Posted on 08/20/2015 1:31:19 PM PDT by robowombat
Pornography and the Decline of a Culture
John Stonestreet | BreakPoint | Friday, August 07, 2015
In June, I told you about the dangers of unfettered Internet use for kids over the summer. The damage to young minds from pornography is long-lasting and measurable. But a recent gathering of experts pointed out that the harms from pornography are far worse than they’ve ever been, and the damage is not just impacting children, but spilling into all of society.
Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center in mid-July, Dr. Gail Dines dispelled the myth that pornography today is like the pin-up of yesteryear. Rather, today’s mainstream pornography is unbelievably dehumanizing, degrading, and violent. She cited a peer-reviewed study that found that 88 percent of the scenes in the 50 most popular porn films involved violence against women. Pornography is not about sex, she said, but about “making hate to women.”
Dines shared how one pornography producer explained that the girls now arrive on the sets “porn-ready.” As she said, “We are part of a culture that hyper-sexualizes girls from a very young age and forces them into an inauthentic, formulaic, plasticized sexuality that is from the porn culture and not of their own making.”
Most of Dr. Dines’ presentation is too graphic to say here, which is important for all of us to understand. For too long, we’ve refused to look behind First Amendment smokescreens to understand pornography’s true nature.
Speaking at the same event, Cordelia Anderson called our culture’s widespread pornography use “the largest unregulated social experiment ever.” Having studied the impact of sexual abuse and pornography for decades, Anderson explained that pornography is a quantifiable public health crisis.
Anderson pointed to research indicating that nearly all young boys have been exposed to pornography. It isn’t enough to protect your own children any longer when their peers have had violent pornography normalized in their minds. The impact has become public, and its damage has seeped everywhere.
Anderson believes change requires a broad public strategy of education, law enforcement, business pressure, and a revitalized media culture. As she so aptly put it, “No mass social disorder has ever come under control just by treating the individual.”
Dines and Anderson were just two of nearly a dozen speakers discussing the public health hazards of pornography at the Capitol event. Dr. Donald Hilton explained how pornography changes brain chemistry. Dr. Melissa Farley examined the link between pornography, prostitution and sex trafficking. And Ed Smart, whose daughter Elizabeth made national news when she was abducted in 2002, explained how pornography played a role in his daughter’s enslavement and sexual torture.
Although not addressed in the Capitol symposium, I’d like to point out the role pornography has played in another recent social crisis: the acceptance of same-sex marriage. In his "Relationships in America" survey released last year, Mark Regnerus found that among church-going Christians who did not support same-sex marriage, only 4.6 percent felt that using pornography was okay. Among church-going Christians who supported same-sex marriage, however, 33 percent also agreed that viewing pornography was fine.
Although not claiming a causal link between the two, Regnerus did suggest that “our moral systems concerning sex and sexuality tend rather to resemble personalized ‘tool kits’ ” that are greatly influenced by social reference points. Looking at the sexual mores of today, there’s no doubt that pornography has become the significant social reference point doing untold damage to children, families, and all of society.
There’s so much to do. Please come to BreakPoint.org and we’ll link you to the video presentations that we’ve mentioned. They’re hard to watch, but we can’t look away any longer. Our culture won’t let us.
BreakPoint is a Christian worldview ministry that seeks to build and resource a movement of Christians committed to living and defending Christian worldview in all areas of life. Begun by Chuck Colson in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends via radio, interactive media, and print. Today BreakPoint commentaries, co-hosted by Eric Metaxas and John Stonestreet, air daily on more than 1,200 outlets with an estimated weekly listening audience of eight million people. Feel free to contact us at BreakPoint.org where you can read and search answers to common questions.
John Stonestreet, the host of The Point, a daily national radio program, provides thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
Publication date: August 7, 2015
Well pornography has been around forever......heck it was just made in a different product. It was make of paper and young boys especially would steal their dads copy and pass it around the neighborhood. Now they just all press a button and do the same thing. Time has advanced but behavior has stayed the same.
Lots of difference between erotica and porn. I enjoy looking at a beautiful woman sans clothing as much as the next male. What i am referring to is some video of a woman having intercourse with three males (won’t call them men) simultaneously. You figure out the logistics. That is porn and it is pure degradation.
Not all dads had this stuff. I never found any in my house and I don’t think my dad had it. My friend did bring some of his dad’s stuff to my house when I was six. It was nude women. He was the son of a Hollywood movie star. Keep your kids away from this kind of family. Never let them out of your site unless it’s a conservative Christian family that you’ve been going to church with for years.
“Well pornography has been around forever”
So has extortion.
Maybe marijuana is not a gateway drug for you but it is for many. Maybe Playboy is not a gateway drug for you but it is for many.
But there is an incredible level of misogyny in porn today. It is degrading. Granted these women know what they are doing and I guess should be free to do it. I'm certainly not in favor of censorship. But porn today is mostly dark and ugly stuff. Instead of glorifying the female body it turns women into a prop for sexual cruelty. Porn is like prostitution, it's always going to be around, but it's sure become something dark and ugly over the years.
site = sight
The biggest problem is the pushing of the envelope. I remember porn films in college and they almost all had rape scenes where the woman discovers that she loves to be raped.
I never got the whole fascination with “Wow, look at the guy who isn’t me having sex”.
As long as people desire porn, there will be no way to stop them getting it.
We are unable to stop physical drugs from coming across our borders. There will be no way to stop intangible electronic video from being passed around.
No. Pornography in its current form has not been around forever. A milder type has been around though for a very long time.
It always affects negatively. Especially men. The lack of real, sexually capable men as husband lovers has grown along with the change in type of pornography. Any of you Freepmales that want to disagree should listen to the women talk about you behind your back. Porn destroys guys.
I prefer the old traditions that formed the underlying fabric of our society, from the unspoiled days before pornography and before the evils of modern civilization that has so manipulated and mutated the human soul, the days when people were normal, life was natural, and oiled cave women danced for the choice pieces of bear meat like God and mother nature designed us to do!
“As long as people desire porn, there will be no way to stop them getting it. We are unable to stop physical drugs from coming across our borders. There will be no way to stop intangible electronic video from being passed around.”
Yep. It will be forever accessible unless the grid goes down or we live in a fascist police state.
Even if you banned new porn production, there is more than enough existing porn to last a lifetime and people will trade it for decades to come.
Just like with Drugs, people can only be educated on the dangers and ultimately are left to their own decisions. Talking about making porn illegal is a waste of time.
“As long as people desire porn, there will be no way to stop them getting it.”
So long as people want to commit extortion, there will be no way to stop them. So we should make it legal? Murder? Rape? There will always be people who desire it.
“There will be no way to stop intangible electronic video from being passed around.”
Actually there is a way. We can prosecute the servers that distribute it. If they are overseas, we can firewall them. We can allow the participants to sue the servers.
Trust me, the government already does all this with “Hate” sites so it can be done.
The eras are completely different as regards price, choice, volume, and ease of viewing.
We are living in an era where porn has never been so easily available in such volume to so many. Free, whatever, whenever on whatever device you want to watch it on.
Freegards
Yu can thank feminism and womens lib,for that. There is no upside for husband lovers when everything is stscked against them and divorce is soceasy to lose half,of evrythjng and be treated as both slave and criminal until kids are grown. Sometimes you even have to pay for kids that arent yours, its that bad.
It was possible to obtain exciting sexual depictions thousands of years ago, God knows: I suppose venus figurines and rock art thought to be arousing have existed since prehistoric times. A depraved man in Victorian England or France, with money, could get quite a secret cache of porn. But today it's almost impossible for all boys --- ALL boys --- NOT to be exposed to the most vile, frankly anti-natural-sexual crap you can imagine, a mouse-click away and more systemically pervasive than heroin.
A major American export. About as pro-sex as the clap.
In the 1950’s the ‘pin up calendar’ was edgy and barely (no pun intended) legal. Now its mainstreamed as a fundraising tool and published as the “Body Issue” of “ESPN Magazine.
The standards legally regarding what is ‘pornography’ were lowered by the courts over a period from the late 1950’s into the 1970’s when anything goes reigned for a bit then standards were tightened up a little to make child porn illegal.
That is true. I didn’t think about the various “rape” type of things that is caused by today’s pornography.
“Maybe marijuana is not a gateway drug for you but it is for many. Maybe Playboy is not a gateway drug for you but it is for many.”
The marijuana that is out there now is nothing like the pot I grew up with in the 70’s. Same thing with the pornography. It is now much “stronger” in the way it affects you.
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