Brain on Porn (Social #1) - DeYtH Banger (uplifting book club books .txt) 📗

feeling bad about themselves [17] and dissatisfied with their partners. [18]

Learning about sex from porn also means absorbing a lot of dangerous ideas about sexuality and women. [19] (See How Porn Warps Ideas About Sex.) Amateur porn, which claims to be more natural and real, actually teaches the same attitudes and reproduces the same false stereotypes as professionally produced porn—sometimes worse! [20]

Ultimately, porn doesn’t deliver the satisfaction and healthy enjoyment it promises. [21] It leads to damaged relationships, disappointment, and isolation. [22] (See Why Porn Leaves Consumers Lonely.) Tinbergen’s butterflies were simply reacting to instinct when they were fooled by the “supermodel decoys,” but humans are not victims of their evolution. You can choose to recognize porn for the deception it is. You can reject porn’s lies and choose real life, real relationships, and real love.

 

 

 

(Note: Nothing is really enough.)

 

 

 

Porn promises immediate satisfaction, endless excitement, and easy intimacy, but in the end, it robs the consumer of all three. The more pornography an individual consumes, the more he or she tends to withdraw emotionally from real people and rely on porn. Eventually, it becomes more difficult to be aroused by a real person or to form a real relationship, and the resulting isolation and loneliness fuel the need for more porn.

Author and political activist Naomi Wolf has traveled all over the United States talking with college students about relationships. “When I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike,” she says. “They know they are lonely together … and that [porn] is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out.” [1]

But what does porn have to do with loneliness?

“The more one uses pornography, the more lonely one becomes,” says Dr. Gary Brooks, a psychologist who has worked with porn addicts for the last 30 years. [2] “Anytime [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.” [3] The worse people feel about themselves, the more they seek comfort wherever they can get it. Normally, they would be able to rely on the people closest to them to help them through their hard times—a partner, friend, or family member. But most porn consumers aren’t exactly excited to tell anyone about their porn habits, least of all their partner. So they turn to the easiest source of “comfort” available: more porn.

“When one partner uses porn at a high frequency,” explains researcher Dr. Ana Bridges, “there can be a tendency to withdraw emotionally from the relationship.” [4] That’s partly because porn consumption causes the brain to rewire itself to connect sexual arousal with porn’s fantasies, [5] (see How Porn Changes The Brain) making it more difficult for the consumer to become aroused by a real person in a real relationship. [6] (See How Porn Damages Consumers’ Sex Lives.)

According to Bridges, as a porn consumer withdraws from his or her relationships, they experience “increased secrecy, less intimacy and also more depression.” [7] Studies have found that when people engage in an ongoing pattern of “self-concealment,”—which is when they do things they’re not proud of and keep them a secret—it not only hurts their relationships and leaves them feeling lonely, but also makes them more vulnerable to serious psychological issues. [8] For both male and female porn consumers, their habit is often accompanied by problems with anxiety, body-image issues, poor self-image, relationship problems, insecurity, and depression. [9]

That may be one reason why porn consumers struggle so much in their closest relationships. Studies have consistently shown that porn consumers tend to feel less love and trust in their marriages. [10] They also experience more negative communication with their partners, feel less dedicated to their relationship, have a harder time making adjustments to their partner, enjoy less sexual satisfaction, and commit more infidelity. [11] Meanwhile, spouses of porn consumers report decreased intimacy in their marriages and a feeling of being less understood by their porn-consuming partners. [12] Relationship experts, Doctors John and Julie Gottman explain, “there are many factors about porn use that can threaten a relationship’s intimacy [which] for couples is a source of connection and communication between two people. But when one person becomes accustomed to masturbating to porn, they are actually turning away from intimate interaction.”

A second reason porn consumers struggle with relationships is because of the nature of porn itself. Porn portrays both men and women as little more than bodies with a single purpose, to give and receive sexual pleasure. [13] Whether porn consumers like it or not, those perceptions often start creeping into how they see themselves and other people in real life. [14] The harder it becomes for users to see themselves and others as anything more than sexual objects, the harder it is to develop and nurture real relationships. [15]

“There’s a certain way of experiencing sexual arousal that is the opposite of closeness,” Brooks says. “At best, it can be managed somewhat by some people, but most of the time it creates a barrier that poisons relationships.” [16] The Gottmans go on to explain, “when watching pornography the user is in total control of the sexual experience, in contrast to normal sex in which people are sharing control with the partner. Thus a porn user may form the unrealistic expectation that sex will be under only one person’s control… the relationship goal of intimate connection is confounded and ultimately lost.”

Porn promises immediate satisfaction, endless excitement, and easy intimacy, but in the end, it robs a consumer of all three.

The kind of intimacy porn offers is nothing more than sexual titillation. Real intimacy offers so much more. Real intimacy is a world of satisfaction and excitement that doesn’t disappear when the screen goes off. It’s the breathtaking risk of being vulnerable with another human being. It’s inviting them not just into your bedroom, but into your heart and life. Real intimacy is about what we give, not just what we get. It’s other-centered, not self-centered. Intimacy is understanding someone at a level porn never attempts, and having the life-altering experience of having them listen—really listen—to you in return. It’s seeing yourself through other eyes, and caring about others as much as you care about yourself. It’s the astonishing, baffling, wonderful experience that artists and philosophers have been trying to describe ever since our lonely human tribe began.

It’s the opposite of loneliness. It’s love.

 

 

 

 

The Porn Industry’s Dark Secrets

 

(Note: You should be sick... if abusive turns you on... )


Would you support a business if you knew that they abused some (but not all) of their female employees? Pornographers don’t want you to think about it, but even if some of the humiliation, degradation, and sexual violence you see in porn is consensual, some is not.

“

I got the &*%$ kicked out of me …. Most of the girls start crying because they’re hurting so bad …. I couldn’t breathe. I was being hit and choked. I was really upset and they didn’t stop. They kept filming. [I asked them to turn the camera off] and they kept going.

REGAN STARRFORMER PORN ACTOR [1]

In the spring of 2004, during the American occupation of Iraq, the world was shocked to learn that US soldiers were abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Hundreds of leaked photos showed Iraqi prisoners being made to crawl on the floor wearing leashes, wear panties on their heads, masturbate for the camera, touch other men’s naked bodies, and even more degrading behaviors that we are not comfortable mentioning here. What horrified the public was not only the human rights violations themselves, but the fact that the soldiers recorded the abuse with obvious glee. In many of the photos, soldiers grinned and flashed a “thumbs up” to the camera as they stood over their victims. After an investigation, several soldiers were dishonorably discharged from the military and others served time in prison for what they had done at Abu Ghraib. [2]

That same year, pornographers video-recorded and photographed thousands of women enduring nearly identical treatment and worse. Those images were published on the internet and viewed by millions of porn consumers. There was no public outcry.

Comparing porn to what happened in Abu Ghraib will ruffle some people’s feathers. A knee-jerk reaction is to say, “Those are totally different! In porn, women give their consent!”

But do they? Do we know for sure that anyone in any porn content gave their consent? Defenders of pornography make this argument all the time, that no matter how a woman is treated in porn, it’s okay because she gave her consent. [3] But what if she didn’t? What if she really didn’t want to be painfully dominated, humiliated, and sexually used for the world to see? The truth is, there’s often much more going on than what you see on the screen. That is, perhaps, the porn industry’s biggest, darkest secret: it’s not all consensual.

There is a tendency to believe that “human trafficking” refers to a Third World problem: forced prostitution or child pornography rings in some far-off, developing country. The truth is, sex trafficking is officially defined as a “modern-day form of slavery in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act is under the age of 18 years.” [4] That means anyinstance in which the individual on screen was forced, tricked, or pressured. By that definition, human trafficking is everywhere. [5] (See How Porn Fuels Sex Trafficking.)

The examples are chilling. In 2011, two Miami men were found guilty of spending five years luring women into a human trafficking trap. [6] They would advertise modeling roles, then when women came to try out, they would drug them, kidnap them, rape them, videotape the violence, and sell it to porn stores and businesses across the country.

That same year a couple in Missouri was charged with forcing a mentally handicapped girl to produce porn for them by beating, whipping, suffocating, electrocution, drowning, mutilating, and choking her until she agreed. One of the photos they forced her to make ended up on the front cover of a porn publication owned by Hustler Magazine Group. [7]

So sure, you could say the handicapped girl “agreed” to participate. You could argue that the women voluntarily responded to an ad. But do you really think those victims gave their consent? We all know that’s not real consent, that’s coercion.

In porn, the question of consent can be tricky (and the growing phenomenon of amateur porn makes it even trickier). For example, if one of the participants doesn’t know there’s a camera running, then the porn is not consensual, even if the sex is. Right? What if a person consented to be filmed, but not to have the film shown to anyone else? What if someone manipulated their partner into being filmed in the first place, like making him or her worry that they’d blackmail them if they didn’t cooperate? Or what if a person agreed to have sex, but in the middle, their partner suddenly started doing something that the person who initially gave consent didn’t expect? Did he or she still give consent?

The point is, when you consume porn, there’s no way to know what kind of “consent” the actors have given. You can’t assume, just because someone appears in a porn video, that they knew beforehand exactly what would happen or that they had a real choice or the ability to stop what was being done.

“I’ve never received a beating like that before in my life,” said Alexandra Read after being whipped and caned for 35 minutes. “I have permanent scars up and down the backs of my thighs. It was all things that I had consented to, but I didn’t know quite the brutality of what was about to happen to me until I was in it.” [8]

Did you catch what Alexandra said there? “It was all things that I had consented to.” That’s the problem with treating consent like it’s “all-or-nothing.” She consented to do X. She didn’t consent to do