Why I am done with porn

When I was a kid, back in the ripe pubescent days of my transformative childhood years, porn was something every middle-school boy sort of expected his peers were indulging in. Spoken about through whispers in the hallways, the boyish chatter occasionally supplemented by a grainy flash of boobs on a flip phone, it was a sense of excitement in a world we had somehow believed had nothing new left to offer us.

As that short phase came and went, I remember eventually thinking to myself that the idea of pornography was at its core sad, lonely, fake, and depressing. So I moved on.

The thing is, that stuff really never goes away. Every day, the stimuli in pop culture and mass media load all of us up with overdone and unrealistic representations of sexuality to the point that it’s essentially impossible for anyone to escape. Boredom paired with a random cue from some societal or cultural aesthetic is all it takes to catalyze the spontaneous temptation to open up your laptop, search, and scroll. It’s sad that temptations like that exist, hidden in plain sight, but they do.

What’s more worrying, though, is the fact that nobody really wants to talk about it. It’s embarrassing. It’s taboo. It’s inappropriate. And, all in all, it’s just not one of those things to causally bring up over dinner. But maybe it’s not supposed to be like that.

The other day I was flipping through my Facebook notifications tab, and eventually investigated a page I had been invited to called Fight the New Drug. Proudly wearing the hashtag #pornkillslove, the page was essentially a non-religious, non-legislative organization committed to giving informed opinions based on research, fact, and conscious reasoning regarding societal porn use.

Articles from well-educated writers backed by fact-based studies alongside common sense and human compassion are flooded all over the page’s newfeed. As an individual who has felt the struggle, who is uncomfortable with the normality around which society bears consideration upon pornography, I can’t help but feeling that these articles are something that more people need to read and seriously reflect on, especially amidst the heavy saturation of tabloid-like posts involving opinionated and dumbed-down content about politics, media, and pop-culture.

An article about the harmful impacts of porn addresses the inaccurate expectations it creates:

“In porn, everything is fake. A typical 45-minute porn video takes three days of filming to produce, but leavesthe viewer thinking that it all happened without a break… Thanks to teams of plastic surgeons and help from Photoshop, the women in porn don’t offer anything close to a representation of being with a woman in real life. As a result, people that regularly watch porn are more likely than others to feel poorly about how they look and be more disappointed about how their partner looks. Studies have also shown that when both boys and girls see sexual media, they gain stronger perceptions of women being sex objects.”

I also connected with a post on their own page addressing the ways porn is counterproductive within romantic relationships:

“Think about it — your significant other is getting turned on by someone else’s naked body, and picturing themselves with them. We don’t believe that adds to the close connection and intimacy of a relationship. Beingokay with your partner watching porn is like being okay with them going home with someone else.”

They apply an analytical approach to show how porn contributes to rape culture in colleges:

“Of the 304 scenes examined [in a study on pornography], 88 percent contained physical violence and 49 percent contained verbal aggression. 95 percent of the victims responded neutrally or with pleasure, and 94 percent of the victims were women… Many studies have shown that both non-violent and violent porn make users more likely to support violence against women and to believe that women enjoy being raped, and those beliefs have been found across several research studies to be predictive of a person being sexually aggressive in real life.”

Whether you take their “research-based” approach as authentic or not (some critics of the page have accused its fact-based articles as utilizing selective listening), the movement is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. The real fact is that Fight the New Drug and its supporters are starting a conversation, and moving the hush-hush realm of pornography toward an open discussion of the effects that simulated online sexual intimacy has on the brain and real-life relationships.

I’ll leave you with this final thought on love from another Fight the New Drug article:

“Let’s be real — porn leaves out the best parts of love. Love is so much more than extreme sex all the time — love is beautifully complicated, and love makes you better. In porn, they don’t show the hand-holding, or the awesome dates, or overcoming obstacles in the relationship. Porn is so fake, it leaves out everything that’s real about sex and love.”