Not so long ago I was in a coffee shop and heard two female students talking. One girl made the following remark to her friend. “Today is my 18th birthday.” Her friend asked what she had planned. She replied “it also means that I can buy porn and that is what I am going to do.”

I was, for lack of a better term, gob smacked. So many thoughts crossed my mind about that brief incident. It brings up a lot of societal issues. Of course, there is the First Amendment to the Constitution that protects pornography through freedom of expression.

Then again, a young woman of 18 making that statement suggests the liberation of women? I don’t honestly think so. Even Gloria Steinem said “pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.” She also said “pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice and battered children are the practice.”

I am trying to write a thoughtful piece here and am bothered by the First Amendment protecting pornography. It, in my estimation from reading statistics and research, is not harmless. Many young men of my generation looked at magazines as almost a right of passage. However, what has happened in the intervening years is nothing short of disturbing to say the least.

Here are some statistics that should make you reflect on the porn industry and First Amendment rights.

• 25 percent of all search engine requests are pornography related (healthymind.com)

• Sex is the No. 1 topic searched on the Internet (worldandi.com)

• 2.5 billion e-mails per day are pornographic (familysafemedia.com)

• According to Datamonitor, over half of all the spending on the Internet is related to sexual activity. Thirty million people each day log on to pornographic Web sites.

Pornography has been around for many years from India to Pompeii but there are several distinguishing factors that make it troublesome today. The availability of the Internet is one cause as well as provocative material in prime time on television. A survey of 600 households by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) found that 20 percent of parents do not know any of their children’s Internet passwords, instant messaging nicknames or e-mail addresses. Equally, only 5 percent of parents knew that POS meant (parent over shoulder) and only 1 percent could identify WTGP as want to go private?

NCMEC also reports that the incidence of child exploitation increased from 4,573 in 1998 to 112,083 in 2004. According to Internet Filter Review, the average age of Internet exposure to porn is age 11. They also report that the largest consumer group of porn is the age group 12-17. That breaks down to 11-13 for boys and 12-14 for girls.

Pornography is not victimless. While protected by the First Amendment, one person’s rights is another person’s pain. Elizabeth Cramer R.N., M.S., led a study about one of the effects of pornography to look into the association between male pornographic use and physical abuse of women. Eighty-seven battered women filing charges against their male partner at the district attorney’s office in a large metropolitan city were surveyed. Forty percent reported that their male partner used one or more such materials. Use of the materials was significantly associated with the women being asked or forced to participate in violent sexual acts, including rape.

An interesting corollary to that study is that 42 percent of surveyed adults indicated that their partner’s use of pornography made them feel insecure. And 51 percent of U.S. adults surveyed believed that pornography raises men’s expectations of how women should look and how women should behave (Harris Poll, October 2005).

Certainly the pornography industry is a lucrative business. The top four countries who sell the most pornography are, in order: China, South Korea, Japan and the United States. These four nations account for $84 billion of a $97 billion worldwide industry. Incidentally, child pornography worldwide accounts for $3 billion annually.

By the way, every second over $3,000 is being spent on porn which is about what was being spent on the Iraq war by the U.S. government. From a 2006 survey from Family Safe the top 10 cities for porn Internet searches are not Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York but rather smaller tier cites with Louisville ranking No. 5 and Elmhurst, Ill., as No. 1.

What does all this mean? It means our nation has an epidemic on its hands as does the world. The First Amendment is a sacred amendment to our nation and us as individuals. Pornography is freedom of expression and speech. However, this is not artistic expression such as the nude paintings of the artist Rubin; it is exploitation and the demeaning of women as possessions to be dominated and humiliated.

I guess one of the questions that you have to ask yourself is this: Would you rather have an art gallery near your neighborhood or a porn shop? Could that be the defining factor of First Amendment bounds?

And if you think that this is an issue of Christians versus non-Christians, think again there Buckeroo. According to the publication Man in the Mirror, five of 10 men in church struggle with pornography. It isn’t just men, but one out of every six women grapple with pornography.

Pornography is to the modern age what the Black Death was to high Middle Ages. Rather than bodies in its wake, it leaves emotional pain and empty souls. Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler, said “Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There’s nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.”

Granted, there have been wars over religion, the crusades, the inquisition, but porn has become a crutch for many in our society and will ultimately cause more destruction than religion.

Tim McDonald can be reached at timothy.mcdonald@agsfaculty.indwes.edu