Why Men Really Need To Stop Watching Porn
“Man is not responsible for what happens to him in the sphere of sexual urges since he is obviously not himself the cause of them, but he is entirely responsible for what he does in this sphere.” - Karol Wojtyla (Love & Responsibility)
At the close of 2018, Pornhub, one of the worlds largest pornography websites published its 6th annual review. The annual report revealed the most trending categories of 2018 and compared the overall usage trends to previous years.
In the review, they were quick to boast about the amount of visitors they’ve acquired in the span of a single year: “Visits to Pornhub totaled 33.5 billion over the course of 2018, an increase of 5 billion visits over 2017. That equates to a daily average of 92 million visitors and at the time of this writing, Pornhub’s daily visits now exceed 100 million.”
That single statistic, plus the rest of the report, makes it blatantly clear that porn isn’t going anywhere - or more accurately, porn users aren’t going anywhere.
That begs the questions, are there good reasons to quit porn? If so, what are they?
Do You Have a Lighter?
Cigarettes were cool, until the science caught up. If you’re a millennial, you’ve probably heard stories from your parents detailing how smoking was normal when they were young-with the added disclaimer that they just didn’t know how bad it was back then. It took a while for society to catch up to the science because the data on cigarettes was there starting in the 1940s and 1950s, yet by the late 1960s only a third of the US doctors believed the data. Over time, we have come to accept the data and the link between cigarettes and lung cancer.
Now, pornography is the cigarettes of the 21st century. The data against pornography is starting to pile up quickly. Here are just some of the findings from studies ranging from 2009-2018:
Porn use causes the 3 major addiction-related brain changes: sensitization, desensitization, and hypofrontality.
More porn use correlated with less grey matter in the reward circuit of the brain (leads to men getting “used to” certain types of porn and needing more violent, hardcore types of porn to become aroused).
More porn use correlated with less reward circuit activation in the brain when viewing sexual images. (Similar effect as stated above)
Addicts had greater prefrontal activity to sexual cues, but less brain activity to normal stimuli (matches drug addiction).
The science speaks for itself. Pornography use is harmful. But I think we’re at the point in the game where, though most professionals may not recommend porn as a positive activity, they are weary of declaring it a bad or harmful one. Even though 11 US States passed resolutions declaring porn as a public health issue, there are still articles and studies that are cited in an attempt to say that porn isn’t as bad as everyone’s making it out to be. Pro-pornography advocates also attempt to portray those speaking up about the harmful effects of pornography as religious zealots. However, Gary Wilson from Your Brain on Porn, the organization Fight The New Drug, and author of The Porn Myth, Matt Fradd, have all done a great job providing non-religious reasons to ditch porn.
Yet despite the fact that all the science is stacked against porn there are still over 100 million daily visitors to a single porn streaming site. Either we don’t believe the science, or we don’t care.
Think No Evil
Stopping our porn usage requires more than information transfer. We can know something is bad for us, but usually that’s not enough to convince us to stop.
As men, we might be embarrassed or ashamed of our porn use. But our saving grace, in our minds, is that no one can tell we’re viewing porn. On top of that, our vice isn’t that bad because it only affects us. We say to ourselves, “Maybe porn is bad for me, but it’s not hurting anyone else.” That is a lie straight from the Devil’s mouth.
Who does your porn use hurt besides you? It hurts everyone, your wife (or future wife), your kids, your friends, your neighbors, anyone you interact with, and especially the men and women being exploited.
Your porn use effects every single person around, because they all end up getting a second rate version of you. However, the people who end up getting hurt the most by this are all the women in your life.
Porn-Colored Glasses
Because of porn, we begin to judge the worth of a woman by the amount of lust she elicits in us or by her potential capacity to quench our sexual urge.
We might start doing this mental rearranging at first with only the women we date or see as potential mates but, with frequent porn use, it can spread to how we see all women.
Without realizing it, porn conditions us to see women and judge their “worthiness” in a split second. Their names, backgrounds, and real life stories are of little relevance to us, because we’re only looking for one thing. Eventually, this becomes the filter through which we judge the worth of all femininity. Women cease to be people and are reduced to objects.
A man who is addicted to porn cannot love a woman, because he has conditioned himself to judge her before he even gets to know her. And a man who cannot properly love a woman as his sister, can never love her as his bride. A man without a complete capacity to love is not a real man, but a caricature of manliness.
A Wake Up Call
Now, asking a man to give up porn is not a call for moral castration. Our sexual desires are not bad, dirty, or inherently sinful. Our sexual urges are not signs of an addicted, repressed boy, it’s a sign of a biologically healthy man. However, the sexual urge, has a spiritual purpose as well. Biologically our sexual urge tells us to find a mate to keep our species going. Without the sexual urge our species would not feel the biological drive to reproduce and our species would die out.
We know, or should know, that we can’t just have any woman we want and in whatever context we want. And despite what our culture may tell us, we know one of those prerequisites is love. That is because the sexual urge is an intense call for spiritual intimacy. In authentic intimacy we give ourselves completely to another holding absolutely nothing back, physically or spiritually. That is why the act of sex itself is a simultaneous union of the physical and spiritual realities of who we are.
The sexual urge finds its proper end, or reason for existing, in a mutually loving consensual, and sacramental embrace. No union is more perfect than Marriage. Therefore, our sexual urge is not just a calling to procreate, but also a calling love.
Pornography turns the sexual urge on its head. Porn conditions us treat the sexual urge as a desire that requires fulfillment. Men who have grown up watching porn regularly don’t think of the sexual urge as reminder of their vitality as a man or a call to authentic love, they see end up seeing it as an itch that needs to be scratched.
That is why we described vice as a disposition that is against our nature. Pornography, and lust, are against our nature as men. Because of porn we don’t know how to properly relate to women, we misinterpret the sexual urge, and ultimately are unable to love. Porn emasculates us, because it takes away what is necessary for us to be a man.
Take Away
The problem with porn is biological and relational. It changes your brain chemistry and changes how you relate to those around you. That is why all men need to make a concerted effort to rid themselves of porn and the vice of lust.
If the science doesn’t inspire you to ditch porn for good, hopefully the relational effects do.
Verso L’alto - Renzo