PORN DESTROYS | KAIROS GLOBAL | NOVEMBER 2020

Author: Babu John

Intro: Part Two in the series on pornography, Babu John lists the ways in which it affects an individual in person and society at large.

Pornography is a social evil and we don’t hear many people talking about it. Pornography is much more common than we think it is. It is everywhere, and many times it pops up when you least expect it. The majority of porn lovers think that pornography is easy, accessible, impersonal, and ‘safe’ because there is no vulnerability, love, or fear of getting hurt.

‘Indians seem to be leading the world in porn consumption, reporting a 95 percent spike in traffic to adult sites during the three-week lockdown.’ [India Today, April 11, 2020]

It is interesting to note that porn has more destructive power than the present Covid-19 virus. The ‘Porn Pandemic’ is running wild and destroying the lives of both men and women along with family, marriage, and society.  Let us examine some of the ways PORN DESTROYS.

Drug effect. Many scientific studies have found that pornography harms and rewires the brain almost the same way as drug addiction. Those who watch porn fall deeper into the mental habit of fixating on (pornographic images), as the exposure to them creates neural pathways and modifies how the brain registers pleasure. 

Desensitise. Porn makes real sex and even the real-world boring in comparison. It particularly anaesthetises the emotional life of a man. Porn leaves men desensitised to both outrages and excitement, leading to an overall diminishment of feeling and eventually to dissatisfaction with the emotional tugs of everyday life. Eventually, they are left with a confusing mix of supersized expectations about sex and numbed emotions about women. When a man gets bored with pornography, both his fantasy and real-world become imbued with indifference, and the real world often gets boring…”¹

Pornography viewing leads to a loss of interest in good family relations. Porn corrupts the ability to be intimate and thus can destroy marriage and marital relationships, thereby directly attacking the family. It is a pathway to infidelity, broken families, and divorce, and is frequently a major factor in these family disasters. 

When viewing pornography becomes an addiction, 40 % of ‘sex addicts’ lose their spouses, 58 % suffer considerable financial losses, and about a third lose their jobs.² 

Escalates. Once you start watching porn it will always compel you for more and force you to indulge in it. Porn users become supersensitive to things that trigger them, which then gives them the seemingly uncontrollable urge to further engage in  pornography 

Pornography is a cleverly packaged sexual novelty. Dr. Norman Doidge in his book, The Brain that Changes Itself, says that we have two pleasure systems in our brains: one for exciting pleasure and another for satisfying pleasure. Porn is all excitement and no satisfaction. Viewing porn is experienced as more exciting because of the novelty of one digital woman after another. However, the satisfying pleasure system is left starving for the real thing.³ 

Erectile Dysfunction. A new study report says that young men who prefer pornography to real sexual encounters might find themselves caught in a trap, unable to perform sexually, when the opportunity presents itself.  Porn-addicted men are more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction and are less likely to be satisfied with sexual intercourse, according to survey findings presented at the American Urological Association's annual meeting, in Boston.⁴ 

Researchers reported that 60 % of men averaging age 25 said they had ED problems with sexual partners but not with porn.⁵ According to research, instead of increasing sexual enjoyment, porn often leads to less satisfying sex in the long run and, for many porn consumers, no sex at all.

Self-centered. Watching porn is something a man does by himself, for himself for the gratification of one’s selfish desires. Porn turns sex into masturbation and a means to self-serving. Sexuality becomes only about the pleasure and the satisfaction of the lust, not the self-giving, mutually reciprocating intimacy for life and love that it was designed for.  

Social and Psychological Problems. Dr. William Struthers confirms that men who use porn become controlling, highly introverted, have high anxiety, narcissistic, curious, have low self-esteem, depression, dissociative, distractible.⁶ Ironically, while viewing porn creates momentary intensely pleasurable experiences, it ends up leading to several negative lingering psychological experiences.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers led by Professor Ray Dolan at University College London, have shown that increased levels of dopamine due to the watching of pornography, plays a role in several mental disorders like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Schizophrenia, Paranoia, Hallucinations, Psychosis, Manic phase of bipolar disorder.

Porn can fuel anxiety, depression, and leave consumers lonelier than before.

‘The more one uses pornography, the lonelier one becomes,’ says Dr. Gary Brooks, a psychologist who has worked with porn addicts for the last 30 years. ‘Any time [a person] spends much time with the usual pornography usage cycle, it can’t help but be a depressing, demeaning, self-loathing kind of experience.’

Sexual aggression. Intense use of pornography is strongly related to sexual aggression and among frequent viewers of pornography, there is a marked increase in sexual callousness, including the ‘rape myth acceptance’. 

The data suggests ‘a modest connection between exposure to pornography and subsequent behavioral aggression,’—when men consume violent pornography (i.e. depicting rape or torture), they are more likely to commit acts of sexual aggression. Dangerously, pornography strongly affects psychotic men, who are likely to act out their impulses. In some cases, the abuser would have watched pornography before abusing the woman, or he would have used pornography while committing the abuse, and in yet other cases, he would have forced his victim to participate in the making of a pornographic film. Pornography significantly distorts attitudes and perceptions about the nature of sexual intercourse.

 Men who habitually watch pornography have a higher tolerance for abnormal sexual behaviours, sexual aggression, promiscuity, and even rape.⁷ 

 Pornography has changed content to the extreme. In 2010 the journal, Violence Against Women reported physical aggression in 88.2% of leading pornography scenes and verbal aggression in 48.7% with 94.4% of the aggression directed towards women and girls. A February 2018 headline in Esquire Magazine read, ‘Incest is the Fastest Growing Trend in Porn’. Many of the sex-based crimes are pointing fingers towards pornographic addiction. 

Template. Porn creates a template on the brain. It sneaks up on you before you know it. It pops up in the mind like a computer. The porn addicts will begin to view women and even children as ‘sex objects’, commodities or instruments for their pleasure, not as persons with their inherent dignity. At a certain stage, they cannot even look at their sisters or mother without all the templates and images which are recorded in their brain, subconscious, and unconscious mind. This is a horrible and devastating consequence of porn addiction. 

Replaces reality. Porn lovers live in a world of fantasy. They create an emotional bond with the artificial/virtual world. Those are most likely to fail in their marital relationship and other intrapersonal relationships at home or workplace or society. Those who perceive pornographic sexual scenes as depicting reality tend to be more accepting of sexual permissiveness than others (e.g. premarital sex, casual sex). Author and speaker, Matt Fradd says, ‘they will develop a novelty-seeking behaviour. Constantly clicking, greedily keeping multiple tabs open, always looking for the next girls, the next sexual buzz.’

Objectifies Women. Men objectifying women – looking at their bodies, and evaluating them as potential sexual partners – has become a reflexive rampant. It is a consequence of their habitual use of pornography and preoccupation with their sexual fantasies. Porn watchers are not interested in relationship or intimacy to know the other. They just want to use the other person for their gratification. 

According to St. John Paul II, the opposite of love is to use another person for our gratification. If we do not seriously work against pornography, all sex will come to be interpreted as porn and for a man, all women as porn stars. Pornography shapes and rewires us in such a way that we become unable to see a woman or man as we should. 

Youth are affected primarily. The younger it strikes, the harder it becomes to overcome.         Dr. Sharon Cooper, a forensic pediatrician and faculty member at the University Of North Carolina School Of Medicine, mentions that ‘imagery affects children’ and that children receive unhealthy sexual images from adult pornography. According to Dr. Cooper, pornography normalises sexual harm by portraying a lack of emotional relationship between consensual partners, unprotected sexual contact, and, in some instances, violence and rape.

Dr. Cooper argues that children and youth are more vulnerable to pornographic images than adults because of mirror neurons in the brain, which convince people that they are experiencing what they see. Mirror neurons play an important role in how children learn. Children learn in large part by imitation, with mirror neurons involved in the process of observing what other people do, and imitating those behaviors. Pornography may have stronger effects among children and youth than other forms of media because it shows a much higher degree of sexual explicitness.

Young people imitate what they see in porn, and when teens learn about sexuality from porn, they are in danger of adopting the misleading, harmful biases embedded there. Many teenagers never have the chance to learn what a healthy relationship is, before porn starts teaching them its version—which is typically filled with domination, infidelity, abuse, and violence.⁸ 

Secret. Porn watchers justify it saying that ‘it does not harm anyone’. They think that as it is within the secrecy of their virtual walls no one else is involved in it. It’s no secret that much of porn is violent, but many people don’t understand the extent to which porn’s underlying messages influence behavior. Porn is full of people, particularly women, being disrespected, coerced, and physically and verbally abused, which is shaping how society thinks and acts. It can destroy families, cause loss of jobs, reputation, and self-esteem, which can lead to criminal behavior, and is a major threat to marriages once the secret is out.

Pornography’s victims aren’t just men. Women can and do observe and use porn, but are more often the subjects or performers in explicit videos, pictures, or live dances. While some women work in the industry for the money, others are coerced into the sex trade due to addiction to drugs, a desperate act of survival, or a misplaced feeling or lack of love. Sometimes the woman is forced to watch porn with her boyfriend or husband. However, it is a fact that women too watch pornography of their own accord, and some of them are addicted to it.

Whether we are talking about lust, pornography, or any other sexual sins, let’s remember that God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female He created them (Gen 1:27). God gave us a male body or a female body so that we can reflect Christ. As children of God, we are called to be holy and blameless before [God] (Eph 1:4) Sexual sins (like pornography or masturbation) take a beautiful and very sacred gift and profane it. Society doesn’t overvalue sex. It undervalues and cheapens it. Pornography is the counterfeit to the real truth about sexuality. 

(Continued in the next edition: HOW TO COME OUT OF PORN?)

¹ (Pamela Paul, Pornified, 90, 91)

² (Mary Anne Layden, Ph.D. Center for Cognitive Therapy, Dept of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania)

³ (Matt Fradd, Porn the Myth, p 149)

⁴ (WebMD May 2017)

⁵ (The Porn Myth, Matt Fradd p.140)

⁶ (Wired for Intimacy, 64-65)

⁷ (marripedia/effects_of_pornography#fn__37)

⁸ (fightthenewdrug.org/how-porn-damages)

Babu John is the Director of TOB for Life, and a speaker on Theology of the Body.