For over a decade, millions of people in our pornified Western culture have been pumping millions of hours of sadistic sexually violent scenes into their skulls, all the while claiming in defiance of all the evidence that this exploding social lust for abuse and degradation has no real-world consequences once the screen has faded to black. This is despite the fact that nearly 90 percent of mainstream porn content now features violence against women—and most of it also includes name-calling so vicious that some scholars are saying it reaches the threshold of hate speech.
And despite the insistence of porn users that this fascination with the on-screen destruction of the feminine does not bleed into real life, that is unfortunately and provably not true. As I noted last week, violent porn is one of the key factors in India’s ongoing rape crisis. In the United Kingdom, violent porn has spawned an explosion of child-on-child sexual assaults. Pornography is grooming a generation of young men to be sexual predators, and it is grooming a generation of young women to be the victims of sexual violence.
When I travel across North America and speak about pornography, I hear stories of porn-inspired sexual assaults all too frequently. I have even encountered many horrifying instances of porn being used to groom children for sexual abuse—sometimes within the confines of a family. And that is why, unfortunately, I was not surprised to see a stomach-turning headline in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix last week: “Adopted daughters became ‘aim’ of Sask. man’s porn addiction, court hears.”
The details are too graphic for me to include here, but the story is this: A 44-year-old man sexually abused his two and three-year old adopted daughters many times, beginning when they were infants. He turned himself in to police when one of his daughters made an off-hand comment about the abuse to her mother. “A pornography addiction may have been the red flag for a rural Saskatchewan man who started abusing his daughters without empathy,” the Star Phoenix reported.
Pornography, the reporter noted, twisted this man from a normal person into a perverse sex offender: “The Court heard the man had been living a double life of an accomplished health-care professional and loving father, and a selfish addict controlled by lust.” This is true of many men in our culture, regardless of whether most of them decide to act out on or imitate the sorts of things they watch on-screen. “Women, and eventually my girls, became faceless,” the man told the court just prior to being sentenced to prison for six years. “Eventually, I crossed the last line.”
That “last line” cost his daughters their innocence. “To my girls,” the convicted sex offender read from a letter, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am for not protecting you like a father, and that you became the aim of my addiction.” The result for the porn addict was a six year prison sentence, a lifetime on the sex offender registry, and a five year period after his release from prison where he cannot be around children unless supervised by someone who is aware of his sex offender status.
The sentence he gave his daughters is also life-long.
Most people remain unaware that pornography is not only a huge driver of sexual assault, but also plays a key role in the abuse of children. When I asked Matt Osborne of Operation Underground Railroad about the connection between porn and child abuse in an interview, he began murmuring in agreement before I could even finish my question. Operation Underground Railroad is an American organization that assists law enforcement officials around the world in breaking up human trafficking rings and rescuing sex slaves, with their operatives going undercover to pose as American sex tourists in shorts and flip-flops to lure human traffickers into revealing their brutal business.
“I’ve seen it firsthand in a couple of different areas,” he said of the connection between porn and child exploitation. “One of the first operations I led in Armenia, Columbia back in October of 2014, we helped take a suspected trafficker in that area who admitted to us…how he got involved in this type of business. He said that when he was 22 years old, he started watching pornography, looking at magazines and videos, and then he just noticed that he needed more and more hard-core, more and more violent pornography to get his fix, so to speak.”
“Then he also realized that he needed to physically have forceful sex with these kids, rape them—he’s admitting this to us,” Osborne told me. “And then he actually got in to making pornography. So you see this whole spectrum here—the ‘harmless’ magazine all the way to having to make pornography. Then some of the American would-be sex buyers we helped to arrest with the Department of Homeland Security, they admitted to us that again, they started with what they thought was harmless pornography and then it got to the point where they actually had to travel to locations to have sex with kids. A couple of them told us, ‘I don’t think I would be here if it wasn’t for pornography.’”
That last observation—“I don’t think I would be here if it wasn’t for pornography”—is actually a common sentiment among those who have been inspired by their violent fantasies to live out their lusts in real life. NBC’s How to Catch a Predator often features sex criminals who admit that it was porn that brought them to this wretched place in their lives—and that they cannot fathom who they have become. Sometimes, it turns out, you really become what you consume: A sexual predator thriving on violence and degradation.
Bluntly put: Pornography is a cultural poison with countless victims, and these victims are largely ignored because “sexual liberation” demands that we never critique someone’s sexual interests—even if that happens to be watching violence being inflicted on women and girls for pleasure. This is a sick and disgusting state of affairs, and it is long past time for us to have an open and honest discussion about what pornography tells us about ourselves, both individually and collectively. It is time for us to take the advice of Langston Hughes:
