Sexuality is powerful. Power can bring invigorating life and freedom in the right context, but without self-control and responsibility it can dramatically corrupt and devastate.
Addictions, broken relationships, violence and rape are just a few examples of ways unrestrained, irresponsible sex can destroy.
The outcomes of pornography clearly indicate that pornography is not an appropriate or responsible context for exercising sexual impulses.
It’s time for people to quit justifying actions without honestly understanding their outcomes.
Frequent pornography consumption can lead to addiction by rewiring the brain to accommodate for overexposure to pleasure chemicals. The viewer may develop tolerance and must view increasingly graphic content or more often or use enhancement drugs such as Viagra to achieve the desired effect.
Whether you call it an addiction or habit, porn consumption can lead to broken relationships and extreme emotional pain to partners of porn consumers.
Porn also skews perceptions of sexual norms. A series of experiments and surveys conducted by professors and researchers at the University of Alabama revealed that the more pornography the participants watched, the more likely they were to believe others to be sexually active and adventurous, and that more graphic sexual activity is more common than it actually is.
According to the Journal of Sex Research, pornography consumption was associated with a significant increase in teenage sex, multiple sex partners, extramarital sex, premarital sex and engagement in paying for sex.
Pornography changes healthy perceptions of sexuality. By reducing sex to a means to an end — a chemical high — it encourages couples to place higher value on sexual performance than on the aspect of intimacy.
When interacting with the opposite sex, people should respect the whole person, not just sexual quality. Porn encourages the opposite by reducing personhood to the physical aspect alone, discarding the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects.
Pornography especially harms healthy perceptions of women. Researchers at Oklahoma State University found that in the most popular pornography videos today, 88 percent of the scenes included physical aggression toward women such as spanking, open-hand slapping, hair pulling, choking and bondage. It should not be surprising that this study of college fraternity males “showed the strong link between men’s viewing pornography and behavioral instinct to commit sexual assault.”
As people become desensitized to increasingly violent and abnormal sexual practices, those practices become acceptable, normal, expected behavior.
One common argument is that pornography empowers women. Quite the contrary: it devalues them by reducing them to sex objects. During Pamela Paul’s research for her book “Pornified,” she said she encountered a man who likened choosing which type of girl and sexual acts to view to choosing ice cream flavors. “Hmm,” he said, “I feel like Asian girls tonight.”
While the sex industry is a regulated industry, it’s important to remember its business is selling a too-good-to-be-true sexual fantasy. In an article published on fightthenewdrug.com, an ex-porn star spoke out against the horrors of the industry:
“I speak from experience to say there are victims and survivors who have been drugged and forced into this ugliness against their wills. I realize that this statement flies in the face of the mainstream, stereotypical, mono-thought mentality that porn is voluntary and that ‘she likes it, she asked for it, she chose it.’ Although that may be true for some, many are coerced into agreeing with whatever our pornographer says just to
stay alive.”
Porn disillusions people, causing them to view love and sex as easy, fulfilling and non-committal and about self-satisfaction. It harms viewers, relationships, the actors in the industry and the effects overflow into our culture. Pornography desensitizes, dehumanizes, devalues. Do not be deceived. Porn hurts.
Christine Guttery is a 20-year-old English junior from Baton Rouge.