Porn’s Effect on the Culture

“We are what we eat” the old expression goes.  However, Jesus stated that it’s not that which goes into a man that defiles him, but that which comes out.

What comes out of the minds of men and women today is that which has been fed a steady diet of sexuality.  We’ve talked before about how there doesn’t seem to be a thing that hasn’t been sold using sex, and with the growing number of people going onto the Internet, what we’ve also found is that our children are beginning to think that sex is like what they see in pornography.

The Effect On Men

The message that men hear from all around them is that it is okay to indulge in the sins of the flesh.  Not only are women more sexually available, but never before has society seemed to encourage the cad and the player to attempt to give in so much to their basest desires.

The message from the media and from the government is not only “everyone does it” but also, if you’re not doing it something’s wrong with you.  They’ve made sexuality the focal point of a person’s life, and reduced people to animals in an attempt justify their unsatisfied (and unsatisfiable) lust.

On New Years Eve, a group at my house watched a classic Dick Van Dyke episode where Laura Petrie is about to have her baby.  We never hear her moan through a single contraction, and Rob and Laura sleep in separate beds.  This played in Prime Time.

I won’t tell you what young men now see acted out in front of them in Prime Time.

Women, the Forgotten Casualty

When we think of porn, we often think about how it excites and desensitizes the man, but it also effects the women:

During countless classroom discussions, boys have told me that from a very young age, they have been taught that for a “real” man, sex is about the aggressive conquest of female bodies and scoring with as many of them as you can. While these ideas have long been around, they are more socially sanctioned now than ever before.

So what happens when individual risk factors become societal norms? And when pornography, because of its ubiquity and availability, effectively becomes sex ed?…

[Girls are] feeling depressed and worthless as they realize that real-life translations of porn don’t make them feel sexy or powerful at all, since the sexual personas they’re trying to emulate have been created by – and for – men.  [Hat Tip: Ann Althouse: “Perhaps that sounds to you like an archaic feminist assertion – the kind of thing that hip women no longer say.”

Exactly so.  When every man thinks that every woman must behave like the constantly available or weak women that they see on television and in porn, the real woman cannot keep up.  Let alone the fact that most women that we see on television are either digitally modified, made up, and do not look like that in person.

Society has been impacted by porn for the worse.  It has served as a wedge in families, it has caused unnatural desires, it has substituted for partners, and it has caused massive casualties in homes.

Yet our culture still applauds it and seeks to keep it legal.  Does that sound right to you?