Crystal Renaud Day grew up believing her struggle with pornography was something she had to hide, even after becoming a Christian. Drawing on her own recovery and nearly two decades of helping other women, she explores what may really be driving women towards pornography – and why the Church needs to respond with truth, grace and practical support.
She was just ten years old. Home alone one afternoon, she walked into her older brother’s bathroom and found an explicit magazine left out in plain sight. She knew immediately that she wasn’t supposed to look at it. But curiosity was louder than the voice telling her to close it.
What she saw was confusing and captivating. Her body responded to something her young mind didn’t yet understand. And almost as quickly as curiosity appeared, another feeling followed: shame. There was no language for what had happened. No conversation about sexuality to help her make sense of it. So she carried it quietly. That girl? She was me.
What began with an unexpected exposure became a pattern that followed me throughout adolescence – bringing with it not only more pornography, but a growing number of unwanted sexual behaviours. Even after becoming a Christian at 16, those behaviours remained part of my secret life.
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I loved God. I wanted to obey him. And I desperately wanted to stop
I loved God. I wanted to obey him. And I desperately wanted to stop. So I prayed harder. I repented. I promised God I would do better. And when I returned to pornography, I concluded there was something wrong with me. Eventually, a friend trusted me with her own story, opening the door to my recovery. As I began healing and speaking openly about my experience, I discovered that what I thought was my secret shame was something countless women were carrying in silence.
For nearly two decades, much of my work has centred on convincing people that women struggle with pornography at all. Thankfully, that conversation has changed. The question is no longer whether women struggle with pornography. The question is why. My recovery taught me that pornography wasn’t just a behaviour I needed to stop. It had become a way of meeting needs and managing emotions I didn’t yet know how to name. Years of walking alongside other women reinforced that understanding.
In 2023, SheRecovery, the organisation I founded in 2009, surveyed 1,321 women who had used or struggled with pornography. We explored their pornography use alongside childhood experiences, relationships, trauma, emotional health, attachment, and other behaviours. What we found confirmed what I had seen for years: for many women, pornography was connected to something deeper.
When we asked what most often triggered their pornography use, loneliness was the most common response at 34%. Sexual arousal followed closely at 33%, while 22% identified stress. While sexual desire certainly plays a role, for many women pornography is also doing something else. Pornography may offer temporary relief from difficult emotions or a sense of connection without the vulnerability of a real relationship. For a woman carrying trauma, rejection, or deeply rooted beliefs about her worth, it can become a way of coping long before she understands the deeper need beneath it.
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Prayer was essential to my recovery, and it remains essential to my life today
I describe these deeper influences as five primary Drivers: emotional, relational, identity, trauma, and spiritual. They overlap and look different in every woman’s story, but they invite us to ask a better question: “What is driving her there?”
Understanding the why doesn’t excuse the choices. But lasting change requires becoming curious about what is happening beneath the behaviour. This is especially important in the Church. Prayer was essential to my recovery, and it remains essential to my life today. For years I asked God to remove a behaviour while having little understanding of the wounds and patterns underneath it. “Pray harder” wasn’t incomplete because prayer was ineffective. It was incomplete because healing required me to bring more of myself into the light.
I needed to recognise what I was feeling before reaching for pornography, safe people who knew my story, and accountability that went deeper than whether I had looked at porn that week. Healing meant examining the wounds, beliefs, and relational patterns that had shaped me and learning healthier ways to respond.
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There are women sitting in our churches today doing everything they know to do. They love God. They pray. They serve. They promise themselves this will be the last time. And when it isn’t, they may conclude, as I once did, that something must be wrong with them. They don’t need more shame. But neither do they need to be overlooked, dismissed, or misunderstood. They need safe places to tell the truth, practical tools, and healthy community. They need help understanding their patterns and space to explore the parts of their stories they may have spent years avoiding. Most of all, they need to know their struggle does not place them beyond the reach of God’s grace or the possibility of genuine healing.
I know because I was that woman. The question is no longer whether women struggle with pornography. We know they do. The question is whether we are willing to understand why. Because there is more to her story.
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