Porn by the Numbers

Porn by the Numbers

When I was a kid, a prominent member of our community got “spotted” exiting the Adult Bookstore. In my family, and in most of our community, that was pure scandal. What filled the shelves of that non-windowed store was considered dark, dirty, smut. But today you don’t have to walk into some seedy store to get more porn than you can imagine. The internet, in all its splendor, brings explicit content right to your monitor, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Lucky us.

The result is that porn is now viewed by more people, in greater volume, than ever before in history.

In this weekend’s Marriage Workshop at New Life, I identified porn as “the intimacy killer”. The effects of porn are far reaching, and impact the viewer, their spouse and children, and the people producing it. I’ll go into greater detail in a future post. I researched some numbers on one of my favorite websites, xxxchurch.com . (Trust me, this is the only xxx site I will ever recommend.) The numbers may shock you.

Here are some stats from xxxchurch that may open your eyes to the prevalence of pornography in our homes:

• There are over 11,000 pornographic films produced annually.
• According to 2004 IFR research, U.S. porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC (6.2 billion). Porn revenue is larger than all combined revenues of all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises. The pornography industry, according to conservative estimates, brings in $57 billion per year, of which the United States is responsible for $12 billion.
• Approximately 40 million people in the United States are sexually involved with the Internet
• 2.5 billion emails per day are pornographic
• 25 percent of all search engine requests are pornography related
• Sex is the number 1 topic searched on the Internet
• Wow. Those numbers are mind-boggling. The sad news is, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Take a look at the rest of the porn stats, complete with references.