It is a sad world when we see how the sexual gratification of adult males is being pushed onto the rest of society. There is more pornography available than ever before. Search the internet even with a plain word such as “woman” and you will find links to pornography. Search with a word like “sex” and you will find links to pornography – pornography aimed at men. This is the point – aimed at men for men.
Now there is nothing wrong with sex. Really, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with sex. In fact, I have a very healthy sex life. I love sex when I am with the right person, but I am fussy about who that person is. So don’t mistake me for being anti-sex.
But I am anti-porn. Not because I am prudish, but because I have great concerns over the impact of porn. As I showed at the beginning, porn is aimed at men. I know some women state they enjoy porn as well, but they are undoubtedly a smaller group. The pornography, though, has a massive impact on their lives. Research(1) shows that, in the UK, 90% of young people surveyed admitted to viewing pornography and the age at which they first viewed pornography was 11 years old!
Now if we think about the consequences of that by considering a well known celebrity: Tiger Woods. "As soon as I read the Tiger Woods texts I knew this was a guy who liked porn. Acts like DP, ATM and choking are now commonplace, while a decade ago they would have been on the fringes of the porn industry."(2)
A celebrity who has been addicted to pornography admitting how it nearly destroyed his marriage, and impacted the lives of a great many other people. His access to porn normalised acts once frowned upon.
Young people are accessing this kind of material for on average 90 minutes per week. How is that altering their views? How are these pornographic images (and it is pornography, not sex) affecting these children? Is this normalising acts that used to be extreme or taboo?
Pornography is damaging women in particular, objectifying them. It is also affecting men, but the real issue is the “pornification” of women in order that women fit into the pornographic images demanded by men.
(1) http://www.sexualhealthsheffield.nhs.uk/resources/pornographybriefing.pdf
(2) http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/tawdry_tiger_FUez9gMmuPdqrih9ijNf2O/0
(3) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jackson-katz/interview-with-porn-schol_b_530909.html
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