We live in a world of “E.” E-commerce, e-trade, e-file, e-news and e-vite, but we also live in the world of e-rotic. The online world is a realm unavoidably erotic. In 2007 it was estimated that 12 percent of all Web sites were dedicated to porn. Twenty-five percent of all search engine requests were porn related and 35 percent of all Internet downloads were pornographic. At that time 28,258 Internet users were viewing porn sites every second.

However that was 2007 when, believe it or not, the Internet was still young. Since that time online technology has moved into adolescents and with it the hyperinflation of mobile devices, social media, perpetual Wi-Fi and cooperative “big data” projects that have exponentially multiplied our capacity to produce and transmit information. In those 7 years since statics were last estimated, all the data ever generated by the human race has doubled 3.5 times. It’s not just that the Internet doubled in size 3.5 times; all human data ever produced since the dawn of time has doubled 3.5 times; the bulk of which is available with just a few taps of the finger, including the black hole of pornography.  No one knows the precise numbers at this point, but currently porn related sites generate more web-traffic per day than Amazon, Netflix and Twitter combined. The top online video porn site streams 6 times more data per day than its non-pornographic competitor Hulu. As all human data has more than quadrupled in the last 7 years, so too has pornography, both in its scope and gratuitousness.

Now why does this matter to me? Because 7 years ago – when the stats were merely alarming and not apocalyptic – my son was 6 and thought girls had cooties. Today he is 13 and has a mobile phone, notebook computer, wireless enabled gaming device and a Wi-Fi connection to the open waters of the Internet. Add to this that he lives in one of the most sexually charged, confused and careless times our culture has seen in its recent history. Sexuality has risen to a civil right and thus biblical boundaries and validations have become suspect for younger evangelicals. In some of the most recent studies we see that evangelical Millennials (approximately ages 10-35) are more likely to engage in pre-marital sex, embrace co-habitation before marriage and endorse same sex relationships/marriage. Some of this fluctuating standard comes from general shifts in culture, some from the softening messages embedded in youth focused media and some comes from the desensitizing agent of pornography.

The most general data shows that 70% of viewers of pornography are male (which means 30% are female – thus while this is an article regarding boys, many of these principles need to be considered for our girls as well). Increasingly girls are viewing porn as a tool to discover what boys want or to explore their own sexuality, creating both confusion and identify conflict, but when looking at Millennial males the data jumps well above 90%. In a recent interview regarding an attempted research project measuring the impact of pornography on sexuality and male/female relationships Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse of the University of Montreal said, “We started our research seeking men in their twenties who had never consumed pornography, but we couldn’t find any.” In short, the research was impossible because Professor Lajeunesse could not find a control group to measure the experimental group against; all were experimenting with porn and had been since the age 10 on average.

What is my penultimate point in all of this? If you have a boy and an Internet connection, you have a porn problem. Porn may not yet be his problem (and prayerfully will never be), but it is a problem you must seriously factor in when it comes to raising boys into godly men. And godly men are the ultimate point. Because of this I have not buegn this 5 part series with how to filter and monitor his Internet activity. I will close this series (Technology Sucks! Pt. 5) with a set of ways to aid in this, but they will not be foolproof. Yet that’s the point. The only way to make anything foolproof is to help a person not be a fool (Proverbs 14:16). Thus I go back to the reality that “The End – A Godly Man” matters more than “The Means – Keeping Porn Out.” Therefore the real intent of this series is not porn proofing your son’s devices, but Jesus centering his heart.