Let's Talk Porn

94% of men and 87% of women have seen pornography.

Nearly half of all 8th graders have viewed pornography.

On average, boys are first exposed to pornography at the age of 13 and girls at the age of 17.

45% of scenes in online pornography include at least one act of aggression (slapping, gagging, spanking, hair pulling, choking).

29% of 10th graders have seen violent pornography.

Black men are more often portrayed as the perpetrators of aggression against women and are depicted as significantly less intimate with their partners compared to white men.

Frequent pornography use is associated with sexual dissatisfaction, greater preference for porn-like sex, and relationship unhappiness.

The more pornography men view the more likely they are to experience erectile dysfunction.

Two porn sites, xvideos.com and pornhub.com, rank ninth and tenth in the world and receive a combined 6.7 billion monthly visitors. Pornography is ubiquitous and it comes in so many shapes and sizes that it boggles the mind. Every conceivable lust and fetish have been photographed or videotaped.

And I could go on and on with more facts. But let’s talk about porn in another way. Let’s talk about why pornography is so appealing to men.

I was first exposed to pornography when I was about 10 years old when I came upon a graphic novel and an explicit magazine that had been thrown away near the head of a drainage ditch in the country not far from my house. My friends and I had stumbled upon the stash as we were exploring the area for anything of value.

The novel was written porn and I suppose it was tame compared to today’s standards. The magazine was just as tame and included only black and white photographs, all of which were censored so as to leave far more to the imagination than today’s images. I don’t remember what we did with these treasures, but we did take our time to digest as much as our virgin minds could take in.

Eventually, on another adventure, we stumbled upon what Playboy had to offer, and we all agreed that it did not disappoint. That was the end of my foray into pornography until the day in college when I walked into my fraternity room and found a mysterious paper bag filled with gay magazines. (See The Gift of Gay Porn.)

The trajectory for porn lust in America has been exponential. Yesterday’s porn can’t begin to compare with the stunning array of what’s depicted today, not only in terms of intensity and variety, but also in its range of degradation and perversity. It’s an anything goes industry catering to everything imaginable, and more. One of the most popular porn sites includes a massive assortment of over 2000 different porn categories from which to scratch the next itch.

Pornography is so ubiquitous that it’s been normalized (except in its darkest extremes) and those who question it are often categorized as prudes, old-fashioned, sex-negative, repressed, conservative, morally archaic, puritanical, straitlaced, uptight, deluded, narrowly moralistic, afraid to experiment sexually, or just plain against sexual freedom. But the pervasiveness of pornography and the commonplace tolerance of it indicate that something is terribly amiss in contemporary culture. The point is neither to repress nor indulge in pornography, but to outgrow it.

That quote comes from Robert Augustus Masters in his book To Be A Man. This psychologist has a theory about porn. He writes, In my work with men, I’ve not yet heard a sexual fantasy or pornographic pull that was not directly and clearly related to childhood and/or adolescent dynamics. In other words, men experience a life-altering core wounding as a child or adolescent that drives them later in life into compensatory erotic activity. Our unresolved wounds inevitably show up in our sexuality, often masquerading as a part of a healthy sexual life.

The sexual conditioning we experience is a nonsexual dynamic for a nonsexual payoff. We erotize our wounds to make us feel better or to make us feel manlier. These psychological, emotional, and social underpinnings (our old wounds and our reactivity to them) create a reliance on sexual fantasy.

It’s very common to unquestioningly normalize sexual fantasies and practices that are not really expressions of our sexuality but rather of our unresolved hurt and core wounding. The act of eroticizing our neglected needs and unresolved wounds not only means expressing them in sexual contexts but also seeking their fulfillment through sexual fantasy and activity. The degree or drive of compulsiveness that characterizes our sexual fantasies reflects the degree of intensity of pain that we’re attempting to bypass through our immersion in such fantasies.

How does a porn addiction become the solution for resolving core wounding that may have occurred in our childhood or adolescence? Masters lays out five progressive steps.

First, we get significantly hurt in our early years – emotionally, physically, psychologically – without any resolution, which leaves us wounded.

Second, accompanying this wounding is a charge, an energetic imprint, an excitation that infiltrates our lives, especially when circumstances arise that mimic the ones in which we first were wounded.

Third, this charge becomes so familiar to us – however unpleasant it may be – that it seems to be none other than another natural part of us.

Fourth, in our adolescent and/or adult years, we plug this charge – our original wound-generated excitation – into sexual channels, thereby both reliving it and finding some short-lived but strongly appealing release from it.

Fifth, this continues, often addictively, until we awaken to what we’re doing and turn toward our original wounding with compassion and fitting action.

Pornography exploits the craving of those driven to distract themselves from their suffering through erotic excitation and discharge. As long as we’re willing to allow sexually explicit material to catalyze and intensify our sexual excitation to loveless, frequently degrading contexts, our erotic imagination will lose contact with love, intimacy, and ecstasy, binding us to arousal rituals that obstruct our stepping into and embodying our full manhood.