If you’re ambivalent about the crisis of pornography in America, The New York Times can change that. Almost instantly. The paper jolted an entire nation into caring with its jarring February exposé, “What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn” (warning: extremely graphic). If their stories don’t shock, repulse, sober, and motivate you, nothing will.
What our kids are stumbling on isn’t your grandfather’s pornography. These aren’t Playboy magazines stashed under a teenage boy’s bed. These are raw, violent, and nauseating videos that they don’t have to sneak into a store for. Every child has a world full of porn at their fingertips. Every time they hold a cellphone or log on to a laptop, the door is open to a life-changing experience that could kill the relationships in their lives forever.
Porn is everywhere, and the research is grim. States are lining up to declare it a public health hazard, and while a handful of people might mock the wave of legislation, Americans on both sides of the aisle are realizing: this is an actual catastrophe.
These sites, the same ones teaching kids a distorted and twisted version of sex, get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined. These are the actors who are being exploited for an industry that’s tied to the dark world of trafficking, domestic violence, child abuse, and abortion. This is the sinister trade that’s teaching men to dehumanize women, leading spouses to stray from marriages, and destroying intimacy the world over.
This is no longer a Republican or Democratic issue. It’s an American issue, and if more people don’t stand up and do something about it, we risk losing society as we know it. Nine states have agreed, passing resolutions that make fighting pornography a priority of local communities. Missouri could be next.
Calling it a “disturbing and invasive social evil,” Resolution 52 sailed out of the state Senate to the Missouri House. “Pornography has become the cancer that nobody [wants to talk] about,” one local leader said. “Almost everyone has been personally impacted by porn or knows someone who has … SCR 52 breaks the silence in Missouri by declaring to the world that pornography is a public health crisis.”
This is no longer someone else’s problem. It affects our playgrounds, our politics, even our pulpits. The devastation to marriages and families and teenagers is real.
“We are supposed to be in the midst of a great sexual reassessment,” Ross Douthat argued in a New York Times piece, “a clearing-out of assumptions that serve misogyny and impose bad sex on semi-willing women. And such a reassessment will be incomplete if it never reconsiders our surrender to the idea that many teenagers, most young men especially, will get their sex education from online smut … The belief that it should not be restricted is a mistake; the belief that it cannot be censored is a superstition. Law and jurisprudence changed once and can change again … ”
As a parent, I can’t encourage you strongly enough to take this issue seriously. Yes, it’s an uncomfortable topic. But it’s a lot less uncomfortable than dealing with the sexual abuse, addictions, disease, and broken relationships that follow. If you don’t know what to say, start here or here or here. It might be one of the most important conversations you have.
This was originally published in Tony Perkins’ Washington Update, which is written with the aid of Family Research Council senior writers.
