“One of my colleagues calls internet porn the crack cocaine of the internet,” [Dr Marios] Pierides says. “It would not be unreasonable to call it an epidemic. In the past 12 months, I’ve seen an explosion in the number of people referred to me with issues about it. It has tripled. This is causing real problems.
“I’ve had many wives complaining about it and simply going along with it, and the number of people in offices is startling. It’s now not at all uncommon for me to be consulted by high-flying professionals who fear their addiction will lead to them losing their jobs.”
The psychiatrist’s views find accord in the US. According to Mark Schwartz, the clinical director of the Masters and Johnson Clinic in St Louis, “Pornography is having a dramatic effect on relationships at many different levels and in many different ways - and nobody outside the sexual behaviour field and the psychiatric community is talking about it.”
Read the whole thing here or here. Also (partially) available at T19.
2 comments:
WB,
It is good to get this issue out into the open - as long as it remains is darkness it has power over men.
Still, the place to talk about pornography and its hold on mens' lives is an important thing to question. I would suggest that the proper locus of discussion is in the parish, in our living rooms, at academic institutions, that is, in the public. The problem with the internet is that it our surfing habits are so personal, private, and therefore unrestricted. Our mode of conversation thus ought to be one that violates the notion that what we do in private is a private matter. In otherwords, it is an issue that should be addressed from within the ecclesial community, by the community, as a community issue and one that affects the common good. It is there that God's healing can be ministered.
Pax,
Brain
I think what we need to deal with the proliferation of pornography in our society is a temperance-movement-style push to make its evils visible (in edited form, of course) to our society. The problem is, the temperance movement was undergirded by a widely-shared framework of Victorian Evangelicalism. In places where our country has this kind of underlying structure(i.e. much of the South and Midwest), it could be done. But the first thing has to be the proliferation of the Christian faith, such that people who take their faith seriously begin to see and speak out against the evils of society. Oddly enough, what we need is something very like the Christian Right, engaging in politics for the sake of bettering our society along the lines of Christian ideals. The underlying foundation can only come through years of conviction and teaching by the clergy. That is, we need this kind of movement in addition to our need for individual men to be faithful in their own lives.
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