The hard-to-swallow reality for many parents is that pornography is at the fingertips of their little children and teenagers on a regular basis. Sure, there are parental controls and services that can help. However, kids, especially teenage boys, will find a way. I hate to say it, but they will.
They can find loopholes in the system, such as using a VPN, using an unrestricted device lying around the house, or simply buying a device and keeping it hidden. Devices with internet connectivity are multiplying in number and becoming cheaper. Meanwhile, ways to access porn online are multiplying as well.
Of course, sexual activity has a perennial place in human existence as a means to procreate future generations. Historically, it has always been there. However, what happens when all sorts of sexual activity between strangers takes on an outsized proportion of a person’s mental space? Like the outsized growth of cancerous cells, it can’t be good.
The study also states, “Internet pornography exposure provides ‘artificial’ (not natural) stimuli that do not correspond to real psychosocial contacts and interpersonal relations, which may lead to eliciting abnormal emotional responses.”
In other words, if you are getting an extreme emotional high from what you watch, then you will lose your emotional drive in your real-life interactions—interactions that are far more meaningful.
There is also the danger of needing increasingly sick content to produce the same stimulation—including violent porn and child porn, which are illegal.
But what exactly does one say to one’s young boys and possibly girls about such far-off, intangible consequences as “emotional detachment”? Perhaps “Stay away from it!” “It’s bad for you!” “It’s gross!” I’m reminded of a program I went through in elementary school called D.A.R.E.: Drug Abuse Resistance Education. It essentially took that approach with drugs. The program ended in 2009 after it was proven ineffective and even sparked curiosity in children. If this is an analogous situation, then warning young people about porn viewing may actually lead to more of it. Yikes! What do we do?
In this awful predicament of parent versus technology, I think we have to start asking some very tough questions and be willing to answer them in ways that are perhaps more visceral than scientific (only for lack of research in this area).
The prevailing wisdom in society—from the scantily clad bikini models that show up in your mailbox to the increasingly provocative gowns seen at formal events—is that sexual attraction and sexual activity are perfectly normal and good, even though their limits and standards progressively lower generation after generation in American society. The skirts get shorter, the chests more exposed, and the clothing tighter.
I think the answer to the pornography problem is really a radical change in the mainstream American perspective. We have to say that sexual activity and sexual attraction—for the most part as they exist now and since after the 1950s or so—are bad.
Looking back historically and culturally, we can even say that the extent it has reached is evil. In the Jewish tradition, a person who engages in sexual activity is unclean for 24 hours. In the Ten Commandments, committing adultery (sex outside marriage) is prohibited. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus Christ expanded this teaching to include lustful thoughts. In the Buddhist tradition, the third of five major precepts taught by Buddha Shakyamuni is refraining from sexual misconduct. The Japanese Bushido tells samurai to avoid addiction to sexual activity. The Confucian tradition places the relationship between husband and wife on a pedestal of supreme importance and treats it only as a means of procreation.
The ancient Greek sage Socrates viewed sexual activity and attraction as a source of addiction, according to records left by his student, Xenophon. He put it on par with drinking. I’ll convert Socrates’s lesson into an updated form: If there were Mexican cartel members recently spotted near your El Paso home, would you want the one guard stationed outside your front door to spend his time looking at porn on his phone? No, of course not. But if you are sitting inside looking at porn on your phone, then that is what you are asking for. Viewing pornography is generally a bankrupt, morally deficient practice.
To be without such an addiction, as Socrates would view it, would be to approach the divine and become more godly and good. To give in to and feed one’s craving for sexual activity and attraction outside of marriage is simply evil. This is what you can tell your child.
