Porn: A 'victimless' crime?
The issue of pornography and whether it is a benign or malignant influence on society has been a persistent and controversial topic in American society since at least the emergence of Hugh Hefner and the Playboy “philosophy” in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
As the sexual revolution of the 1960s progressed, pornography became a part of the revolution’s public relations campaign. Porn’s detractors were caricatured as “prudes” and uptight, religious bigots who wanted to repress healthy sexual expression.
I distinctly remember as a young pastor in the 1970s that President Carter hosted a White House conference on pornography, which amazingly concluded that pornography was a “victimless” crime. What an astounding, morally obtuse statement.
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The first victims were the women who were objectified and dehumanized in the making of the product. I remember once interviewing a woman (a preacher’s daughter) who had run away from home and gotten entangled in the porn industry. She had managed to escape pornography’s web and found her way back to her Christian faith. She was traveling around the country sharing her testimony as a warning to others. In my naiveté, I asked her, “How many of the women and girls you know doing pornography were addicted to illicit drugs?” She fixed me with a look of amazement and replied, “All of them. You couldn’t do what we do if you weren’t desensitized by illicit drugs!”
A “victimless” crime? Society’s experience in the intervening decades has revealed to us how pornography dehumanizes and objectifies women and children. Study after study (including the Reagan Administration’s "Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography" (The Meese Commission) has shown how pornography is addictive for many men and viewing it leads many of them to seek out evermore hardcore pornography in order to get the same dopamine high.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of porn’s ever more ubiquitous presence in society has been the exponential increase in increasing violent, hardcore pornography, including rampant sexual crimes against children.
As cited in First Things, “The Shifting Narrative Around Pornography,” Harriet Grant reports in the Guardian, “we face 'a spiraling global crisis' with law enforcement and child protection experts consistently pinpointing one culprit: 'the explosion over the past 10 to 20 years of free-to-view and easily accessible online pornography.…A growing body of research is beginning to warn of how problematic porn habits can be a pathway into viewing images of children being abused.'”
A recent opinion article by Nicolas Kristoff, “These Internal Documents Show Why We Shouldn’t Trust Porn Companies,” in TheNew York Times exposes the heinous extent to which these purveyors of toxic filth will go to masquerade and distribute their vile content.
The average age of first exposure to hardcore pornography has fallen from 17 to 11 in the past three decades, and it has increasingly warped young men’s understanding of sex. Sophie Gilbert, in her new book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, explains how easily available hardcore pornography “trained a good amount of our popular culture…to see women as objects—as things to silence, restrain, fetishize or brutalize. And it’s helped train women too.”
Gilbert observes that consequently, we should not be surprised at a “2019 study that found that 38 percent of British women under 40 reported having experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during sex.”
The evidence is overwhelming. Pornography is wickedly toxic for women, children, and men. Women and children are dehumanized and objectified. Boys and men are warped and robbed of the ability to become the loving husbands and fathers God designed them to be.
Hardcore porn is “the water through which many young people now swim which many adults refuse to see and name.”
We must sound the alarm. Generation Z (1998-2012) has been devastated by this porn plague. We must seek to rescue and protect victims from this social media river of electronic slime, and act to protect Generation Alpha (2013- ) from similar toxic exposure.
What do we do? We must sound the alarm far and wide that pornography poisons everything it touches. We must also lovingly explain how pornography is a satanic perversion of God’s precious gift of human sexuality (for example, gutter euphemisms for the sex act, which God intended for intimacy and giving of oneself to one’s partner, are used for acts of exploitation and aggression against another human being.
We must also, as adults, insist that our government take action to protect society, and especially young people, from exposure to this emotional toxic waste. In just the past few days, my home state of Texas became the 20th state to pass a child safety law to give parents “more control over the apps their children download.”
At the federal level, Senator Mike Lee has introduced the “Interstate Obscenity Definition Act,” which would define pornography as “obscenity” and would make its distribution illegal.
So-called defenders of “free speech” will oppose Senator Lee’s bill. As they do so, they must address some very serious questions.
“Do you want to live in a society where it is normative for children to be exposed to extreme porn before puberty, and their libidos wired to respond to sexual violence? Where almost a quarter of adult American women reportedly ‘felt scared during sex’ due to porn-inspired violence like choking? Where underage porn users are increasingly abusing other children? Where men are being transformed into sex offenders by pornography that is increasingly difficult to avoid? Where innocence is increasingly impossible?” —Jonathon Van Maron, “The Shifting Narrative Around Pornography,”First Things
The “social experiment” of “anything goes” pornography has been tried, and the landscape is littered with its victims. Enough is enough! It is well past time to outlaw this spiritual toxic waste.
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
