I saw this video a week or so ago over at Human 3rror. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Please take a few minutes to watch. It is extremely powerful and devastating.
Then consider these questions: How do you see Bundy’s “dirty little secret” affect the world? The church? Individual homes? Marriages? Have you ever struggled with the same “dirty little secret” or known people who have? How do we battle this “secret”?
Next Tuesday I will be doing a follow-up post on this topic, discussing my own personal experiences with the same “dirty little secret.”
This is so sad to me. Heartbreaking really. I also think it could’ve been so unpreventable had he felt like he could talk to someone about his “secret” and get help. I was in an unfortunate situation years back when a “friend” of mine we discovered had taken advantage of myself and a lot of my friends through videotaping and taking inappropriate pictures with out our knowledge. It was horrible and shocking and sent a lot of us and the church questioning How did he get away with this for so long? It seemed so out of character for this person. Like Ted Bundy said …it is a slippery slope and pornography is an addiction that is fed and not easily satisfied, The person addicted is always left wanting more. This friend that took advantage of us struggled with the same issue that Ted Bundy did although praise God went to jail early enough and I am hoping has sought help for his addiction. My hope and prayer is that if someone is struggling with pornography that they have at least one trusted person they can talk to and seek help for it.
I’m so sorry that you had to experience that. I’m sorry that the Church was harmed by that individuals actions.
I agree that sometimes just having one person to talk to might make a difference for people. I wonder though, does the church as a whole and individual Christians promote that kind of open freedom on the topic of pornography? Or is it still so taboo and “dirty” for people to talk about?
I think things are changing though. More and more churches and pastors see the need to raise this issue. Thank you for sharing your story and commenting here. Blessings to you CS.
Wow. wow. wow. I hadn’t realized this about him and all of the other prisoners he discusses. I am glad you are urging people to watch this, I hope it is a wake up call to many. This is one of the reasons I have been scared of having/raising boys, the pornography issue is a HUGE monster that is in their faces everywhere. It is so easy to stumble upon, so tempting, and easy to become addicted to. For girls too, but I think it is even harder for boys. All the more reason to be diligent in teching our children (girls and boys) and to pray, pray, and pray some more for their protection over this. The Lord has entrusted me with boys, and I pray continually for knowledge on how to direct my prayers for them. Thanks for this!
Pornography is a huge monster, you are right. It is so destructive. It’s a cancer that destroys lives.
You bring up such a good point about protecting our children–boys especially (although porn use by females has gone way up). I think I’m going to mention some of that in my follow-up post. It is scary to think of how prevalent porn is now and will be in 5-10 years, when are kids are in grade school. My stomachs turns.
And yes! Praying for the Lord’s wisdom, direction, and help in steering our children towards “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable” is critical.
Thanks Jill for the great comment!
While I do not doubt a link btwn pornography and crime, I fail to feel sorry for Mr. Bundy in any way. The man was a psychopath. He was known for manipulating the police and most of his crimes involved him playing on the sympathies of women (pretending to use crutches or a cane and dropping his groceries near a lady so she’d come over and help him, then he’d grab her). He was cold and calculating and craved attention constantly. Any time he spoke in an interview, he was manipulating someone. He was lying throughout this interview. No one knows who his father was. His grandparents raised him and until high school he thought his mother was his sister. And there IS evidence he was not “normal”…he was always withdrawn, and by high school was a thief and already obsessed with violence. The video is clearly trying to gain sympathy for a man who is lying through his teeth, manipulating with every breath.
Yes, porn is an issue for every man, and even women now….but there are also thousands of people out there that are addicted to it that don’t turn to crime. In the same way that serial killers were often abused, it’s still a lousy excuse for their crimes.
I certainly don’t have sympathy for Ted Bundy, but I do think his response seems somewhat genuine. This was filmed just hours before he was executed.
Bundy, in this interview, does not offer porn as an excuse, either. He mentions it as a destructive force and a catalyst that helped propel him from violent fantasy to violent reality. If anything, he explains pornography as a common denominator among many violent criminals not a justification for their crimes. I don’t feel that he “blames” pornography at all in this clip.
Of course not everyone who is addicted to porn becomes a serial killer either. The point again though, is that for someone who is already troubled as Bundy was early on, pornography can act as a compelling force on the path to violence. You may be interested in this research paper called Pornography and Violence: A New Look at Research by Dr. Mary Ann Layden.
Pornography is not to blame for violent crime, but it is certainly a factor for many violent criminals. My hope in posting this video was just to highlight the destructive and corrosive nature of pornography, especially since so many in the Church are enslaved by it. I understand your position Dee Dee and thank you for sharing it too.
I think regardless of his “true” background, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Bundy#Childhood for more info about it), the fact remains: we have to deal with these “dirty little secrets”. It’s so easy for someone to hide something because of shame or just not wanting to give it up. Although Bundy may have been trying to get an emotional and sympathetic (dare I say EMpathetic) response out of the viewers of this recording, we can all take notes from this.
Slippery slopes are so very… slippery. We all think we’re in control of whatever our secret may be and yet, we’re no different from any other person. The truth is, we’re all pretty nasty looking sinners. THANKFULLY, we no longer need to be enslaved to it.
Regardless of the truthiness of this video’s historical content- we can all take away a serious reminder: do not cover up your “dirty little secrets”- we all need to deal with them.
Kelly, so well said. Thank you also for bringing up an even more important over-arching theme which is: expose your “dirty little secret” or sin, whatever it may be.
The enemy wants to keep our secrets “dirty” so we feel we cannot share them. He also wants to keep them in the dark, where they can fester and grow. Exposing and confessing our secrets brings them into the Light and that produces freedom. And freedom is what Christ desires for us.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment.
Just wow! Thanks for sharing this. I’ve known a few lives that have been destroyed by pornography. It really is a silent killer of the mind, soul and body. I read a great book a few years ago about an FBI agent and his career in chasing and catching serial killers and he shared that the most amazing fact that all serial killers share is addiction to porn. It’s mind boggling. I also found an amazing infographic about porn that blows my mind. I blogged about it yesterday (see: http://www.betachristian.net/?p=1)
What’s even scarier is knowing that Bundy was raised in a very Christian household. that was in the late 70s and trying to get porn in those days was a challenge. Today, it’s as simple as firing up your web browser. Too easy for our children. I have a rule in my home that no one will have access to the computer in a bedroom. My computer is in the living room where thereis always someone passing by throughout the day. Not perfect, but I consider a child with a computer in his/her bedroom by themselves as dangerous as a child in a room with a loaded gun.
Thanks for the video and if you don’t mind, I want to share a post about it soon. I just have to digest his words a little deeper.
You raise a good point Moe: the rise of pornography from the 70’s to now. What will access to pornography look like in 5 years?
It horrifies me to think about it and my children being potentially exposed to such poison. I agree too, no computer in kid’s rooms. My husband and i have ours in a public room in our house and we use Covenant Eyes. It’s not perfect either, but it helps.
Thank you too for posting about this issue on your blog! The more the better.
15 years ago, if a man wanted porn (and while women may view it, it affects them very differently than it affects men), he had to muster up the courage to go to the adult bookstore and be seen buying it. He had to look someone in the face and buy the dirty magazines and videos. Someone somewhere knew your fetishes and desires. There was also the risk of being seen by somebody you were trying to keep the secret from. Then, you had to have a place to physically hide it. That fear of being found out is what kept many men at bay.
Fast forward to 2010 (although this really began in the late 90s)… The internet has completely removed the fear of getting caught. Moreover, the financial burden of a porn addiction has been removed, as there is plenty of free and legal material out there.
If ever we could look to a “perfect storm,” this is it. Unfortunately, we have a society that does not treat this problem as a “big deal.” You call porn out for what it is, and you’re immediately branded as a religious nut job. There is however, backlash slowly but surely rising against this (in the secular world of all places).
Sadly, I don’t see this as a problem that is going to go away anytime soon. Our generation seems to have the heavy burden of navigating these dangerous waters.
Sadly, you bring up such a good point Joey. Pornography was once expensive and hard to come by, but oh, the wonders of the Internet. Now pornography is almost common-place.
I agree with you that we are a long way from seeing this evil eradicated or, at the very least, lessened. But many more churches and social activists (not just believers, as you point out) are going to battle against pornography.
Do you know XXX Church? They do so much good and churches like them are spreading the word that it is okay to discuss this sin…the more we do that, the more Light, the less grip and devastation.
Thanks Joey for bringing up that great point.
I have heard of XXX Church and I’ve checked out a lot of their material. As far as I’m concerned, they’re doing yeoman’s work out there (under a harsh amount of criticism from more “conservative” Christians I might add). This will be one of those landmark issues that ends up making or breaking society. There’s a big polarized rift in it too. There are many who say “it’s not a big deal and we overreact,” and then there are those (Including Dr. Drew on Loveline) who know that this is a deep psychological addiction that can control and ruin lives.
While I recognize that pornography is a sin, and that it affects women, children, and men, and is in general something that I wish did not exist in our culture, I reject the notion that it “turned” Ted Bundy into a serial killer. If that were the case, my brother would have turned into a serial killer. So would half the teenage male population.
Ted Bundy was a sociopath. Pure and simple. Sociopaths are not neccessarily “made”, nor are they turned into killers by their parents. And he actually had a defining watershed moment before he started killing, where he discovered he had been illegitimate. He grew up thinking his grandparents were his parents, and his mother his older sister. He learned the truth around the same time he had a traumatic breakup with his girlfriend, in 1969. He later alluded to an attempted kidnapping in 1969.
I’m just saying I sincerely doubt the testimony of a confessed serial killer, one who did everything he could to avoid capture and prosecution. He also said in an interview: “I have known people who…radiate vulnerability. Their facial expressions say ‘I am afraid of you.’ These people invite abuse… By expecting to be hurt, do they subtly encourage it?” Notice how he’s deflecting responsibility. It’s the victim’s fault, not the abuser. Bundy was a master at making himself out to be a victim.
If we accept that pornography turned Ted Bundy into a serial killer, then we start down the slippery slope of absolving criminals of their responsibility. Bundy had a choice to make. Everybody does. Plenty of people, sadly, view and use pornography without becoming serial killers.
Karen, I agree completely. For the sake of not re-typing I’m copying and pasting my response to Dee Dee, who raised almost the exact issue:
“I certainly don’t have sympathy for Ted Bundy, but I do think his response seems somewhat genuine. This was filmed just hours before he was executed.
Bundy, in this interview, does not offer porn as an excuse, either. He mentions it as a destructive force and a catalyst that helped propel him from violent fantasy to violent reality. If anything, he explains pornography as a common denominator among many violent criminals, not a justification for their crimes. I don’t feel that he “blames” pornography at all in this clip.
Of course not everyone who is addicted to porn becomes a serial killer either. The point again though, is that for someone who is already troubled as Bundy was early on, pornography can act as a compelling force on the path to violence. You may be interested in this research paper called Pornography and Violence: A New Look at Research by Dr. Mary Ann Layden.
Pornography is not to blame for violent crime, but it is certainly a factor for many violent criminals. My hope in posting this video was just to highlight the destructive and corrosive nature of pornography, especially since so many in the Church are enslaved by it.”
Thanks for your well-stated and thoughtful comment Karen. You raise a great point and I hope my previous comment helps adequately answer from my perspective.
There is nothing that Bundy did that will justify his behavior. He is guilty as charged. However, there is a connection to serial killers and porn. There are various levels of the addiction. First, there’s the curious addiction in which the person is satisfied with seeing some “skin” then that grows into a deeper addiction where skin is not enough and need to see more. For the sake of keeping this post PG13, let’s just say that as the addiction gets stronger the dehumanizing of woman grows in the human mind. Eventually, woman are seeing as objects. It gets worse and violence becomes the next tier. Once the addiction reaches the point where it consumes the mind, the body and the soul the person becomes “less human”. I’ve worked and dealt with people in different levels in the addiction and let me tell you, the behavioral changes are astonishing. Really sad!
I saw an interview in which the president of a porn company was discussing the challenges of providing these services to their audience and his biggest challenge was “satisfying their hunger”. The industry is running out of creative ideas and the audience gets more hostile.
I would recommend reading: Mindhunter by Mark Olshaker. He was an FBI agent I’m the serial crime unit.
Just a note: John Douglas was the FBI agent who helped the FBI create their profiling process; he is the coauthor with Mark Olshaker, who, while being a fine writer, was not the FBI agent. :)
John Douglas also wrote “The Cases That Haunt Us” in which he looks at Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, and other unsolved crimes.
Ha! Good catch Karen. Thanks for the correction. ;)
Whether he was being sincere or not, this is pretty tragic. The effects of pornography is so much more serious than our world is ready to admit. I’m interested to read your perspective in the follow up post.
Exactly. I don’t think most people who are addicted to pornography understand the implications of such an addiction, let alone the general public.
What an image of James 1:14-15. It seems to me from the interview that the lie is still there though. It’s not a Dirty Little Secret, it’s a Filthy Old Lie. He says he’s not the monster, but pornography is the monster. That’s the lie, isn’t it? WE are tempted when WE are lured and enticed by OUR desires. I have no one to blame but myself for the sin in my life. I guess we’re more like Adam than we want to admit. Maybe I can blame that on my wife.
I agree, Dave. Blaming pornography is like blaming the gun for a drive by shooting, or a knife for a stabbing. Maybe it was a gateway drug into violent thoughts, maybe it was the beginning of a slippery slope..but and individual, unless he is insane without a doubt, has a responsibility for his choices.
Bundy chose to kidnap and torture women to satisfy his urges. He had to know that what he wanted to do was wrong in the eyes of society–otherwise he wouldn’t have taken such care to not get caught–but he didn’t care. Did the pornography feed his illness? Probably. Was it the root cause? No. In the end, it’s all down to personal choice.
I tell my kids that every day they have a choice to make—are you going to be good, or are you going to be bad? You could go further and say that you make that choice every minute of every day. It’s exhausting to think about, frankly, which is why we need God and the Church to guide us!
Dave, I agree that Bundy was dragged away by his own evil desire. I also acknowledge that pornography is not to blame for the evil he committed.
As I had written to some other commentors, I just wanted to highlight the common denominator of pornography among many violent criminals. I also wanted to just engage people in a conversation about how the Church deals (or doesn’t) with pornography as a whole.
All that to say, yes, I am the only person responsible for my sin. Bundy never took that responsibility and his life and subsequent death were proof.
Thanks for commenting and adding the great perspective of James 1:14-15.
It begs the question, then, about whether it’s a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Are potential criminals more drawn to pornography? I think it’s likely, because violent criminals tend to ‘depersonalize” their victims, think of them not as people but as objects. Which is what pornography offers, complete objectification of people.
So I think the question is not, “Does pornography spur criminals on to violent crime?” but “Does pornography feed a need that these criminals already have?”
I would agree Karen. You said it well. I think those feelings do already exist in most violent criminals, at least those that attack women. Although, I suspect that for some, those feelings may lay dormant or just under the surface and pornography helps bring them out, so to speak.
Pornography for violent men is like pouring gasoline on an already lit flame. It didn’t start the fire, but it certainly helps is become all-consuming and extremely dangerous.
nicole –
thank you for always posting such thought-provoking topics. i love reading your blog even though i rarely comment. i really think accountability for the person with a porn addiction is the only way to overcome it. that and a lot of prayer, humility and willingness to seek God above selfish desire. and more prayer! as a girl who once dated a guy with a porn addiction, i have seen first hand how this issue within a relationship can manifest into other doubts and insecurities in that relationship and eventually ruin the relationship. satan works in very real and scary ways.
while God intended sex to be an amazing and enjoyable part of marriage, porn defiles sex and makes it dirty and taboo and so readily available at the click of a button to anyone willing to take a look. but the secondary effects of porn like objectifying others can exacerbate that downward spiral into strongholds of lust and other sins, which often comes at a cost in the form of relationship. it makes me sad to think that satan so easily gets a hold of guy’s minds (especially) and society today provides ample opportunity for porn addicts to practice this sin in the comfort of their own bedrooms with no one to know but them and God. conviction and accountability are so important if they ever want to have a healthy and God focused marriage. i hope it is discussed more within the christian context as i bet more people struggle with it than willing to admit, so thanks for bringing it up here.
Kelly, thank you for commenting. I think you are so right that accountability and conviction is key. I hope the Church moves forwards in doing a better job of providing accountability for those addicted to pornography, as well as allow them to feel safe in even confessing their sin.
We have to move away from it being so taboo, as you pointed out. It is, like you siad, so easy to sit in the dark-secluded and in secret-and be possessed by pornography.
I’m sorry that you were in a relationship that was hurt by pornography, but am thankful that God has convicted you of its evil and brought you to a heart that desires to see this issue eradicated within the Church. Thanks again for commenting Kelly. I hope you will do so more in the future!
What you are watching is a high IQ sociopath making what he thinks is the most plausible excuse he can sell for what he did – and thus hoped to get his sentence commuted – pornography does not turn people into sociopathic killers.
He talks about himself as having been normal, not true, sociopaths are born not made – and you cannot cure them.