Above the gum, mints, and candy bars at the grocery checkout, two rows of glossy women’s magazines caught my eye. Alongside the cover-model cleavage were headlines like “How to blow his mind,” “99 sex facts,” and “outfits your man will love.” All these magazines wanted to sell me, it seemed, were ways to attract attention from men.

A quiz to determine one’s “type of sexiness” asked: What holiday gift would you give your guy? The three possible answers: “tasteful nude photos” of yourself, a watch, or golf lessons.

A teenage girl might actually think the first option was a smart, sophisticated idea. But doing something like that could quickly put her in a terrible situation. The boyfriend she gives the photos to can quickly become an angry ex-boyfriend, and suddenly, those photos are going around to everyone in her high school, most of her town, or plaguing her for years to come on the Internet. And that’s sexual exploitation.

I recently attended a conference on commercial sexual exploitation sponsored by several Lutheran groups from the U.S. and Canada.

There I met an attractive, funny woman with whom I had many things in common. But there was one thing we didn’t share: Joy had been raped as a child and prostituted for more than 20 years.

She’d been told this was her power as a woman. She’d also been rejected time and time again, by well-meaning church people like me. Together, we listened to the voices of prostituted women and children from around the world as well as the voices of the men and women who had helped them to survive. About 50 of us worshiped, sang, and cried together, and networked about what church people can do to prevent and confront commercial sexual exploitation. As church members, as consumers, as children of God, our hearts were convicted.

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