Episode 352 – Pervasive Pornography

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Here’s a headline from Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, Porn Star James Deen’s Crisis of Confidence.  This guy is loved by – you people that are parents, you need to listen to this.  This James Deen character is loved by teenage girls.  It’s teenage girls who have an infatuation with James Deen.  They even set up what are called Tumblr accounts to share James Deen videos.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  I’ll try to make this as family friendly as possible.  If you’re looking at the Twitter feed, I tweeted out the awesome graphic image of the 25^th Anniversary Mike Church Show dispensing founders red pills uber-cool t-shirt.  I put on there, “Who’s going to be the first person to step up to the plate?”  We used to sell so many t-shirts that we’d order in grosses.  We didn’t even bother with dozens.  Today, I’m still looking for 25^th Anniversary t-shirt wearer number one.  I’ll tell you what, whoever that is, if you want it, put a note in there.  I’ll even sign it for you for free.  I’ll mark you down as number one.  Hell, I’ll give you a plaque just so I know that the store still works.

Here’s a headline from Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, Porn Star James Deen’s Crisis of Confidence.  This guy is loved by – you people that are parents, you need to listen to this.  This James Deen character is loved by teenage girls.  It’s teenage girls who have an infatuation with James Deen.  They even set up what are called Tumblr accounts to share James Deen videos.  Rod Dreher:

[reading]

A lot of Christian parents are totally in denial about what they’re aiding and abetting by providing their kids with smartphones. You know who’s not in denial? The porn superstar James Deen. In this piece from Conor Friedersdorf takes note of Deen’s concern about pornography and the young. (Warning: there is some graphic description in the piece.). He begins by quoting from this 2012 profile of Deen by Amanda Hess:

[quoted material]

Emily was sitting in her fourth-grade classroom when she was first introduced to porn. “These boys were sitting next to me, talking about boobs,” she says. Emily asked one of them what that meant, and “he stared at me like I was crazy.” In school the next day, the boy slipped her a piece of paper with a URL written on it. She caught “like five seconds’ worth of humping” before closing the page. Now 17, Emily is distributing porn links of her own—this time, to other teenage girls across the United States.

Emily runs a Tumblr blog dedicated to her two obsessions: Twilight and James Deen. Thanks to Deen, Emily is no longer watching porn for the generalized humping. “When I watch his videos, I don’t really pay attention to the sex,” Emily says. “I watch his videos for his reaction. It amazes me.”

[end quoted material]

Friedersdorf quotes at length from Deen’s recent interviews, nothing that “he now feels there is an ethical dilemma in porn.

[quoted material]

On one hand, the industry’s success depends on its being accessible to mass audiences online. On the other hand, Deen is convinced that the accessibility of porn is harming young people . . .

I’ve had conversations with business partners, the people that run––well, they run a bunch of adult web sites. This guy, he’s a father of two, and we were having a conversation about how I want all adult web sites, I want everything to be behind an age-verification wall. You can’t just say, “Yes, I’m 18”—you actually have to input a credit card, or something, the best you can, to create an 18-and-older environment… And he said––and I agree with him––“As a father I agree with you 100 percent, I would love to do that. As a businessman, I will go out of business in a day.”

[end quoted material]

. . . Friedersdorf:

[quoted material]

Just as likely, the industry will instead invest in virtual reality, and the teenagers of 2023 will see pornography that even Deen’s teenage fans could scarcely have imagined.

Insofar as that is a problem, it is not because seeing sex is inherently damaging to young people––for thousands of years, a village’s adults had no bedroom walls for privacy––[Mike: Come on, Conor, that’s not part of the Christian world, is it?] but because what young people see, when exposed to hard core pornography, resembles real sex only as much as a Jackie Chan sequence resembles a real fist fight. Yet it creates the illusion of reality, then reaches sexually inexperienced porn consumers in a society where there are few graphic but non-pornographic portrayals of sex, and where accessing hard core porn is (properly) legal, but a teenage couple texting naked pictures to each other is a criminal sex offense.

No one would choose anything like that information ecosystem for the sexual acculturation of young people. But technology evolved in a way that made it so, changing the social landscape faster than humans evolved norms to mitigate its flaws. Mercenary concerns are delaying any hedge. The consequences remain to be seen.

[end quoted material]

[end reading]

Mike:  In other words, there’s too much money wrapped up in this.  The company’s got to smell the smartphones; right?  The teenagers want to buy them.  Can’t get rid of them.  AT&T and Verizon and Sprint and all the rest of them want to sell the broadband download packages, don’t they?  We now know that porn is a big part of that.  Can’t get rid of that, now, can we?  Stock price might go down.  Then you have all the other tie-ins, all the other websites.  What about the websites that vend the ads?  These ads are thinly veiled, but you can tell what they’re for.  What about all the email?  Folks, this is a multi-billion-dollar industry.  It’s estimated now that it’s over $20 billion.  That doesn’t include the hardware acquisition.  That doesn’t include any of the other expenses.  It doesn’t include what AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint must do to make this possible.

In other words, it’s part now of a will-to-power diabolical plan.  It was concocted and hatched for illicit purposes.  Now, it is true that the Crusade Channel website and app and this show right now are being delivered by the same system.  That’s true.  It’s true that other things are being delivered by the same system that are harmless and are seeking to do the exact opposite.  Again, when you say all we’ve got to do is secede and all will be right with the world, you haven’t changed a single moral mind or immoral mind into a moral one.  It is the discipline and the grace that one prays for and is granted that allows either A, to kick the porn habit, or B, to never start the porn habit.

Let’s go back to earlier in this show today when I read you the statistic that in 2008, 94 percent of all 25- to 54-year-old males were in the workforce.  As of the last month that stats are available, April 2017, that number is now down to 88 percent and falling.  Again, why did that matter?  What are 25- to 54-year-old men or young men doing?  We used to call them fathers and husbands.  Now what are they?  Millennial losers, for the most part.  If they’re not working and they don’t think they need to work, they don’t have families.  It’s as simple as that.  That’s the connection.  Gee, I wonder why they think they don’t need families.  Because what do I need a wife for?  All she’s good for is haranguing and harassing me and sex once every month or so.  I get it every day on PornHub.

End Mike Church Show Transcript