Potiphar's Wife & Internet Porn

Can somebody please help me understand what we are doing to our kids??

Now Joseph was well-built and handsome. After some time his master’s wife looked longingly at Joseph and said, ‘Sleep with me.’ But he refused. ‘Look,’ he said to his master’s wife, ‘with me here my master does not concern himself with anything in his house, and he has put all that he owns under my authority. No one in this house is greater than I am. He has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. So how could I do this immense evil, and how could I sin against God?’

Although she spoke to Joseph day after day, he refused to go to bed with her. Now one day he went into the house to do his work, and none of the household servants were there. She grabbed him by his garment and said, ‘Sleep with me!’ But leaving his garment in her hand, he escaped and ran outside. Genesis 39:6b-12

Internet Porn

Fast forward a few thousand years… Internet pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry vying for your child’s attention like a lonely housewife. The porn industry of today makes Potiphar’s wife look like a timid mouse.

Since launching this substack, I have been careful about how much I’ve talked about pornography. The reason why is because educating parents on the dangers and prevalence of internet porn doesn’t seem to make any meaningful difference in how we parent. It is so well documented that kids are viewing increasingly violent porn at young and younger ages and hardly any of us are doing anything about it.

We’ve all heard that the average age of first porn exposure is before your sweet little child has gone through puberty. Often, this is because porn found your child, not because your child went looking for porn. And then there are kids, even from Christian families, who are going looking for porn. I recently overheard a 15 year old bragging to his buddies about how much porn he was going to watch that weekend. Yet, parents continue to believe the lie that filters and parental controls on tablets and smartphones will stop pornography exposure. Or maybe parents just don’t care as much as I think they should? Look, there isn’t a single filter in the world that stops all porn. Even if there was, this multi-billion dollar industry would figure out a way to render the filter useless within days, if not hours. If you want to know just how bad the problem is, here are three resources:

1. YourBrainonPorn.org this page links to tons of research and peer-reviewed studies.

2. “The Most Dangerous Playground is Now… In Our Kids’ Pockets: Hardcore Pornography on Digital Devices is Damaging America’s Children” from NCOSE.

3. What Happens When Children Are Exposed To Pornography? published by the Institute for Family Studies

Reality

Despite all of this research, much of it going back over a decade, parents keep believing their child won’t fall victim to this filth. Screen Strong’s founder

Melanie Hempe

likes to say “all parents have blinders on when it comes to their kids.” We think our child will be like Joseph; when temptation comes, our child will run the opposite way. Is that really your normal parenting experience? That your child ALWAYS chooses the right path? Because once your child has viewed porn (intentional or not), algorithms and tracking data will push more of this content to your child’s device.

Photo by Andrew Guan on Unsplash

Have you met a teenager in your church who has said, “Internet porn found me, so I gave up my smartphone.”? I’m looking around and I’m not seeing kids who are acting like Joseph. I’ve seen parents who found out their son or daughter was viewing porn and took the device away for a prolonged period of time. And then believing the child had “learned their lesson,” they hand the phone right back. The lesson I think most of these kids learn is, “Don’t tell your parents you’ve seen porn. You’ll loose your phone.”

The porn industry is out to addict your child. That’s their business model. They want more customers and it is faster and cheeper to addict a child or teenager than it is to addict an adult. So like I’ve said before, smartphones and tablets aren’t a good idea for kids and teens. The risks outweigh any perceived rewards.

Instead, you should talk to your kids about internet pornography. Teach them about how addictive it is and how much the porn industry wants to hook them. We talk to our kids about the dangers of illegal drugs without giving them access. We can do the same for internet porn. In the mean time, get a landline or a basic cell phone.

Dear Christian Parent, why are we sending our kids to hang out with Potiphar’s wife? We know her character. Why is giving access to sexually explicit content via the web a normal part of parenting? I mean, can we read our Bible for a few minutes? Abraham didn’t run when Sarah offered him Hagar. David didn’t run when he saw Bathsheba. Joseph running from Potiphar’s wife is the exception, not the rule. Moms and dads, even if you trust your child to run from Potiphar’s wife, stop sending the message that teenagers hanging out with her is a good idea. Christians, I don’t just think internet porn is a bad idea for our kids. It is bad for all kids and when we don’t speak and act differently, we are shirking our responsibility to love our neighbors.

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The Supreme Court

There is some movement to make access to pornography more difficult for those under the age of 18. Currently before the Supreme Court is a case over a Texas law requiring age verification for porn sites. I’ll be sure to update you once the Court has ruled on this case, until then I leave you with these quotes:

Supreme Court Justice and mother of seven, Amy Coney Barrett stated during oral arguments,

I mean, kids can get online porn through gaming systems, tablets, phones, computers. It’s - - let me just say that content filtering for all those different devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with. So -- and - - and I think that the explosion of addiction to online porn has shown that content filtering isn’t working.

Justice Samuel Alito openly said,

There’s a huge volume of evidence that filtering doesn’t work. We’ve had many years of experience with it. We now have many, many states who have adopted age verification requirements... Why are they doing that if the filtering is so good?

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The Wheatley Institute put together a two minute video that’s worth your time to watch.

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