I’m sorry if the graphic details from this piece in the Telegraphupset you, but we cannot turn away from this demon. In the piece, the writer recalls a dinner conversation among mothers talking about how hard it is to raise kids in a culture where pornography is ubiquitous. Excerpt:

A couple of the women present said that they had forced themselves to have toe-curlingly embarrassing conversations with their teenagers on the subject. “I want my son to know that, despite what he might see on his laptop, there are things you don’t expect a girl to do on a first date, or a fifth date, or probably never,” said Jo. A GP, let’s call her Sue, said: “I’m afraid things are much worse than people suspect.” In recent years, Sue had treated growing numbers of teenage girls with internal injuries caused by frequent anal sex; not, as Sue found out, because she wanted to, or because she enjoyed it – on the contrary – but because a boy expected her to. “I’ll spare you the gruesome details,” said Sue, “but these girls are very young and slight and their bodies are simply not designed for that.” Her patients were deeply ashamed at presenting with such injuries. They had lied to their mums about it and felt they couldn’t confide in anyone else, which only added to their distress. When Sue questioned them further, they said they were humiliated by the experience, but they had simply not felt they could say no. Anal sex was standard among teenagers now, even though the girls knew that it hurt. There was stunned silence among the mothers around that dinner table, although I think some of us may have let out involuntary cries of dismay and disbelief. For Sue’s surgery isn’t in some inner-city borough where kids may have been brutalised or come from cultures where such practices are commonly used as contraception. Sue works in the leafy heart of Hampshire. The girls presenting with incontinence were often under the age of consent and from loving, stable homes. Just the sort of kids who, only two generations ago, would have been enjoying riding and ballet lessons, and still looking forward to their first kiss, not being coerced into violent sex by some kid who picked up his ideas about physical intimacy from a dogging video on his mobile.

Read the whole thing.

You think that being “nice” people, and maybe putting your kids in Christian school, is going to protect them from this? You’re dreaming. I get so fed up with Christina parents who have no restrictions on their kids’ access to technology, and who aren’t teaching them how to cope with it. They somehow think that either their kids won’t find porn, or that everybody uses it, so how bad can it be, really?

They don’t want to face the reality because if they did, they would have to institute radical changes in their family’s life, including forcing their kids to be weirdos in their peer group.

But what is the alternative? At a conservative Christian college not long ago, a campus minister told me that every single young man he works with, helping them to prepare for seminary after graduation, is addicted to pornography (meaning that they use it compulsively, and find it impossible to stop, even though they want to). Sixteen young men — conservative, churchgoing men who want to serve God and others as pastors — caught in that trap. You think it can’t happen to your kids? Really?

This is not just a moral crisis. It’s a social one. And it’s a crisis that is destroying something vital and precious. Here’s a story about the disaster unfolding in Japan. Excerpt:

Nearly half of Japanese people are entering their 30s without any sexual experience, according to new research. The country is facing a steep population decline as a growing number of youngsters abstain from sex and avoid romantic relationships. Some men claimed they “find women scary” as a poll found that 43 per cent of people aged 18 to 34 from the island nation say they are virgins. One woman, when asked why they think 64 per cent of people in the same age group are not in relationships, said she thought men “cannot be bothered” to ask the opposite sex on dates because it was easier to watch internet porn.

It’s one thing to be a virgin because you choose to abstain until marriage, for religious or moral reasons. It’s quite another to be a virgin because you are too afraid of emotional and physical intimacy, and would rather sit home and watch porn.

We are conducting a radical experiment that has never before in history been tried, because it has never been possible. What happens to individuals and societies when images — moving images — of the most bizarre and violent sex acts imaginable can be instantly accessed by anyone, anywhere, at any time? What does that do to our brains, our minds, and our hearts? What does it to do us as a people?

I keep telling people that the Benedict Option is not about heading for the hills. But when I read stories like this, I think, “I should reconsider that.” True, wherever there is an Internet connection, pornography can find you. I don’t mean “the hills” in a geographical sense. I mean it metaphorically. By “the hills,” I mean a more radical separation from this culture of death.

Let’s say that our own children manage to get through childhood without having porn colonize their minds and hearts. One day, we want them to marry and start families, if that is their calling, right? Think about what the ubiquity of porn does to the prospect of finding life partners who are capable of loving them, in soul and body, in a caring, compassionate, righteous way? This is not a crisis that we can face adequately as individual families. We have to do it as a community. We have to do this as a community embedded in Weimar America, where there is widespread indifference or even contempt for our values. We not only have to do our utmost to protect our sons and our daughters from it, but we have to rescue those of our children who have been ensnared by it.

This British general practitioner is treating teenage girls under the age of consent for incontinence. They cannot keep from soiling themselves because the muscles in their rectums have been stretched out from anal sex. You want to turn away, I know. So do I. But we can’t. Nor can we turn away from the young men who have been convinced that demanding this of girls is something good and right and necessary.