Rabbi Y.W Responds:
Dear Dov and the GYE Team,
You are among the heroes of our generation.
What R' Dov has written (on the previous page in bold) in my opinion and experience is right on the mark.
I think that as a Kehilla we have to openly accept that pornography (and watching pornographic material in movies and TV series – today some of the most popular TV shows feature graphic nudity and relations. In the words of one Baal habos I spoke to on Sunday: "everyone in the religious community watches these programs") is the main Nisayon and avodah of our generation. It is the modern day "Shabbos Nisayon". It is the modern day Haskala.
If we think it's a problem only for fringe elements and teens at risk, we are helping to perpetuate the problem. In most religious circles people are deathly embarrassed to even utter the word pornography out loud. And pornography is just the tip of the iceberg. Frum people are using all the popular social media platforms to have affairs and act out with z’nus. Frum people are spending hours and hours a day watching graphic sexualized movies. A Baal habos told me on Sunday, "It’s good the Rabanim don't know about Netflix, because then they will stick their nose into it. They found out about pornography and got their nose involved in that".
Companies such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime give unlimited access to streaming television and movie programs. Very popular programs have something like 7 seasons, with 15 episodes each. It's like one long movie with 105 parts. Each part is 45 minutes long. This means that to finish the "long movie" you have to watch close to 80 hours of videos. Netflix is designed to encourage you to watch them all consecutively. (See this powerful video clip on GYE's video site about this point). Programs are written to be addictive. Many people watch them over one or two long weekends, watching for 8-10 hours straight. They can be watched on a phone, tablet, or laptop.
This of course has disastrous consequences on shalom bayis and chinuch. It also leads to chillul shabbos, and a general sense of depression.
In the past, when one watched television, they watched for an hour and the story was over. When one went to a movie theater, he watched one movie and was done. But now the story is not over until one goes through all of the scores of episodes. It's similar but much more interesting than a soap opera, like an action movie never ending. And soap operas had very small budgets, usually shot on a single set. These programs sometimes have a million dollar budget for one episode. So they are much higher quality than anything ever shown on TV in the past. They are therefore much more addictive. Every episode ends with a cliffhanger and it is extremely difficult to stop.
And this is in everyone's pocket; and it's free for anyone who uses Amazon!
In fact, movie studios are shifting away from theater programming to streaming episodic content, like the ones I described above.
One Hollywood figure described the function of these long episodic, 100 episode long programs in the following terms. "Movies are for a short escape. But Episodic content is to "fall in love and make a relationship with the characters". Another said: "Movies should not be a place to escape to recharge, but a destination". In other words, their express goal is to make people leave the real word, with their "boring lives" and join them in the digital world, where things are much more exciting.
Binge Watching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binge-watching) is part of an internet addiction "conveyor belt", a continuum of compulsive behaviors. Binge-watching can lead to compulsive porn use, that can lead eventually to meeting with prostitutes and other physical sexual encounters. Binge-watching also leads to Chillul Shabbos.