Pornography
Pornography is tearing apart the very fabric of our society. Yet Christians are often ignorant of its impact and apathetic about the need to control this menace.
Pornography is an $8 billion-a-year business with close ties to organized crime. The wages of sin are enormous when pornography is involved. Purveyors of pornography reap enormous profits through sales in so-called adult bookstores and through the viewing of films and live acts at theaters.
Pornography encompasses books, magazines, videos, and devices and has moved from the periphery of society into the mainstream through video cassettes, soft-porn magazines, and cable television.
The extent of pornography is shocking. Nearly 900 theaters show films rated NC-17, and more than 15,000 "adult" bookstores and video stores offer pornographic material. Adult bookstores outnumber McDonalds restaurants in the U.S. Each year, nearly 100 pornographic films are distributed to "adult" theaters, providing estimated annual box office sales of $50 million.
Forms of Pornography
Some argue that pornography is hard to define. But for the sake of this discussion, we will use the definition of the 1986 Attorney General Commission on Pornography. It defined pornography as material that is "predominantly sexually explicit and intended primarily for the purpose of sexual arousal." Hard-core pornography "is sexually explicit in the extreme, and devoid of any other apparent content or purpose."
Pornography can be broken down into at least five types. The first type of pornography is adult magazines. These magazines are primarily directed toward an adult male audience. The magazines that have the widest distribution (like Playboy and Penthouse) do not violate the Supreme Court's standard of obscenity and thus can be legally distributed. But other magazines that do violate these standards are still readily available in many adult bookstores.
A second type of pornography is video...
Please login to view the full essay...