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HOLLYWOOD, California, July 10, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Parents are being cautioned that Spiderman: Homecoming, which opened in cinemas last weekend, contains a joking reference to teenage porn habits.

Movieguide, an online reference to family-friendly movies, praises the new Marvel film for its virtue-affirming messages but warns that it contains obscenities, profanity and a troubling scene: a high school freshman covers up online spying by telling a curious teacher that he is “just looking at porn.”   

According to the reviewer, such flippant references to porn get curious children involved in watching porn, leading to their addiction to the material. “Would the filmmakers make the same joke about doing heroin?” he asks. “Of course not.”

Schoolchildren’s growing addiction to online porn made headlines last week in New Zealand when parents accused a primary school of allowing their children to watch porn and violent movies during class. Rory Birkbeck of the anti-porn charity SurfSafer said, “I’ve heard of schools where there are children that have had to have their mobile device taken off them at [recess] because they are all addicted to porn. They are 13 or 14.”

‘This is a dirty little secret’

“The normalization of porn is not a new thing in Hollywood,” insider Barbara Nicolosi told LifeSiteNews. “The show Friends regularly made jokes about the guys using porn and the girls accepting and even encouraging it.”

Nicolosi said the entertainment industry has a lenient attitude because porn is both a bigger business than mainstream Hollywood and one that many people in the industry moonlight in.

“The U.S. hosts 60 percent of the Internet porn sites on the Web, and most of that is coming out of the San Fernando Valley just over the hill from Hollywood,” she said. “This is a dirty little secret that has been going on for decades, and lots of folks who need some extra cash sideline in the ugly world of porn.”

That’s why porn is normal to many people in the film business. “So many people they know are acting below the line as grips, technicians, post-production, etc., in that world,” she said.

Nicolosi used to have an office that overlooked the “Teen Canteen” ministry in Hollywood. This was an outreach to kids who had come to Hollywood with dreams of stardom but had been sucked into the porn industry instead. “They were all strung out on drugs and all the light was gone from their eyes,” Nicolosi recalled. “People need to know that their porn use is not a victimless habit.”

‘You take something beautiful like a person and treat it like something gross’

If trapped with the kids at a movie that makes light of porn, what could Mom or Dad say on the drive home?

Children’s novelist and father of eight John McNichol told LifeSiteNews that he’d take a different approach with his 10-year-old son than with his 16-year-old daughter.

“My 10-year-old might ask ‘What’s porn?’ and I’d have to come up with a definition that would still preserve his innocence,” said McNichol. “I’d describe ‘porn’ as ‘gross pictures of people — pictures so bad you have to go to confession if you go looking for it.”

He’d follow up with an age-appropriate theology of the body talk, saying, “Porn is wrong because you take something beautiful like a person and treat it like something gross.”

He has told his older sons that viewing porn sets a man up to fail in relationships with women. And he has told his daughters to be cautious. “Boys who indulge in pornography may come into relationships thinking certain things are normal and expected. Set boundaries early, and don’t ignore red flags. ”

McNichol, who has taught schoolchildren for 20 years, is repulsed that the Spiderman character tells a teacher that he is viewing porn. “I’d say a teacher had seriously fallen down on the job if their students felt comfortable saying that. In real life, pornography uses and destroys people. Would a teacher put up with a student saying ’Just dealing drugs’ or ‘Just planning a murder?’ I’d hope not.”  

Porn has already warped the social lives of American teenagers. According to McNichol, “In some school cultures today, boys apparently swap pictures of girls they’ve persuaded to make nude selfies [whereas] they used to trade hockey or baseball cards.”

Spiderman: Homecoming had a lucrative weekend, grossing an estimated $117 million at the box office.