I first got interested in the psychology of pornography a year or so ago when I read a book called “The Brain that changes itself”, by Norman Doidge. In one of the chapters he discusses a client who he worked with who was having problems with online pornography. The book is excellent, and well worth a read, but it was this chapter that really got me thinking.
My story of how I came to battle with my porn use is unusual, but probably not isolated. I really didn’t use pornography at all until I was about 28 and even then, at such a low level as to be almost negligible. I was briefly exposed to it as a sixteen year old, but just simply never got into it. It was a combination of things which changed everything. The main thing though was having private and easy access via a computer to lots of pornography. I started using it more often because my wife and I had our first child and as such, a heap of things changed, some of which I was expecting, and some not. I like to think of myself as a pro feminist male. I married my wife because she is a serious feminist and I respect and love her for it. I love being involved in raising my two young boys and we work hard to have a very loving and fair relationship. And so, with myself and my wife tired from our new parental responsibilities I thought I would use pornography as a way to have some harmless enjoyment, and leave my wife to get all the sleep she needed. We even discussed this, and she was all for it.
Little did I know what I was in for. It has been quite disturbing to experience the changes in my mind that have happened as a result of my increased pornography use. After using porn, for the next few days I find unwanted images and thoughts in my mind, sparked by the most unexpected experiences. However, what really shocked me was an experience at a good friend of mine’s place one night, whilst over for dinner. My two little boys were sharing a bath with their 8 year old daughter and I went in to get the kids out and changed and all of a sudden, my mind started bringing up sexualised thoughts upon seeing a naked 8 year old girl. I was so shocked I walked straight out and asked my wife if she could take over. This is not something you can tell anyone. They are not thoughts that I have ever in my life even entertained, and yet, there it was, out of nowhere. But not really out of nowhere. I now realise that a lot of the porn I had been looking at depicts women with no pubic hair – not something I even particularly like, or had even noticed…but, it had, unbeknownst to me, become etched in my mind. The fact that pornography could do that to me, disturbed me very much, and as a result, I had a discussion with my wife about my increasing use of porn, and have taken steps to manage it, but it is difficult and I have to remain quite vigilant. I dont know what we are going to do to stop this problem. I know that for me, if I hadn’t had a computer and easy access to it, I doubt that my porn use would have ever become the issue it has become.
It is encouraging that there is a place where men can openly discuss the dangerous nature of pornography for our psyches. Because, largely in our society, and especially amongst the vast majority of men, we are encouraged to laugh it off as a trivial matter, which increasingly, many of us know that it isn’t.
No related posts.
Wow! What a powerful story.
“Largely in our society, and especially amongst the vast majority of men, we are encouraged to laugh it off as a trivial matter, which increasingly, many of us know that it isn’t.”
So true.
Thanks for sharing.
The only thing for you to do, mons amies, is to stop looking at porn, totally. You will find that your outlook towards the opposite sex will, after a few weeks, relax & change and will then ‘normalise’ all together. The longer you’re away from it, the easier it gets. It’s easier than giving up smoking!
Get a new computer, or completely wipe your current one and start again. You must then promise yourself and your family that you will not ‘dirty-up’ your nice, clean computer with vile porn. Do it and be strong.
Actually this is not the only approach. I turned porn into a mirror of my own shame, fear and limitations around sexuality and, having accepted and released that shame, no longer feel drawn towards looking at porn.
Thanks Guest for a very brave piece.
Scary story… and very interesting. I think in many anti-porn discussions the violence in porn gets most of the attention, but this story really highlights how insidious the effects of porn use can be. Without our knowledge, in our subconscious, porn has such power to shape our sexuality and influence how things appear to us.
Thank you for your honesty.
On effecting how things appear to people, I think with enough use, with becoming accustomed enough (to sexual depictions of women with no public hair), things we see in the world (a naked 8 year old girl) light up as meaningful to us in ways they did not before.
nice…norman doidge is one of my influences as well…have all his books and have seen his lectures. I actually used “the brain that changes itself” as a guide to remapping my brain for a healthy understanding of intimacy.
Great page guys! Keep up the fight.
What a bizarre anecdote.
Truly worrying http://bit.ly/kmk8rl
It’s very interesting that, having become involved with pornography at a “late” stage, and being mature enough to reflect on your thoughts, you are more able to easily compare your “before” thoughts and “after” thoughts, whereas I imagine many men who are currently porn users only have those “after” thoughts. Which is probably bad, as that is then their whole personality…
I’m sorry, but your wife was not a true feminist if she approved of you using typical sexist, woman-hating male dominated pornography that intentionally dehumanizes women and teen girls as nothing but non-human things to just stick a d*ck into, to feel, f*ck.ejaculate all over, call woman-hating names such as sl*t, Wh*res and b*tches, and forget!
Women’s Institute for
Freedom of the Press
Pornography and the First Amendment
Twiss Butler
from her chapter “Why The First Amendment Is Being Used to Protect Violence Against Women,” in The Price We Pay, The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography, Laura Lederer and Richard Delgado, eds. (NY: Hill & Wang, 1995)
“Twiss Butler argues that men’s control of institutions of communication and education allows them to support speech that harms women and to suppress speech against that harm. She observes that the publishing industry funds legal, journalistic, and nonprofit organizations endorsing a First Amendment absolutist position. She contends that the industry’s defense of pornography as protected speech serves the double purpose of dignifying misogyny and establishing the First Amendment as the publisher’s product liability shield.” (p. 160)
“When feminists criticize pornography as graphic misogyny, they are attacking not only the system of sexism itself, with its economic and social pay-offs for men, not only Playboy’s advertising rates, but also publishers’ broad First Amendment shield against liability for any harm caused by the products that they produce and sell.
“The publishing industry and the men in it therefore have a conflict of interest in reporting a critique of pornography as inimical to women’s civil rights (unsecured as those rights are by the Constitution). We need to consider how that conflict of interest distorts the information we receive through journalistic coverage of public debate and action on this issue.
“Publishers protect their liability shield either by silencing feminists while granting speech to those who vilify them, or by misrepresenting the feminist critique of pornography. Women are given credibility and access to speech to the extent that they say what men want them to say. Stray from the script and you will be attacked, misquoted, or simply go unheard. As power brokers in a large industry profiting from sexism, publishers disguise this censorship as selfless concern for the First Amendment and freedom of speech. (p. 163) …
“In the news business as elsewhere, men have long relied on the weapon of pornography to avoid having to compete on their own merits. The role pornography plays in keeping women journalists at a disadvantage is evident in the experience of Lynn carrier, an editorial writer for the San Diego Tribune who sued the paper in 1990 for sex discrimination and harassment. Men coworkers attempted to intimidate and segregate Carrier by displaying pornography in the office, using sexual insults when talking with her, and asking her to run out and buy a copy of Playboy for her supervisor–who also wondered aloud what she would charge Playboy for posing nude for photographs. Carrier won her civil suit (refusing, incidentally, to accept a secret settlement), but the outcome was typical–she no longer works at the Tribune, but is employed instead as a smaller paper in the area. (p. 164) …
“To protect pornography, women’s speech must be carefully controlled. When Linda Lovelace said she loved starring in pornographic films, she was treated as credible; when Linda Marchiano said that she had been beaten, raped, and coerced into making those films, her credibility was questioned. No risk is overlooked. At a National Press Club speech by Christie Hefner in 1986, I addressed her ‘as a pornographer’ in a written question about her lawsuit to censor testimony from a federal hearing that referred to Playboy as pornography; when my question was read aloud by the club’s president, these three words were deleted.” (pp. 166-167)
[This chapter by Twiss Butler alone is worth the purchase of The Price We Pay, The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography. The entire book is excellent and highly recommended.]
And as Twiss Butler at the main NOW in Washington said to me in March,women who support pornography are *NOT* Feminists! She’s *so* right! They are traders, fakes and hypocrites who are supporting extremely sexist, woman-hating sexualized male supremacy it’s exactly the same thing as a Black person calling themselves a civil rights activist and supporting Klu Klux Klan pornography or a Jewish anti-semetic activist support Nazi pornography!
STUDY PROVES “PORNOGRAPHY IS HARMFUL
A new study has found that viewing pornography is harmful to the viewer and society. In a meta-analysis (a statistical integration of all existing scientific data), researchers have found that using pornographic materials leads to several behavioral, psychological and social problems.
One of the most common psychological problems is a deviant attitude towards intimate relationships such as perceptions of sexual dominance, submissiveness, sex role stereotyping or viewing persons as sexual objects. Behavioral problems include fetishes and excessive or ritualistic masturbation. Sexual aggressiveness, sexually hostile and violent behaviours are social problems as well as individual problems that are linked to pornography.
read the full article here: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive/ldn/1920/31/2031203
Linnea Smith
By Patricia Barrera
Linnea Smith is your average woman of the 90s. She has a satisfying family life, rewarding career in mental health and interests that include traveling with her husband, spending time with her daughters, babying her dogs and reading pornography. Yes…reading pornography–and using her professional skills and expanding international network to fight it. Like most of us, she never really thought about pornography as a critical social issue until a 1985 media conference where she learned about past and present research on pornographic materials. And what she learned shocked and angered her.
As a psychiatrist, feminist, and woman, she was well aware of the personal and societal consequences of battery, rape, and child sexual abuse. The results of the studies delivered at that fateful conference were an indictment to the connection of pornographic materials, both directly and indirectly, with these violent sex crimes. For Smith, pornography became an issue of public health and human rights that needed to be addressed.
As every critical thinker should, Smith went straight to the source to see for herself what was going on. She turned to Playboy, the nation’s first pornography magazine to earn mainstream acceptance and support. By 1984 Playboy had 4.2 million subscribers, and was selling 1.9 million magazines at newsstands (Miller, 1984).
The results of her extensive investigation of the magazine (from the 1960s on) are presented in three brochures. “It’s Not Child’s Play” is a disturbing brochure that outlines the specific ways in which Playboy sexualizes small children and presents them as sexual targets for adult males in their magazine. The collection of cartoons and pictorials is damning, and made even more so when juxtaposed against pathetic statements made by Playboy representatives denying they ever used children in their publication. Smith very well could have called the brochure “Playboy Exposed”.
Right alongside their claims that “Playboy never has, never will” publish such offensive imagery (Playboy, December, 1985), Smith placed pictures the magazine did indeed publish- of children in sexual encounters with adults and references to girl children as ‘Playmate’ material. In December of 1978, for example, Playboy published a picture of a five year old girl with the caption “my first topless picture,” and in March of that same year published a cartoon in which Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz is pointing out the Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man to a police officer as having just raped her on the yellow brick road.
Smith did not limit her investigation to the use of children in Playboy. She found jokes about sexual harassment, abuse, manipulation, dehumanization and avoidance of intimacy by men toward their partners and callousness toward women in general, and the promotion of sexual conquest over women instead of sexual intimacy with a woman.
In another powerful and well documented brochure, “As Sex Education, Men’s Magazines are Foul PLAY, BOYS!,” Smith once again had Playboy do the talking for her. The brochure featured Playboy cartoons that dehumanized women like the one in which a man was shown holding a pornography magazine over his girlfriend’s face and body as they are having sex (Playboy, August, 1974), and another featuring a taxidermist calling a man to come and pick up his wife, who had been stuffed (Playboy, April, 1995). Was she hunted down and killed, too?
Smith’s brochures include extensive documentation and commentary by recognized scholars and researchers addressing the impact of pornography on our society. There are chilling statistics, like the finding that 100% of all high school aged males in one survey reported having read or looked at pornography, with the average age of viewing the first issue being 11 years old (Bryant, testimony to the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Hearings, 1985).
In another study she lists, three per cent of the women in a random sample and 8.5 per cent in a survey of college undergraduate women reported being physically coerced into sex by someone inspired by pornography. Ten per cent of the nonstudent and 24 per cent of the student respondents answered yes to the question of whether they had ever been upset by someone trying to get them to do something out of a pornographic book, movie, or magazine (cited by Anderson in Lederer and Delgado, eds., 1995).
Also included is a study conducted by Mary Koss on 6,000 college students in which she found that men reporting behavior meeting legal definitions of rape were significantly more likely to be frequent readers of pornography magazines than those men who did not report engaging in such behavior (Koss and Dinero, 1989).
Smith is one of few people to expand her analysis of pornographic magazines to include the presence of drugs and alcohol, especially important today considering the almost epidemic level of drug and alcohol use by adults and teenagers in this country, Smith agrees that drugs and alcohol are contributing factors to high risk and coercive sex, and that the relationship between them within pornographic materials is an overlooked, and greatly needed, area of research.
As Smith explains ” . . . No [other] reputable publication brought positive drug information within easy reach of juvenile (or adult) consumers. Since 1970, Playboy has been glamorizing intoxication as a mind-expanding, sexually-enhancing experience. It is difficult to conclude these magazines have not played a major role in popularizing ‘recreational’ drug consumption and the myth of its being fun, risk-free, and even sexy. What greater reinforcement for drug taking behavior than to eroticize it?”
In “Drug Coverage in Playboy Magazine,” a brochure she developed for the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), Smith compiled a plethora of cartoons that favorably paired sex with drugs and alcohol. Cartoons, articles and columns advise readers on how to use drugs for sexual enhancement. References to negative effects were usually humorously presented and so, easily dismissed.
Playboy’s depiction of underage users of drugs and alcohol even included their own version of the Official Boy Scout Handbook in (Playboy, August, 1984). Their suggestions for Scout Merit Badges included “Water Safety” for the scout who ordered his Johnnie Walker whiskey straight up, and “Free-Basing” for the scout who smoked cocaine. A similar feature in 1979 stated that “Today, ‘boyhood fun’ means cruising and scoring; overnight adventures’ involve Ripple and car stripping; and ‘survival skills include cocaine testing, bust evasion and cutting into gas lines” (Playboy, December, 1979).
Once Smith contacted the NCAA about her serious concerns, media attention and public scrutiny increased. Playboy denied any wrongdoing, claiming they were only reflecting a “major cultural phenomena”, but they did scale back the more obvious pro-drug and alcohol features in the magazine. damage control campaign resulted in a politically correct editorial statement on the magazine’s position on drug abuse in the May 1987 issue as well as a few anti-drug articles. To counter Smith’s NCAA attempts, the magazine also courted collegiate sports information offices with a mass mailing of a hastily compiled slick, glossy booklet “The Dangers of Drugs”, explaining their “real” position against substance abuse. However the magazine still includes covert messages glamorizing substance abuse and pairing sexualized alcohol consumption with easier prey. According to Smith, “we succeeded in exposing yet another dimension of the destructive nature of pornography, and, at the very least, cost Playboy some time and money.”
It may also cost Playboy the niche they are trying to carve out for themselves in organized sports. Playboy’s strategy for commercial success has been to include respected and well- known public figures in their magazine, an old tactic for aspiring to legitimacy. That way the magazine may be looked at as more of a credible news journal than just a porno rag. Readers too, can feel better about their consumption of pornographic pictures of women when they are “wrapped” in articles about current social issues. It made business sense to Playboy to seek out an alliance with athletes who, in some countries, are accorded hero status.
So they came up with an annual pre-season award for college level athletes and coaches, the Playboy All-America Award. The nominated players and coaches receive an all-expenses paid trip to a luxury resort for a weekend party, photo session and public relations blitz.
The team selection process is unorthodox at best. It is not a panel of sports officials but rather Photography Director Gary Cole, doubling as sports editor when needed, (Playboy, March, 1996, p.117) who chooses players and coaches for the award. The prerequisite is not athletic ability but rather who agrees to be photographed for the magazine. Again, a common tactic for legitimacy. Playboy rejects players unwilling to have their pictures associated with the magazine- -its content and underlying messages–and keeps making “awards” until the sufficient number of players and coaches agree to the photo sessions. The event hit some legal snafus as well. Complaints were officially lodged with the NCAA which included the presence of professional agents at the photo sessions. This charge, like the others, was also denied by the magazine in a letter to the NCAA.
Go to Part II
A good article on the harm pornography does when children and young people are exposed to it:
http://www.xyonline.net/sites/default/files/Flood,%20The%20harms%20of%20pornography%20exposure%2009.pdf
There was a university of Pennsylvania student who was gang raped in 1990 after college men watched porn videos in their dorms. And I still have a 1985 letter written into Mademoiselle Magazine by a woman who wrote in response to Peter Nelson’s His Column, Why Nice Guys Like Playboy, she wrote from Allendale New Jersey:
“I just finished reading Peter Nelson’s His Colum. Peter Nelson is certainly no nice guy, nor is any participant in pornography, a trade which profits from the exploitation of women. Why I must ask does a so-called “woman’ magazine” feature editorials which support misogyny? Mr.Nelson’s callous disregard for women is evident in his neglect to face the fact that pornography promotes rape and violence .I know,because my best friend was raped by four men who used pornography as a reference guide.”
There were several articles that were online from MIT’s newspaper The Tech from 1983,1984 and 1985 about how women were being sexually harassed year after year in the 1980′s after men watched hardcore porn videos on campus the university lecture hall and of because of the sexual harassment of women students after the showings. Rhea Becker from the sadly former Women’s Alliance Against Pornography Education Project in Cambridge,sent me a lot of research on the harms of pornography back in 1991.One of the things she sent me included information that North Carolina State Representavie Richard Wright-Democrat,while announcing enactment of anti-pornography legislation he sponsored,cited a N.C. State Police study which found:defendants in 75% of the violent sex crimes in the state”had some kind of hard-core pornographic material” in their homes or vechicles. “I’m talking about S&M (sadistic & masochistic)
material, bondage he said, that came from The New York Times 1/26/86 & 10/13/85; The Virginian Pilot 10/20/85 and the articles were contributed by Alexandra Basil, Ray Lynn Oliver and Barbara Sparrow.
The information also included a study conducted by the Michigan State Police in which 38,000 sexual assaults from 1956 to 1979 were analyzed found that in at least 41% of those crimes,pornography was used or imitated just prior to or during the act this came from Ladies Home Journal October 1985.The information Rhea sent me also included that a study of 36 convicted sexually oriented murderers/serial killers,found the single most common trait amongst them was 81% listed their primary sexual interest as pornography,71% voyeurism.The study’s objective,conducted by the FBI’s behavioral science unit in Quantico,Virginia,was to develop a psychological profile on sex killers in order to track them faster.The researchers concluded,after interviews with the 36 who collectively provided information on 1,188 murders,that the killers were characteristically immeresed in fantasy. This came from NY Daily News 6/26/85 and This World 7/14/85.
Feminist psychologist Phyllis Chesler says in her book Patriarchy: Notes Of An Expert Witness that serial killers are obessed with pornography and woman hatred and sexually use their victime both before and after killing them,and she said most wife beaters, pedaphiles, rapists and serial killers of women are addicted to pornography. Nobody would need to do studies to prove that racist and anti-semetic pornography is very harmful to Blacks and Jews; it never would have been mainstreamed and made acceptable!
Dr.Gene Abel also found that more than 50% of sex offenders use pornography and that they were less able to control their abusive behavior than sex offenders who didn’t use it.Psychiatrist Dr.William Marshall who treats rapists and child molesters,found that 86% of rapists regularly use pornography and that 57% imitate pornographic scenes in the commiting of their crimes.I also told her that he also found that in a study of convicted child molesters in Ontario Canada, 77% of those who molested boys and 87% of those who molested girls said they were regular users of hard-core pornography.
an excerpt
Former Hetersexual Male Porn User Admits Pornography reduces Women To Nothing But Somthing To Stick A D*ck Into And degrades Women Period!
6812, Since you
Posted by gaspee on Sat Mar-31-07 08:28 AM
– (warning for frank language.)
Seem to think only people who have seen a lot of porn are qualified to speak, I might meet your qualifications. I’ve watched a lot of porn. I used to have no problem with porn. I *write* erotica for a few online magazines. A few years ago, I got so ed by het porn that I’ve never watched it again. I will watch gay porn, either m/m or made for *women* f/f. I won’t watch made for men f/f.
porn is degrading to women. Period. Mainstream porn, especailly. I’ve watched a lot of it over the years. I’m no spring chicken. I don’t have a problem watching m/m porn. Funny, that. Know why? because I don’t take it personally when men are treated like a f*ck hole. Hmmm… I think I’m onto why most men don’t have a problem watching women turned into nothing but a place to stick their d*ck.
When watching for what passes as mainstream porn these days, I get sick to my stomach. Anal, face f*cking to the point where the poor girl is next to vomiting, slapping, demeaning talk. it’s all there in mainstream porn. Why men are so turned on by anal in het porn has always been a mystery to me. Why women do it is another mystery. I can get why men have anal sex. Women do it because men want them to.
What makes me the most sick is the look in the girls’, oh sorry, *actresses*, eyes. It f*cking kills me these days, which is why I don’t watch het porn any more.
And I’m speaking as someone who has seen a lot of it.
Now put on some Bel Ami stuff and my girlfriend and I are quite happy. Why? Watch it sometime, then watch the current top five or ten selling het porn titles and I think you’ll see the difference. And if you don’t, that’s a little scary.
And to continually say that het porn “isn’t like that” and looking at the top selling and rented titles makes me think you are being disingenious or in plain old denial.
Because the most popular het porn is like that.
And someone doesn’t have to watch a lot of porn to see just how degrading to women it is.
Topic subject Hmmm, no response to your post. Wonder why? Posted by Morgana LaFey on Wed Apr-04-07 10:14 PM
And someone doesn’t have to watch a lot of porn to see just how degrading to women it is.
Yup.
and:
I don’t have a problem watching m/m porn. Funny, that. Know why? because I don’t take it personally when men are treated like a f*ck hole. Hmmm… I think I’m onto why most men don’t have a problem watching women turned into nothing but a place to stick their d*ck.’
Especially when they’ve been taught and continously reassured that women LIKE that, or if they don’t something wrong with them.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=229×6696#6812
I just noticed I made a typing mistake,I meant Degrades women.
Pornography: a vicious cycle
quote:
“These sex scenes convey to viewers the idea that women are not human but rather are objects to be used by men to satisfy male sexual desires. In order for a man to get pleasure from watching a woman being verbally, sexually and sometimes physically abused, he has to deny the woman’s humanity. If he’s thinking about the fact that this woman has the same feelings, relationships with loved ones, dreams and aspirations as his mother, his sisters and his female friends, there is no way he would be aroused by a scene in which a man treats a woman like garbage as he’s penetrating her; he’d find it sickening. Pornography dehumanizes women, and when a man is exposed to it for a long period of time, it becomes easier for him to ignore the humanity of the women in his life.
One of the men at the conference shared how his past experiences with pornography have had a deep impact on his life. Like many of his peers, he was first exposed to pornography in middle school, years before he would have his first serious sexual experience with a woman. Pornography offered him a rare glimpse into the world of sex that nobody was talking about, and because he wasn’t given accurate information about what sex was like, he started to believe that the acts he had been witnessing in pornography – of men sexually dominating women – is what sex is supposed to be. He then carried these beliefs into his romantic relationships, and caused his partners, and himself, a lot of undue grief.”
the full article is here:
http://www.dailyillini.com/index.php/article/2005/10/column_pornography_a_vicious_cycle
“All healthy men, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, know there is a certain fury in sex that we cannot afford to inflame, and that a certain mystery and awe must ever surround it if we are to remain sane.”
G.K. Chesterton
Just harmless fun? Understanding he impact of pornography
http://www.protectkids.com/effects/justharmlessfun.pdf
I commend you for your honesty. This must have been difficult for you to share. But the more people DO share about this kind of effect that porn is having, the better chance there is to do something about it.
You CAN do something about it. You can completely stop watching porn in any way, shape or form. You can be proud of yourself for taking that step and you can begin to eradicate those mental images by replacing them with other things. Eventually they will stop. But you have to choose 100% to stop watching porn.
Good luck.
My profound respect and admiration for all those men who are exploring the true nature of pornography on their own psyches.
This is simply to let you know that I have linked this piece to a particular blog of my own
http://wildwalkerwoman.tumblr.com/post/20897583815/awildwomanhowls-pornography-the-darkest-nwo
I hope that I have honoured the work of this site, and the author of this piece – that was my intention.
You’ll have make up your own mind whether I have been successful.
Blessed Be.