The Pornography Plague​—Are You Aware of It?

AN INSIDIOUS plague threatens you and your loved ones. It already affects millions. Like unseen but lethal fallout from a nuclear reactor accident, it subtly settles down on entire populations before they fully realize what is happening. This plague is pornography.

Misconceptions about this plague leave people unaware of the danger, allowing it to spread easily. For example, to think that this is just a big-city disease would leave you and your family vulnerable. Today it is also rampant in small towns. It has penetrated homes, schools, libraries, prisons, and the workplace.

It is also not correct to think that only “dirty old men” would produce or be connected with this threat to your family. Boy Scout leaders, lawyers, actors, businessmen, clergymen, and even preteens have reportedly been involved with it​—those you might least suspect.

The carriers of this crippling disease are many: magazines, books, movies, TV and cable TV programs, videotapes and video games, music, and advertising. Even your phone company may be a carrier; some allow a “dial-a-porn” service! “Adult” movie houses, video shops, and bookstores are proliferating.

The smut industry’s trade paper once boasted that “in 1979 there were . . . three to four times as many adult bookstores in the U.S. as McDonald’s restaurants.” You may not have expected to find this plague so prevalent. But that only demonstrates how stealthily and yet relentlessly it has spread.

Of course, pornography is not just a 20th-century pestilence. Obscene drawings have been found from early times on. Ancient cultures had temple prostitution and the worship of phallic images. In the time of the Roman Empire, debased Pompeii featured pornographic art. Porn has a long history.

Spreading Infection for Profit

What is different in our time is the way this infection has mushroomed into a profitable major industry. Making use of modern equipment, producers of porn turn out vast amounts of material, saturating the market to epidemic proportions worldwide. This is reflected in the startling figures that follow:

CANADA​—Chatelaine magazine sets porn sales in Canada at “about $6 billion a year.” A report in Pornography and Prostitution in Canada says some “$500 million a year” from the industry goes to organized crime. Just the pornography seized annually by the authorities is estimated by Ottawa’s police chief to have a value of more than $20 million.

UNITED STATES​—The California Department of Justice estimated that pornography in that state was a “$4 billion business annually” in 1978. Other reports show profits of $475 million a year by “ten leading ‘skin’ magazines” and $365 million a year by “adult” movie theaters. An “adult” bookstore in Times Square in New York City can make $10,000 a day. A single dial-a-porn number in the same city brings in $35,000 a day to the phone company alone. One such “service,” operating in more than a dozen large American cities, averages half a million calls a day!

Because of the clandestine nature of some materials, accurate figures are hard to get. But one source says that North American porn sales range “from $12 billion a year to $50 billion a year, not including videos.”

OTHER LANDS​—In 1984, Japan’s “prosperous sex industry” flooded bookstores with “sexually explicit magazines for teen-age girls.” The government took quick action to remove these publications from the stores. Sweden’s multimillion-dollar porn industry sells “half a million hard-core pornographic magazines” a month. India, Malaysia, and Bulgaria have felt the impact of video porn on their young people. And, according to an Associated Press dispatch, an upsurge of “readily available” salacious materials in China brought a government ban on pornography there in 1985.

Clearly, this plague is raging all around you. Be aware that it exists in forms that can quite easily enter your home or that can be picked up at any corner store.

But is it really fair to label pornography a “plague”? Has it been established that it is harmful? Can we honestly say it is a real threat to you and your loved ones? Would not strict censorship or a ban curb the rights of people to read and watch what they choose?