The Politics of Porn
February 19, 2009 by Patrick Madrid
Filed under Patrick's Blog
By Robert R. Reilly
In many major American cities, the tawdry sections of town that once housed pornographic cinemas, bookstores, and strip joints have given way to shiny new office buildings and Starbucks coffee houses. Does this sign of urban renewal also signify moral renewal? Has America finally grown bored with a surfeit of pornography? Unfortunately not. Pornography has simply relocated from inner city slums to a far worse location — the home, which it now infiltrates via the latest technology.
U.S. News and World Report (Feb. 10, 1997) revealed just how deeply mired this country is in explicit depictions of sexual depravity; it is a sign of the times that the cover article on pornography was carried in the “Business and Technology” section. The story states that hardcore pornography is now an $8 billion industry.
A more recent Time magazine article (Sept. 7, 1998), “Porn Goes Mainstream,” also in the “Business” section, estimates $10 billion in revenues. In either case, hardcore porn out-grosses all of Hollywood’s domestic box office receipts and rakes in more cash than the rock and country music businesses combined. In 1996, 665 million hard core videos were rented — over two for every man, woman, and child in America.
Explicit sex has become part of the bottom line for video stores, long-distance carriers like AT&T, cable companies like Time Warner and Tele-Communications, Inc., and hotel chains like Marriott, Hyatt, and Holiday Inn. In addition, there are an estimated 100,000 pornographic World Wide Web sites on the Internet, offering millions of hardcore pornographic images, some of them “interactive.” Pornography is now mainstream. How did this happen? . . . (read article) courtesy of Spirit Daily.
Porn is the sickness that is going to bring down the American Empire. Great article. I think porn is broader though than man’s objectification of the female. It lies in our very suspension of Christian principles when our opinions or feelings are on the line. http://catholicdestination.com/community/bobnicholas/2008/06/25/political-porn/
Yep, our culture is disintegrating before our eyes… This is related to something that has been on my mind for the last few days though. We as Christians need to pray for the poor girls involved in this industry. It seems to me that they receive less Christian charity than common prostitutes. They are in the grips of Satan big time, and yet who prays for them? Most other women despise them, and to most praying men they are a source of temptation and danger to be pushed out of thought. They’re almost a special class of spiritual lepers, objectified and despised even by the men who lust after them. It seems to me that they may be one of the groups in our society most tightly in Satan’s clutches. As members of the Church Militant, I see no reason why we should let Satan have these victims in peace. They need our prayers desperately.
The situation was critical in 1998 when this article was written. How much worse is it now?
Still… What to do? I don’t want to see enforced filtering on the Internet. That will inevitably be used against free speech.
Certainly laws against the businesses that trade in this kind of thing can be supported.
This article is incredible. Its one of the underlying reasons why the US is going to fall big time.