Porn is ravaging an entire generation. Here’s the proof.

By Jonathon Van Maren

The porn plague is in the news again, and as usual, it isn’t pretty. A brief perusal of a few stories highlights the degrading impact of pornography on our society, and one overarching fact shines through: Porn wrecks everything.

An Ottawa mom recently discovered that it is perfectly alright for adult perverts to peruse hardcore pornography in full view of children—at the public library. When her thirteen-year-old daughter told her that a man was viewing “inappropriate,” Jennifer St. Pierre went to take a look, and realized that a man was watching porn on PornHub in a very high-traffic part of the library. When she complained—she was there with her two young daughters, and understandably did not expect to be confronted with hardcore porn—she was told that the man was within his rights. At least people are still going to the library, I suppose.

Fight the New Drug just reported on a new study by NSPCC Childline that found a full 10% of children ages 12 to 13 are worried that they might “have a compulsion to pornography.” That’s kids going into Grade 7 and 8, in case you were wondering, worried that they might be addicted to porn. Parents are going to have to reckon with this, and reckon with it soon. The fact that most children that age have unfettered access to unfiltered Internet, a cell phone, and any number of other mobile devices will be revealed over the next decade to have been criminal negligence.

Speaking of pornography, Kevin De Young has taken another shot at explaining to Christians why they shouldn’t be watching Game of Thrones, which is so full of graphic nudity that many scenes are literally hosted on PornHub and porn usage Internet-wide goes down when the show is airing (get your graphic sex and violence in one place!) It’s ludicrous that Christians even need to be persuaded of this, and actually says a lot about modern Christianity in North America. The main argument I hear is that “the later seasons have much less graphic nudity and sex.” I’m sure they’ll be delighted to hear similar arguments from their sons and daughters about Internet pornography (“It’s the storyline, Dad!”)

The Daily Telegraph has also published a fairly lengthy essay detailing the dangers of pornography, and their case is comprehensive, from noting that the British National Health Service believes porn use might be causing an uptick of erectile dysfunction in young men to the impact of porn on sexual violence:

Studies are generally in agreement that pornography influences real-life practice, to worrying degrees. A report in 2014 found a link between watching unprotected sex occur on screen and going on to have unprotected sex in real life, for instance, while the number of women who underwent a ‘labiaplasty’ – a surgical procedure to reduce the size of the vaginal opening – rose by almost 40% last yearin the US, and is believed to be elected by women wishing to look more like the often cosmetically-enhanced performers. Porn-watching was linked to infidelity in another study, again American, which found that seeing multiple sexual partners on screen subtly wounds a committed relationship by convincing the watcher that the grass will be greener on the other side, no matter how happy you are with your current situation.

The conviction of Jamie Reynolds, who murdered 17-year-old Georgina Williams in Shropshire in 2013, brought the topic acutely into public debate. Reynolds, a court heard, had been watching extreme pornography immediately prior to strangling Williams to death. Giving evidence to MPs, Lord Thomas, the Lord Chief Justice, stopped short of blaming porn directly, but said he was left “in no doubt at all that the peddling of pornography on the internet had a dramatic effect on the individual.”

In fact, the BBC has reported that there’s been a surge in girls under the age of 18 asking for “labioplasty”—cosmetic vaginal surgery. In 2015-16, over 200 girls under 18 had the surgery done, with 150 of those girls being under the age of 15. Girls as young as age 9 are requesting the surgery, even though Dr. Naomi Crouch, a leading adolescent gynecologist who chairs the British Society Paediatric and Adolescent Gynaecology says she’s never seen a single case of such surgery being necessary. In one heartbreaking interview, a young girl explains why she thought she needed it:

Anna – not her real name – considered having labiaplasty from the age of 14. “I just picked up from somewhere that it wasn’t neat enough or tidy enough and I think I wanted it to be smaller. People around me were watching porn and I just had this idea that it should be symmetrical and not sticking out. I thought that was what everyone else looked like, because I hadn’t seen any normal everyday [images] before then. I remember thinking, ‘If there’s surgery for it, then clearly I’m not the only one who wants this done, and maybe it won’t be that big a deal.’.”

Just think about that for a moment—girls as young as age 9 hating their own bodies so much they want surgical revisions done, because porn is so prevalent among their peers they think it is necessary. In Australia, teenage girls are reporting that pornography has transformed their high schools into an ugly version of a sexual Hunger Games:

As the Plan Australia/Our Watch report found, girls are tired of being pressured for images they don’t want to send, but they seem resigned to send them anyway because of how normal the practice has become. Boys then typically use the images as a form of currency, to swap and share with their friends. Often times boys will use the revealing pics to humiliate girls publicly if there is a bad break up.

Seventh grade girls are asking questions about bondage and S&M. Many of them have seen 50 Shades of Grey, and wonder if a boy wants to hit me, tie me up and stalk me, does that mean he loves me? Girls are tolerating demeaning and disrespectful behaviors, and thereby internalizing pornography’s messages about their submissive role. Girls describe being groped in the school yard, and being routinely sexually harassed at school or on the school bus on the way home. They are saying that boys act like they are entitled to girls’ bodies, like girls are only there to pleasure them. It is partially true what defenders of porn often say, porn does provide sex education—but not in the way they think. It teaches middle school boys that women and girls are there for his pleasure and that they are always up for sex. To them, no just means persuade me.

Girls describe being ranked at school on their bodies, and are sometimes compared to the bodies of porn stars. They know they can’t compete, but that doesn’t stop them from thinking that they have to. Requests for genital surgery have tripled in a little over a decade among young women aged 15-24. Girls who don’t undergo porn-inspired waxing are often considered ugly, dirty or gross by boys, as well as by other girls. Some girls suffer physical injury from porn-inspired sexual acts, including anal sex. The director of a domestic violence centre on the Gold Coast wrote to Collective Shout about the increase in porn-related injuries to girls aged 14 and up, from acts including torture:

“In the past few years we have had a huge increase in intimate partner rape of women from 14 to 80+. The biggest common denominator is consumption of porn by the offender. With offenders not able to differentiate between fantasy and reality, believing women are ‘up for it’ 24/7, ascribing to the myth that ‘no means yes and yes means anal,’ oblivious to injuries caused and never ever considering consent. We have seen a huge increase in deprivation of liberty, physical injuries, torture, drugging, filming and sharing footage without consent.”

The Australian Psychological Society estimates that adolescent boys are responsible for around 20 percent of rapes of adult women and between 30 percent and 50 percent of all reported sexual assaults of children. Just last week, Emeritus Professor Freda Briggs argued that online pornography is turning children into copycat sexual predators, acting out on other children what they are seeing in porn.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Pornography is laying waste to an entire generation. Just listen to what the kids are saying. They’re saying that from puberty or even younger, they’re simply seen as sex objects. They see sexual blackmail as a normal part of high school. Sexual violence is now demanded by many boys and accepted by many girls. Little girls want what amounts to the porn version of female genital mutilation because porn has taught their peers an entire ideology about females and sexuality.

This is happening right here, right now, on the cell phones and tablets and computers of your children. Don’t pretend it isn’t. I’ve given presentations on this in high schools and churches across North America, and from kids who’ve been home-schooled their whole lives to kids who go to public school and everything in between, this problem is ravaging every community, every church, and every school. If you don’t act, you’ll regret it. That I promise you.

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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.