“The boy I had feelings for was remarkable. He had an incredibly strong moral conscience and was always examining his behavior through the lens of whether it had a positive or negative impact on the world.”
When they discussed a relationship, Lily said his conscientiousness manifested in another way. “He really wanted to help me make an informed choice,” she explained. “So, he insisted on telling me every single thing about himself that I might not be okay with.”
Laughing a little, she said, “I just thought it was adorable and sweet. Especially when nothing he shared was actually an issue.”
When he was done, Lily’s crush asked her if there was anything else she wanted to know. After thinking about it, she asked: “Do you watch pornography?”
“I’ll never forget how he looked at me then,” Lily soberly recalled. “The blank confusion in his eyes … The way he repeated the question back to me, as though he couldn’t fathom why I would ask that, so he was checking whether he’d heard right.”
Finally, he simply responded: “...Yeah?”
“It was and still is surreal to me,” said Lily. “This young man, who cared so much about doing the right thing, had never even considered that pornography might be a problem. It didn’t even make his list of things I might not be okay with.”
As she processed this heartbreaking experience, a disturbing reality crystallized before Lily’s eyes: pornography had been normalized.
“Truly, thoroughly normalized,” she emphasized. “To the point where even the most conscientious people accepted it as a matter of course.”
Realizing this, Lily made a decision:
“I decided I wouldn’t put up with this. I wouldn’t put up with a world where boys and men are taught that the objectification and exploitation of women is normal. I would have to find a way to change things instead.”
That’s what led Lily to NCOSE.
NCOSE is drawing a line in the sand and saying: No, this isn’t normal. No, this isn’t okay. No, we won’t put up with this.
That’s the side Lily wants to be on. And if you join us, that’s the side that will win.
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