Meet The Porn Creep

If you search Google for the word “porn” you will get over 234,000,000 sites. “Porn” is searched for almost 350,000 times a day, every day of the year. Clearly, perusing these kinds of materials is a popular pastime, but just because it’s popular doesn’t make it good. I will officially go on the record, right here and right now, that while I am not opposed to the consumption of pornography per se, neither am I convinced that it’s such a good thing for a mature, healthy relationship. One additional note: I will be referring primarily to men throughout this article because we men are by far and away the largest consumers of pornographic materials.

The first (and to my mind, the biggest) issue is the effect that these materials have on our wives and girlfriends. To know that we are actively seeking out images of other women often brings up feelings of jealousy and low self-esteem in our wives, as they see us reacting so favorably to these images. It doesn’t matter if they know that the pictures are airbrushed. It makes no difference how much plastic surgery these women have had, all that matters is that the man they love is having a strong (or stronger) reaction to this other woman than to her. Additionally, these images often set up unrealistic expectations for both partners as to how a woman should look and behave in respect to her man.

Many women have adopted a variety of coping strategies for these situations, the most common that I am familiar with being, “Oh, he’s just being a guy”. Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I hear statements like these, I can’t help but get a sense of resignation and defeated futility from the speaker. It’s like they have just given up, accepting this as a hidden pain that they will just have to live with. I hope that I’m wrong in that, for if my sense is correct, it speaks of a deep tragedy that could easily be rectified by her husband.

Why Is Porn Addictive?

For the human male, orgasm and ejaculation provide the greatest high possible. The effects and action in the male brain has been compared to such street drugs as cocaine and heroin, with similar levels of addiction possible. It bears noting however, that because it is a “natural” high, the bulk of the addictive qualities are psychological.

In the normal course of events, a man’s sexual activity begins at or just after puberty, in the form of masturbation. There are three primary ways that a young man will go about his masturbation, all of them a question of who or what he is focusing on as he performs the act. He can think of the act itself and the specific sensations being produced, or he can think of a girl he knows personally, or he can masturbate while looking at pictures of girls he doesn’t know. The method he chooses in the early months and years of his sexual growth will determine many of his attitudes later in his development.

The first two methods listed are normal, and as far as I know, pose no significant problems in his development as a sexual being, because they are focused on real people: himself and/or a girl he knows personally. The third, masturbating to pornographic images, is where problems begin to arise.

The human brain likes to attach people, objects and events to intense emotional episodes. This is equally true for positive as well as negative emotions. For example, if your first love always wore a particular brand of perfume, then in the future, even when the relationship is long over, the smell of that perfume will evoke a plethora of positive feelings.

Given the peak experience of orgasm, whatever the young man is thinking of at the time of orgasm and ejaculation becomes powerfully linked in his mind as critical to that experience, leading him to seek out a repeat performance, using the same stimulus. If he pleasures himself thinking of a flesh and blood girl, then flesh and blood girls will become associated with this powerful high. Conversely, if the stimulus comes from a video or magazine, then that is what he will seek more of in an effort to achieve the high again.

Picture Or Person, What’s The Difference?

The human mind is an interesting and perplexing construct of contradictions. On the one hand, your mind cannot distinguish between events that occur only in the realm of the imagination and real life events that happen in the real world. And yet, it makes a very clear distinction between real people and images of those same people. In other words, your mind knows that a picture is an object, not a real person.

Consequently, if a young man has the habit of achieving his orgasmic high via images in a magazine, then his sexual urges can become strongly linked to objects rather than people. There are two consequences to this linking: First, the objectification of women, for that is the only way he can interact with them and still achieve his high. In order to be aroused by a woman, he must first see her on some level as an object. There are varying levels of this objectification, but a discussion of them is beyond both the scope of this article, and my own expertise. Suffice to say that it is my belief that exposure to pornographic materials at an early age may be a leading factor in the objectification of women.

The second consequence is less well known. Some men have reported that they are incapable of making love to their spouse without some form of pornographic materials near at hand, such as a magazine open on the bed. In other words, his addiction has progressed to such a point as to render him almost completely incapable of becoming aroused by a flesh and blood woman without the aid of these materials. In psychological circles this is sometimes referred to as “porn creep” (UrbanDictionary) (Wikipedia) the action of pornography subverting normal sexual desires away from healthy relationships, and towards pornography.

Additionally, as is the way of any addiction, there is a question of escalation. Because an image is not a real person, pornography cannot fully satisfy the underlying need for human contact found only in a real relationship. As such, the high becomes less intense as time goes on, leading the consumer to seek out more extreme and explicit materials, and in the process further disassociating them from the ability to form healthy relationships.

What Can We Do?

With the ready access to pornographic materials on the Internet I can only see this problem growing in coming years. I shudder to think of the effects this could have on relationships as these young men mature and enter the world of the adult. My approach, when I caught my sons accessing these materials, was to emphasize respect for human beings, and women in particular.

With the availability of Internet porn, pornography can become a drug of choice to a new generation.
The approach taken by public institutions such as governments and schools is one of highlighting the evils of various behaviors, without addressing the concerns that are driving the behaviors. The message then becomes one of, “Sex is evil. Necessary, but evil.” Think about this: Sex is a fundamental function of human expression and is designed to be extremely pleasurable. Now adults come along and start preaching the message that it’s bad. That kind of weird logic gets them to think they must be really bad (because it feels good so darn good), or causes them to simply tune out the twisted rantings of the adult world. And really you can’t blame the kids since if we think it’s so bad, when clearly it feels so good, then we must not be doing it right and that means we don’t know what we’re talking about.

Our kids need to be taught to value human beings above all, and to respect each other as well as themselves. The best way that I know to do that is to respect them first, for when we respect someone, we consider where they are coming from without projecting our own interpretations of their behaviors. We speak to them with understanding, as guides with sound advice to give, rather than “bosses” with little more than a pocket full of rules for them to follow.

The antidote to a pornographic addiction is relationships, and we can only teach relationship skills by participating in a them.

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