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

get the same buzz, you need more alcohol. And so the alcoholic begins to drink harder liquor, or drink larger quantities.

The same thing happens with porn. Because porn teaches us that sex is all about the body, and not about intimacy, then the only way to get a greater “high” or that same buzz is to watch weirder and weirder porn. I think most of us would be horrified if we saw what most porn today really is. It isn’t just pictures of naked women like there used to be in Playboy; most is very violent, extremely degrading, and very ugly.

“Regular” intercourse is actually not depicted that often in porn, and so quite frequently the person who watches porn starts to get a warped view of what sex really is. And often they start to want weirder and weirder things.

Now, I’m not against spicing things up, and I do think lots of things can be fun! But when we’re wanting “more” because we’ve programmed ourselves to think “the weirder the sexier”, there’s a problem.

 

6. Porn Makes it Hard to Be Tender When You Have Sex

 

It’s no wonder, then, that people who use porn often  have a hard time being tender when they have sex. Sex tends to be impersonal, rushed, and “forced”. I’m absolutely not saying that all porn users rape their wives, but porn itself is often violent. There’s no foreplay. There’s no waiting to arouse someone. It’s just taking what you want.

Being tender means to be loving. It’s to give and to express affection. Because these things aren’t paired with sex in the porn users brain, tenderness and sex no longer go together.

 

7. Porn Trains You to Have Immediate Gratification and Have a Difficult Time Lasting Long

 

With porn, when you’re aroused you reach orgasm very quickly, because porn users tend to masturbate at the same time. Thus, orgasm tends to be very fast. The porn user hasn’t trained his body to draw out sex so that his spouse can get pleasure; his body is programmed to orgasm quickly. Many porn users, then, suffer from premature ejaculation.

Some porn users go to the other extreme when they start suffering from erectile dysfunction. They have a difficult time remaining “hard” enough during sex because the stimulation isn’t enough. In their case, orgasm can take an eternity, if it’s possible at all.

While both seem like polar opposites, the simple fact is that sexual dysfunction of some sort is one of the big negative effects of pornography.

 

8. Porn Gives You a Warped View of what Attractive Is

 

Sex is supposed to bond you physically, emotionally and spiritually with your spouse. But if porn has made the chemical pathways in your brain go haywire, then sex becomes only about the body. And porn shows you that only certain body types are attractive. It’s not about the whole person; it’s just a certain type of person.

If a woman gains even ten pounds, then, she’s no longer attractive, and the porn user has an honest to goodness difficult time getting aroused, because he associates only a certain body type with arousal. Porn has taught your brain that sex is only about the body, and not about the relationship, so if someone’s body isn’t exactly right, no arousal happens.

 

9. Porn Makes Sex Seem Like Too Much Work

 

All of this combines to often make sex with your spouse too much work. You’re not aroused; you find your spouse not attractive; sex is blah; and sex requires you to make an effort for your spouse, while you’re used to immediate gratification.

Thus, many people who use porn retreat into a life of masturbation. Even if the porn use stops, they often find it easier to “relieve” themselves in the shower than to have to work at sex.

 

10. Porn Causes Selfishness

 

All of this causes a spiral of selfishness where the person ignores his spouse’s needs and is focused only on getting what he wants, and getting it instantly. Often this manifests itself in other areas of the relationship as well, where the spouse becomes annoyed if they have to wait for something, or if they don’t get what they want. Porn has sold them the message: you deserve pleasure when you want it. You shouldn’t have to work to get what you want. Your needs are paramount.

It’s no wonder that shows up in other areas of your relationship.

 

People who think that porn is harmless and simply helps people “get in the mood”, or “relieves frustration”, are kidding themselves. The chemical processes in our brains are really complicated, and when you start messing with them, it’s really difficult to develop a healthy sexuality again.

 

 

 

Chapter 6.1. - Too Much Porn (Part 5)

This former porn star is exposing porn’s secrets: and it should make you very, very uncomfortable

 

“If porn is as bad as you say it is, why does anyone still work in porn?”

This is a common response to anti-porn advocates who argue that pornography is sexually violent, the visual celebration of rape and a perverse glorification of the degradation of women and girls.

There are, of course, many answers to this question: Some women are desperate for money; many, if not most, have been sexually abused; still others have been deceived into thinking that the porn business is a glamorous and sexy business (the mainstreaming of Playboy and the increasing crossover of porn stars into other entertainment industries has certainly contributed to that).

But to find out what women experience inside the porn industry firsthand, I decided to call someone who’d been through it herself: Shelley Lubben.

 

"I can’t tell you how many porn addicts have lost their families and jobs. It’s really sad. And they’re contributing to children being raped. I’m like—for a better reason not to click on porn, [think about] child porn. Just think, right now as I’ve been talking to you, there are little children that are being drugged and raped. How could anyone click on porn knowing that?”

 

 

Shelley Lubben was a porn star in the 1990s, having entered the industry as a prostitute at a very young age. The “sexual exploitation industries,” as Dr. Mary Anne Layden refers to the various aspects of the sex business, soon began to take their toll.

 

 

 

“It’s a vicious circle [being] a sex worker, because you’re stripping, taxi dancing, and you just get burned out in prostitution,” Lubben told me. “After prostitution I got burned out, and I was lied to that I would be safe from STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) and I would make all this money. I was a single parent, so what the heck, might as well do sex on camera. But it was completely and utterly the worst, darkest thing I’ve ever been involved in.”

 

For starters, Lubben had assumed that unlike in prostitution, where many of the johns didn’t want to use condoms, the porn industry would at least keep her safe from STDs. It didn’t—and that’s because, as Lubben tells it, the entire porn industry is rife with them.

 

“We didn’t use condoms in porn,” she said bluntly. “There’s no condoms allowed, so we’re forced to do unprotected sex—and I can’t tell you how many people alter their tests. Just last year, they had 4 HIV cases, a high bunch out of a very small group of people…we know that most of the porn stars have had an STD at one time or another, and they estimate between 66% to 99% have herpes. They don’t test for herpes, so all these people are involved with rampant STDs.

 

 

“Even the LA Public Health Department shows they’ve been monitoring and they came up with thousands and thousands [of cases] of chlamydia and gonorrhea. They’re the highest group in California to have that many STDs. So when people click [on porn], they’re contributing to sex trafficking, they’re contributing to STDs, they’re contributing to people who are mostly alcohol to drug addicts. Now I’m speaking of the majority. Not every porn star’s a drug addict, but the majority of them are. And I can’t tell you, when I went through recovery, I had PTSD. I had all kinds of disorders, serious traumas.”

 

 

RELATED: The James Deen porn scandal is so much worse than what’s being reported

 

 

It’s a story I have read time and time again in my research on the porn industry, so I had to ask: why did she get involved in the sexual exploitation industries in the first place?

“Well I’d been sexually abused at nine years old by a teenage boy and his sister,” Shelley Lubben replied. “So I experienced very shocking heterosexual and homosexual activity at a very young age, and at the same time I was raised by the television - I was allowed to watch R-rated movies, horror movies, movies with sexual content, so I learned about love and sex from abuse and from basically parental neglect, because they would just allow us to watch these things.

“And then as I got older, I was rebelling because my dad was not very involved in my life, and I began to look for sex with boys because the boys would say they loved me. So it was this cycle that I felt in my head that I’m loved if I have sex with a person. My dad kicked me out on the street for being rebellious, and I ended up in San Fernando, LA, which is Porn Valley, and a pimp lured me in, and I was very naïve. No, I was rebellious, I was not naïve. He lured me in for 35 dollars, and then he… you know, I had to escape from him physically, because he became very abusive, and then a Madame found me, and it just spiraled on.”

Once she was embedded, Lubben felt trapped in a cycle of degradation and destruction.

“I would hate prostitution, feel guilty, then I would do stripping to survive,” she said. “I had no education - most of these girls that enter porn do not really have an education, there’s gonna be maybe a few that say they have degrees, although I have yet to see one - but most of the girls don’t come from, like, healthy families, where they have a healthy self-esteem. I haven’t really met porn stars with really healthy families. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but maybe they exist in their mind because of course different girls are gonna wanna say they’re empowered by their sex work, because what you can’t beat, you’re gonna join. You don’t want people to think you’re weak when you’re in porn; you wanna act like you love it and you love rough stuff, and you love being violated, and called degrading names. It’s all just a pack of lies. People do porn because they need the money, and most of them don’t have other options or education.”

The porn industry is dark, evil, and incredibly violent—and it has been that way for a very long time. I read Lubben some of Dr. Gail Dines’ research on how pornography is becoming more violent, and then asked her if that reflected her experience.

 

 

 

“Absolutely,” she replied. “It was even violent back in my day, but I got involved in hardcore porn just because I was still filled with rage from my parents. But yeah, in my day I would have never let anyone rip my mouth or put some weird gadget