You Were Made for More

Episode 3: Pornography Is Not What You Think It Is (With Kristie Cossel)

• Sammie / Guest: Kristie Cossel • Season 1 • Episode 3

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0:00 | 43:40

Disclaimer: This episode does mention pornography, masturbation, and other mature content. We encourage parents and students to talk about these topics together before listening.

In this episode, Sammie interviews Kristie Cossel - a youth director from El Paso, Texas. Kristie has been married for almost two years to her husband, Mark, who she started dating in high school.

Kristie has personal experience with what it really means to struggle over sin and seek healing because of the impact that it had on her life, her relationships, and her identity. Not only does she truly believe that things she's saying in this interview, she vulnerably lives them out each day - something that I admire about her so much.

Truth is, we are all affected by pornography (whether directly or indirectly, which Kristie does a great job of highlighting in this episode):

  • 12% of websites on the internet are pornographic – that’s 24,644,172 sites. 
  • 1 in 3 porn viewers are women. It’s not just a “guy problem.”
  • Porn sites receive more regular traffic than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined each month.
  • Watching porn diminishes relationship commitment. Porn increased marital infidelity, or cheating, by 300%. A few studies reported in Psychology Today show that people who watched porn were more likely to engage in flirting (or more) outside their relationships and were more likely to cheat and hook-up with someone other than their partner.
  • 50% of all adults do not think that porn is wrong – and most teenagers are encouraging, neutral, or indifferent about opinions of pornography. They say it’s “not a big deal.”
  • Porn is a $57 billion-dollar industry worldwide - $14 billion-dollar industry in the US. That’s larger than all the combined revenues of all professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises AND more than CBS, NBC, and ABC combined.
  • A pastor in Cincinnati, Ohio polled all the 7th graders in his church and 100% of those 11-year-olds admitted to having exposure to pornography.
  • 50% of Christian men are addicted to pornography.

Pornography is a phenomenon that not many youth groups aren’t talking about, despite the epidemic running wild within the lives of our young men and women. Kristie personally relates to the statistics listed above, and I know that many of you listening will be impacted by what she has to share. At the root of the pornography problem lies a tragic misunderstanding of who we were created to be and what relationships are supposed to be about.

You were made for more than the counterfeit love that pornography offers you, and our prayer is that this conversation would allow you to wrestle with the weight of it's destruction in the world.

Things we mentioned in this episode: