The Adulteration of "Adult"
Why "adult" shouldn't mean pornography and what it should mean
I recently took a van full of teenage boys on an 11-hour drive to a church camp in Colorado. On the way home I passed an old, broken down sign on the side of the road that read “ADULT” in large red letters. And tucked into a turnout behind some trees was a very sad, dilapidated building with a few cars in front of it. I tried to imagine what kind of person, in the age of ubiquitous and virtuously free pornography, still visits a roadside pornography store. I couldn’t. And then I thought about those large red letters and the word ADULT. I had spent a week with young men on the cusp of entering adulthood, discussing with them a theology of sanctification and sharing with them practical advice on growing in maturity. And here was a sign that took the good thing they were working toward (becoming an adult) and used it to represent the very opposite of adulthood: being controlled by your passions, lusts, and sins. And it seems to me that there is something very perverse about calling pornography “adult content.” It implies that adults are people who give in to their passions and indulge in their sins, which is true on some level because of our sin nature, but should not positively define adulthood. And it also perverse because we need adults to be mature, safe, self-controlled, responsible and godly. The word “Adult” shouldn’t have connotations with pornography. It should call to mind those higher qualities. Yes, I understand that we use the category of “Adult” to note that those under 18 shouldn’t have access to the material. But I’m merely pointing out the natural consequence of this use of language. The result is that this essential word in the English language becomes adulterated by a perverse meaning, a meaning that represents the very opposite of its intended meaning. And I do wonder if that has consequences on the way we view adults and adulthood in our culture.
