Confronting Porn

In the past few months, there has been a curious revival of talking the “porn-myth” in certain secular circles. Russell Brand, a greasy image of compulsive sexual addiction, openly launched a crusade on porn. College campuses across the nation are campaigning for consent. Porn stars are dropping left and right and returning to their faith. The New Yorker and The Atlantic are regularly publishing articles on the effects of porn. A new academic journal called Porn Studies recently put out its first volume to open up a platform for discussing porn research.

To be sure, much of this is a response to two things. First, the box-office hit 50 Shades of Grey got many questioning the authenticity of pornographic content. Second, rape cases have been popping up at college fraternities all over America. However, neither of these causes gets at the heart of the discussion—what are the effects?

There are two general types of arguments that can be raised against pornography. The first is an argument from religion and the second is an argument from social behavior. Arguments from religion are used more frequently, but are less interesting and not convincing, especially for a culture that is not grounded on religious principles.

The Religious Argument

The human person is a body-soul composite. Thus, in order to properly relate to another person, we need to engage both aspects of the person. Pornography, however, takes the soul out of the picture. So, personhood is degraded when viewing pornographic content.

Further, pornography glorifies the sin of lust. Erotica is put on display as the height of human love. A third party enters into an arena that is made exclusively for one man and one woman. Porn usually leads to sins of lust. It is often accompanied with some sort of sexual arousal in the viewer, probably masturbation.

These arguments, as true as they may be, are not going to work.

The Social Argument

The social argument takes on a variety of different forms. As I see it, it is three-pronged. First, viewing pornography leads to a warped image of reality, usually accompanied with some form of narcissism and a tendency to act compulsively. Second, pornography leads to, at best, an unrealistic conception of women. Finally, porn addicts tend to crave sexual violence, whether in person or in media.

The first of these bears the most weight. Pornography upsets reality. A recent study examining the impact of Internet pornography on adolescents concluded that youth who view sexually explicit material suffer from severe forms of social anxiety and depression. As has been said, pornography removes a natural part of human life from the social world. Sexuality becomes an entirely private matter, so much so that it is restricted to the individual. What’s more, pornography becomes the viewer’s reality. Pornographic content is his template for social behavior. This is why many studies show a correlation between sexually criminal behavior and exposure to porn. Convicted sexual offenders, on average, viewed eleven hours of porn per week. It strips any sense of the other from reality.

Pornography use leads to an obsession over body image and personal appearance. Narcissism is an obvious consequent of virtual sexual worlds. Pornographic images set up an impossible physical standard. Men and women alike have evolved into downloadable cyber images of perfection. For viewers, this leads to scrupulous comparison and constant fretting over weight, build, definition and the like. The fact of the matter is that the human form is choppy and flabby. Most people are not well chiseled.

On top of all this is the tendency to act compulsively. As it stands, compulsive masturbation usually follows from compulsive pornography use. This just makes sense. Viewing sexual material without the intention of some sort of sexual arousal would be strange. But more so, the compulsion to engage in sexual behavior and view porn also follows from regular use. It is a basic principle of neurobiology that the repetition of an act establishes new neural pathways thus facilitating the retention of certain behaviors. But, as I will discuss later, repetitive use requires new forms of satisfaction, which has some bizarre consequences.

As I hinted at above, porn leads to a distorted perception of women. Certain studies show that men who are addicted to porn are less likely to find satisfaction in genuine sexual relationships. A real woman just doesn’t cut it. Naomi Wolf put it nicely: “real naked women are just bad porn.” With this comes the deadening of sexual appetites. Porn addicts are less turned on in their daily lives because their sexual appetites are stimulated and fed by artificial material. In this regard, porn has failed to achieve what it set out to do: intensify sexual pleasure. The rise of Internet porn has deadened male libido in relation to real women.

From all this, we can see that porn leads to a dangerous distortion of the nature of social life. Porn addicts develop a tolerance for sexually explicit material thus requiring more novel or bizarre material to achieve the same level of sexual stimulation. We have seen a shift in preferred styles of porn. Playboy magazines and soft-core porn are no longer the standard. Violent and misogynistic forms of pornography have become mainstream.

With a rise in violent porn comes a rise in cases of rape, since porn sets social standards for the viewer. Rape is often depicted as a pleasurable experience for the woman in many hard-core porn films. Twisted sexual practices, such as group sex, sodomy and bestiality, are often thrown into porn films in order to make things more interesting. Thus, these practices are normalized in the eyes of the viewer.

Every age of the Church has a particular challenge to face. Generally, ours is the secularization of culture and the philosophy of relativism. But more particularly, it is the sexual revolution, which is a result of relativism, and part of this revolution is the growth of the porn industry. The last generation of parents saw the rise of the Internet. But pornography is not something they could have anticipated. They did not get a chance to adequately respond to porn. It is an issue the next generation will need to seriously discuss with children. More so, it is an issue we will need to respond to on a cultural level. Russell Brand’s sexual conversion and the launching of Porn Studies is only the beginning.

All statistics and generalizations on the content and effects of porn are taken from the following studies:

Marriage & Religion Research Institute, The Effects of Pornography on Individuals,

Marriage, Family, and Community, Patrick F. Fagan, Ph.D, December 2009.

Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, The Impact of Internet Pornography on Marriage and the Family: A Review of the Research, Jill C. Manning, 2006.

Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents:

A Review of the Research, Eric W. Owens, Richard J. Behun, Jill C. Manning, Rory C. Reid, 2012.