I’m not advocating Playboy magazine.
But its still mild compared with bestiality, anal, and the other things mentioned in the article.
The first report at your link is 735 pages long, and I’ve no doubt that Dr. Reisman does an excellent analysis of the data.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/107147NCJRS.pdf
But I don’t know how in the world you’re going to get boys to stay away from this. Pornography is a huge, multi-billion dollar industry in the US.
So what do you propose? Shall we make pornography illegal? How would we enforce such a law? I am honestly open interested in hearing your solution. I admire the fact that you are concerned and that you wish to solve this problem. So, please, explain what you think should be done?
I remember the two Playboy centerfolds that always got passed around the locker room in my early teens were Deborah Harry from Blondie (”see...I TOLD ya she wasn’t a Natural Blonde!”) and Erin Gray from Buck Rogers in the 24th. Century (”biddeee..biddeee..bideee...bideee.....what’s THIS, Buck?”)
“But I don’t know how in the world you’re going to get boys to stay away from this. Pornography is a huge, multi-billion dollar industry in the US.”
Teach them to love the Lord. Surround them with positive role models and lead by example. Explain that porn is a tool of Satan that damages their mind and the lives of the people involved with making it.
My teenage boys are better than I am.
“So what do you propose? Shall we make pornography illegal? “
One word “Shame” What happened to it? Funny you see people carrying their Bibles on Sunday morning but do you see people carrying a Playboy around? HMMM I wonder why this is? Please God don’t let us loose so much shame that I actually see men carrying a Playboy around the way one carry a Bible on Sunday. Now could we please bring back enough “shame” that we don’t have/produce/view so much freaking porn in our society? Is this really too much to ask?
Like several problems facing our society, pornography has been made acceptable and even posed as normal healthy behavior. Desire is normal. Lust is normal. Feeding these desires endless, empty feasts is not. When the sexual appetite becomes bored with the easily obtainable, then slowly “kink” is introduced. And when “kink” becomes standard, then child pornography or other repulsive taboos become “necessary” to reach prior levels of “high.”
Dr. Oz featured young people on his program when he discovered the degree to which anal sex had become socially acceptable and “expected” in high school. One young girl said that it wasn’t that she liked anal sex but that there was pressure to do “more” after oral and vaginal sex.
Look at Madonna. After she distributed a book featuring herself nude, it was hard for her to do “more” to expose herself. Miley Cyrus was just one among those trying to do “more.”
The pastor of our church says that 50% of men he’s spoken with “struggle with porn.” The desire for sex is God given. The warping of it to include children and animals is NOT. There is a slope between the two. Some slide down that slope and become mired in simply looking at porn featuring women more hours of the day then they can afford to spend and still have quality of life. Perhaps this is the most common stopping point but it is extremely damaging - the images don’t have to become more extreme but the time spent consuming it does.
I’ve known two marriages that ended because the husband became more interested in porn that having sex with his wife. Or speaking to his wife. Or speaking to his children or going to work. A man with a normal sex drive and wife that he loves never imagines that looking at porn could slowly change his focus to staying in the garage most of the day looking at hard core porn.
The pastor at our church recently commented that the availability of porn and the focus on physical beauty in porn which represents maybe the upper 20% of women (”idealized” bodies, airbrushed faces etc.) meant that young women were finding that they were completely ignored unless they looked like models or porn actresses. They tried to use sex to garner some fragment of attention because otherwise it seemed as if they didn’t exist. Some college men interviewed in an (old) 60 minutes episode kind of wistfully acknowledged that they couldn’t find young women attractive unless they were the “standouts” - the few that every man wanted to date. They lamented that there were far too few of those rare combinations of ideal sexual partner for every man to date and they simply had zero interest in anyone else. The average looking guy couldn’t get a date with the “ideally sexy” girl because he was competing with almost all other men and he simply had zero interest in dating anyone else. This phenomena isn’t new but the proportions are new. Yes, every man wanted to date the standouts before but in the past was able to eventually find average women appealing - women who were as physically attractive as he was. Now, young men increasingly report not being able to find average women attractive enough to want to date, but instead find them useful for sex while waiting for the “right one” to impress.
I mention men here because it’s more out in the open. However, I notice that ereaders allow women an access to porn as well. Many women online have said that they are embarrassed because people praise them for reading so much - their families, their grandmother etc. treat them as if they are intellectuals. These ladies squeal “If they only knew what I was reading!” S&M or simply pornographic “fiction” is on their eReader but no one knows because there is no explicit cover or title in view. Again it’s a situation where in the past it was available but consumption was conspicuous. Now with eReaders some of these ladies “admit” to reading “spicy” romance novels during church services, giggling that people think they are accessing their e-version of the bible.