Porn Nation: Generation Sex

 

Over New Year’s I had the opportunity to spend the last four days of 2007 at a Christmas Conference with 40 friends from Otterbein and 2,000 students from the Great Lakes area. Upon arrival to the conference, each student (guy and girl) was presented with an advanced reading copy of the book Porn Nation, by Michael Leahy. When I first opened the book, I was a little standoffish. Nobody wants to be the person caught reading a book titled Porn Nation. Holding the book almost immediately places you under the stereotype of pervert or sex addict. But I would be lying if I didn’t admitt I was a little intrigued. Pornography is an issue every American is faced with today. If you own a televison, have access to the internet, or even walk down the magazine aisle at your local convenience store, you probably have been bombarded with your fair share of unwanted images. Do you know how difficult it was for me to find a picture to go with the title of this blog?

I would be a two-faced liar if I tried to act like the female body wasn’t an issue for me. Like any other red-blooded, American male, I have had my own struggles in the area of lust and purity. I believe 3 Doors Down got it right when they released their song back in February of 2000 titled Kryptonite. As a matter of fact, under my category for love I have a subcategory labeled “Kryptonite” devoted soley to girls. They are every man’s weakness.

I could type out a laundry list of scriptures ranging from the book of Job, to Jesus’s teachings and Paul’s writings, blatantly opposing sexual immortality. But sometimes that isn’t always enough. The biggest argument for pornography is that it doesn’t hurt anybody. Advocates insist pornography is a harmless fun people can indulge in on their own time. It is fun, for a moment (Hebrews 11:25). But the rest of that statement sounds like a lie fabricated by a libido driven society. Porn Nation tells the story of Michael Leahy’s struggle with pornography, and the downward spiral it resulted in. But it doesn’t just stop there, if his story isn’t powerful enough to make one reconsider the “innocence” of pornography, he continues with a long list of statistics proving the danger of it.

-) Incidents of child exploitation have risen from 4,573 in 1998 to 112,083 in 2004, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

-) 51% of US adults surveyed believe that pornography raises men’s expectations of how women should look and changes men’s expectations of how women should behave.

-) 40% of adults surveyed believe that pornography harms relationships between men and women.

-) More than 30% of 1,500 surveyed companies have terminated employees for inappropriate us of the internet.

-) Child pornography generates $3 billion annually worldwide (TopTen Reviews, March 2007)

These statistics make a firm argument against pornography. It reduces productivity at work, undermines male-female relationships, ruins the development of innocent children, and places unrealistic expectations on women. I have to wonder what impact pornography has on the self-esteem of the unsuspecting wife of a regualr porn user. This isn’t what God meant for marriage or the church.

MORE STAGGERING STATISTICS REGARDING PORNOGRAPHY:

-) At $13.3 billion, the 2006 revenue of the sex and porn industry in the US are bigger than the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball combined.

-) Worldwide sex industry sales for 2006 are reported to be $97 billion, more revenue than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix, and Earthlink combined. China is largest with $27.4 billion, South Korea is second at $25.7 billion, Japan is next at $20 billion, and the U.S. is fourth highest at $13.3 billion.

-) Every second $3,075 is spent on pornography, 28,258 internet users view pornography, and 372 Internet users type adult search terms into search engines.

-) 420 million: Total number of porn pages

-) Pornographers currently release over 13,000 adult movies per year- move than 25 times the mainstream movie production. Every 39 minutes a new pornographic video is being produced in the U.S.

-) 1 in 3 visitors to all adult websites are women. 9.4 million women access adult websites every month.

-) The largest consumer of internet pornography is the 35-49 age group.

-) 20% of men and 13% of women admitted to accessing pornography at work. 72 million: The approximate number of  unique visitors to adult websites in 2006, per month, worldwide. 40 million: The number of U.S. adults who regularly visit porn websites.

-) One out of every six women grapples with addiction to pornography.

I sure hope these statistics are somehow inflated but I fear they aren’t. No one is exempt from the far reaches of pornography. Even women are affected. I know that this is an unacceptably long post on an untouchable subject but someone needs to address the elephant sitting in the middle of the room. Obviously this is an epidimic. Generation Sex, the first generation to ever be raised with unabated access to the internet and pornography is now finally coming of age. What is going to happen to them? What will become of my children? I am honestly scared that my children will mature to be moral vegetables. We need God now more than ever. I want to ask Al Gore the more importnat question, “Remember when the air was clean and the sex was dirty?”

Here are a couple final quotes from Porn Nation that I would like to close with:

Like resorting to the “F” word to win an argument, (the) media has always been aware of the competitive advantage of using any and all things sexual to capture the attention of their audience…how many times do you need to repeat the “F” word in a sentence to get my attention? Answer: as many times as it takes. And so (the) media no longer simply contains sex and innuendo, because that is what it now takes to get our attention. (Ex: Any Tag or Axe body spray commercial.)

Fifteen years ago, I was a ‘pervert’ and a ‘deviant’ who ought to be locked away. By today’s standards, I’m fairly normal, a ‘victim,’ a man like any other who ‘wrestles with his personal demons’ and like all of us ‘has his issues’ not a sick man but a man with a sickness. ( <—–Talk about a socio-sexual pathology)

 As once was the case with alcohol addiction, many people cannot accept the reality that women can become sex addicts. One of the greatest problems facing females addicts is convincing others they have a legitimate problem. For that reason, their struggle with shame and guilt is typically greater than what male addicts face. With sexual beliefs changing so rapidly, how comforting to know we’ve still clung to the misogyny and igonorance of  a previous century, where the ‘men are men’ and the women are whores! (This quote is for my feminist readers. It is a sad truth)