Source: Covenant Eyes Let’s admit it. It seems we constantly hear how porn is ruining your life. We hear how unethical pornography is and how those who consume it are sinning and on their way to hell. We hear it’s bad to look at sex and nude people on the Internet, magazines, or even sexually explicit movies.
Original source: Mary Eberstadt, "The Weight of Smut" in First Things [This article may be from 2010, but this only means that the issues discussed here are magnified by now - Father Aleksey.] As the impressively depressing cover story “America the Obese” in the May 2010 issue of The Atlantic serves to remind us all, the weight-gain epidemic in the United States and the rest of the West is indeed widespread, deleterious, and unhealthy—which is why it is so frequently remarked on, and an object of such universal public concern. But while we’re on the subject of bad habits that can turn unwitting kids into unhappy adults, how about that other epidemic out there that is far more likely to make their future lives miserable than carrying those extra pounds ever will? That would be the emerging social phenomenon of what can appropriately be called “sexual obesity”: the widespread gorging on pornographic imagery that is also deleterious and unhealthy, though far less remarked on than that other epidemic—and nowhere near an object of universal public concern. That complacency may now be changing. The term sexual obesity comes from Mary Ann Layden, a psychiatrist who runs the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She sees the victims of Internet-pornography consumption in her practice, day in and day out. She also knows what most do not: Quietly, patiently, and irrefutably, an empirical record of the harms of sexual obesity is being assembled piecemeal via the combined efforts of psychologists, sociologists, addiction specialists, psychiatrists, and other authorities.
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