A while back an article circulated social media that both shocked and appalled parents from the United Kingdom to the United States. The article was written by Martin Daubney, the former editor of Loaded, a UK magazine similar to Maxim here in The United States. The article, Experiment that convinced me online porn is the most pernicious threat facing children today, exposed adolescents’ extensive knowledge of, and experience with, pornography. (The article was originally published on The UK Daily Mail Online, which ironically enough, displays nudity in the sidebar, so I’ve linked to another website that re-posted it.)
Pornography is Addictive, Devastating Relationships and Lives
Besides highlighting the proliferation of pornography within today’s youth, Daubney sites a study by Cambridge scientist Dr. Valerie Voon which documented that the change in brain function caused by viewing pornography is similar to that of alcoholics and drug addicts. No one knows how many images or videos it takes to turn a porn habit into a porn addiction, so avoiding it all together is the wisest defense.
A study conducted last year by researchers Dr Gomathi Sitharthan and Professor Raj Sitharthan at The University of Sydney went further to examine the repercussions of pornography in the lives of the survey’s participants. The university reported last year on their website that the researchers surveyed 800 people who regularly watched pornography, and they found that “excessive users had severe social and relationship problems and had often lost their jobs or been in trouble with the law as a result of their addiction. Some users escalated their viewing to more extreme and often illegal material.”
The survey also reported that “20 percent of participants said that they preferred the excitement of watching porn to being sexually intimate with their partner, 30 percent acknowledged that their work performance suffered due to excessive viewing, and about 18 percent were preoccupied with fantasizing when they were not online.”
Pornography is raising generations of little boys with disturbingly inaccurate expectations of sex that no girl is ever going to be able to meet – as she shouldn’t. And it is teaching little girls that their role in sex is to be dominated and subservient. Pornography, without a doubt, is destroying our children’s chances of developing a healthy view of sex, which they will carry into marriage and then pass on to their own children.
So what can we do? How can we protect our children from this industry vying for our children’s attention and allegiance? To get some answers, check out the post, Online Safety Essentials – Tips to Protect Your Children Online.
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