The Pain of Pornography

The Problem of Porn, as seen in Junior High
Two years ago I decided to take an informal poll among our jr. high boys during an EDGE Night on chastity. I asked four questions: Who has ever seen porn, who has seen porn in the last two months, who has seen it in the last two weeks, who has seen it in the last two days? Pretty much everyone raised their hands on the first one. The second question had about 90% of the room with their hands up. By the time I got to the last question, at least 80% of those junior high boys still kept their hands up!

There are 420 million pornographic pages on the internet with 12% of all websites on the Internet being pornographic sites. 42.7% of all internet users view porn online, bringing in a total of $4.9 billion dollars in porn sales in 2006. The American porn industry gets more revenue than NBA, NFL, and all baseball franchises put together. It generates twice as much revenue as NBC, ABC, and CBS combined. Worldwide, porn generates an astounding $97.06 billion! In the United States a new porn video is being created every 39 minutes.

To say that our world today has a pornography problem is an understatement. But it is more. It is a tragedy. And it is a problem for every junior high boy in school today in our community because it is rapidly becoming a daily part of the youth culture, whether or not an individual is actually looking at it him/her self.

What does this mean? It means that at lunch time porn is a typical topic of conversation. It means that when teens are sleeping over someone else’s house, they often look at porn. What this means for us is that parents need to take another look at their child’s online life, to get involved, to have uncomfortable conversations and to protect your children from the distortion and exploitation of the Adult Industry today. And its time to bring Christ into the picture.

Understanding the Wrong of Pornography
Pornography is a powerful medium of distortion and fantasy that devalues women, distorts sex and sexuality, and reduces the dignity of the person to become just a collection of body parts.

“Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense.”

-Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2354

Pornography robs men of the capacity to give of themselves in a self-sacrificial way. Men are outward oriented and when it comes to sexual arousal, men are visually stimulated. Porn is thus far more appealing to men than it is to women and in that it is far more destructive. Engaging in pornographic behaviors is attractive to men because it makes them feel like a man without asking anything of them in return. It essentially cripples a man’s heart because it does not challenge them, asks nothing in return. It is all just taking, taking, taking.

If love is about self-gift, then pornography trains a man in lust where instead of giving one’s self to one’s beloved, one takes. Lust is found in many places today, but for teens who are going through puberty and trying to discover who they are in life, it represents a powerful twisting of the good and natural sexual desires into perversion. The great mystery and dignity of the human person is lost to the viewer of porn, and instead the person is reduced to simply their body parts. The great value of the whole person is nothing more than the other’s ability to gratify my needs. You do not have worth because of who you are, but only in what you can do for me.

I think every parent agrees that today it is hard to be a woman. Women are constantly thrown images of what beauty should look like from billboards, movies, and magazines, that they are consistently feeling like they cannot measure up. Depression and anxiety about their bodies is common place in elementary age girls now. In a culture that looks approvingly upon pornography, as youth culture undeniably does, there is now an added pressure on women to not just be “hot” or “sexy”, but to be sexually available. Sadly, we are seeing this effect the even the junior high party scene where sex acts, especially oral sex and group viewing of porn, is increasing in our community.

Pornography turns sexual intimacy into a commodity for profit. It turns women into objects. It turns men’s hearts to selfishness and lust. It breeds further sexual perversions, earlier ages of incidents of sexual contact in teens, and it looses sight of the meaning and dignity of sexual love between spouses. As Pope John Paul II so famously put it: "The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much, but that it shows too little. It reduces the person to only his or her sexual value."

Habits in the Dark: A Sad Look into the Addictive Nature of Pornography

“When pornography becomes a filter through which the rest of life is understood, serious damage occurs. A 2001 report found that more than half of all sex offenders in Utah were adolescents — and children as young as 8 years old were committing felony sexual assault.”

-Daniel Weiss, Senior Analyst for Media and Sexuality at Focus on the Family

This article seeks to draw attention to the reality of a silent epidemic that is alive and well in America: Teenage pornography addiction.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. To many that struggle daily with an addiction to pornography, those images, videos, and sounds are worth a thousand agonies as well. Many parents today are surprised at the addictive nature of pornography and are often tempted to treat the problem as simply a matter of will power.

When a teenager first encounters pornography and becomes sexually aroused, his body reacts to the stimulus in a very specific way. The image causes the adrenal glands to produce epinephrine, which enters the bloodstream. When this reaches the brain, it causes that image to be locked into the memory of the teenager. Often the adults who have struggled with an addiction to pornography over the course of years or even decades can still recall the first images that they saw as a child or teenager. The imprint of the image on the brain of the adolescent is significant. The mere remembrance of that image can cause arousal in the individual.

The rush of epinephrine and the surge of other pleasure inducing chemicals, such as dopamine and adrenaline, cause the porn user to experience a sexual high. The user seeks to return to this high, but finds that more images and a longer exposure to them is needed in order to experience that rush again. This leads to the formation of the habitual abuse of pornography and is often accompanied by masturbation.

As the habit becomes more ingrained and the seeking of this rush more difficult to achieve, the teen has probably viewed hundreds, if not thousands, of images and seen dozens of videos. At this stage it becomes compulsive.

The teen may also be experiencing intense feelings of shame and isolation, especially if the family and religious upbringing views porn negatively. These feelings tend to only drive the teen into further use, as the biochemical rush is also a means of temporary relief from stress or anxiety. The feeling of powerlessness over one’s life is increased, even more so when repeated attempts to stop viewing porn or to overcome past memories fails. The turning to pornography becomes a cycle as the teenager feels worthless after viewing it, but the worthless is what causes the teen to return to it again and again.

The most important message that a teen can hear at this point is one of healing and support. The addiction can be broken, but only by stronger means, such as counseling and yes, even medicine. The goal is moral freedom from lust, or in the language of Sexaholics Anonymous, "sexual sobriety." The longer the addictions are allowed to endure, the deeper the addiction takes hold of the person's psyche. It needs to be brought out into the light in order to find the revolutionary freedom that only purity, chastity and holiness can bring.

Better Parents. Active Parents.
Addictions, 100 billion dollar industries, and youth culture sustaining hedonism can seem like an impossible foe, but with our God “nothing is impossible.”

Parents, the worst thing you can do is not take action. First, have a conservation with your child about their online habits. Talk to them about sex, pornography, lust, love and real relationships. If you don’t, realize that the media already is speaking loudly, and chances are your values are being lost. Secondly, take practical steps to destroy the influence of porn. Remove all computers from bedrooms and have them in open, high traffic areas. Turn all screens towards the room and not the walls. Cancel certain cable channels, too. On your family computer, put software that monitors and/or filters internet content. Check your History folder often. If it has been recently cleared, that is usually a sign of someone hiding inappropriate online viewing.

I can wholeheartedly recommend the software available from www.xxxchurch.com called X3 Watch. This is an accountability program, not a filter, so it sends out a bi-weekly or monthly email to specific accountability partners (such as parents) containing flagged websites. Best of all, the scaled down version, which may be all you need, is free to download!

Finally, pray as a family. God is bigger than addiction, than lust, than sin. Through the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ we have the strength to fight lust in our lives and bring all these things done in the dark into His merciful light. For it is only in the Light that we see the light, that we can see the wrongness of our actions and the experience the boundlessness of His merciful grace. Prayer every day, especially to Saint Joseph, the foster father of Jesus, and to Saint Michael the Archangel, will lead to victory. But no one can overcome alone. Get a group together who can support you and your teen. They need someone that can hold them accountable, that can pray for them and lift them up with strong words.


Praise Him in the dust of our humanity,
Mike Gormley
AMDG