The Cultural War on Purity
No matter how much you seek to avoid drama, new Sydney Sweeney controversies still somehow manage to find you. Most recently, the internet was once again up in flames due to her ad for the company “Novig”, in which she poses naked to promote sports gambling.
In an ideal world, neither you nor I would know who Sydney Sweeney is or what Novig does, and yet here we are, me writing about them, and you reading about them. However, I’ll do my best to ensure that this article moves on swiftly from their specific case onto a few —hopefully— more profound arguments I want to make.
The ad in question angered a lot of people, for various reasons, some valid, some not. For me, personally, it’s just another reminder of how much our culture wants us to be perpetually preoccupied with sexually charged advertisements and entertainment.
Most people who have given this some thought would agree that our culture has declared an open war against purity, and that it’s not a coincidence that millions of dollars are spent every single day trying to get you to fall into sexual immorality. Give them bread, circuses, and sexually explicit content and they’ll never revolt.
In media, ads like the one we just mentioned are quite common, and big brands are even using OnlyFans “models” to promote their products. Because about 90% of all visual real estate is now advertisements, this means that wherever you go (or wherever you look), you’ll encounter photographs and videos of nude actresses or sex workers trying to get you to consoom.
Then there’s entertainment: series like Euphoria or Game of Thrones make of nudity and sex one of their main marketing points and allow softcore pornography to become accessible and accepted in every household. People like Lily Philips and Bonnie Blue reach mainstream fame by competing on who can sleep with the most men in the least amount of time (I wish I didn’t know who those people were), and on and on it goes, with an entertainment industry pushing all possible buttons to ensure that no one ever dares to attempt to pursue the virtue of purity.
Even in academia or in the realm of “science” you see sexually immoral behaviors being promoted: The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University announced on September 30, 2025, headline results from a clinical study concluding that "masturbation can relieve menopause symptoms." Interestingly enough, the study was funded through "Womanizer's Pleasure Fund, a five-year, $300k commitment" from the sex-toy brand Womanizer. The jokes write themselves.
Planned Parenthood, however, refuses to surrender its undisputed title for the most degenerate institution ever, and thus chooses to promote masturbation to children as young as 12 and call it “liberation”.
I think that’s enough proof of the very simple thesis that gives this article its title: there is an ongoing war against purity, and the world wants you to be forever lustful and to remain a slave to your sexual impulses.
Why Would the Enemy Want This?
But why? What’s the point? Why would the principalities of evil that rule this world want this to be the case? What’s the agenda and what’s in it for them?
It’s wise to consider these questions before letting yourself be convinced of what some might deem a “senseless conspiracy”, because pondering the reasons behind certain cultural phenomena allows you to filter out the nonsense and distill whether or not there is some truth in what is being said. And if you ask yourself those questions, you’ll realize that the enemy has every reason to want to make you lustful.
A few months ago I posted a series of viral articles, the first one titled “Sexual Sin Makes You Dumber”, in which we went over the Thomistic principle of the “eight daughters of lust”, eight negative effects that persistent sexual sin has on the will and intellect. I'll spare you the details here, as the full series is linked below, but offer the main conclusion: sexual sin makes you dumber and weaker through various psychological and spiritual mechanisms.
Our intellect is a tool that we can use to arrive logically and rationally at the conclusion that God is real. And our will is essential in persevering in the fight against sin, and in ordering our actions towards the good.
You can see now why the enemy would want you lustful: clouded by sexual sin, your intellectual power will be limited and your will will be softened, making it much more likely that you remain blind to the truth of God’s existence and incapable of pursuing the disciplines required to get there.
Many great saints have written about the terrible effects of sexual sin. In another article, we discussed St. Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus, and extracted from it another worrying effect of sexual sin: the isolation of the sinner. As I wrote in that piece:
Sexual sin has a particularity that makes it different from all other sins: it is by nature uniquely self-enclosing among the passions. Other sins like anger, avarice or pride are often visible to others and are thus somewhat subjected to social control. Sexual sin, in contrast, is usually secret It requires concealment to survive, and that concealment over time creates within a man an entire interior region that is carefully hidden from everyone around him.
Damian is clear: sexual immorality expels the virtues from your heart and opens it up to every barbarity of the vices. Thus, if your faith has been undermined, your hope weakened, your charity broken, and your prudence blunted by sexual immorality, you have a structural problem that leads to isolation and the feeling of being unknown. These are the social consequences of lust’s destruction of the interior life.
When a man is consumed by sexual immorality, he stops being capable of developing genuine relationships, because any authentic relationship requires the mutual knowledge of each other’s interior.
— Juan Domínguez, St. Peter Damian on the Social Dimension of Sexual Sin
Just think about what this means for the average male friendship, and even worse, for the average marriage. It’s clear that we are going through an epidemic of male loneliness, and Damian’s insight just makes me wonder: is this somehow caused by the demon of lust and by the hold it’s taken over our culture?
No relationship can flourish without honesty. A marriage even less so. Maybe over 50% of marriages wouldn’t end in divorce if purity was a virtue we still lived by, so that we could be fully open about the contents of our hearts instead of living to hide a part of us that brings us shame and dishonor.
How Can We Walk a Different Path?
Spiritually
I’ve written amply about chastity, and I’ll link some recommended articles at the end of this one. But I want to offer some clear guidance right here as well.
Lust is a physical and psychological problem, yes, but it’s also deeply spiritual. That’s why most attempts to quit porn and other forms of sexual immorality that do not include spiritual work eventually fail.
So, spiritually, you have a few tools at your disposal, all of which will be weapons in your war against lust.
First and foremost, you need to be living a rich sacramental life. You cannot defeat sin on your own. That’s a fact. It’s also a fact that God can give you the grace you need to defeat it. What logically follows is that by accepting God’s grace through the sacraments, you will receive the strength required to defeat the demon of lust. Receive the Eucharist often (more than once per week), go to adoration, and seek to remain in a state of grace by confessing as soon as possible after committing mortal sin.
Our Lady and St. Joseph are also great helpers in the fight against sexual immorality. You can pray to them to ask for their intercession:
Jesus, Lover of chastity, Mary, Mother most pure, and Joseph, chaste guardian of the Virgin, to you I come at this hour, begging you to plead with God for me. I earnestly wish to be pure in thought, word and deed in imitation of your own holy purity.
Obtain for me, then, a deep sense of modesty which will be reflected in my external conduct. Protect my eyes, the windows of my soul, from anything that might dim the luster of a heart that must mirror only Christlike purity.
And when the “Bread of Angels becomes the Bread of me” in my heart at Holy Communion, seal it forever against the suggestions of sinful pleasures.
Heart of Jesus, Fount of all purity, have mercy on us.
Another thing you could do is pray to St. Maria Goretti, who’s the patron saint of purity. There’s also a popular novena (nine days of prayer) to ask for her intercession, which you can read more about here: https://novenaprayer.com/st-maria-goretti-novena/.
Practically
Now, onto the more practical tips to quit porn and other forms of sexual immorality, here’s a quick summary (there’ll be a full protocol linked below):
See it for what it is: strip away the justifications and accept honestly how destructive pornography is, both to yourself and to the people who partake in it. You cannot fight it if you keep thinking it’s “not that bad”.
Remove all triggers: mark provocative content as “not interested,” unfollow accounts that cause temptation, install content blockers on your phone and computer, and restructure your physical and digital environment to prevent occasions of sin even before they arise.
Stop drinking and using substances: alcohol and drugs lessen your willpower and cloud your judgment, both of which you need to overcome this battle.
Create negative reinforcement loops: when you relapse, give yourself an uncomfortable consequence (a cold shower, fasting, giving up entertainment) to break the psychological association between lust and pleasure.
Change your identity: stop counting the days that you are “porn-free”. Tell yourself simply: “I am not a man who watches porn.” Change your identity and you’ll change the behavior.
Pray in the moment of temptation: invoke the name of Christ, pray the Jesus Prayer, and rebuke the temptation directly.
Consecrate yourself to Mary: she is the model of purity and leads every soul toward her Son.
Fast regularly: controlling your appetite for food trains the same self-control muscle needed to govern sexual appetite.
Go to confession frequently: naming the sin, receiving absolution, and being held accountable sacramentally is one of the most practically powerful elements of the entire protocol.
Stay busy: idleness leads to relapse. Train hard, work hard, pray hard, and leave no empty space for lustful thoughts to take root.
Never lose hope: the one thing you cannot do is conclude that the battle is lost, because that’s when you actually lose.
Finally, I always recommend Relay, a Christian app designed specifically for overcoming pornography and sexual sin. There’s a ton of positive testimonies of men who’ve overcome porn addiction, masturbation, and other forms of sexual immorality with the help of the structured protocol that Relay offers. Many men (even some close friends) have also told me personally it made the difference after other methods failed.
If you have been trying other methods and they haven’t worked, you could give this one a try and see if it helps you. You can get a 7-day free trial with the code AETERNUM:
If there’s one thing I’d like you to take from this article, it’s this: the enemy wants you weak, dumb and addicted to your base impulses, and is using the machinery of culture to achieve that. You can fight back and win this battle, but it requires a radical commitment to live differently, a complete surrendering of your life to God, and the perseverance to keep getting up after you fail.
Only once you understand the overwhelming strength of the forces of impurity will you understand just how impossible it is to fight them alone. Maybe that is what’s required for us to open our hearts to the transformative power of The Lord, and allow Him to fight this battle through us, to strengthen us, and shield us from a world that desperately wants us to lose ourselves in sin and immorality.
May God bless you in this fight, and know that you’re in my prayers.
Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,
Juan
Further Reading and Additional Resources
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Great article ✊🏾✝️👏🏾
Beautifully written