’t watch porn. It would be like saying vegetarians eat meat or airline pilots fly bicycles. Christian women might have a horribly curious weekend, or occasionally exercise pathetic judgment at the movies, or find themselves clicking on ten-too-many website links on a vulnerable night, but that is not what the question asks. By their very nature, Christian women do not watch porn because it is entirely inconsistent with the brand new, scrubbed clean, miraculously regenerated soul that knows “that we should no longer be slaves to sin.”

Another reason that you might have landed on this essay of all things could be that you were curious about the role of women viewing pornography—an arena that appears to trap far more men than women. I’m guessing the reasons that women view pornography are more complex than men, but I’m not sure about such research. My instinct says that women are often deeply insecure about their own sexuality. Pornography provides such a stark contrast between the healthy and the unhealthy—it’s the train wreck that we instinctively slow down for. Some women know men who are deeply affected by these images, and they want to climb down into the sewer and look around, to see for themselves what has poisoned so many wells.

Other women are, no doubt, addicted themselves to the rush or the thrill of the forbidden. Yet if you look at the statistics for prostitution and pornography, the trail almost always leads back to abuse and brokenness. For others, especially the very young or perhaps the inexperienced, it’s bound to be the irony of feeling shameful for being too pure or too virginal that makes them want their share of such a low-grade education. Do they hope to mimic what they see?

None of the environmental or psychological reasons stray very far from my starting point, which is much simpler than we make it: Fallen man loves dark, shadowy, broken things; redeemed man loves the light. Good breeding and Sunday school lessons cannot conquer the darkest part of the human condition, so stop wondering how you, of all things, could be such a pervert. A blog won't answer this thing. Instead, read the book of Romans in one sitting. And then read it again the next day. It will challenge how you answer my question.