Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that I have spilled gallons of ink inveighing against the many ways porn is poisoning our relationships, our families, our churches, and ourselves. But the prevalence of porn is having other effects, too. Consider this, from the Washington Examiner:
Of men with no college education, less than 1 out of 6 people report having read a book for pleasure in the past week, according to the American Perspectives Survey from the Survey Center on American Life. For comparison, 50% of college-educated women report having read for pleasure in the past week.
What are men doing instead? Well, 44% of men report having watched pornography within the past month. Among those between 30 and 50 years old, 57% have watched in the past month, and 42% have watched in the past week.
Put these numbers together, and you see a bunch of older millennials and middle-aged working-class men who don’t read but watch pornography. And the numbers suggest these are mostly lonely, unmarried men.
“Men who report having watched pornography” in the past 24 hours, the study authors found, “report the highest rates of loneliness. Six in 10 men who watched pornography in the past 24 hours say they have felt lonely or isolated at least once in the past week.”
What this article does not mention is that many men have been essentially weaned on porn. They were first exposed to it around the age of 8 or 9—I’ve talked to boys who got hooked as young as age 5. Using technological devices, they hook up virtual jumper cables to their libidos and spend hours shocking themselves senseless. From a young age, they destroy their capacity for wonder and intrigue.
How do you get a boy interested in Oliver Twist, or The Swiss Family Robinson, or even the Hardy Boys when their minds are packed with images of naked women and videos of every imaginable sex act? How do you mold and fill a young mind that is constantly screaming for more dopamine hits—more porn? The simple answer is that it is nearly impossible. Porn is not only poisonous, but it replaces everything. It becomes an obsession. It hacks our brains, rewires them, and creates constant sexual cravings.
We have poisoned the cultural groundwater our boys and girls drink from, and it is destroying them.
