Tonight I was attempting to finish up a website for one of my customers. Nothing too unusual about that except that one of the advertisements was pornographic and I do my best to avoid such images. Normally I use the AdBlock Plus plugin for Firefox and everything disappears. That wasn’t possible tonight.

The job involved working on the advertisements for this particular website and making them rotatable. I installed OpenX and replaced the code for almost every advertisement with the proper zone created in it. So blocking the ads was out of the question. I had to be able to find them on the page and in the HTML code behind the page.

This advertisement I am complaining about was not there the last time I had worked on the site.

To further complicate matters, Firefox wasn’t loading the script or style information for OpenX for some odd reason. Instead of tracking it down tonight, I just switched over to using Google Chrome (which I like so far except for the lack of Linux support). Cut off from my favorite plugins, I didn’t see a way to block just a single image.

For the three hours that I was flipping between pages and coming back to this ad, the image bugged me. It is so representative of how our culture sells things. We try to hook into their emotions instead of offering a product that will improve their lives. The idea is to make them unhappy with what they have. Compound it with the way that men are hard-wired to notice a naked woman, and you have an advertisement that very few men can ignore.

So what’s the big deal if someone wants to denude herself for a camera? The woman in the ad is somebody’s daughter and more than likely somebody’s wife or mother. She is a person and sex is so much more than just a fun activity to engage in. It affects us very deeply. I can recount dozens of stories off the top of my head of how much hurt sex adds to a relationship when it ends. Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthian church (1 Corinthians 16:18) that every sin is external to us except for fornication. Sexual sin goes deeper than any other in how it affects us.

The verse that is quoted in the title for this post (Ezekiel 33:26) asks if, among other things, we expect to still own our own land and be free when we make the wives of other men our whores. This woman in the ad tonight is somebody’s wife. If she isn’t, she will be one day.

What would I think of somebody desiring my future wife enough to click on an advertisement in hopes of seeing more of her? The thought is reviling.

Addendum: It seems that AdBlock Plus was trying to do its job in Firefox and was the reason that OpenX wasn’t loading properly. If you ever have to work on OpenX, try disabling AdBlock Plus. Smart plugin.