PORN IS A FORM OF MALE VIOLATION AGAINST WOMEN
In times of crisis, we’re acutely aware of our need for relief, but I fear we’re not always aware of the damage we cause towards others in the process. One of the primary problems with porn is that one person’s relief is another person’s exploitation. The fantasy world created in porn requires a woman (or another human being) to be reduced to an object or commodity. In porn, a woman’s body is used to absorb the anxiety and anger men will not suffer.
Porn = Violence to women
Porn is always moving to greater levels of violation and degradation. This is why many men will see an escalation from their first porn exposure to what now arouses them. In the beginning, a swimsuit catalogue may have been enough, but now hardcore imagery is needed in order to achieve the same effect. Pornographers know that we start with a sacred longing for beauty, but that soon gets hijacked by our demand to control beauty, followed by the eventual desire to see beauty itself be degraded beneath us.
Porn draws men in to experience the warmth of sex and the fire of desire, but once we’ve witnessed the life-giving power of women, we’re confronted with a two-choice dilemma: live in awe before them or violate them. Researchers analyzed the content of over 300 popular pornography videos and found that men mostly prefer to violate this beauty as 88.2 percent of the scenes contained aggressive acts.[iii]
Personal healing helps stop the demand for exploitation
We can all agree that we’re entering a historic time of uncertainty. As we do our part to mitigate the suffering of others through social distancing and quarantine measures, let’s not forget our digital ethics as well. Even more heartbreaking than facing financial stress would be to become increasingly calloused to the impact our demand for porn has on the bodies and stories of the human beings marketed for sexual consumption. If we’re going to counter a global health pandemic and a porn pandemic, we’ll all need to do our part to protect others and learn generative practices of self-soothing. Learning to find calm in the face of adversity is not only an investment in our mental health, it also helps lessen the burden we place on others.
6 THINGS YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW TO FIGHT PORN AND ANXIETY:
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- Recognize that the specifics of your porn search reveal something about what you are attempting to reverse or repeat in your life. Watch this preview episode to learn more.
- Watch this short video from Dan Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. Siegel offers a simple and eloquent phrase for people who find themselves in distress: “name it to tame it.” When we identify and name our concerns, our emotional life is soothed.
- Download an app like Headspace to learn how to pay attention to the ‘traffic’ going on inside your mind. It will help you practice new ways of finding calm as the anxiety intensifies both within and outside of you.
- Stop and think about how porn influences you to feel afterwards. Consider if you really want to intensify your futility, shame, and loneliness.
- Pursue activities that engage the senses. Cooking a new recipe, playing an instrument, or writing a haiku will all allow you to experience far more life-giving experiences of pleasure and power.
- Talk to a trusted guide (therapist or mentor) or an ally about some of the anxiety you’re harboring. Many therapists are now offering sessions online. Go to psychologytoday.com to see therapists in your area who can work with your insurance (if you have it).
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ADDITIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR LONGER TERM SUPPORT
The Journey Course. This guided journey will help you outgrow your use of pornography. Through a cutting-edge sexual behavior self-assessment and 18 episodes, you’ll learn to identify and transform the key drivers of pornography in your life.
Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing. Unwanted is based on research I completed on nearly 4,000 men and women. The premise is that our unwanted sexual behaviors (use of porn, infidelity, hookups) are not random and therefore have a great deal to teach us.
This article originally appeared on jay-stringer.com.
Sources
[i] Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (2016). Liking, Wanting, and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction. American Psychologist, 71(8), 670-679. doi:10.1037/amp0000059; Berridge, K.C., & Kringelbach, M. L. (2015). Pleasure Systems in the Brain. Neuron, 86, 646-664. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2015.02.018; Hilton, D. L. (2013). Pornography Addiction—A supranormal stimulus considered in the context of neuroplasticity. Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 3:20767. doi:10.3402/snp.v3i0.20767; Pitchers, K. K., et al. (2013). Natural and Drug Rewards Act on Common Neural Plasticity Mechanisms with DeltaFosB as a Key Mediator. Journal of Neuroscience, 33(8), 3434-3442. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4881-12.2013; Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself. New York: Penguin Books.
[ii] Bridges, A. J. (2010). Pornography’s Effect on Interpersonal Relationships. In J. Stoner and D. Hughes (Eds.) The Social Costs of Pornography: A Collection of Papers (pp. 89-110). Princeton, NJ: Witherspoon Institute; Paul, P. (2007). Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. New York: Henry Hold and Co., 153; Zillmann, D. (2004). Pornografie. In R. Mangold, P. Vorderer, and G. Bente (Eds.) Lehrbuch der Medienpsychologie (pp.565–85). Gottingen, Germany: Hogrefe Verlag;
[iii] Bridges AJ, Wosnitzer R, Scharrer E, Sun C, Liberman R. Aggression and sexual behavior in best-selling pornography videos: a content analysis update. Violence Against Women. 2010 Oct;16(10):1065-85. doi: 10.1177/1077801210382866.PMID: 20980228
