The Repeal of Reticence and Protection from Pornography: The Imaginable and the Possible
By Movieguide® Contributor
The “hyper-sexualization of boys and girls” made possible by online access to pornography via social media is now a primary topic regarding the dark social spirit of the times.
“What we see over and over again is the hyper-sexualization of both boys and girls.” Lina Nealon of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation told CBN. “Kids have smartphones at unprecedented levels and of course COVID just supercharged child sexual exploitation as kids went online in droves.”
This comes on the heels of a report from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) that 2021 broke all previous year records for online child sexual abuse.
As this debate rages, Christians must take the steps necessary to protect their children from the spiritual, mental, and physical threat of pornography.
Dr. Ted Baehr of Movieguide® has researched and written extensively on this subject, noting “4 Ways Pornography Affects Children” and concludes that such deeply damaging exposure to pornography is more and more likely in a society whose social media addiction has reached a critical level.
Rochelle Gurstein, in her masterful monograph, The Repeal of Reticence, weaves a fascinating narrative of the 20th century war between “reticence” – the philosophical and social position that some things, especially things pertaining to sex and sexuality, ought not to be paraded in the public square – and “exposure” – the philosophical and social position that they should. She closes her book by noting that the battle over pornography really is “The Last Stand of Reticence” (Rochelle Gurstein, The Repeal of Reticence, p. 288), saying that this battle “[raises] the terrible specter that once there are no limits to what is imaginable, then there are no limits to what is possible in the world” (Rochelle Gurstein, The Repeal of Reticence, p. 295).
This is a sobering thought. For the darkness of the unregenerate human heart is dark indeed. How much darker then, when fallen men and women’s hearts, minds, and eyes are exposed to the depths of the satanic, destructive darkness of pornography.
This fight is one Christian parents, protectors of their families, must not lose.
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