Why watching Porn is Toxic!

As I watched the video above, I had a passing thought... How correct I was about the side effects of the so called pornographic industry on our society at large. I couldn't have felt more happier about my judgement as Ran really lists out what are repercussions of watching porn, both on the people who feature in it and on the people who watch it. Not to forget such people's influence on their beloved's life!

It has been close to 5 years that I actually took this public stance and declared on my Face book page that people who watch porn need therapy and really need to get real actually. Cos you see when things go missing we humans substitute the real thing with a seemingly satisfying option that comes closest to the real thing, choices choices! Nobody taught us the value of going after the right things, instead we are taught to cope and told that we are independent and other rubbish and then taught how to be highly individualistic! All that jazz is great but I ask one and only one question from those proponents of the theory of Independent living and please by all means ponder for a while and then answer it to yourself and not on this blog to spit venom on me but "Is there anything in your life, starting from the origins of your body to what you are wearing to your work and your amenities that you pay for created by you almost exclusively for you?"

In other words... my darlings you pay for something that someone else made, grew or gave, it doesn't matter if its in return for someone thing in cash or kind but you have to agree that it just did not drop out of nowhere and landed at your doorstep for your consumption. You don't create everything by yourself and in the process of working, you do offer your services in exchange for money so your income is also because of someone Else's dependency on you or your services! You grew up in your mother's womb and not independently in some freely floating bubble in the air!... So unless and until you don't think broadly and see the level of dependency and interconnectedness of this world we live in I am sorry you can keep yourselves deluded for a lifetime! By dependence I do not mean parasitic or totally ruled by people and surroundings. But appreciate the fact that there is a small link to everything we do in our lives!

Coming back to the main topic: Porn... It is something people watch to compensate, read it again.. COMPENSATE for things that are missing in their lives and in the process forget how to really connect with others and in the end land up more damaged than what they were to begin with. If you do not believe me then scientists across universities have come to conclusions like:

1) Porn causes Social and Psychological Problems

According to anti-pornography activist, Gail Dines, young men who become addicted to porn, “neglect their work, spend huge amounts of money they don’t have, become isolated from others, and often suffer depression.” Dr. William Struthers, who has a PhD in biopsychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, confirms some of these and adds more, finding that men who use porn become controlling, highly introverted, have high anxiety, narcissistic, curious, have low self-esteem, depressed, dissociative, distractible and not at all wired for intimacy. Ironically, while viewing porn creates momentary intensely pleasurable experiences, it ends up leading to several negative lingering psychological experiences.

2) Porn Rewires the Brain

Struthers elaborates,

As men fall deeper into the mental habit of fixating on pornographic images, the exposure to them creates neural pathways. Like a path is created in the woods with each successive hiker, so do the neural paths set the course for the next time an erotic image is viewed. Over time these neural paths become wider as they are repeatedly traveled with each exposure to pornography. They become the automatic pathway through which interactions with woman are routed….They have unknowingly created a neurological circuit that imprisons their ability to see women rightly as created in God’s image, in other words... Men start viewing women more as sexual objects than human beings with emotions!

In a similar vein regarding porn’s effect upon the brain, Naomi Wolf writes in her article, "The Porn Myth,"

After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it. 

 3) Porn Turns Sex Into Masturbation  

Sex becomes self-serving. It becomes about your pleasure and not the self-giving, mutually reciprocating intimacy that it was designed for.

4) Porn Demeans and Objectifies Women 

This occurs from hard-core to soft-core pornography. Pamela Paul, in her book Pornified, quoting the research of one psychologist who has researched pornography at Texas A&M, writes,

‘Softcore pornography has a very negative effect on men as well. The problem with softcore pornography is that it’s voyeurism teaches men to view women as objects rather than to be in relationships with women as human beings.’ According to Brooks, pornography gives men the false impression that sex and pleasure are entirely divorced from relationships. In other words, pornography is inherently self-centered–something a man does by himself, for himself–by using another women as the means to pleasure, as yet another product to consume.

Paul references one experiment that revealed a rather shocking further effect of porn: “men and women who were exposed to large amounts of pornography were significantly less likely to want daughters than those who had none. Who would want their own little girl to be treated that way?”.

It becomes about your pleasure and not the self-giving, mutually reciprocating intimacy that it was designed for.

Again, it needs to be emphasized, that this is not an effect that only rests upon those who have viewed porn. The massive consumption of porn and the the size of the porn industry has hypersexualized the entire culture. Men and women are born into a pornified culture, and women are the biggest losers. Dines continues,

By inundating girls and women with the message that their most worthy attribute is their sexual hotness and crowding out other messages, pop culture is grooming them just like an individual perpetrator would. It is slowly chipping away at their self-esteem, stripping them of a sense of themselves as whole human beings, and providing them with an identity that emphasizes sex and de-emphasizes every other human attribute.

 5) Porn Squashes the Beauty of a Real Naked Woman 

Wolf, in her own blunt way, confirms this,

For most of human history, the erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.

 6) Porn Has a Numbing Effect Upon Reality 

It makes real sex and even the real world boring in comparison. It particularly anesthetizes the emotional life of a man. Paul comments,

Pornography leaves men desensitized to both outrage and to excitement, leading to an overall diminishment of feeling and eventually to dissatisfaction with the emotional tugs of everyday life…Eventually they are left with a confusing mix of super sized expectations about sex and numbed emotions about women…When a man gets bored with pornography, both his fantasy and real worlds become imbued with indifference. The real world often gets really boring…”.

7) Porn Lies About What it Means to be Male and Female

Dines records how porn tells a false story about men and women. In the story of porn, women are “one-dimensional”–they never say no, never get pregnant, and can’t wait to have sex with any man and please them in whatever way imaginable (or even unimaginable). On the other hand, the story porn tells about men is that they are “soulless, unfeeling, amoral life-support systems for erect penises who are entitled to use women in any way they want. These men demonstrated zero empathy, respect, or love for the women they have sex with.”

Source: https://theresurgence.com

Not only do such people lack any moral conduct but also it gives women associated with such men immense amount of low self esteem, lack of warmth in a relationship and in some severe cases even suicidal tendencies! Women who are into this larger array of the porn/prostitution industry largely end up feeling helpless, isolated, deprived and in the end suicidal.

If statistics are to be believed 90% of the people involved in this activity at one point or the other have accepted that they feel the need to get out of the trade, suicidal, exploited and even grossly depressed. If numbers are to be believed then it does give a picture that young girls are now under the pressure to look good, be bold on bed and also look like the surgically perfected women in those videos thereby affecting their self esteem which in turn has a huge impact on their lives at a very young age. Some of them drop out of high schools, get pregnant, end up getting HIV and battle with psychological issues. Not to forget how women get sucked into sex trafficking, the sex industry or prostitution.

Now coming to the theory of interconnectedness and how every small choice we make has an impact, think about this: How many lives do you think are getting negatively affected in the process. If one of you watches or buys that porn, you make up for the audience or you financially contribute towards such a market. Are you comfortable with that? You might wanna dust it off.. But here is a story and it is so impacting that I can assure you that you would not like to be in peace if in case you father a girl child or have a sister at home:
Picture this: A man, who is in a troubled marriage apparently hires a commercial sex worker. Only to discover that the lady he was waiting for was his 20 year old daughter! This is the true story of a Zimbabwean man Mr. Titus Ncube for whom all seemed well until he fainted after seeing his daughter walk in as the commercial sex worker he had hired during his troubled marriage.

 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/man-hires-prostitute---and-his-daughter-94578

I am guessing a lot of you would pray rather hope that you do not find yourself in such a situation and also hope that your daughter does not become a part of such an industry! The next time you want to watch porn, really ask yourself: Is my ten minutes or half an hour's pleasure really worth such an impact on people's lives? I am sure your conscience will stop you no matter how bad an addiction it is! And instead of all the graphic images I suggest you find that person, do the sensuous touching, kissing and the hugging and then run the imaginative reels in your mind. That is what nature made us to work like. It will not disappoint you and you shall get your satisfaction with an added benefit of a deep emotionally well connected relationship that is well rounded.

I sign off knowing fully well that some one my friends will ping me saying I have totally embarrassed myself on a public forum. Before you ping me people I would like you to know that we come from the land of KAMA SUTRA, where temples have gods and goddesses carved out in explicit forms. And the shiv ling you worship is actually a representative of the unity between shiva and parvati. So please SHUT up and get a life! And least of all do not ping me as if I had lost it...Because I have the courage to talk about it without any inhibitions and addressing the real problems while you like the rest of the JUNTA love your happy, oblivious and fittingly con-formative bubbles you live in!


See you until my next post that is....