The wild West and the meek East

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Aneela Shahzad January 24, 2025
The writer is a geopolitical analyst. She also writes at globaltab.net and tweets @AneelaShahzad

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According to Statista, as of May 2024, Canada-based pornhub.com held the leading adult content and pornographic website for global uses, averaging around 5.49 billion monthly visits. French-origin Xvideos ranked second, with 4.02 billion monthly visits. Those are just two such sites. The total number of pornographic websites was estimated in 2012 at around 25 million, 60% of which were hosted in the US, 26% in the Netherlands and 7% in the UK. Child pornography, which is a crime in most western countries, has skyrocketed since then, with around 255,588 URLs involved in hosting such imagery by 2022. Most child porn imagery was found to be made in a child's bedroom or a bathroom. Girls aged 11-13 were the group that appeared most frequently in this content. What does that tell about the normalising of exploitation of unaware victims! About 60% of the content is uploaded from the Netherlands, the US and Slovakia.

According to a report, in 2016, people watched 4.6 billion hours of pornography?at just one of the more than 42 million pornographic websites. That's equivalent to 524,000 years spent watching porn in a single year. Studies in western states show that 93% of boys and 63% of girls will be exposed to internet porn before the age of 18, while the average age of first exposure is 8 to 11 years.

Thanks to the triumph of all the liberal and feminist movements in Europe and America, porn, prostitution, drugs and LGBT have all been legalised throughout the West. Pornography is referred to as a flourishing industry. So lucrative it is that it has been generating $97 billion annually. And as for the feminist run for equality, about 90% of this content is rife with physical violence/aggression against women.

Watching pornography for entertainment does not come without repercussions. Studies have found problematic pornography use (PPU) to be a type of compulsive sexual behaviour disorder (CSBD). It can affect a person's mental health and sexual relationships, and lead to sexual violence. PPU entails feelings of distress, guilt, anxiety and depression; it creates brain-fog and exhaustion and negatively effects everyday-task motivation and work performance. Another study has found 56% of divorces to involve one party having an obsessive interest in pornographic websites. And on top of all that, it leads to the real-life exploitation and sexual abuse of women, because for a huge portion of the population in the West, the mental framework for sex is being formed by porn. So, in the age of female empowerment, porn is normalising rape and sexual abuse of women - not only that, it is rather grooming western women to accept abuse as normal.

Going further, research by porn portal xHamster revealed that watching porn can make you homo or bisexual. It found that 13% of people who watch porn once a week are bisexual. Those who watch it a few times a week have a 19% chance of being bisexual; watching once a day increases this chances to 23%, and watching several times a day to 27%.

So, what would you say of nations whose populations are overwhelmingly using porn content! They will be filled with men and women who are depressed, demotivated, socially misfit, unable to sustain relationships and sexually disoriented, and where women objectification, abuse and derogation is a norm in the minds of both men and women. And for those who are in the industry, it was found that 79% of porn performers have used marijuana, and 50% have used ecstasy.

And guess what! This flourishing industry needs more women and children all the time - but not normal women and children who understand their dignity and rights to their bodies. That would prove hazardous and hard to control. So, the industry looks for women and children that can be completely controlled and exploited without fear of reporting to any authority - meaning sex-slaves. The UNODC report on human trafficking, exposing this modern form of slavery, says that the most common form of human trafficking (79%) is sexual exploitation. According to the reports, almost 20% of all trafficking victims worldwide are children. However, in some parts of Africa and the Mekong region, children are the majority. So, guess where these women and children end up!

So, here siting in the meek East, we cherish a culture of modestly that is endangered by the advent of the internet and mobile age and by the AI advancement which is expected to exponentiate user-generated porn, virtual reality porn and AI-generated porn - leaving no place for the eyes to hide, no place for decency to exist! How are we to secure our society and our youth from vileness, abomination and obscenity of the eyes and the heart? Are we to allow the internet and mobile phones to become the new parents, the new prophets for our youth, when we know it's filled with all this filth? And if we are unable to prevent this, perhaps the new obscenities will become their new gods and goddesses!

Is there, in this modern world - where all lewdness is getting acceptance and all modesty is being attacked as human rights violation - any place left for belief, for piety, for solemnness, for purity!

Will we be left with the sacredness that we felt in our relation with God, and within our families and in the institute of marriage? Will young men and women come together in love, respect and trust, or will they engage only in lust and sensualism?

In the face of this online onslaught, we find ourselves weak and defenceless. And the choice we find is to entrust ourselves and our children in the protection of Allah, and in the protection of the beautiful words of Allah, that alone show and guide onto the best way of life.

'O Prophet! Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and guard their chastity. That is purer for them. Surely Allah is All-Aware of what they do.' (Al Nur 24:30)

'And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; and that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what must ordinarily appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their adornments except to their husbands…' (Al Nur 24:31)

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