Once again, the dawning of the New Year has brought with it PornHub’s annual bragfest about the numbers of unfortunate men, women and children who feed from their buffet of poison. As summarized by Fight the New Drug:
People spent nearly 4.6 billion hours on Pornhub last year, which breaks down to 23 billion visitors watched a total of 91.9 billion videos, all which have increased since last year’s report. Pornhub boasts that this figure equates to if every human being on the planet (man, woman, child) viewed 12.5 videos each. To put that into even clearer perspective, the analytics show that an average of 64 million people were watching porn on just this one site on any given day. 64 million people each day.
That’s 5,246 centuries worth of porn, in case you were wondering. I won’t even get into what it is that people want to watch, other than to make the comment that the current obsession with incest porn (step-moms etc.) says something decidedly ugly about the health of our families. Broken families make a broken culture which produces broken people. For evidence of that, look no further than the metastasizing of misogyny and rape culture that continues to develop, mostly unchecked, just beneath the surface of respectable society.
Which brings me to another little news item I spotted a couple weeks back. A note to all the“sex-positive” liberationist porn addicts who like to get their cyber-freak on and are relying on the hilariously piddling protests of Dr. David Ley and the other porn apologists that smut is safe: Porn is the furthest thing from sex-positive. In fact, porn is wrecking sex. From The Independent:
A masculinity expert says he fears heavy internet porn usage may have left up to one in 10 young men with erection problems.
Dr. Andrew Smiler said that easy access to endless streaming porn is leaving healthy young men with the sexual problem. He told The Independent: “The guys I see, most of them are between 13 and 25. The vast majority are, for the most part, the picture of physical health.
“So if I’m masturbating to porn once a day for 15 minutes but I do that every day for five years, I’m pretty well on my way to being an expert to having an orgasm to porn.” He warned that because many heavy users are young, the habit becomes even more concerning…
Dr. Angela Gregory, psychosexual therapist at Nottingham University Hospital, said: “Men are becoming both physically and psychologically desensitised to normal sexual stimulation and arousal with a sexual partner.”
For some men, however, they develop hypersexuality and are constantly aroused. “It’s like an itch they can’t scratch and is always on their minds,” Dr. Gregory said.
As former porn users like Gabe Deem turn into anti-porn activists because they’ve experienced the negative health effects of pornography, we’re seeing larger numbers of people, from every walk of life, come forward and explain why porn is so destructive. Despite the fact that we can’t even begin to summarize the damage that the porn tsunami has caused, people are beginning to wake up.
I’m hopeful that in 2017, Canada may even start to take meaningful action against the viler aspects of the porn industry—especially since Motion 47, put forward in the House of Commons by Member of Parliament Arnold Vierson, received unanimous consent from all political parties. M-47, as per Vierson’s website, aims to examine the reams of research that has come out over the past several decades:
I introduced M-47 on March 8, 2016, on International Women’s Day.
Motion M-47 states: That the Standing Committee on Health be instructed to examine the public health effects of the ease of access and viewing of online violent and degrading sexually explicit material on children, women and men, recognizing and respecting the provincial and territorial jurisdictions in this regard, and that the said Committee report its findings to the House no later than July 2017.
If this motion is adopted by the House of Commons, it would require the Standing Committee on Health to conduct a study on violent pornography. The last major federal study on the impact of pornography was in 1985 before the Internet was invented. A study would allow for a broad spectrum of stakeholders to be involved in developing future policy on this important issue.
It’s always encouraging to see politicians who are truly concerned about the issues that matter most. As for the rest of us, if you’re one of those procrastinators who hasn’t yet conjured up a New Year’s Resolution, I’ve got an idea for you. How about making 2017 the year you pitch porn out of your life forever?
