In an exclusive interview, Matt Fradd, Byzantine Catholic author and host of the Pints with Aquinas podcast, sat down with Live Action founder and president Lila Rose to discuss pornography, sex, and how the perversion of sex has affected the world.
Fradd says he was first exposed to pornography at age eight. By age 13, his friend’s mother was buying he and his friend pornography and supplying them with alcohol. Looking back on the behavior, he called it sexual abuse — and said it led him down a dark path.
When he later became a Christian and worked to remove pornography from his life, he said he found “freedom” and began sharing his story with others to help them leave porn behind as well. He has spoken to tens of thousands of people, including college students during their university’s “sex week” activities. He told Rose that pornography is wrong for more than just the negative effects it may have:
“Pornography is wrong because of how it treats the human person and sex,” Fradd explained. “So I think the human person is a good towards which the only adequate attitude is love. I think that when a person consumes pornography, they are acting in an anti-love way. So I think that love means to will the good of the other for their sake. And I think the opposite of love, therefore, in this sense, would be ‘use’ — ‘I don’t will the good of the other for their sake. I will my good at your expense.’ I just don’t think you should ever treat people like that.”
Fradd added, “We’ve all had experiences where we were treated [merely] as objects in one way or another and whenever that happens, in whatever capacity, it might not be sexual, it might be financial … you always feel like some kind of violence has been done to your nature. And I think that’s because it has.”
He said that as the Church teaches, the sexual act has two ends; one is obvious: the procreation of the species. But it’s also “for the good of the two coming together,” he said. “… If you remove one of those ends, you’ve perverted it.”
He listed porn, masturbation (self-abuse), fornication, adultery, sodomy, and genital mutilation through so-called gender-affirming care as examples of perverting sex.
“The Church was right on everything. Sex before marriage, what a stupid idea that was,” he said. “Abortion, what a wicked thing that is even though at one point I said to my girlfriend, ‘If you got pregnant you’d just have an abortion, right?’ And I think she was quite shocked, taken aback by that, as she should have been, and I was shocked that she was shocked. But I think this is what happens when we indoctrinate children with stupid television shows like ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld’ that are going on the fumes of a Christian civilization while tearing it down at the same time.”
Fradd tackles these issues in his book, “The Porn Myth,” which discusses the negative psychological and sociological effects of pornography on the person, on their relationship, and on society.
“If you pervert sex then you pervert marriage, and if you pervert marriage you pervert the family, and if you pervert the family you pervert society, and if you pervert societies you pervert the world,” he explained. “And so it seems to me that if we want to get the world in a better place, we have to understand what man is and what sex is and start acting accordingly.”
