Brain on Porn (Social #2) - DeYtH Banger (a book to read TXT) 📗

train yourself to recognize these triggers and keep moving past them. Right now, your brain is programmed to seek things out. So when something flashes in front of your eyes the natural response is to chase it down. But following an urge down that rabbit hole can go a lot deeper than you thought. The white rabbit might be enticing but it leads to no wonderland at all. Don’t rationalize! Learn to step back from those moments and see things for what they really are.

 

 

Brian’s Story: Freedom Is Right Around The Corner

 

 

It is a bright Saturday afternoon. I am sitting in church keenly following the program. The choir is singing beautifully. Everyone is looking on.

Just then, a lady comes and sits in the empty chair besides me. “Hi,” she says and I turn to look. It’s a very good friend of mine. After a bit of catching up, amidst the singing of the choir, she picks up my phone and begins perusing through the picture gallery. I begin shivering. My heart beats faster. I feel like snatching the phone away. But I can’t. What would she think if I did? All I do is pray that she doesn’t look at my browser history.

I hold my breath.

 

I keep a side eye, just in case, becoming more and more restless.

Well, my name is Brian and such were my experiences before I decided that enough was enough. I would look at pornography all night long and forget to clear my browser history. I would even, at times, forget to delete the videos I had downloaded. Anxiety was something very normal to me then. Anyone going into my room, perusing through my phone or at my browser history, all made me very anxious. I lived in constant fear that I would be discovered.

My hopelessness worsened the situation. I considered myself a wretched being, devoid of any purpose in life. I knew that I could never make it without help from outside. Inside me there was no strength, I was too weak. Yet, I hoped for freedom every day. I really begged that one day help would come.

I kept searching. Filtration and accountability programs had failed me, making me feel more hopeless. I wanted to stop using porn but I just could not. Sometimes, I would do nothing the whole day other than watch porn and masturbate.

 

One afternoon, after wasting an entire morning acting out, I lay in my bed staring at the ceiling. “What should I do?” I asked myself. I seemed to have no solution. I gave up on thinking. I picked up my phone again and opened the browser. This time I looked for something very different. Unconsciously, I typed in “Overcoming pornography addiction.” As I scrolled through the results, I saw an ad for Fight The New Drug. I clicked and found myself redirected to The Fortify Program. I quickly read through. These people are promising me freedom from porn in one month, I thought. My eyes widened. I sat straight. Reading closely, I understood what it was all about.

I immediately applied for the teen program. I was exceedingly excited. When I received an acceptance email, my joy knew no bounds.

I am now forty days into the program and I can confidently say that freedom is right around the corner. The program has empowered me to fight. It has given me a reason to be hopeful. Although I have relapsed at times, I have always fought again. Only 37% through the program, I am already feeling very uplifted and hopeful. I rarely have anything to hide. My mood is always constant, instead of perpetual ups and downs. My life is coming back once again. The person that I was before porn is slowly coming back. The fulfillment I find in life nowadays is immense.

I sincerely appreciate the Fortify team for such an initiative. You are giving people back their lives. This is indeed the noblest pursuit that man can ever do.

Keep it moving. Keep it strong. Keep fortifying lives.

Chapter 4 - Lies and Lies (Part 3)

 22. We can’t protect our kids from porn in today’s world.

There is no question about whether our children will see porn. Their exposure to it is inevitable.
While making his documentary Porn on the Brain, Martin Daubney was invited to sit in on a class of teen boys and girls at a school in North England with a fantastic reputation. Jonny Hunt, a sex education consultant, stood before a class of uniformed students—wide-eyed, shy, with high-pitched voices, barely adolescents—and asked them to write a list of all the sexual terms they knew, no matter how extreme. When Hunt pinned their lists to the board, every adult in the room was startled about how much these students knew: their index of terms surpassed the knowledge even of the consultant.

After sitting in on several more classes like this one and interviewing some of the children, Daubney wrote, “It seemed as if the children’s entire expectation of sex had been defined by what they see in online porn.” Young girls spoke of how boys expect porn sex in real life. Boys spoke of how they even stumble across bestiality online. Daubney asked the teens, “On a scale of one to ten, how likely would you say it is that boys and girls your age are watching porn online?” The reply was a chorus of tens, nines, and one eight. All the students admitted that their parents had no idea what they were watching.1
Eric Spitznagel, writing for Details magazine, says, “By the time they’re in high school, America’s porn-fed youth have already amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of smut.”2 Spitznagel was not writing this out of concern for teens but was looking upon their experiences with a middle-aged jealousy. Gone are the days of prepubescent boys stumbling on a father’s stash of magazines in the closet. Boys and girls now consume hard-core video material that is readily available to them.
CyberPsychology and Behavior released the results of a study showing that 93 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls in the United States see porn before the age of eighteen, and many of these exposures are not shut-the-laptop-and-walk-away glimpses but porn binges.3 According to the 2010 Youth Internet Safety Survey, a quarter of U.S. teens are exposed to porn online when they aren’t even looking for it.4
The majority of the pornography consumed is accessed on mobile devices.5 An estimated 31 percent of teens own smartphones, and a smartphone without restrictions amounts to an X-rated theater in your pocket.6
Among youth, it is not a matter of merely consuming porn but of becoming porn. Kim Goldman, director of the Santa Clarita Valley Youth Project, says, “Of course girls want to emulate this stuff. Girls talk about feeling like they have to be like what they see on TV.”7 Conservative estimates say that about 20 percent of sixteen-year-olds and 30 percent of seventeen-year-olds have received a sext (a sexually explicit text message) on their cell phones.8 Teens use apps such as Snapchat, Kik, WhatsApp, or iDelete to send nude images of themselves. Often teens will use Tumblr and Facebook to leak sexts of their ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends—a phenomenon called “revenge porn”.
I heard Joanna Angel, owner of the porn company Burning Angel, say that she doesn’t have to coach the young actors doing porn films for the first time. Having indulged in porn since youth, she said, boys and girls come to the porn set ready to perform. They enter their relationships ready to perform too. Pornography is powerful sex education. One study that surveyed teens suggests that the more often young people seek online

porn, the more likely they are to have a “recreational” attitude about sex.9 Among young men who watch porn, 53 percent say that porn has “inspired” them.10
In the face of such an overwhelming trend among youth, do parents have any hope of protecting their children?
First, as parents, we should not allow the trends to cloud our understanding of the role we play. We are not responsible in the short term for every child on the planet. We are responsible for our own children. All the grim statistics should not paralyze us into inactivity.
To help our children to grow up in a pornified world, we must take the double-pronged strategy of both protecting their minds and preparing their character.

Protecting Their Mind









Beginning when your children are very young, think holistically about media choices and access in your home. You must be shrewd about all the media your kids consume. Remember, pornography exists on a spectrum of media options. A report from the American Psychological Association states, “Virtually every media form studied provides ample evidence of the sexualization of women, including television, music videos, music lyrics, movies, magazines, sports media, video games, the Internet, and advertising.”11
You must be the media gatekeepers and never be passive when it comes to the media choices your children make. Watch TV and movies with your children. Know what magazines they are reading and what websites they visit. Be vocal about your values, and ask critical questions. “Is a woman’s true value bound up in how she looks?” “Did you notice that this advertisement is drawing attention to her sex appeal?” Give your

children the language to question the values that are being pushed through sexual images. If you don’t like a certain TV show, movie, or piece of music, tell your children why and then be clear about your expectations.
Some kind of Internet filtering and monitoring is an absolute must. Make this your personal rule: if I am not willing to monitor it, I will not provide it or allow it. This rule should go for you as well: if you install monitoring or filtering software on computers, tablets, and phones that your children use, do the same for yourself—with modified settings so that you can get to the places online you need to go to. This models accountability for your kids.
For a while, I worked for a wonderful software company called Covenant Eyes, and I saw firsthand from the customers the value of raising kids with accountability. Especially when kids are young, strict filtering is a must, but as they get older, you should hold your kids accountable for where they go online as you loosen the filtering restrictions. Notice that the focus here should be on accountability, not on spying. Accountability means that your teens know that their online footprints are being tracked. You aren’t trying to catch them red-handed. If kids grow up in a home where tracking isn’t a punitive measure but simply part of the culture of the home, they are far more likely to embrace it.
Children should be prepared from a young age to deal with porn exposure. Even when all the protective measures are in place in your own home, your child is only as safe as the locker room at school—where kids are walking around with cell phones full of hard-core material. Train your child from a young age how to react when porn appears.
For young children, there’s a fantastic read-aloud book called Good Pictures Bad Pictures. Author Kristen Jensen does a wonderful job of warning children about the existence of pornography.

without provoking needless curiosity. The book presents kids with a simple plan for how to react if they