Help Others Restore Integrity
Help Others Restore Integrity 5 minute read

Sexual Sabotage

Last Updated: April 18, 2015

The Pornifying of American Youth

In last month’s issue of Pure Minds Online (the Covenant Eyes e-magazine), I wrote a story called “Sexual Sabotage: The Pornifying of American Youth.” I’ve been asked by several people to supply sources for the stats given in the article for research purposes. I’ve reproduced the article in its entirety below, this time with hyperlinks to the sources. Enjoy reading and please subscribe to our e-magazine.

. . . .

A little over a week ago Covenant Eyes was invited to be a part of the Convergence Summit outside Baltimore, Maryland, which united hundreds of leaders from around the country to talk about the rapid sexualization of our culture. Many speakers took to the stage to talk about how pornography is impacting our kids, our marriages, our brains and bodies, and even current trends in crime—specifically sex trafficking.

It was a highly emotional experience for all the conference attendees. Overwhelmed with expert testimonies and statistics, it was hard to walk away not wondering how our society has come this far. How is it that 82% of guys in college today saw porn by the age of 14? How is it that 8 out of 10 boys and nearly 6 out of 10 girls have seen “group sex” online before the age of 18? How is it that nearly a third of teens have received a nude or semi-nude picture or video from someone else? How did child pornography become a $3 billion business? How is it that a quarter of a million American kids—not including internationals—are victims of commercial sexual exploitation in the U.S.?

In short, how is it that we have sexualized youth so much in this country?

It wasn’t always this way. Western culture has undergone dramatic changes in the last 70 years. Sexual media has gone from being a largely underground industry to impacting every corner of our society. How has this happened?

How Porn Got Its Start

Some say porn has been around since men were drawing on cave walls. This is only true if your definition of “porn” is so broad as to include all forms of writing that approach the subject of sexuality. A narrower definition is more fitting in this case. The word “pornography” entered the English language nearly 150 years ago, and it means “writing of or about prostitutes.” From the beginning, the definition of pornography was limited to forms of media and art that were tied, not to sex, but to commercial sex.

Pornography did not become mainstream on its own. Dr. Judith Reisman, former president of The Institute for Media Education and one of the keynote speakers at the Convergence Summit, says pornography is part of a much larger “Sexual Industrial Complex” in America—a multifaceted network of pornography makers, pharmaceutical industries, and especially the field of sexology.

Take, for instance, the landmark year of 1953: the year Playboy hit the newsstands. Playboy is the first of what would become a long series of pornographic periodicals, paving the way for a whole industry. And what fueled Hugh Hefner’s creation of his magazine? The field of sexology or Human Sexuality—more specifically the work of Dr. Alfred Kinsey. “He credits Dr. Alfred Kinsey with changing his whole perception of sex,” Dr. Reisman reports. “He read the ‘science,’ and he wrote his thesis saying we have to change all of our sex laws based on Kinsey’s findings, and he called himself ‘Kinsey’s Pamphleteer.’ And indeed, that is exactly what he became.”

Kinsey’s Mad Science

Dr. Reisman calls Kinsey “the father of Human Sexuality” in America. His landmark book, Sexual Behavior of the Human Male, was released in 1948 (the book on female behavior came out 5 years later). It fell like a bomb on the academic world, changing forever the way sexuality was discussed in intellectual circles.

Dr. Reisman has spent the lion’s share of the last three decades exposing the work done by Kinsey not only as fraudulent but frightening. “Kinsey had to create—cook the data,” says Reisman, “to make our World War II generation look like a bunch of promiscuous characters.” How did he do this? Reisman reports most of his subjects were already deviant individuals—prisoners, pimps, and pedophiles. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that Kinsey found that 69% of men visited prostitutes, 50% engaged in adultery, 87% of pregnant single women were having abortions, and 95% of Americans were “sexually deviant.” And this was the 1940s?

The message of Kinsey’s research was clear: We’ve all just been hiding what is actually “normal” sexuality. We’ve been promoting an abnormal and puritanical sexual ethic. Forget the Leave It to Beaver image of America. Promiscuity is the new normal.

More disturbing are Kinsey’s reports on the sexuality of children. Dr. Reisman reports that up to 2,034 children were used in Kinsey’s experiments, though many are unaccounted for in the official research documents. Some children—even those documented in his books—were as young as 4 years old.

This research put Kinsey in the spotlight for the rest of his life. Reisman says Kinsey would become the single most important individual who lobbied for the relaxing of well-established laws that protected women and children from sexual violence. He would also become a cultural icon who worked to normalize the sexualization of youth in the public eye.

From Scholars to Smut

What Kinsey did in the academic world, Hugh Hefner did for the masses. Reisman asserts, “Just as Kinsey’s statistics and graphs were all fraud and phony and lies, so were Playboy’s images.” Porn became one of the primary vehicles through which the American mind was rewired to see sexuality differently.

Dr. Reisman was the principle investigator for a study of child images in major porn magazinesPlayboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. After reviewing 683 issues, from as early as 1953 and as late as 1984, her team found 6,004 child images associated with sexuality, nudity, and even violence. Even more troubling is that 46% of the child photographs showed children ages 3-11.

And these images are just the ugly tip of a very large iceberg. The most massive body of evidence for the sexualizing of youth is visible all around us today, from the toys that are marketed to the clothes they wear, from the music videos they watch to the TV shows they see. Adults and children don’t even need to see pornography to get the message: youth is sexy, so flaunt it.

And in the mean time the porn industry marches on, increasing their profits and pushing the limits. With each new media format and each new technology, the porn industry is not be far behind. Damon Brown, a regular writer for Playboy, SPIN, and the New York Post, summarizes it best: “If we invent a machine, the first thing we are going to do—after making a profit—is use it to watch porn […] DVDs, the Internet, cell phones, you name it, pornography planted its big flag there first, or at least shortly thereafter.”

Comments on: Sexual Sabotage

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related in Help Others Restore Integrity

Editor's Picks

An empty church sanctuary.

Help Others Restore Integrity

How Porn Affects Church Attendance

As time goes on, it seems like more and more Christians are…

6 minute read

Read Post

Editor's Picks

Covenant Eyes podcast team in studio with Allen Parr.

Help Others Restore Integrity

Unmasking Spiritual Deception: A Conversation With Pastor Allen Parr

In a world filled with spiritual complexities and theological debates, finding the…

3 minute read

Read Post

Editor's Picks

Black and white photo of an empty podium.

Help Others Restore Integrity

Porn’s Devastating Impact on Christian Leadership

In 2021, Barna found that 38% of pastors had thought about quitting…

4 minute read

Read Post

Editor's Picks

3 men in therapy discussing porn addiction.

Help Others Restore Integrity

What Is Porn Addiction?

If you’re looking to learn about porn addiction, this article is for…

12 minute read

Read Post

Editor's Picks

The front of a historic Catholic church against a blue sky.

Help Others Restore Integrity

5 Steps to Implement Safe Haven Sunday in Your Parish

Regardless of the size of a parish, the role of the parish…

6 minute read

Read Post

Editor's Picks

A woman sharing about church resources with a group.

Help Others Restore Integrity

5 Resources Your Parish Needs to Be Sharing to Equip Marriages and Families

Addressing pornography in your parish can be a full-time job, and maybe…

6 minute read

Read Post

Related in Help Others Restore Integrity

An empty church sanctuary.

Help Others Restore Integrity

How Porn Affects Church Attendance

As time goes on, it seems like more and more Christians are…

As time goes on, it seems like more and more Christians are watching porn. The average pew-sitter today is likely to have struggled with pornography at some point. And this struggle is also likely to…

6 minute read

0 comments

Covenant Eyes podcast team in studio with Allen Parr.

Help Others Restore Integrity

Unmasking Spiritual Deception: A Conversation With Pastor Allen Parr

In a world filled with spiritual complexities and theological debates, finding the…

In a world filled with spiritual complexities and theological debates, finding the true path to spiritual enlightenment can be daunting. Misleading doctrines and false teachings often lurk in the shadows, leading believers astray. To shed…

3 minute read

0 comments

Black and white photo of an empty podium.

Help Others Restore Integrity

Porn’s Devastating Impact on Christian Leadership

In 2021, Barna found that 38% of pastors had thought about quitting…

In 2021, Barna found that 38% of pastors had thought about quitting the ministry. Certainly, the difficulty of leading a church in the COVID era was a major factor in these results. The overall trends…

4 minute read

0 comments

3 men in therapy discussing porn addiction.

Help Others Restore Integrity

What Is Porn Addiction?

If you’re looking to learn about porn addiction, this article is for…

If you’re looking to learn about porn addiction, this article is for you. In it, we’ll look at some of the controversies about porn addiction, some of the different terminology that’s used to understand it,…

12 minute read

0 comments

The front of a historic Catholic church against a blue sky.

Help Others Restore Integrity

5 Steps to Implement Safe Haven Sunday in Your Parish

Regardless of the size of a parish, the role of the parish…

Regardless of the size of a parish, the role of the parish priest and his leadership team is essentially the same: the salvation of souls. This is the sole reason for the Incarnation, Passion, Death,…

6 minute read

0 comments

A woman sharing about church resources with a group.

Help Others Restore Integrity

5 Resources Your Parish Needs to Be Sharing to Equip Marriages and Families

Addressing pornography in your parish can be a full-time job, and maybe…

Addressing pornography in your parish can be a full-time job, and maybe you have a coordinator who does in fact have it as his or her job description. Whether or not that role exists in…

6 minute read

0 comments