Pornography and the Clergy: I Guess They are Human Like the Rest of us

Who views porno is very interesting. In a survey in Britain 2/3 of females and 70% of males (age grp 18-34 yrs). The figures for the U.S. must be comparable.

This is early porn, courtesy: infinitethought.cinestatic.com

(MOLALLA, Ore.) - I ran into this subject by accident, really, about 2-3 weeks ago. I even printed a copy of it but after searching for several hours I couldn’t re-find it so I started over by checking out Wikipedia. They had a whole rack about the subject.

According to them Porno is as old as civilization itself with graffiti and figurines, pre-history. Pornography as we now know it was/is written in the Bible, Jacob 2:7-11, Matthew 5:28, and Proverbs 5:19 et cetera. Much was found in Pompeii produced around the first century A.D. The first book on the subject was Fanny Hill written in England in 1748. This caused a turmoil. Sexual matters were supposed to be kept secret.

The subject was criminalized in 1857 but when photography and films were developed, so did porno. The first movie was a striptease and an American actress Gypsy Rose Lee popularized the craft in the U.S. I’m not talking about bordellos here. They have been around prior to Pompeii.

Most countries banned porno but it was legalized in Denmark in 1969 and the product was smuggled into every country in the world. This was followed by and with women in less and less clothing and briefer and briefer bathing articles. By today soft porn is all over TV, movies, magazines and advertisements.

The finances covering this are reported to be about $10,000,000 in the U.S. in 1970, about one billion in 1998 and about 12 billion in 2010. The biggest producer of porn today is supposed to be China with about 25 billion dollars worth and the total world value is about 60 billion dollars.

Who views porno is very interesting. In a survey in Britain 2/3 of females and 70% of males (age grp 18-34 yrs). The figures for the U.S. must be comparable.

One of the very striking revelations of the search of Pornography and the Clergy was a surprise but it just said to me that they are much like the rest of us despite their reversed collars. This included sexual addiction which I posted in salem-news.com. One title stated 35% self report viewing porn. Another report taken at a religious conference indicated 50 to 60%.

The Clergy was represented as diverse groups as Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals, etc, etc, etc.

Along with this came some striking statistics. The non-clergy Promise Keepers reported 53% viewed porno.

In the magazine Christianity Today in 2000 revealed that 37% of Pastors viewed porno. Another indicated that 50% of Clergy viewed porno at least monthly.

One of the strangest of my findings was the 1998 World Conference on Pornography held at the University of California Northridge and sponsored by and for women showed explicit pornographic movies at least for one full day and the writer of the story related that she was surprised that so many of the female faculty

I cannot say that I wasn’t astonished by this bevy of information. After being on this earth the past 80+ years, I was really surprised.

WHAT IS NEXT LEGAL MARIJUANA?!?!?

Before any of that, Phil Leveque was a Combat Infantryman in the U.S. Army in WWII. He suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder more than 60 years after the war, and specialized in treating Veterans with PTSD during his years as a doctor in Molalla, Oregon. Do you have a question, comment or story to share with Dr. Leveque?
Email him: ASK DR. LEVEQUE

More information on the history of Dr. Leveque can be found in his book, General Patton's Dogface Soldier of WWII about his own experiences "from a foxhole". Order the book by mail by following this link: DOGFACE SOLDIER OF WWII If you are a World War II history buff, you don't want to miss it.