Porn and our youth

Tue, Feb 7. 2012

Editor: I often thank God for the “one laptop per child” program and that I grew up in the years before the Internet was in every home; I’m not sure that I would have handled it very well and I am wondering if our youths are handling it well.{{more}}

It’s not like I’m ancient, but my thirty-three years do mean that I was born and raised in a pre-Internet world. It is difficult to quantify or even qualify how the world has changed, since the web tied us all together into this elaborate network of bits and bytes. There is scarcely an area of life that has remained untouched by it. We do not have the old sweet St Vincent and the Grenadines plus the Internet; we have a whole new St Vincent/world all around us. Even something as flesh and blood as sex has been radically altered in this digital world.

Teenagers in the 90s were not a lot different from teens today. We wanted the same things – we just had to work a little bit harder to get some of them. If we wanted to see pornography (and we did, of course), the process usually involved my brother and I working in tandem, one of whom would block the space at the bottom of my parents bedroom to prevent the light from the tv penetrating, while the other would turn on the tv and turn the volume down as quickly as possible. It was dangerous, high stakes work that, if it went wrong, could easily involve a serious “pair of licking”. Times have changed.

Today, a teenager needs only to turn on his computer and, within two or three clicks of the mouse, he can have unlimited amounts of pornography available to him. Today, it is far more difficult to avoid pornography than it is to find it. It would be literally impossible for one person to watch all of the pornography being created today; there would not be enough hours in the day. Not even close. Needless to say, teens, and teenaged boys in particular, are quick to take advantage of this pornographic feast. Even pre-teen boys are being drawn into the world of porn. From the first awakenings of a boy’s sexuality, he is being inundated with pornographic images. These are not simple images of naked women, as they may have been a couple of generations ago, but are hard core images that often extend to what is base and degrading. The sexuality of a whole generation of our children is being formed, not by talks with their parents, but by professional pornographers who will do anything, to fuel the increased desire for increased depravity.

This is the very nature of sin, isn’t it? Sin is always progressive in nature. If you give it an inch, it soon seeks to take a mile. Sin is never content, but always seeks and desires more. Have you ever been scared by your sin? Perhaps there was a time that you saw how a particular sin was taking you over. Maybe you had thought you were in control of your sin but suddenly found that, almost in an instant, it had increased to the next level. You were no longer in control – sin was leading the way and you were more and more just along for the ride, obeying the impulses of the flesh. This is a terrifying place to be and I believe everyone has experienced it at one time or another.

Next week I will continue, but if you have read this we all have a part to play.

Glenroy George
vincyforeal@gmail.com