What We Must Know About the Porn Plague

We must take a stand against the sleaze culture:

That the porn culture has reached epidemic proportions is now without dispute. Entire cultures are being destroyed by this insidious attack on relationships, family, marriage, children, and human sexuality as it is meant to be expressed. And it has evolved (or devolved) from remote shady sleazy bookshops to the internet age and now to AI-generated porn and all that goes with it, such as sexbots and the like.

There have been many who have sought to resist this. In this piece I simply do two things: offer a number of key books on this topic, and then quote from a few of them.

Books

Here I feature 35 important books that have been penned over the past half century. Some are penned by religious authors and some by non-religious authors. They all discuss the dangers of the porn tsunami and how it is destroying lives and entire societies.

Alcorn, Randy, Christians in the Wake of the Sexual Revolution.  IVP, 1985.

Anderson, Neil, A Way of Escape. Monarch, 1994.

Arterburn, Stephen and Fred Stoeker, Every Man’s Battle: Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time. WaterBrook Press, 2009.

Bartosch, Jo and Robert Jessel, Pornocracy. Polity, 2026.

Challies, Tim, Sexual Detox: A Guide for Guys Who Are Sick of Porn. CreateSpace, 2010.

Chester, Tim, Closing the Window: Steps to Living Porn Free. IVP, 2010.

Court, John, Law, Light and Liberty. Lutheran Publishing House, 1975.

Court, John, Pornography: A Christian Critique. IVP, 1980.

Dines, Gail, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality. Beacon Press, 2010.

Dixon, Patrick, The Rising Price of Love: The True Cost of the Sexual Revolution. Hodder & Stoughton, 1995.

Fradd, Matthew, The Porn Myth: Exposing the Reality Behind the Fantasy of Pornography. Ignatius, 2017.

Hall, Laurie, An Affair of the Mind. Focus on the Family, 1996.

Harris, Joshua, Sex Is Not the Problem (Lust Is): Sexual Purity in a Lust-Saturated World. Multnomah, 2005.

Heath, Graham, The Illusory Freedom: The Intellectual Origins and Social Consequences of the Sexual Revolution. William Heinemann, 1978.

Kirk, Randy, A Generation Betrayed: It’s Time To End the Sexual Revolution. Huntington House, 1993.

Laaser, Mark, The Secret Sin: Healing the Wounds of Sexual Addiction. Zondervan, 1992.

Layden, Mary Anne, The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations. The Witherspoon Institute, 2010.

Lederer, Laura, ed., Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. William Morrow, 1980.

Levy, Ariel, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Free Press, 2005.

Lubben, Shelley, Truth Behind the Fantasy of Porn: The Greatest Illusion on Earth. Createspace, 2010.

Marshner, Connie, Decent Exposure: How to Teach Your Children About Sex. Legacy Communications, 1988, 1994.

Minnery, Tom, ed., Pornography: A Human Tragedy. Tyndale House, 1986.

Paul, Pamela, Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. Times Books, 2005.

Reisman, Judith, Sexual Sabotage. WND Books, 2010.

Reisman, Judith, “Soft Porn” Plays Hardball. Huntington House Publishers, 1991.

Russell, Diana, Dangerous Relationships: Pornography, Misogyny and Rape. Sage Publishing, 1998.

Schaumburg, Harry, False Intimacy: Understanding the Struggle of Sexual Addiction. NavPress, 1992, 1997.

Schlafly, Phyllis, ed., Pornography’s Victims. Pere Marquette Press, 1987.

Shapiro, Ben, Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future. Regnery Publishing, 2005.

Struthers, William, Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain. IVP, 2010.

Tankard Reist, Melinda and Abigail Bray, eds., Big Porn Inc. Spinifex, 2011.

White, John, Eros Defiled. IVP, 1977.

White, John, Eros Redeemed. IVP, 1993.

Williams, Nigel, False Images: Telling the Truth About Pornography. Kingsway Publications, 1991.

Wilson-Thomas, Claire and Nigel Williams, Laid Bare: A Path Through the Pornography Maze. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.

Quotes

All of the above books have much of value. But here I offer quotes from just a handful of the volumes. They might encourage you to get some of these books and read them for yourselves.

Bartosch and Jessel (p. 4):

Humans all have the capacity to love, and be loved. But the Pornocracy is robbing us of this birthright. It teaches girls that their worth can be measured by cash, clicks and subscriber counts, and boys that to be a man is to be impervious to intimacy and empathy. It is a threat to humanity, a force that is tearing our species apart.

 

Perhaps the greatest victory in porn’s relentless rise to power is how it has become normalised. Shame has been inverted. Everywhere from schools to teachers, government guidance to fashionable dinner party conversations, those who criticise porn are sneered at as censorious, `sex-negative’ or `whorephobic’. How many of these people have any understanding of the brutality which props up twenty-first century pornography?

 

If you think porn is a harmless bit of fun and just something ‘all men do’; if you believe its critics (including the authors) are frigid, sex-starved prudes — fine. But that judgement means nothing if you don’t understand the nature of modern porn, the acts inflicted upon the performers and the viewer. That’s where we begin. We dare you to look away.

Dines (pp. 143-144):

Typing “teen porn” into Google yields over 9 million hits. . . . Even though these sites are also becoming increasingly popular with porn users, with nearly 14 million Internet searches for “teen sex” in 2006, an increase of 61 percent in just two years, and 6 million Internet searches for teen porn, an increase of 45 percent over the same period, there is very little research on either the content or the effects of such sites. One of the main reasons for this could be that those who research the field of child pornography and child sexual abuse prevention have been overwhelmed by the flood of real child pornography that accompanies the growth of the Internet. Since an actual child is used in the making of such imagery, there is an urgent need to track both the producers and consumers of such pornography and to infiltrate the many international child porn rings that swap thousands of child pornography pictures in the relatively safe and anonymous space created by the Internet. To get some idea of the scope of the problem, one Internet ring that was raided in 1998, called the Wonderland Club, operated in over twelve countries, and to join, each prospective member had to have at least 10,000 child pornography images to swap.

Paul (pp. 267-268):

Pornography has a corrosive effect on men’s relationships with women and a negative impact on male sexual performance and satisfaction. It plays a rising role in intimacy disorders. More than ever, it aids and abets sexually compulsive behavior in ways that can become seriously disruptive and psychologically damaging. Men who become addicted to pornography feel helpless and degraded, often losing themselves and their loved ones to the habit. Even men who use pornography regularly, but not compulsively, question the effect it has on their lives. For married or otherwise monogamous men, pornography often signals discomfort or uneasiness in a relationship. They hide their porn from their girlfriends and wives, make light of it with other men, and even lie about it to themselves—underestimating their consumption, writing off the impact, telling themselves they only ended up looking for two hours because they were stressed, tired, bored, or annoyed. Men caught with pornography by their bosses or their wives often feel humiliated and pathetic. They get defensive and angry, alienating the people who matter most to them. They can lose their jobs and jeopardize their careers. They can weaken or destroy their marriages and isolate their children. What titillates in the short term hardly merits the long-term costs.

 

Pornography is degrading in its own way to men. In interviews, porn stars and strippers typically say they view their male patrons with revulsion and disrespect. They see men who frequent strip clubs as pathetic, egotistical, women-hating, superficial, stupid, out of control, predatory, or just plain rude. Yet men who use pornography have been stamped by the pornified culture as manly, virile, powerful, suave, and confident. They have been told that they’re “getting” women through the pages of magazines, the purchase of lap dances, the downloading of images. In reality, they are most certainly not getting any women while engaged in such pursuits. So why should men allow themselves to be manipulated in this way? And why shouldn’t men be allowed to speak out? If a man chooses not to go to a strip club for a bachelor party, not only out of respect for women but out of self-respect, he should be commended rather than mocked for his actions. If enough men did so decisively, pornography would no longer be fated for mass acceptance.

Shapiro (p. 10):

This book is meant to force us to reexamine the true consequences of tolerating immorality and the oversexed society in which we live. If we see clearly the moral pit which we have dug for ourselves, maybe we can stop digging—and maybe, just maybe, restore the standards that have served American society well in the past.

 

It is also an attempt to reach out to my peers. Yes, sex is fun, and good, and in the right context, healthy. But let’s keep it in the right context. Let’s think about our prospective children. Do we want our kids growing up in the over-sexualized world that we do? Let’s learn from history. Let’s not repeat the mistakes of our parents’ generation.

 

The baby boomers and liberals who make up the current leadership in this country need to take a good, hard look at what they’ve done to American society. If they don’t feel that the children giving blowjobs at age twelve are the products of a broken nation, they aren’t looking hard enough. It is the baby boomers and the grown-up flower children who began the trend of oversexed culture. They produced the television shows, made the movies, bought the albums, corrupted the school system, and ushered in a new era of “tolerance.” They tore down the traditional moral system in the name of youthful rebellion.

 

It is not right that children be dunked headfirst into the vat of garbage we call popular culture. Ten-year-old girls should not have anorexia, and ten-year-old boys should not have to question their sexuality. It is the responsibility of parents to teach their children about sex, not the schools’. It is the responsibility of parents to teach their children values.

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