Ok, so the full story is: My companion and I made contact with a family of former investigators in our area of the mission. They had two kids and were only unable to be baptized due to extreme poverty making it difficult for them to “fully live the law of chastity” (i.e., the husband was still legally married to someone else and couldn’t afford a divorce.) But they were super interested in baptism, especially his fiancée. They’d been getting the missionary lessons from other companionships for so long they knew everything by heart, so they liked to request certain lessons they liked more than others. One day, the wife asks if we can teach The Law of Chastity with a focus on eternal marriage, and we said “yes” because that is like a missionary’s dream.
So we start preparing the lesson and get a decent setup for the couple and their two young kids to be engaged and interested. We go to their place and teach them and at the end of the lesson we ask if they have any questions. The husband and the kids all shake their heads and say thanks, but the wife lets out a big huff and says,
“Hey, you guys skipped the part about pornography, right?”
Which, we did. Because they requested a lesson on the law of chastity focused on temple marriages AND because they had teeny weeny little kiddos and we didn’t wanna broach that topic unless we had explicit permission from parents. So we told her all this, and she goes,
“Ah, that makes sense! My kids already know what pornography is.”
And me being a dumbass, say back,
“Your oldest is like 4, how do they know what that is?”
And she does the most dramatic hair-toss-head-flip combo I’ve ever seen and goes “I don’t know, BABE, how did they learn?” 👀
And he sighs and says “baby, you swore you weren’t gonna do this.”
And she says, “yeah, because you swore I wouldn’t have to! You said you’d do it yourself!”
And he sighs and tells us that after he and his soon-to-be ex-wife separated he bought a subscription to Hustler and had it for years before he cancelled it. He also mentioned that he was involved in a lot of chat rooms and that he had bought and printed out a lot of porn over the years. He said when he started dating his fiancée he realized that he didn’t want to look at porn anymore so he just kinda stopped, but he had so much stored up that he needed a place to put it so he put it all in a box and forgot about it until they decided to move to a smaller house and his fiancée mistook the porn stash for their eldest son’s bed and opened it and unearthed the morherload of all porn caches in front of their children, who just wanted their beds so they could nap.
We listened patiently as they shared the story with us and the husband shared feeling super guilty and gross about that part of his life and that was why he hadn’t brought it up. He asked if we could help at all, and, again, because this is the stuff of missionary dreams we said yes. So he brought his porn stash box down and it was a fucking full-size refrigerator box stuff to bursting with porn. Like, I fully do NOT believe pornography addiction is a thing but this experience pushed my belief in that a little. It was SO much porn. Magazines, posters, DVDs, even stuff he had clearly printed out at an Internet cafe. We had our work cut out for us, and let me tell you friends that me and my companion got to work.
We set up a day and time to meet with them, and told them to make preparations by stockpiling wood and tinder. My companion and I bought two bottles of rubbing alcohol and two gallons of gasoline the day of the booty bonfire and set out towards our destination. When we arrived, we became aware that the parents had turned gathering firewood into a family game, and we hey had amassed a pile of wood and dry grass about 3 feet high and 3 feet wide. We started off by spraying a whole bottle of rubbing alcohol onto the wood, then started systemically ripping the magazines and tossing them into the pile. We then doused the whole thing with 1 gallon of gasoline and lit a match. It was at this point that we realized the true challenge of our task: the paper that made the magazine pages was some sort of a plasticky laminated paper substance, and was insanely hard to burn. Overall, this turned something simple (burning paper) into a wretched task, which was made more wretched by the noxious smoke the plasticky pages emitted. Even a full week after our cum quest ended our eyes were bloodshot and irritated. People thought we were stoners, and because the pages smelled faintly like burning plastic we even kinda smelled like stoners. We had to tend to the fire excessively, as each individual magazine took concentrated effort to set alight. Additionally, the pages often fragmented and got carried away with the rising smoke, which created a fire hazard that required a lot of attention.
Despite how gross it was at its core, it was actually a really fun act of service. The fiancée and kiddos sat a safe distance away from the burn pile and cheered like we were star athletes any time we got another magazine to catch fire. They turned burning pornography into a wholesome family event by letting the kids throw fistfuls of dry grass and lint into the infernal pile of blazing pornography and making it a contest to see who could find the most kindling. Additionally, like @inbabylontheywept said, we ended up showering the neighborhood in highly detailed chocolate starfish and exquisite 1999-2005 era tiddies because the pages would break apart and float up on the rising smoke, then descend like depraved confetti. I personally found fragments of Hustler as far as a mile away while waiting for the bus home, and I heard tell from a family of members who lived about 2 km away that their neighbors had found what appeared to be fragments of roasted pornstar anus falling into their backyard in the evening, so we got some distance with that stuff. Overall the experience was fun, and realistically it was one of the only times I had a story from my mission I felt I could write home about without traumatizing my mom, so I was stoked. It was a very weird thing overall, though. So anyways, I guess the moral of the story is if you’re burning porn get more than two gallons of gasoline. Like, consider thermite. Read more Terry Pratchett, be gayer, and if you wanna burn your porn stash be prepared for a fucking slog.