77% of Americans use porn regularly……

….and a bunch guys lie about doing so.  First the report, then some comments:

Jason King, chair of the theology department at Saint Vincent’s College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, wrote about the accessibility and damage of pornography in his latest piece at Catholic Moral Theology. King summed up the situation well when he wrote that people used to have to exert an effort to view pornography. Now you have to exert an effort to not view it.

King provided further scary statistics about the viewing of pornography and its effects:

• The best estimates indicate that 77 percent of Americans view pornography at least once a month.
• 75-77 percent of males have downloaded porn in their lives.
• 20 percent of males consciously abstain from viewing pornography.
• 47 percent of women believe pornography harms relationships while 33 percent of men said the same.
• 33 percent of all Americans believe that pornography will not harm a relationship.
• During a six-week experiment the statement, “marriage is an important institution,” was affirmed by 60 percent of men who viewed no pornography during that period, but only 39 percent of those exposed to heavy viewing of pornography during the same period affirmed the same statement

I have already covered that last item here on this blog, but some of the numbers don’t make sense.  If 77% of Americans view porn once a month (at least), and the number of women who use porn monthly is less than 50%, how can it be that at most 77% of men have downloaded porn, ever, in their lives?  Either the 77% of Americans use porn monthly figure is wrong, or men are under-reporting if they use it at all – which I would suspect is the case.  My personal guess is that something more like 90% of men, or at least men under 60 or so, use porn, and regularly.  I’m not an expert, but that is what my gut tells me from personal experience, innumerable locker-room conversations, and a number of other sources.  I have no doubt, actually,t hat 77% of Americans use porn – I think that there is still a bit of embarrasment about that use (thank God), so some folks are under-reporting.

What a train wreck.  Thank God my grandmother didn’t live to see this day, I don’t know what she would have thought.  She would be beyond mortified to know that millions people, not just wierd men who go to the seedy side of town, but almost everyone, abuses their own sexuality and that of others in this way.

As the linked article goes on to say, the best way to avoid using porn is to never start. Once one starts down that path, it is exceedingly to stop, as the behaviors associated with porn use and abuse of self have powerful effects on the psyche and rapidly develop characteristics of addiction. I personally feel, although I can’t back it up with peer reviewed scientific studies, that many people today lost in deviant sexuality started out with self-abuse.  That transmogrified into a virulent narcissism that became so great that many developed a sexual attraction for the same.  At any rate, there is no question that porn use and the concommitant self-abuse is extraordinarly destructive of marriages, of self-esteem, and of morality.  It is the devil’s playground.  And the prince of darkness is winning many souls through our mass societal embrace of what used to be called filth.   I must conclude by asking, with this hideous moral catastrophe in our midst, how often do you hear a priest condemn porn use?  Shouldn’t that be fairly non-controversial?  Can’t at least a stand be taken there?