Putting Porn Back in its Place

Porn is not all fun and games, and it’s no longer just the Catholic Church that’s saying so.

An upcoming private members bill by Winnepeg MP Joy Smith would by default block internet pornography. Those wishing to gain access to it would do so by contacting their internet service provider and opting in to it.

I utterly love this motion. It follows recent legislation in Britain which confronts the social impact of pornography addiction. It recognizes that children and families deserve protection from the pervasive lures of online porn.

In her reasoning regarding the motion, MP Smith recounts receiving a tragic letter from a 10-year-old boy addicted to pornography. 10 years old. When I was 10 it was just before the advent of the internet, and you would have had to work pretty hard to get access to pornography. The magazines were in plastic and up high on corner store shelves, and you’d probably be chased from the store if you tried to reach for one. You wouldn’t dare set foot in an “adult video” store, no matter how curious you were.

The fact of its inaccessibility really reminded you that it was wrong.

Today is the opposite extreme, where kids have to deliberately avoid pop-up ads, forwards from friends, malicious Facebook posts, etc., to allude porn’s snares. This motion puts it out of the hands of innocent kids browsing the web, and also forces adults to ask themselves:

“Do I really want to request this? Do I want to deliberately invite pornography into my home?”

This bill would moves things back to where you have to go after porn, rather than have it come to you, and that’s a good thing.   

Recent criticism of pornography in the secular realm should be lauded. I wrote about the movie Don John, where the lead character has to face the problems of porn’s hold on his life. GQ posted an article a few weeks back called “10 Reasons Why You Should Quit Watching Porn.” And the UK’s Daily Mail has begun to offer raw and honest reporting on the ugliness of porn addiction (warning: graphic, discretion advised).

May we have more of this honest discussion in the future.    

Porn’s prevalence is a truly awful reality of our modern world, but thankfully we are moving toward a place of questioning how accessible it should be.