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PETITION: Authorities must shut down Pornhub after showing rape videos of 15-year-old trafficking victim. Sign the petition here.

November 14, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Earlier this month, Slate published a letter from a distraught woman who had just discovered her partner’s porn stash. Although she had been aware of the fact that he watched porn, what she found stunned her. 

“Some of his ‘favorite’ pages on the browser were things with titles like ‘Teen Degraded’ and ‘Woman Treated Like a Piece of Meat.’ This really upsets and disturbs me, especially the focus on violence towards adolescent girls,” she wrote. “I also am disgusted by him getting off on degrading violent porn about adolescent girls, partly because I am sensitive about that stuff due to an assault I experienced as an adolescent, but partly also because I find it upsettingly misogynistic.”

As I’ve noted several times in this space over the past several months, mainstream pornography — that is, the stuff that most porn users are watching — now primarily features violence against women. Increasingly, as the advice-seeking woman discovered, porn companies are pushing content that focuses on the humiliation, degradation, and abuse of teenage girls, with entire genres dedicated to girls who look “barely legal.” This is not what a few creeps are watching. These genres are the most popular porn categories on the Internet, and millions of men and boys are consuming the destruction of the feminine as a matter of course.

Many adults do not understand how pervasive and how poisonous today’s porn is because when they hear “porn,” they’re still thinking of plastic-wrapped magazines sold at the dingy corner store, the sort of place that might also have a little room curtained off at the back where porn flicks were also available for rent. Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler, once the giants of the industry, are now considered to be so quaint and harmless that I regularly see boxes of these porn mags at antique stories or antiquarian bookstores. In an age of ubiquitous filth and omnipresent porn and screens, the magazines that jump-started America’s addiction to the consumption of her daughters are now capable of triggering nostalgia along with lust.

The anti-porn organization Fight the New Drug has been working to dispel the delusions many adults (and especially parents) have about today’s porn industry by bluntly publishing the names of wildly popular content. Last month, they pointed out that one of PornHub’s most popular videos featured the rape of a teenage girl while she begged her assailant to stop. A few days ago, they tweeted out a list of titles to expose the naked brutality of the porn industry, including one featuring a stepfather raping his stepdaughter, videos featuring black slave women getting raped by white men, a teenage girl getting raped by a home invader, and another being sexually assaulted in a car. The titles are too graphic and explicit for me to reproduce here, even in edited form.

Again, this is not fringe material. Violence against women is mainstream in the porn industry, and we have a generation of boys growing into manhood watching this stuff. Millions of them are watching girls get beaten up, raped, tortured, and humiliated in unimaginable ways as a matter of course. This is happening in our homes, our schools, our communities, our churches. Purging pornography from our families is one of the most important responsibilities we have, and the cost of not doing so is not only the destruction of godly masculinity in a culture that desperately needs it — it is also the awful reality that our daughters will face a generation of young men who have been watching young women like them get raped with extraordinary cruelty just for entertainment. 

Parents need to wake up. The churches need to wake up. Pornography is unleashing the demons of the darkest imaginations, and it is our children who will face the consequences.

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Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.