Porn is mainstream in America. We no longer even blush to mention it. Porn stars are celebrities and books like Fifty Shades of Grey glorify it. A couple of years ago, Ed Stetzer wrote a short article outlining some of the dangers that included an infographic of stats related to pornography. You should read Ed’s article and view his statistics here. Unfortunately, you will probably not be surprised, but the long and short of it is that porn addiction has been shown to lead to job loss, financial ruin, divorce, and according to this TED Presentation, even re-programing of the brain.
Certainly the pornification of America is disturbing on a number of levels, but possibly the most disturbing fact is that 11 years old is the average age at which children are first exposed to pornography. This early exposure has led to a frightening turn among children in middle school where sexting is fast becoming the norm rather than the exception.
A recent article from the Telegraph of London,Children and the culture of pornography: ‘Boys will ask you every day until you say yes’, exposes some of the sickening tragedies that are occurring among tweens and teens as a result of the over-sexualization of our culture. Cole Moreton begins his article this way,
There is a storm coming. I can feel it as I stand on a street corner in south London, thinking about my daughters. Lily and Rose are both 11 years old. One is crazy about dogs, the other loves owls.
They are at that tender age when the hormones have begun to stir, and they could be stomping around the room like furious teenagers one minute but snuggling up for a cuddle the next.
The girls are fast approaching 13, the age that Chevonea Kendall-Bryan was when she leaned out of one of the windows on the fourth floor of a block of flats on this street. A boy she knew was down here on the ground, but this was not Romeo and Juliet. Far from it.
Chevonea had been pressurised into performing a sex act on him, and he had shared a phone clip of her doing so with all his mates. She threatened to jump from the window if he did not delete it. Then she slipped and fell 60 feet to the ground, dying from massive brain injuries.
Moreton goes on to tell stories of young girls who feel constantly pressured to peform sex acts for boys and to take sexually suggestive pictures and videos of themselves for distribution. Young boys have been so influenced by the pornification of our society, that they have begun to see girls as nothing more than servants for their own sexual gratification and unfortunately, many girls have been so influenced by pop-culture as to believe the lie that they exist only as sex-objects.
The Christian community has for too long stood with our heads in the sand on this issue. We preach against pornography and sex abuse, but have we shed tears and mourned yet for the portrayal of girls and women (who are coincidentally probably God’s most beautiful creation) as possessions of men for their own self-gratification rather than as image-bearers of God. Pornography is destroying our culture and we are allowing it into our homes and lives. Pictures that would have been considered taboo only a generation ago are common among advertisements and they are invading our homes and destroying our children and our marriages.
We read in Genesis 1:27 that God created men and women in his image. We need to honor women and men as image-bearers of God. Slavery was wrong, at least in part because it denigrated human beings into possessions to be used for the selfish welfare of others. Porn does essentially the same thing and our children are learning this lesson well. We must love our children and teach them of their intrinsic value and of the value of others in the sight of God. We must also work to see that we add value to all lives–a part of doing that in our culture is to fight against the prevailing winds of popular culture that over-sexualize women and girls (even toy dolls are dressed like street walkers) and that promote a chauvinistic abusive attitude for men. Ladies, stand up and show modesty and class in your dress and your attitude, and men, let’s do all we can to celebrate women who display godly beauty…
