I was giving the little girls a bath and wanted to capture an incredibly sweet moment that included two soapy, naked posteriors, but I hesitated. My smartphone was sitting next to me but I was reluctant to take the picture. Even though I knew it would put a smile on my mom’s face I struggled with the thought of texting it. During those few seconds of internal dialogue the moment passed, the girls resumed splashing about, and I felt tremendously cheated.
Why had I hesitated? Because I don’t want CPS banging on my door accusing me of taking pornographic pictures of my children. Because the world, hyper-sexualed and without boundaries, now judges the motivations of parents who take innocent photos of their own children.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. What we have allowed in the name of freedom has now become our unraveling. As a society we have compromised our principles for social acceptance and political correctness and I fear we have lost the spirit of liberty which prompted us to freedom so many years ago. We are steeped in a quagmire, shackled and enslaved to an ideology that freedom includes anything that is morally corrupt-even if it means we become morally bankrupt.
At some point we, as a society, decided that pornography was acceptable and went so far as to label it part of the feminist movement. Women made the choice to take their clothes off for magazines under the guise of empowerment. The game became redefining pornography to promote sexuality, power and control in an effort to demonstrate that women were on equal footing with men. Instead of balking at the blatant objectification of young girls and women, a generation brazenly celebrated by mass producing pornographic material resulting in an unstoppable billion dollar industry. And eventually, like sin does, it permeates and creeps into the culture. It spreads like cancer, quietly at first until one day you open a magazine to find perfume advertised by a barely clothed, underaged model and provocative, sexually explicit commercials on the television. Pornographic images have been so quickly ingrained in the fabric of our society that we only flinch when it is egregious or an insult to our normally tolerant sensibilities. The line has been crossed so frequently that what was once immodest is now mainstream-all in the name of progress. And the ugliest side of porn, besides the world wide degradation of women, is the rampant, surging subculture of child pornography. While not new, child pornography, with the help of technology, flourished right alongside Hustler, Penthouse and Playboy.
I believe we are so desensitized to our overtly sexual world that we have forgotten why there were social boundaries in the first place. For the life of me I can’t understand how a woman ever came to believe that becoming the object of a man’s lustful and fleshly desires somehow made her life more equal or fair. That an entire generation decided that taking on the supposed promiscuous behavior of the opposite sex thinking it would create an environment of liberation is lunacy.
Pornography is steeped in sin. It is ugly, it is degrading and it destroys families. It doesn’t just affect the reader, watcher or partaker. It perpetuates an emotional disconnect. It feeds escapism and burdens the soul with reckless addiction. Pornography, whether splashed on a billboard advertisement or on the movie screen, has helped drown our nation in darkness.
So what have we done about it-this plague infecting our children, marriages and our families? We’ve turned around and pointed the finger at innocence. We demonize and scream in disgust at breastfeeding in public and naked pictures of babies because everything has become tarnished by sex. Instead of denouncing pornography we hold everything to it’s standard. We have actually begun using pornography as a litmus test for what is truly innocent or pure. You take a picture of your one year old in her birthday suit and a conclusion can be drawn that the picture is too sexual in nature. Why? Because we’ve lost our perspective on the beautiful creation of the human body and it’s function. We can not see past our sexualized filter even though families have been needlessly ripped apart for such things.
So, yeah. Pornography pisses me off. It’s warped our perspective and it stopped me from capturing a moment that was sweet and meant to be cherished. We may have freedom of speech in this country but we also have the freedom to refuse to patronize any industry, product or organization that promotes, sells or distributes porn. We have a responsibility to our children to unequivocally reject pornography.
Decency needs to be taught, it needs to be valued and it needs to trump perversion. The next generation depends on it…
This post is written by April Cao. You can find this post on her blog here: http://theconservativeparent.com/why-pornography-pisses-me-off/
Why had I hesitated? Because I don’t want CPS banging on my door accusing me of taking pornographic pictures of my children. Because the world, hyper-sexualed and without boundaries, now judges the motivations of parents who take innocent photos of their own children.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. What we have allowed in the name of freedom has now become our unraveling. As a society we have compromised our principles for social acceptance and political correctness and I fear we have lost the spirit of liberty which prompted us to freedom so many years ago. We are steeped in a quagmire, shackled and enslaved to an ideology that freedom includes anything that is morally corrupt-even if it means we become morally bankrupt.
At some point we, as a society, decided that pornography was acceptable and went so far as to label it part of the feminist movement. Women made the choice to take their clothes off for magazines under the guise of empowerment. The game became redefining pornography to promote sexuality, power and control in an effort to demonstrate that women were on equal footing with men. Instead of balking at the blatant objectification of young girls and women, a generation brazenly celebrated by mass producing pornographic material resulting in an unstoppable billion dollar industry. And eventually, like sin does, it permeates and creeps into the culture. It spreads like cancer, quietly at first until one day you open a magazine to find perfume advertised by a barely clothed, underaged model and provocative, sexually explicit commercials on the television. Pornographic images have been so quickly ingrained in the fabric of our society that we only flinch when it is egregious or an insult to our normally tolerant sensibilities. The line has been crossed so frequently that what was once immodest is now mainstream-all in the name of progress. And the ugliest side of porn, besides the world wide degradation of women, is the rampant, surging subculture of child pornography. While not new, child pornography, with the help of technology, flourished right alongside Hustler, Penthouse and Playboy.
I believe we are so desensitized to our overtly sexual world that we have forgotten why there were social boundaries in the first place. For the life of me I can’t understand how a woman ever came to believe that becoming the object of a man’s lustful and fleshly desires somehow made her life more equal or fair. That an entire generation decided that taking on the supposed promiscuous behavior of the opposite sex thinking it would create an environment of liberation is lunacy.
Pornography is steeped in sin. It is ugly, it is degrading and it destroys families. It doesn’t just affect the reader, watcher or partaker. It perpetuates an emotional disconnect. It feeds escapism and burdens the soul with reckless addiction. Pornography, whether splashed on a billboard advertisement or on the movie screen, has helped drown our nation in darkness.
So what have we done about it-this plague infecting our children, marriages and our families? We’ve turned around and pointed the finger at innocence. We demonize and scream in disgust at breastfeeding in public and naked pictures of babies because everything has become tarnished by sex. Instead of denouncing pornography we hold everything to it’s standard. We have actually begun using pornography as a litmus test for what is truly innocent or pure. You take a picture of your one year old in her birthday suit and a conclusion can be drawn that the picture is too sexual in nature. Why? Because we’ve lost our perspective on the beautiful creation of the human body and it’s function. We can not see past our sexualized filter even though families have been needlessly ripped apart for such things.
So, yeah. Pornography pisses me off. It’s warped our perspective and it stopped me from capturing a moment that was sweet and meant to be cherished. We may have freedom of speech in this country but we also have the freedom to refuse to patronize any industry, product or organization that promotes, sells or distributes porn. We have a responsibility to our children to unequivocally reject pornography.
Decency needs to be taught, it needs to be valued and it needs to trump perversion. The next generation depends on it…
This post is written by April Cao. You can find this post on her blog here: http://theconservativeparent.com/why-pornography-pisses-me-off/
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