Porn is evil. Don't ban it.

On the unforeseen consequences of a pornography ban

Pornography.
(Image credit: Illustrated | michal-rojek/iStock, mocker_bat/iStock, Aerial3/iStock)

There was a rumor at my (small, private, Christian) high school that a group of seven or eight guys in my class got together at one of their homes our junior year and watched pornography together. The host's parents weren't home, and supposedly the boys played a DVD on the family television, right in the living room. What else they did I didn't want to hear or know or in any way attempt to verify. I was young for my grade, and quite innocent, and it had never before occurred to me that any of these boys I considered my friends would look at porn, let alone watch it together.

By the time my sons are in high school, that story will seem quaint. Perhaps it is quaint already, if a recent widely shared article from The Dallas Morning News is any indication. "When 6th graders can access rape porn on their smartphones, school becomes toxic," its title declares in an understatement. In it, a mother recounts her 11-year-old daughter's story of being shown a Snapchat video on a friend's phone in which boys from her class laughed as they watched rape porn together. In every respect this is an escalation of my experience: I only heard about the porn party; this girl saw it. I was probably 16 and my classmates 17; these are young children, some of them prepubescent. And there was never any suggestion that the porn my classmates watched played out a rape fantasy in which "the woman was bound up, saying 'no' as a masked man approached her."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.