Here is some good news, I guess, depending on how you look at it, but bear with me for a moment.
I have long had trouble with people who try to encourage or alarm us with raw numbers alone. Raw numbers alone are often a very misleading part of the story. An example would be a statement that Americans are wickedly self-centered because they spend 32 bazillion dollars annually on cat food, and what about the rest of the world scraping to get by? But these kinds of numbers rely the shock value of their mere size, and we are rarely allowed to look at the other parts of the algebraic equation. What percentage does this represent? What are we comparing this to?
Another example of this kind of funny business(using incomplete percentages this time) is the observation that Americans are just four percent of the world’s population and we consume 40 percent of the world’s resources. It has been a while since I heard this one, and so the numbers are probably off, but you get the picture. The message here is that Americans are selfish hogs. But an important datum is left out, and it gives us a more complete picture. What percentage of the world’s goods do we produce?
Anyhow that is just to illustrate the problem with this kind of reasoning. There is far more to stories like this than total tonnage. I bring this up because I was recently thinking about America’s problem with porn, and I don’t think it is as big as most of us think. But according to Fortune magazine, the porn industry in America is a 10 billion dollar a year affair. There’s good material there for a preacher to launch a jeremiad, but how much does it actually tell us?
We can easily figure out from this, by means of simple division, what the average American spends on porn annually. And as soon as we frame the question in this way, it reveals the problem. It makes sense to say something like, “The average American consumes so many gallons of milk a year” because virtually everyone drinks milk. But it makes no sense to calculate what the average American spends on cocaine, because the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t use cocaine. But the math problem would be simple — take the dollar amount spent on cocaine and divide by the number of Americans.
The population of our nation is right around 300 million people. The porn industry is about 10 billion a year. The average American therefore spends around 33 dollars on porn annually. But this assumes that everyone is doing it. At the other end of the scale, let us assume that virtually no one is doing it, and that the 10 billion figure is the result of one guy with a lot of money and a set of really bad compulsions. Or maybe two guys, with a 5 billion habit each.
But the vast majority of porn users are men, so let’s divide our 300 million figure in half. From that 150 million, we should subtract 25 million young boys who haven’t heard about this temptation yet. This leaves us with 125 million candidates, and if every last one of them had a problem, it would average out to 80 bucks annually a person. But we know that every last one of them does not have this problem, and so the question then becomes what is the average size of the average porn problem? And in what sense might it be America’s problem?
We know that the nature of this problem is that a high percentage of those entangled in it are in the grip of a compulsive behavior. Those who have a real problem with it are likely to have a real problem with it. Go back to the illustration of cocaine use. Those who are users are likely to be carrying a disproportionate part of the national average — the same thing goes for other compulsive behaviors like out-of-control gambling. In other words, it is in the highest degree likely that a comparative handful of lust slaves are skewing the averages.
Let’s go back to our one guy with the 10 billion habit. That is obviously a ludicrous example, but it is for the sake of making a point. What would a compulsive use of pornography actually look like? Could such a person spend something on the order of 10K annually? If so, how many of those people would it take to get our 10 billion figure? That would be 100,000 men with a serious problem. Or 200,000 men with a 5K problem. But what percentage of our national population would those 200,000 men be? That number would be .06%. Three million men would be 1% of the population, and that 1% of the population would have a problem that amounted to 3,333 dollars annually.
Numbers about this kind of thing, taken out of context in this way, are weapons. Consider Kinsey’s infamous lie about 10 percent of the population being homosexual, and that figure, apparently immortal now, is routinely used to make the rest of us “face facts,” and come to terms with what is obviously a fact of nature. It is in fact lying propaganda. In the same way, the raw fact that American has a 10 billion dollar a year porn problem is used by friends and foes of porn alike, the former to tell us, “resistance is futile, you will be assimilated,” and the latter to tell us if we don’t get off our keisters now, we are all going to be living in a seedier section of one of the Cities of the Plain in about three weeks.
Now I think it is plain we do have a problem — with porn, with lust, with the degrading of public discourse, and far more. As a pastor, I can say that counseling people with this problem is unfortunately not a rarity. But I don’t believe we have the same problem with porn that we think we do. And part of the reason we have the actual problem we have is because we have bought into the lies that have been selling us a problem we don’t really have.