Sex, Soul, and Society…

May 12, 2005

A couple months ago I was driving some young girls in grade seven at our church to an event. I started ranting on about how great it would be to be their age again, when one of them blurted out ‘when we’re with boys all they want to do is look at porn’… I was speechless. Pornography has seeped into the foundations of our culture more than we think it has.

The $4 billion that Americans spend on video pornography is larger than the annual revenue accrued by either the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or Major League Baseball. But that’s literally not the half of it: the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually in the United States…People pay more money for pornography than they do on movie tickets, more than they do on all the performing arts combined.” NY Times, May 20, 2001, Naked CapitalistsThe average age of first exposure to Internet pornography is age 11

There are more outlets for hard-core pornography in this country than there are McDonalds restaurants

At $10 billion, porn is no longer a sideshow to the mainstream like, say, the $600 million Broadway theater industry — it is the mainstream

Advertisers and companies that use sex to sell their products use it because it works. They do not throw in billions of dollars using sex to sell without knowing for certain that it will have an impact on not only our thoughts but our actions.

There is absolutely no question that the way our society portrays sexuality impacts us, the real question is how. How does it affect how we see the world? How does it encroach upon our relationships? How does it shape us as individuals or as humanity? I believe it can shake and shatter our very souls.

Posted in Culture, sex