America is facing a problem with pornography of epidemic proportions. Thanks to the Internet, it is no longer necessary to sneak porn magazines under the mattress or travel into the city to the local peepshow.
Now anyone and everyone can access endless amounts of pornography at the click of their mouse and in the complete privacy of their own home.
Anyone without a porn filter installed on the computer is more than likely to be exposed to pornography at some point. The average child sees internet porn by the time they are eleven years old!
As a society, we tend to see the issue of pornography as a free-speech issue — victimless entertainment for consenting adults. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. But a new report from the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J., raises some red flags we should not ignore. “The Social Costs of Pornography” musters new social science and brain research, and shows evidence that pornography is harmful. Porn is not just private entertainment. It “functions as a teacher, a permission-giver and a trigger of … negative behaviors and attitudes,” according to Mary Anne Layden, coauthor of the report and director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
And even more troubling, is that graphic porn creates a real risk of addiction. Recent advances in neuroscience make clear that frequent exposure can actually alter the brain by hyperstimulating its appetitive pleasure system. For some men, porn is the start of the path to child pornography.
65 percent of 16 to 17 year old boys say they have friends who regularly download pornography. Even pre-teen boys are reporting compulsive porn behavior. This is happening right under the nose of parents who are not aware of how their children are using the Internet. Behind closed doors, late at night or while parents are at work, countless teens and children are looking at porn. This will not change until either the government figures out how to protect us from the porn content that we do not want in our homes or each parent, takes the responsibility to install a porn filter and stop porn on their own. For now, a porn filter is the only realistic solution.