Pornography: A detriment to society or a means of personal fulfilment?

For every voice decrying the evils of pornography, there’s another that says it’s healthy, part of our freedom of expression, “sex positive”!

So, which is it?

LINKS

Download a transcript of this episode here

• This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan’s new commentary on the book of Exodus by Christopher Wright.
• Meet our guest, Melinda Tankard Reist, and find out more about the Collective Shout Movement that she founded.
• Meet our other guests, Professor William Struthers and Simon Camilleri
• Read more on the protest of the 70,000 Korean women who held banners shouting ‘My life is not your porn’ in 2018 after a spike in the number of spycams found in female bathrooms.
• Read the New York Times explosive investigative report ‘The Children of Pornhub’, published in December 2020.
• In response to the NYT report, Mastercard and Visa withdrew their cooperation with Pornhub later that month. 
• Read Melinda Tankard Reist’s book, Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Porn Industry
• Read Melinda Tankard Reist’s piece on the exploration of the issue of porn and consent for ABC Religion and Ethics.
• Here’s the research John Dickson lists off in this episode on pornography:
  • A study by the Australian Research Centre in Sex Health and Society said it found that pornography enabled sexual confidence and positive community formation, especially for LGBTIQ+ people.
  • A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Medicine found that the sex lives of 18 million men over age 20 were negatively affected due to excessive porn viewing.
  • A recent study by the Kinsey Institute showed that people who use technology for sexting or webcamming gained a sense of emotional connection as well as sexual gratification from this contact.
  • In a study conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, researchers discovered a significant association between reported pornography hours per week and gray matter volume in the human brain, and a drop in reactivity to sexual cues.
  • A study published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour looking at Norwegian use of pornography found that couples who use pornography together tended to enjoy a more permissive erotic climate. But where only one person in the couple did, men who used porn were likely to experience problems with arousal, and women who used porn were likely to have increased negative self perception.
• In February 2021 in Australia, a former Sydney schoolgirl launched a petition calling for ‘sexual consent education’ to be taught much earlier in schools.
• In this opinion piece, a high school teacher argues that ‘Hardcore porn is to blame for disturbing teenage sex culture’
• This ‘TraffickingHub’ online petition to shutdown Pornhub has over 2 million signatures.
• Here’s a [safe] link with more information on Pornhub’s traffic numbers.
• Sexual health research stresses the ‘bonding hormones’ released with sexual encounters. Check out this with Australian sex researcher, Dr Patricia Weerakoon on this subject. 
• C. S. Lewis, the great Oxford literary don and public advocate of Christianity, once defended the biblical approach to sex against the call in his day (the 1940s) for more sexual ‘freedom’. His insights are as relevant today as then:

I know some muddleheaded Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves. But they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy.

Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once … There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

I do not say that you and I are individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance. God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. HarperCollins, 1997, 81-82)

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