You’ve heard some of the shocking statistics. As much as 30% of all Internet bandwidth may be delivering pornography to someone. People on Google search for porn-related terms more than anything else, by a huge margin. But within that broad category of “pornography,” do you know what, exactly, people are trying to find?
A recent news article caught my attention when it offered an answer to this question. This recent report (compiled by a pornography search site) identifies the three top pornographic search terms for each state in the United States. I read the entire list. What I found is disturbing.
The terms “teen” and “college” are the most popular terms in the list. Together they appear 47 times. Remember, that statistic only considers the top three search terms. I’m betting that, if the list were expanded to the top five terms, every state would include at least one of these two search terms.
Now, we can either presume that online pornography is only or mostly consumed by people in their early 20s or younger (in which case you’re going to have to explain how the industry remains profitable), or we can admit that the pornography epidemic indicts ours as a nation of closet pedophiles. Up and down your street in your neighborhood, middle-aged men are seeking sexual gratification from images of high schoolers.
I think a lot of people, knowing that depraved human sexuality has been around for a long time, presume that Internet pornography simply brings to light what has been under the surface since the Fall. I disagree. Yes, all humans are depraved sinners. Yes, sexuality is one place in which human depravity reliably surfaces. Yes, this has always been true. And yet, all of that being true, I still think that human sexuality is malleable. Internet pornography, I think, is CHANGING human sexuality.
Not for the better.
And so, as a father to a daughter, I worry about what is happening to the world around us. At one time, I was imagining a crowd-sourced, if possibly illegal, way to strike back against the scourge of Internet porn. I’m thinking along different lines now. I think that it is time for the government to intervene along the lines of what British Prime Minister David Cameron recently proposed.
All sin is dangerous. The enemy has come, after all, only to steal, kill, and destroy. The terminal dangers of pornography are just becoming evident, and our children are imperiled by it.
