This is a great article. It presents the dangers of internet porn. Great Statistics. Please take a few moments and read/ look at this article.
http://www.projectknow.com/discover/taking-a-whack-at-porn-addiction/
Category Archives: Articles
Great article and commentary on a new movie that is being shown. I highly recommend it. There is a lot of science behind this article, associating viewing porn with addiction.
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By Nisha Lilia
There’s a scene in Don Jon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s new comedy about a womanising New Jersey stud with a rabid porn habit, in which Julianne Moore’s character gently breaks it to Jon that the sex they had was, well, not that good. That, actually, she felt like Jon was pretty much masturbating using her instead of his hand. Jon is stunned, mortified and finally completely confused by his sex life. Because, the truth is, he’s not enjoying it much either. Porn is what he really loves. Porn, porn and more porn.
Jon’s not alone in his love of porn. Statistics are superfluous – we all know it, don’t we? – but here are some anyway: 97% of boys and 80% of girls who responded to a University of East London survey targeting those aged between 16 and 20 said they had viewed porn. In America, one in three women regularly watch porn and 70% of men aged 18 to 24 visit porn sites at least once a month. (And the English-speaking West isn’t even pornography’s most enthusiastic market – that honour goes to Pakistan.)
The question is: does it matter? If we’re all getting our kicks and having a good time, what’s the problem? “It’s a disconnection from what’s really in front of you,” says Gordon-Levitt, who directed, wrote and stars in the film. “Rather than engaging with a unique individual and listening to what the other has to say, right at this moment, we put people in boxes with labels. We objectify each other.”
The consequences of this are worse than you might think. The thin end of the wedge is less enjoyment during sex. Jon’s dissatisfaction with real life sex is something he has in common with a lot of habitual porn users. In his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, the psychiatrist Norman Doidge writes about a phenomenon he began to notice among his male patients in the mid 1990s. They watched porn – “everybody does,” they told Doidge – and were experiencing “increasing difficulty in being turned on by their actual sexual partners, though they still considered them attractive.” They found themselves having to fantastise about porn scenes to get turned on.
That’s because, along with a great number of porn users, they had rewired the arousal pathways in their brains. “Pornography,” writes Doidge, “satisfies every one of the prerequisites for neuroplastic change,” – that is, the brain’s ability to form new neural circuitry. The most important condition is the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that gives us a feeling of exciting pleasure, which porn triggers. The more often you watch porn and get the dopamine hit it delivers, the more the activity and the sensation become entwined in your brain.
Doidge puts it like this: “since neurons that fire together wire together, these men got massive amounts of practice wiring these images into the pleasure centres of the brain.” And, “because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images increased at the expense of what had previously attracted them.”
A related problem is what addiction experts call “tolerance”, in other words the need for more of a given stimulant (harder and weirder porn) for the same amount of dopamine. In the end, the result is what Doidge politely calls “potency problems”. Compulsive pornography users become unable to maintain erections.
Even among more casual users, porn is wreaking havoc in the bedroom. Last year, American GQ’s sex columnist, Siobhan Rosen, complained about the “pornified sex” men seemed to expect – not in a relationship, when trust has been established, but from the very first encounter. She wrote about men she had just started seeing who brandished ball gags, ejaculated on to her body and used really nasty language during sex.
“You don’t want to do those things with someone you hardly know,” she tells me. Men recreating the money shot is something that “has happened to every single one of my girlfriends,” she says. The advertising executive, Cindy Gallop, became so irritated by this very thing that she made it the central complaint of her TED talk when launching her website, makelovenotporn.com, in 2009. The talk went viral.
Gallop is 53 and “only dates younger men, usually men in their twenties,” she tells me over a drink in London. She’s encountered many of the same porn-inspired behaviours as Rosen (who is 30), which is why she decided to set up Make Love Not Porn, to promote “real sex”. “Guys watch porn and when they go to bed with a real woman, all they think about is recreating that scenario,” she says. And women, who are watching porn in ever-greater numbers themselves, “start believing that that is what they have to be like in bed as well.”
The American porn star and sex educator Nina Hartley calls this “doing it on someone else’s template”. Gallop agrees. “The poor guy is going, ‘That porn actress loved it when he did that, so why doesn’t she?‘ Meanwhile, the girl is lying there thinking, ‘The porn actress really loved it when he did that so why don’t I?’” But, she goes on, “in real the world , every single partner you will ever have is different. Different things will turn them on.”
Unfortunately, Rosen says, “a lot of girls don’t speak up” about not enjoying a new partner’s aggressively porn-y approach. “Instead, they’re just like, ‘I guess this isn’t going to work and, you know, it’s over.’ And the men I’ve said something to have felt horrible when I’ve told them. They have no idea and are so sorry. Most of the time they really don’t know they’re doing anything wrong.” All they know is that girls keep breaking up with them.
This romantic failure is especially apparent among boys in their teens and early twenties. The psychologist, Catherine Steiner-Adair, interviewed a thousand children aged between four and 18 across America for her new book, The Big Disconnect. Among her findings was a marked tendency among boys to approach girls they liked in a sexually aggressive manner. “That is a trend,” she tells me. “There’s no question about it.” They send extremely crude messages – Steiner-Adair gave me a dozen examples, none of which I can reproduce here – and, unsurprisingly, “the girls don’t like it.” And they rebuff the boys.
“The boys are very confused about how to approach girls,” she says. “Their sexual education is porn. And it’s very misogynistic and violent porn.” Porn has become more extreme over the last two decades, probably because its users’ “tolerance” has rapidly increased with the ubiquity of internet connections. Steiner-Adair had conversations with boys who wanted to know why women liked being choked when they were having sex or why women liked being urinated on.
Because young men lack the experience that would allow them to differentiate between an extreme sexual performance and real sex, says Steiner-Adair, some of them “are surprised when the girls don’t want to play out the scenarios that they have been watching.” The result is mutual unhappiness, frustration and disappointment. And, according to Doidge, a potentially permanently addled sexuality thanks to the presence of porn during this highly plastic period of brain development….
Found a great article on FACEBOOK, written by Matt Walsh. He ridicules modern “health” and ‘sex-education teachers for their foolishness and culturally corrosive explanations about ‘casual sex’. LOVED it… well done Matt!
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Matt Walsh: Abstinence is unrealistic and old fashioned
Shocker: Matt Walsh knocked it out of the park again.
His latest, “Abstinence is unrealistic and old fashioned”
From my inbox, an email from a high school student named Jeremy:
“Dear Matt, first I want to say I really like your blog. One of my teachers actually mentioned it in class once after you wrote something (she didn’t mention it in a good way lol) and I went and looked you up so I’ve been following you ever since. I know you get so much email so I don’t expect you to see this but in case you do I wanted to get your opinion about something. You write a lot about relationships and everything so I’m wondering if you think abstinence should be encouraged in school?
Reason I’m asking is because we are doing our sex ed lessons in health class now and the topic has come up. Yesterday my health teacher was talking about safe sex and someone mentioned abstinence and she said it wasn’t realistic. She said it was an out dated way of thinking and the people who push for it are out of touch because they were probably kids a long time ago. She said sometimes sex can be more casual and isn’t always a part of something serious. Then she asked how many people in the class are sexually active because she said it was important for people not to be ashamed. Almost all the guys in class raised their hands but I didn’t. They were all talking about how sex doesn’t have to be something for marriage or long term relationships. I always wanted to wait for marriage and I hope it’s not weird for me to say that. They said in class that we should be more accepting of sexual expression that doesn’t conform to older ideas. But I still always wanted to wait for marriage. But at this point I feel like an outcast or something.
I read something you wrote about dating once and it seemed like you were saying that people should wait for marriage [to have sex]. What do you thinkabout what my teacher said? Am I weird for not really wanting to go out and hook up with girls and stuff and instead wait for marriage?”
Dear Jeremy,
Yes, it’s weird for you to want to wait until marriage. In spite of the hyper-sexualization of our culture; in spite of society’s decaying moral sensibility; in spite of all of the messages that bombard you every day through every available medium; in spite of the pressure from your classmates; in spite of the bullying from that fool of a “health teacher,” you STILL stand tall and resolve to save yourself for your future wife.
Man, that is weird. It’s also awesome, inspiring, courageous, and extraordinary. Not to mention, Jeremy, you’re doing the RIGHT thing. You’ve got more character than most adults in this country, and you should be commended for it.
Speaking of adults without character, please ignore everything your “health teacher” says on this subject. I have to put quotes around her title because it doesn’t sound like she’s doing much in the way of teaching, and whatever she’s blabbering about has very little to do with “health.” She seems to think there’s a “safe” way for emotionally immature juveniles to have casual sex. Maybe she’ll follow up this performance by advocating “safe drunk driving.”
Dude, I had to go outside and breathe a little before I even attempted to write back. There is so much I want to say about this woman and the nonsense she spews. In any other context, an adult would probably find themselves on a statewide registry if they went up to a bunch of kids and asked about their sex lives. But this was “educational,” so it’s cool. The most charitable possible interpretation I can muster is that she’s an overgrown gossipy teenager who thinks she’s at a slumber party. “OMG you guys! So who here has had sex??? Let’s play truth or dare!!!!” A less charitable translation of her actions would lead me to the conclusion that she was actively attempting to pressure and humiliate people like you. And not just you, Jeremy. You said every guy in the class raised their hands? Yeah, a lot of them were lying, because that’s just the sort of thing dudes lie about.
So, Mrs. Health Teacher has singlehandedly declared sexual morality dead, has she? With one scoff and wave of her wand she’s buried thousands of years of insight into the topic? Anyone who advocates such things must be “old” and “out dated”?
Hmmm. Well, this tattooed 27 year old former DJ happens to be on your side, man.
God forgive me, I’m not old fashioned at all. I don’t think you are, either. Truth only seems old fashioned nowadays because we’ve grown so accustomed to deceit and manipulation. But Truth is eternal, so it can never be old or new. It never ‘was’ or ‘will be.’ It just ‘is.’ It always ‘is.’ Truth never grows old, and if you believe in it and try to live by it, you will always be, in some ways — the only ways that matter — the youngest, freshest, most energetic rebel on the block.
So here’s the point, Jeremy:
Our culture tells a lot of lies about sex. Your teacher is one of the liars.
There’s plenty of ignorance on the subject. Plenty of confusion. But it’s the lies I hate. The lies that come from people who know better. The people who have made mistakes and now encourage others to make them, too.
You could ask any married person who slept with other people before meeting their spouse (I wouldn’t recommend actually asking this, I’m just trying to illustrate a point here): are you happy about it? Are you glad that you gave yourself to someone other than the person you now love eternally? If you could go back to those times, would you stop yourself?
Was it worth it?
Really, was it worth it?
Do you wish you could say that your spouse is the only person who has experienced these intimate, sacred moments with you? Are you proud that there are other men or women in the world who have seen this side of you? Are you satisfied that what you give to your spouse is now secondhand?
If they tell you they feel happy or neutral about the fact that they gave themselves to someone other than their spouse, you’re dealing with someone in a very dysfunctional marriage. Any honest person in a healthy relationship would tell you they’d erase those moments from their lives if they could. They can’t, of course. Nobody can. We can’t live in the past and harp on our mistakes, but this all leads to an important point: the myth of “casual sex” persists, even though many of us — millions and millions — have seen it for what it is. Marriage as an institution is in rough shape, but people still do get married in this country. That means millions have had to look at their spouse and say — probably silently in their own heads, deep in their subconscious — “I have nothing new to give to you.”
It’s a tragedy, really. It’s a shame. You deal with it and you move on, but “casual sex” has taken its chunk and you’ll never get it back.
Yet few will speak against the predators and perverts in media, Hollywood, and Academia who promote this “casual sex” deception. There should be armies of people opposing it, but instead there is only a small, fringe group of cultural insurgents; the ones we point and laugh at and accuse of having a “boring” and “outdated” view of sexuality.
This is another lie. Casual sex proponents are the ones who have turned sex into something trivial, banal, utilitarian, pointless, joyless, one-dimensional, lifeless, lonely, and disappointing. How could the ones who hold it as sacred also be the ones who make it “boring”? No, it’s mainstream culture that’s made sex boring. It’s mainstream culture that is, in fact, afraid of sex. That’s why we spend so much energy shielding ourselves from every natural aspect of it, other than the physical sensation itself.
And the ones who believe it to be so much more than that are the ones who make it “boring”? THEY are the ones who are afraid of it? They embrace all of it, every part of it, and they are the ones who “hate sex”?
Ridiculous. Casual sex is a lie. It’s a lie that rests on lies and breeds lies and turns people into liars.
We’re told that we are sexually “liberated” if we throw ourselves at strangers and give ourselves over to people who couldn’t possibly care less about us. This is yet another lie. If modern attitudes about sex have “liberated” us, what, precisely, have we been freed from? Security? Commitment? Trust? What, we’ve broken the Shackles of Purity and Love and run gleefully into the Meadows of Pornography and Herpes? Because that’s all that our sexual liberation has wrought. A lot of confusion, a lot of porn, a lot of disease, a lot of emotionally desperate, psychologically battered, spiritually broken people wandering around, searching for another stranger who’s willing to go in for a few more rounds of sterile, shallow, pointless sex.
Let freedom ring, right?
Libertas, madam Health Teacher!
It’s quite interesting, though. Casual sex has liberated us, yet casual sex produces so many regrets. The landscape is rife with people who have felt the sting of our “hook-up culture.” But where are the people who regret abstinence and monogamy? Sure, some people, while married, think they regret having not “played the field.” Then they play it. And then they learn what regret really feels like.
Even the term “casual sex” is insane. It’s an oxymoron. Denim is casual. Restaurants can be casual. Casual: without serious intention, careless or offhand, informal. A high-five is casual. Sex can only be viewed in this same vein once we have dehumanized ourselves enough to see human sexuality as something no more significant than a pair of jean shorts.
Describing sex as “casual” is like describing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as a “nice little doodle.” That’s what I can’t stand — the people who diminish and cheapen sex are the ones who get to pass themselves off as “sexually enlightened.”
It doesn’t surprise me that your crackpot health teacher pulled out the “sexual expression” line. She teaches in our schools yet she doesn’t even understand the words she speaks. To “express” means to SAY something. It means you are indicating something of meaning. When you “express yourself” you are conveying a message about your thoughts, feelings, and character. So shouldn’t we, rather than encouraging sexual expression for the sake of it, encourage MEANINGFUL and POSITIVE sexual expression? In the context of commitment and loyalty, sex expresses something. It expresses: “I love you. I give myself to you.” But what does casual sex express? “Use me and I’ll use you.”
That’s an expression, alright. An awfully sad, pitiful expression. You’re right to have no interest in going down this road.
It sounds like you want to express a different message: self-respect and maturity; honesty and integrity; patience.
And, when the time comes, you’ll express love. Then, you’ll be able to say that you only ever expressed this sort of love to the one person who deserves it. And you’ll both be better for it.
So, in summation, your health teacher is full of it.
You’re on the right path. You’re a rebel. Keep going.
Thanks for writing,
Matt
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Twitter: @MattWalshRadio
Lesbianism: the Fruit of Cultural Acceptance of Porn
This is an interesting article linking male use of pornography and the rise of young women claiming to be lesbians. Several quotes stand out: “But I have to wonder: Are there so many girl-girl couples out there because that’s truly who they are – or because the guys are such losers?” The author is referring to men who encourage their girl friends to kiss other girls, and/or to men watching lesbian sexual contact through porn. This is another sad link to our cultural deterioration as a result of the porn industry.
The Stats on Prostitution
Prov 6:26 for a harlot may be hired for a loaf of bread, but an adulteress stalks a man’s very life.
Prov 23:27 (WEB) For a prostitute is a deep pit; and a wayward wife is a narrow well.
Prov 23:28 (RSV) She lies in wait like a robber and increases the faithless among men.
When a young disciple goes off on deployment or away to college and ‘suddenly’ appears to lose his faith, the first thing that I suspect is that he has been to a prostitute or committed acts of fornication. Scriptures teach that she ‘increases the faithless among men’. Continue reading
Anyone Can Rationalize Anything….
In the Navy it is called Fraud, Waste and Abuse. Government employees, on government time, using government computers accessing a lot of porn. We desperately need revival in our country.
While Nero Fiddled, Rome Burned
This story is amazing but sadly, not surprising. Porn and it’s pervasiveness has infiltrated our whole society. It distracts us, consuming our energies, our passions and steals all our productive time. As you can read from the article, what part did porn play in the recent financial collapse on Wall St?
Ghosts of Cruises Past
When onboard the USS Enterprise, our ship made frequent visits to the Philippine Islands. One particular port was know for its prostitutes. Sadly, it was also known for the rampant extent of its venereal diseases. One sailor in my division got VD six different times on the cruise. Toward the end of the cruise, the ship ran out of penicillin. This was also the cruise where the ‘black clap’ was first recognized. This was the the first of apparently many drug resistant strains of various types of VD. It looks like the the same thing is still happening. Again, God is not mocked….
God is Not Mocked
A recent article posted on Reuters speaks about the further dangers of oral sex. A lot of people think that oral sex, anal sex and other forms of sex are not really ‘intercourse’. This is a false notion. Deut says that the Lord will keep us from sexual diseases if we follow him. Exodus 15:26 He said, “If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you.”
Teenage Girls to Parents: Protect us from SEX
Young men have become so saturated with porn that when they are alone with girls, they are demanding sex. This has prompted a call FROM girls to their parents to chaperone them and to NOT leave them alone with boys….
