Porn exposes sex ed sham
We are quite ‘pornified’ these days. I just learned, for example, that the porn industry amounts to about $97 billion worldwide. The US alone makes for $13 billion. Imagine that!
I wonder how much it is in the Philippines. No wonder, one can see porn almost at every corner and at just one click on the computers and other gadgets. Is there anything done about this, anything serious and sufficient?
The modern technologies have driven it to break-neck, warp speed, and have enabled it to be accessed in the most hidden ways. Thus, many people just find it irresistible and they helplessly fall into some kind of addiction.
The addiction is actually in pandemic proportions, although no official stats are made on it. This, to me, is a worse indication, because it can only mean that this irregular, anomalous condition is now generally considered as regular and normal.
The porn addiction affects all sectors of society—the rich and the poor, the urbanites and the provincianos, the intellectuals and the laborers, young and old, men, women and the in-betweens, etc. Even consecrated persons are mixed up. It’s a horrible picture!
Also, the move to give porn sites their own domain in the Internet seems to gain ground. Thus, aside from the .com, .net, .org, .edu, we may soon have .xxx.
Those pushing for it claim that in this way there can be better control of these sites, and so on and so forth. But that concern for control is actually needless and irrelevant. It’s all rationalization. In the first place, should it be there?
Obviously, no matter how in theory we can say it should not be there, in reality, it can’t help but be there, and in profusion. Why? Because many people just want it. We would have better chances taming a bull in a china shop than domesticating these people with raging hormones.
The world is sick, and the worse part of it is that it is still in the denial stage. It’s a spiritual illness whose virus is constantly recycled by a recycler embedded in our culture and mentalities.
That recycler is that part of our culture that deems access to pornography as a right, a fundamental expression of our freedom. Unless we outgrow this mentality and delete this virus of a cultural recycler, we are doomed. We cannot get out from the lamentable condition of porn addiction.
This brings us to the touted sex ed program now presented by our Education Department. What is its stand on this issue? From what I could gather, it is generally neutral about it and simply proceeds with some practical suggestions.
This is the congenital infirmity of this sex ed program. It’s conceived and born blind to the moral quality of the issues within its concern. And it dares to present itself as enlightened, for simply being practical and realistic.
But as we all know, all appeals to practicality and realism are useless if they are based on the wrong premises and assumptions. At best, and this is even very rare to happen, they can expect to gain a level of tolerance, but never a cure of the sickness.
What actually happens most of the time is that the practical-and-realistic attitude only prolongs and worsens the anomalous condition, and makes the definitive healing more difficult to occur.
Regarding this scourge of porn addiction, we need to be bold in tackling it. It may require more effort, involve more pain, but in the end we should not avoid to use the frontal approach to it. Of course, neither should we avoid using the more subtle tactics.
But we need to clarify the whole truth about our sexuality and our freedom, the need for chastity, for developing the virtues of charity and piety, etc. Converting theories into praxis about these needs and duties should be a continuing task to be done by everyone according to one’s possibilities.
I’m happy to know that in the States and in other places, there are already initiatives to seriously combat this porn addiction, making their techniques readily accessible and transmissible to whoever would like to have them.
This is a most welcome development, since they carry a holistic approach, properly grounded and oriented, unlike our sex ed program that is so questionable as it reeks with mere ideological animus.
With our world entering into more tricky times, we cannot afford to be easily taken by ideological trappings. We have to enter into the true essence and nature of things.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
