Sponsored by the Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC) student union club, students were shown an 80-minute, multimedia presentation titled “Porn Nation,” which attempts to show students how pornography has become “big business.” It includes factual data, such as figures that show annual worldwide sales of pornography exceed $57 billion and that cable companies generate $177 million a year from sexually explicit pay-per-view programming.
The presentation also claims more than 20,000 images of child pornography are viewed on the Internet weekly, 60 percent of all website visits are sexual in nature and that there are more adult bookstores in the U.S. than McDonald’s restaurants.
“Pornography is one of those subjects that are always swept under the rug,” CCC President David Heska said. “Society and mass media has taught us that pornography is just another form of entertainment. ‘Porn Nation’ is trying to get people to think about the other side of the story.”
A survey conducted by CCC of the university’s student population found that 78.1 percent of students agree pornography is “at least somewhat harmful to society”; 53.2 percent of men and 25 percent of women also said they view porn at least once a week. Thirty percent of students said they had been exposed to pornography before the age of 12.
CCC told TFN that “Porn Nation” also was shown at the University of Guelph and the University of Waterloo, both in Canada, as part of a Canadian trial launch of the program.
