I Feel Like Stabbing Her

“I feel like stabbing her.”  It was what one 18-year-old shared with his therapist in a recent article on LifeSiteNews.com as his “usual” reaction when rejected by a girl.  The same boy also confessed “he enjoyed seeing women being hurt and he often fantasized about strangling them—all the while thinking of suicide himself, because he feared that hardcore porn had ruined his chances at a relationship forever”.

One 13-year-old became addicted to hardcore online pornography before he ever kissed a girl in real life:

“At first I found it a bit scary and a bit yucky … I didn’t know it was possible for people to do those sort of things — and there were lots of nasty close-ups. But it gave me funny feelings and the pictures started to stick in my head… The websites led me to other websites and soon I was looking at even weirder stuff I could never have imagined — animals, children, stabbing and strangling. I stopped leaving my room and seeing my friends because when I was away from the pornography, I was dying to get back to see what else I could find.”

In case you haven’t been paying attention, pornography has dramatically changed with the advent of the Internet.  Once a user scrapes beyond the soft-core surface of the pornography industry, they will dive into the “anything goes” world of hardcore pornography, filled with fetish, violence, bestiality, genital torture, group “gang-bangs” and “barely legal” content.  With so much exposure, people need a new high.  So both to differentiate their product and to combat user desensitization, pornography producers have created a vast array of niche, hardcore, violent and fetish pornography.  Many pornography stars have explained that the actions commonly depicted in today’s pornography were almost non-existent before the advent of the Internet.

In one analysis of fifty best selling adult titles, half of the 304 scenes surveyed showed extreme verbal aggression and over 88% included extreme physical aggression.[i]  And as therapists share, their patients often long to engage in violent hardcore pornography scenarios when meeting with rejection from real-life women.

The violent nature of today’s online pornography and its potential impact on our kids today is why it is critically important for you to protect your kids from exposure in the first place.  Make sure that, regardless of the age of your kids, you are using a strong filter, parental controls and accountability software.  Engage in regular conversations with your kids about being safe online.  If your child is involved with pornography online and if they are exhibiting addictive patterns of behavior, consider getting them help they need—don’t turn your back on them or pretend you don’t know what’s going on.  This problem will not go away on its own.