But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. ~George Orwell

I study religion, society, and culture, with a particular interest in how ideas take shape in everyday life. I tend to look at these questions through the lens of power, paying close attention to how people talk about issues, in media, in communities, and social media comment sections, because that’s where we can see meaning being made in real time.

What fascinates me is not just what people believe, but how those beliefs are formed, reinforced, and shared. The language we use doesn’t just reflect reality. It helps create it. The ideas we absorb, often without noticing, end up influencing how we see each other and how we live.

Education can gives us tools to understand the world. But it also invites us to step back and examine the world we’re already living in, the assumptions we’ve absorbed, the narratives we’ve inherited, and the ways they shape how we think and act.

I recently ran across a post by a conservative outlet that read: “While women at our church lamented their husbands’ or older sons’ pornography addictions, finding hidden magazines or videos in unmarked bags, I don’t remember anyone using the same shocked voices or hushed tones when talking about romance novels. 

When I heard about ‘pornography,’ I always heard it described as images and videos that got men addicted.

Porn was online. 

Porn was in magazines. 

Porn was male.

My version of porn was romantic, fantasy-centered, and distinctly feminine.”

In essence, her argument is that because her porn didn’t look like a man’s porn, she didn’t recognize it as such. The author writes, “I’m a recovering smut addict, and it took me years to admit it.” I want to be clear: I do not endorse smutty novels! What I’m interested in here is not the personal admission, but the strategy behind the assertion, because it is both common and influential. I’ll first address the argument’s shortcomings, and then the broader rhetorical move. It’s a pattern worth recognizing, because it doesn’t just shape perception. It can also obscure harm.

I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. ~Emily Dickinson

The argument invites a broader conclusion, that pornography and smutty novels are parallel problems, simply expressed differently across gender. But that assumption deserves closer scrutiny.

Men’s pervasive use of visual pornography is not just an individual habit. It is a massive, highly accessible, algorithmically optimized industry with near-universal exposure beginning in adolescence. That level of saturation is significant. It shapes norms, expectations, and behavior at a cultural level. Visual pornography is immediate, immersive, and often escalating in intensity. It trains arousal quickly and repetitively.

Romance or “smutty” novels, even when explicit, do not operate at that same scale or intensity of exposure. Written material is mediated through imagination, narrative, and emotional context. That doesn’t make it harmless, but it does mean it engages different cognitive and emotional pathways. The effects of pornography and “smutty novels” are not identical.

Novels, even “smutty” ones, are embedded in story, character, and relationship. What’s notable is that in much of women’s erotic fiction, the fantasy often still centers on powerful men and unequal dynamics, with women navigating, adapting to, or finding safety within that power. In that way, both men and women are being formed within a system that normalizes power imbalance and shapes desire around it. So rather than proving equivalence, it raises a deeper question about what our culture is teaching all of us to find desirable.

Mainstream pornography, especially in its most consumed forms, strips away relational context and centers performance, domination, and the visual consumption of primarily women’s bodies. That difference matters when we’re talking about how people learn to relate to others.

Men’s disproportionate consumption of pornography has documented downstream effects on women: expectations, pressure, normalization of certain behaviors, and at times coercion and abuse. There isn’t an equivalent large-scale pattern of women’s consumption of erotic novels shaping men’s bodily safety or autonomy in the same way.

The narrative in this post functions subtly to suggest, “see, women are just as bad.” But this isn’t a careful moral comparison. It’s a leveling move. It redistributes discomfort so that a largely male-dominated issue, one meaningfully connected to patterns of harm against women, feels less gendered. In doing so, it blurs important distinctions. Collapsing these into equivalence obscures differences in scale, form, and impact, and minimizes the real and disproportionate harm women experience.

The “equivalence” argument is not just flattening differences. It misreads the pattern entirely. Yes, both can be harmful. But if we want a world where people relate to others with mutuality, agency, and care, we need to be honest about what is actually shaping us.

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. ~C. Wright Mills

So while the comparison itself is weak, it points to something more significant. This isn’t just an isolated argument. In some Christian contexts, this is described as “sin leveling,” but the pattern is not limited to religious discourse. It appears across broader cultural conversations. Once you begin to listen for it, it becomes increasingly visible.

On the surface, it may sound like humility. We’re all sinners. And that’s true. But in practice, it flattens responsibility in ways that obscure real differences in harm and accountability.

First, it shifts attention and moves quickly to: “Everyone struggles.” In essence, we are all equally bad. That move short-circuits the harder moral work of naming harm, patterns, systems, and consequences.

Part of what makes that move so effective is that it resonates with how we’ve been formed. We are not simply individuals making neutral choices. We are deeply socialized into systems that normalize dominance and hierarchy, and those hierarchies are often gendered.

In many cases, those patterns are reinforced through identity and religious formation. They may feel like part of the moral order itself. That means reinforcing them feels natural, even “right.” They often feel internally coherent. Questioning or resisting them can feel unsettling, even “wrong.”

And once that framing takes hold, it begins to shape how responsibility and blame are assigned. In practice, “sin leveling” shifts moral scrutiny in ways that protect individuals and communities from confronting uncomfortable realities and allow existing structures to remain intact.

It does this by softening the focus on the behavior in question and introducing a parallel behavior to “balance” the conversation. The result is a redistribution of moral weight, even when the impact itself is not equal.

While sin is universal, responsibility is not. It varies with power, influence, and impact on others. When “leveling” ignores that, it can unintentionally excuse harm and recast moral agents as passive recipients rather than accountable actors.

Moral clarity comes from telling the truth about harm. We get there by naming it honestly and equipping people to discern it clearly and respond in ways not dictated by cultural conditioning, but grounded in a higher ethic of responsibility and regard for others.

Other resources:

Why Sin Levelling about Infidelity and Betrayal Hurts Women

Seeing What We’re Part Of