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The Porn Addiction Supplement, Chapter I
This article (at
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/internet-porn-nearly-cost-me-
my-marriage-man-tells-forum/2005/08/07/1123353212143.html?oneclic
k=true) got me thinking (again) about pornography addiction. In
the article a man who’d been watching internet porn for the last
ten years is now confessing his addiction at the ripe old age of
22.
Now a lot of people may see his predicament as a matter of
perspective. While a 22-year-old with no wife or kids may be
seen as going through a highly sexual phase, the 22-year-old
family man - with commitments and obligations - who is
enthralled with computer porn has a serious problem.
Let me just say right now, I am neither a psychotherapist nor a
psychoanalyst (I do not play either on TV, I did not stay in
some fancy hotel last night, etc). For a professional take on
pornography, I can’t recommend the following resource enough: Are You a Pornography
Addict?
(http://www.noeldouglas.com/psychology/pornography/Are_You_a_Porn
ography_Addict)
That being said, the purpose of this article is twofold: 1. To
help people - specifically men - who have a porn addiction look
at it from another perspective; and 2. To present an average
joe‘s approach to enjoying and coping with porn without it
leading to sexual deviance, visual desensitization, or sensual
failure/disinterest in the bedroom. Who knows, someone might
actually find this piece useful. :)
Although the man in the story was Australian, I’d like to speak
to American culture because this porn addiction is far too
common where I live and breath. It’s no secret that this is an
addictive society. We work hard, we play hard, we drink to
excess, we eat far more than is healthy for us or necessary to
sustain life; all-in-all we seem to overdo things and live life
with greater abandon than any other country.
We’re such a nation of over-doers that our kids learn early in
life how to go overboard with things. The problem is, they tend
to pick up and repeat the worse habits along the way: habits
such as over-eating and playing video games for long hours at a
time.
And I’m not saying that this is a relatively new phenomenon (of
over-doing things). Maybe overindulgence has been interwoven
within the fabric of our culture since long before people can
remember. It’s just that in such a technologically and
culturally progressive society, it seems we find new things to
exploit everyday, new ways to go overboard on something.
Internet pornography has been in full swing for the better part
of about a decade and a half now. Frankly, it’s about time we
started abusing the privilege. Since everything else in this
culture is overdone and overwrought, why not porn?
Too much of anything is not good for you. Case in point, did you
know that too much water is actually detrimental
(http://www.chclibrary.org/micromed/00059400.html) to the human
body? As you might expect, different substances require
different dosages to ruin your health. So while it would take
copious amounts of water to hurt your system, it would take less
bad food to prove toxic to you (insofar as skyrocketing your
cholesterol, making you obese, and bestowing upon you all the
negative things that a poor diet can). And it would take even
less heroin or any other manner of illicit narcotic to
accomplish the same feat. Levels of toxicity change from person
to person.
Likewise, it takes various degrees of different vices to ruin
your life. Internet pornography is no different than any other
vice. It can destroy you if you’re not careful, and you need to
know when to say to say when (to borrow a popular beer slogan)
given your own coping skills.
Now let’s take a look at addiction as it pertains to pornography
- whether on the internet or otherwise - and the men that get
hooked on it. It’s been said time and time again that one of the
problems with porn is that - much like a drug - if you partake
of it frequently enough, eventually you‘ll need bigger and more
extreme doses to afford you the same sexual high. (This was also
the case for the Australian gentleman.) I’ll get back to this
point in a moment.
One of my favorite expressions is, “A man gets wed (hopefully
when the time and circumstance is right), he doesn‘t go dead.”
That is to say, a heterosexual male - as long as he has a pulse
- will always find other women attractive (depending on what he
deems attractive) even in supposed wedded bliss. We all know
that men are creatures of sight, it’s hardwired into the male
evolutionary agenda and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
Straight men just get turned on by beautiful women. (Again, that
is defined by the eye of the beholder.)
So what is the problem here? If men are so turned on and
attracted to beautiful women, how is desensitization possible?
Why does it take the porn “veteran” ever-increasing extremes of
porn - like so many drugs - to arouse the same feelings?
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