Dr Paul Allen

Image via Wikipedia For years, the entertainment industry has laughed off warnings from Christians and others about the link between depictions of sex, violence, and nihilism in the media and what happens in the real world. They dismiss critics like you and me by saying young people make their own choices and can clearly distinguish between what they see on screen with what goes on in their own lives. But common sense, experience, and studies show this isn’t necessarily the case. For instance, news outlets for years have voluntarily adhered to strict reporting standards concerning suicide, because the evidence of copycat suicides is so clear and uncontroversial. One academic stu dy spoke of “the need to actively restrain reporting of suicides to decrease the imitation effect.” Well, what about when suicide is dramatized on television or the silver screen? Here, the evidence has been less clear, but according to a new report by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of

Image via Wikipedia As the impressively depressing cover story “America the Obese” in the May issue of  The   Atlantic  serves to remind us all, the weight-gain epidemic in the United States and the rest of the West is indeed widespread, deleterious, and unhealthy—which is why it is so frequently remarked on, and an object of such universal public concern.  But while we’re on the subject of bad habits that can turn unwitting kids into unhappy adults, how about that other epidemic out there that is far more likely to make their future lives miserable than carrying those extra pounds ever will? That would be the emerging social phenomenon of what can appropriately be called “sexual obesity ”: the widespread gorging on pornographic imagery that is also deleterious and unhealthy, though far less remarked on than that other epidemic—and nowhere near an object of universal public concern. That complacency may now be changing. The term  sexual obesity  comes from Mary Ann Layden, a psychiat