In December of 1895, Louis and Auguste Lumière revealed their invention of the motion picture camera. Less than one short year later, a French pornographic film featuring a young woman undressing was filmed and publically screened. The sexual objectification of women is nothing new; in fact, archeologist Nicholas Conard discovered an erotic ivory statuette depicting a purposefully “well-endowed” woman dating back more than 35,000 years while excavating in Germany.
Of course, we live in the 21st century, where, according to the Huffington Post, “30 percent of all data transferred across the internet is porn” and 450 million people visit porn websites every single month. To put that in perspective, Netflix only receives about 46 million visits every month. Pornography use has clearly become an epidemic, but what exactly is pornography, why is its use so prevalent and why is it so destructive?
According to Oxford Dictionary, pornography is defined as being, “Printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.” That definition includes everything from pornographic websites like YouPorn to purposefully-erotic novels such as the ever-so-popular Fifty Shades of Grey.
As far as the evolution of pornography goes, in the past, pornography had no choice but to progressively manifest itself in the form of statues, paintings, magazines and, eventually, hardcopy videos. Today, the pornography industry has hijacked the internet to become mankind’s most deplorable tour de force. Pornography is now available in unfathomable excess, for free, at the press of a button. As technology has progressed and advanced, so has access to and indulgence in pornography.
The worst aspect of wide-spread pornography use and availability stems from the fact that it is highly destructive on the psychological scale. According to the American Psychological Association, men who watched porn frequently reported feeling “increased secrecy, less intimacy and also more depression.” Also, according to YourBrainOnPorn.com, many men who went to see Psychiatrist Norman Doidge due to “sexual problems that affected their relationships” reported their pornography use led to very little sexual arousal outside of fantasizing about or role-playing a scene from a porn shoot and that as their time of watching porn progressed, they have been forced to seek out more extreme content to reach the same level of arousal. This is because while and after viewing porn, the brain releases a chemical known as dopamine, which is responsible for “reward-driven learning.” During an orgasm that results from sexual intercourse, the human body releases dopamine in combination with a number of other chemical changes that prevent the brain from building up a tolerance to dopamine. However, when watching pornography, the body builds up a significant tolerance to dopamine, telling the brain, “Hey, do that again!” knowing good and well that more extreme content must be viewed to result in the same level of short-lived satisfaction.
Pornography also distorts and taints the manner in which people perceive sex, especially the manner in which men perceive the role of women in sex and intimate relationships.
Porn falsely asserts that sex is strictly a mechanical act that does not require true intimacy for prolonged fulfillment, and according to YourBrainOnPorn.com, some studies claim that pornography use can be “beneficial to relationships.” However, this same article goes on to point out that, “Reports from partners are overwhelmingly negative and empirical data shows that sexual pleasure decreases with increased pornography use.”
In short, the very nature of constantly bombarding your brain with video after video of men and women having random sexual encounters, typically with little to no context as to why they are even having sex, results in an extreme sense of depravity in yourself as well as the value of the intimacy of any relationship one may be in. This failed intimacy in relationships in which one partner frequently watches porn might be explained by the sexual-script theory.
Sexual-script theory is the idea that the content people consume while watching pornography highly affects and alters their expectations of what real sex should be like. Seeing as how scenes depicted in video pornography are typically nothing more than over-the-top fantasies or “superior” men “preying” upon young teenage girls looking to make quick cash, one can easily conclude how this can result in failure to become aroused during real-life sexual encounters.
Pornography also severely affects how men view women after prolonged exposure to the fantasy women depicted in pornographic videos. For men who watch pornography, the woman is there as nothing more than an object, a piece of meat, whose sole purpose is to please him according to his desires. Porn typically insists that women are not intelligent, do not deserve respect and lack all sense of dignity. The typical roles played by women in porn are almost nothing like real women.
From a factual standpoint, we know that pornography is destructive. I would like to share a bit about the way pornography has affected my life and how I have made steps to overcome my inner-demons.
Having viewed pornography for the first time when I was 12 after accidently stumbling upon a sexually explicit image on the internet and having struggled with compulsive viewing ever since, it is no surprise that my own perception of sex and women has been corrupted by the porn industry. I grew up with a sense of superiority and dominance toward girls, and I feel it would be foolish not to attribute this to the way I saw women treated in the pornographic videos I would watch night after night for years. More recently, my porn abuse heavily attributed to the loss of someone very dear to me, as I learned far too late that it is an incredibly feeble task to try to love somebody with sincere passion, devotion and loyalty when you are constantly feeding a dark addiction that thrives on the objectification of women and devalues your entire sense of romantic intimacy.
Using porn set me on a path of self-destruction in which I was willing to forsake every other desire I have ever had for the chance to lay down, alone in my bed with a laptop. I felt depressed, I had no motivation to go to class and I was incredibly selfish. Porn was essentially ruining my life.
Then, after years of struggling with self-help websites that offered the same advice that never seemed to help me, I found the motivation I needed for quitting porn walked the fence between a constant remembrance of who and what porn took from me as well as a sincere commitment to never let it happen again. Now, every time I am tempted to give in to my desire to watch porn, I think about my future wife and how much I love her already. I do not just say no to porn for my sake, but for hers as well. My desire to only have these eyes for her is greater than my desire to let my eyes wander and I remind myself daily that I am guarding my heart today so I can guard hers when she lets me have it.
I am also quick to think on my future children who will undoubtedly be tempted to indulge in the sexual promiscuity idolized by our American culture and I want to be able to protect, encourage and guide them away from those vices with knowledge, experience and empathy.
Determine why you are quitting porn and who you are quitting porn for and never let yourself forget. Because until you truly desire the best life possible for yourself and those you love more than you desire five minutes of fantasized trash, it is doubtful you will find the will to quit. You can rewire your brain to think with a passion for selfless love rather than selfish lust; you just have to want it more than you want anything else in the world.
