A Brain Gone Wrong
Pornography: Molesting the Minds of Our Youth
By Dr. Dean W. Belnap

Part 8 of an Eleven-Part Series on "A Brain Gone Wrong"

Time was when Sodom and Gomorrah was considered as bad as it could get.  The entire civilization was consumed by sex in all its forms and fashions. 

Today’s society is spinning downward into such a culture of bizarre mindsets, beliefs and practices.  Sex is paraded about like the ice cream truck on a Saturday afternoon.  The result is being recorded — we call it imprinting — on the brains of the young.

President Gordon B. Hinckley stated in a 2004 leadership training broadcast, “I do not know that things were worse in the times of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Sobering

Pornography is the heart of sexual perversion.  It is everywhere.  Condoned as free speech, it looks nothing like what the founding fathers had in mind.  All boundaries and taboos have been dropped; anything goes as long as it is pleasure-driven.  Hollywood with its misguided pop culture is fanning the flames.  What once was considered intimate and even honored, is now ever-present, cheap, meaningless and tawdry and it is available for the young.

Immaturity of the teenage brain makes it vulnerable to miscues or misdirections.  Imprinted with pornography, the brain rewires to the new stimulation as if this were the course — for a lifetime.  Developing the ability to plan, organize, manage emotions, understand others, read circumstances, and exercise judgment are pushed aside by the need to feel exhilarated by sexual stimulation, and that is trouble. 

Put simply, imprinting of sex prompts an addiction that has swept at least 30% of the male population and is growing among women as well.  Some statistics say it is as high as one out of two churchgoers in this country. 

Magazines which were once the domain for pornography, with all their centerfold titillations, were kept behind the counter.  It was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mentality.  Times have changed.  Sex has jumped to the internet with a vengeance and taken hold of unsuspecting minds by the hundreds of thousands.  All it takes is one view to be imprinted and addicted — for life. 

With the growth of online pornography, every imaginable sexual experience has been spread across the screens of America and been shoved into the faces of many who’s emails are clogged with hardcore sexual images. 

What is the result?  Viewers want more.  Not because they are bad people, or because they have sought sex, but because they have had one glance imprinted, and for many that is all it took.  Whatever dark and loathsome activity you can imagine, someone out there is actually putting it on the internet, drawing others to their harmful thinking.  It is destroying our society.

It is astonishing that today’s popular culture — from gender confusion to perverse sexual expression — has lost its Christian values and debunks any efforts to hold the line at virtue and morality.  Even the very mention of the words “virtue” or “morality” bring jeers and charges of being “old fashioned.”

In past eras, parents had the rest of society to help with the fight between good and evil.  Youth could bond to teachers, church leaders, mentors or organizations for healthy direction and ability and for affirmation of their parents’ beliefs.  But today, youth have been cut loose, drawn off in an iPod world that puts cell phones at the finger tips and parental guidance at arm’s length. 

What to do in a culture that is molesting the minds of our youth? 

Be virtuous.  Consider your imprint on the minds of your youth.  If you live according to the rules you have set, honestly seeking to do the right thing at the right time, to act with integrity, to present the best in you though you are far from perfect, you will create, form and shape an image for your youth to consider.  Youth need patience, firmness, limits, kindness, insight and honest, not hypocritical examples.  In other words, they need to feel genuine parental love and direction.  It comes from constancy and integrity to a cause greater than today and tomorrow. 

That does not suggest imposing limits and rules that speak louder than your love.  It means being reasonable and accessible.  Otherwise, they will resent your structure — and you.  And that rage will manifest itself in complex and evil ways.  Children feel compelled to rebel against authority when you fail them.  Everything forbidden — from sex to drugs, to tattoos — speaks of personal freedom from you.  Practices they once would have shunned or even ignored become enticing and then — just one experience imprints their minds.  Next the basal area of the brain begins to drive their decisions — their addictions. 

Take pornography seriously.  Expect that every youth has been or will be exposed to pornographic images.  Talk with them about the degradation of such imagery, the risks of losing your own will to basal needs.  Keep them talking to you day after day, week after week and help them fill their “down time” with something that stimulates their creative senses, their athletic interests, their social skills.  Be there for those activities and those quiet moments. 

Pornography is accessed behind closed doors.  It is harsh and dirty — and inescapable.  They are not prepared to fight it alone.  They need support to supplant that addiction with other stimulus.  They need parents to continue to love them, to help them turn off the screen and never return. 

You have heard the advice to put the computer in the middle of a room, not in their room or the basement.  However, it takes more than placement of the machine because your child’s friend’s laptop can bring up those images so quickly.  Help your children prepare responses and ways to get out of uncomfortable settings without losing face.  They need personal will and commitment, spiritual strength and constant check-ups.  They need to trust you will be there and if you are that rock of constancy, they can reverse that imprinting. 

Hold a family counsel and make some determinations that the group can help uphold.  Talk one-on-one — not once, but often.  Find new interests you can share.  Work at it together.

Turn to the Lord.  The spirit can cleanse the soul and erase the images in the mind.  Trust that the spirit of God can reverse the imprints of pornographic addiction.  Live worthy of that blessing beginning today. 

It is not too late.

Pornography is one of several addictions.  They will be discussed collectively in terms of their influence on the brain and minds of people.  It will be followed by a tenth article relating to solutions to the problem by putting spiritual forces to work in fighting pornographic addiction.