I guess like most any other person who has grown up in a society consumed with sordid images I just got used to it. If you watch enough television it’s really hard not to. I’m not any more proud of it than anyone else, but that is reality. Things had to be really bad for it to shock me enough to change the channel. Then I became a father and everything changed.
The presence of innocent eyes has made me much more aware of what we’re watching or what is going on around us. I’m much more perceptive to inappropriate material, but no more perceptive than I should have been all along. It just took those little eyes to bring home the fact that I didn’t want her to grow up and get used to images of sin.
It is no secret that we are, and have been for some time, a very visual society. But the impact of visual images becomes only greater as we fall deeper into our digital age with more and more content available than every before.
Over the last few days I read a book Joe Wells wrote a couple of years ago named Game Plan. It was a great read and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the world’s assault on society, and specifically on our young people. In that book Joe provided some eye opening statistics related to what visual content we have to deal with on a daily basis:
- On television “75% of prime-time programs contain sexual content…” (pg. 166, source:The American Academy of Pediatrics).
- In video games “38% of female characters…are ‘scantily clad’, 23% show bare breasts or cleavage, 31% have exposed thighs, 31% have exposed stomachs or midriffs, 15% expose their behinds” (pg. 167, source: Media Awareness Network).
- On the internet “young people ages 8-16 who have viewed pornography online is as high as 90%, young people 15-17 years old who have had multiple exposures to hard-core pornography is as high as 80%” (pg. 149, source: Family Safe Media).
And the effects are severe:
- “46% of all high school seniors in America report having had sexual intercourse.”
- “14% (of all high school seniors) have had four partners or more.”
- “The revealing truth is that more than 46% (of all high school seniors) have engaged in some type of sexual activity (oral sex, masturbation ,etc.) with another person.” (All of the above are quoted from pg. 169, source: Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance – United States, 2009).
- 70% of all teens have admitted to having engaged in sexual intercourse by their 19th birthday (http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-Teen-Sex-Ed.html).
Those are some overly startling figures that bring home just what we have to combat on a daily basis, not just as individuals but as parents, guardians, and mentors in our attempts to guard our children and young people from these influences. But that’s nothing new.
Visual stimulation has plagued man’s pursuit of purity since the beginning (Genesis 3:6a) and numerous times since (Genesis 9:22; Judges 14:1; 2 Samuel 11:2). In fact, God warned that one of the great dangers to our relationship with God, besides the lust of the flesh and the pride of life, was the lust of the eyes (1 John 2:15-16). God knew that visual stimulation would be a huge stumblingblock to us all in our attempt to live pure lives before God. And how many have fallen prey to that great evil? More than we can possibly imagine.
When the occasion demands we have got to learn to change the channel, cut off the video game, and more closely monitor what is being consumed on the Internet. We can and must begin to take back our lives and our society, but it will require that we pay a little bit more attention to what we see.
-Andy Brewer