Pornography and erotica saturates our culture of today. From the sexualised Bratz dolls our little girls play with to the faux dominatrix gyrations of the Rihanna in her latest music video and free amateur porn videos posted on YouTube; there is no getting away from the message that sex sells. It sells everything from hamburgers to clothes and cars and of course it sells itself.

Pornography by definition is the production and distribution of graphic material created specifically to sexually arouse the user. In therapy terms this would encompass magazines like Playboy, Penthouse and Swank; DVDs available in XXX shops of London with interesting names like ‘Honour’ and ‘Coco De Mer’ and of course the plethora of paid porn masquerading as entertainment on the internet and adult TV channels available to hotel guests and home viewers..

We need to understand the extent of porn availability and use to get our minds around the issue. Internationally pornography is a 97 billion dollar industry. The average age at which a young person first views porn is between eleven and thirteen years of age. Porn on the internet is a click away whatever age you are. All it needs is to click on the ‘over 18’ button.  Almost three quarters of porn viewers are male, which tells us that women also watch porn.

 

 

As a sex educator, therapist and researcher there are three aspects of porn that I would like to discuss:

 

1. Porn as the sex educator of teenagers:

Social learning theory and sexual scripting theorise that watching pornography will result in the acceptance and adoption of the attitudes of male domination and female subservience at the least and the rape myth that women enjoy forced and violent sex at the other extreme. In teenagers, research indicates that boys who watch porn feel pressured to gain masculine status through sexual achievement; accept the sexual double standard of female ‘sluts’ and male ‘studs’; have a narrow image of what is an attractive female body (based on the porn stars); often expect girls to mimic porn stars in love making and develop a tolerance to sexual violence.

In the case of girls, the prevalence of porn, supported by the pop culture of media and music videos, and the subsequent peer pressures to conform have resulted in the emergence of what is called ‘Raunch culture’. Here girls make sex objects of themselves and others with the expectation that exhibition of the body is the norm.  They see female empowerment as signalled only by overt and public sexuality.  Today we see young girls shaving their pubes and asking for breast enlargements and ‘sexting’ nude pictures of themselves to their boyfriends.

 

 

2. Porn as a relationship breaker:

Over ninety per cent of men would have viewed porn in some form before marriage. They are usually occasional users, going there when stressed, tired or as a release for sexual tension. However, the images and behaviours they see wheedle their way into the brain. Porn sex rarely includes affection, intimacy or expressions of love. There is no kissing, cuddling or foreplay.

The focus is on male pleasure with an apparently ever-available complaint partner. These expectations get carried to real life relationships. Women who find out that their partner is a porn user struggle with two issues.  Firstly there is a deep feeling of rejection and loss of self-worth. Secondly there is anger and feelings of being used and abused at being asked to do things that they feel are unnatural and reflect what porn stars do. Therapy requires dealing with the compulsive porn use as well as mending the fences of intimacy and re-establishing a good sex-relational model.

 

3. Porn as an addiction:

The debate is ongoing as to whether regular, ongoing use of progressively more graphic and aggressive pornography is actually an addiction like alcoholism or a hypersexual disorder more akin to compulsive gambling. What we do know is that there is a release of brain neurochemicals like dopamine when watching porn that mimic the drug high of cocaine. Also that it is likely that there is a cortical neuronal ‘rewiring’ to alter sexual pathways.

Therefore it is likely that watching porn leads to an addiction cycle of the need for increasingly higher doses (more graphically sexual porn). Treatment of porn addiction is today a specialist area and involves both the treatment of the immediate problem as well as ongoing prevention.

So, is porn use always bad and destructive?  Is there ‘good porn’?  What about couples who use porn as part of their sexual lovemaking repertoire? Porn when accepted as the ‘norm’ sets the user on a slippery slope of behaviour that drags sexuality from being a wonderful act of intimacy and love into the cess pit of aggression and ugliness. It exchanges the reality of one flesh couple sex for the fantasy world.

Whatever age or sex you are – avoid it.