5 Terrible Things Watching Porn Does to You

Pornography is as old as humanity itself, and with good reason. If we weren’t curious about and enamored with sex, there’d be no human race. And those that can’t acquire sex, watch it.

Pornography has definitely evolved (devolved?) in recent years thanks to that blessing and curse, the Internet. It used to take ancient man days to carve out some porn on a tree stump or rock, and your grandpappy had to fight a war and find elicit French girlie mags to enjoy it. Heck, your dad had to sneak a Playboy or look at the Sears catalogue lingerie section — like a real American.

But now anybody with an iPad…and that includes your precocious toddler…can call up porn as fast as Captain Kirk inexplicably remembered “ancient Earth history”. And there is so much of it. Torrents of sex acts ranging from the marital to the nigh criminal (and beyond) are available with simple search terms. A person can literally view hundreds of acts between hundreds of people in the space of an hour.

And just like our steady diet of high fructose corn syrup and Netflix binges, the human brain was never equipped to handle that in a healthy way. Here are five ways porn is destroying your mind and soul.

Porn fosters addiction.

The easy availability of pornography is creating sex addicts at an alarming rate, in the same way the easy availability of high sugar foods is fostering the obesity epidemic. Why? We need food and sex. They are essential to the continuation of life. You can quit drugs and alcohol and survive, but if people quit eating and procreating, humanity disappears. This is why these addictions are so difficult to treat.

Worse, studies show that we can become addicted to porn in much the same way people become addicted to substances. We can feel like we need porn to just get a baseline of normalcy, but derive no pleasure from it at all. Can you imagine not deriving pleasure from sex? Porn can do this to some people.

Porn creates an escalated arousal threshold.

The term “arousal threshold” has many uses in neurology and psychology, but today we’re going to use it to denote the amount of and quality of stimuli one needs to feel sexual.

If you can think back to your teen years, just touching a girl’s hand might have made your nether regions come to attention, or the feel of a boy’s head on your chest might’ve made you “feel funny”. Now think about being married for twenty years, and hand holding isn’t quite enough to get you going (if it is, congratulations!!).

People who are exposed to a lot of porn are no longer charmed by the darling things of lovemaking, like soft kisses and gentle touching. Maybe your boyfriend saw that one chick take two dudes dry on a kitchen counter, and now he expects you to be just as delighted when he suggests something similar.

Women who’ve dated younger men have complained to me that their sexual demands are very odd and unrealistic. “He wanted to choke me. And I don’t mean with his hands. Is that a thing??” “He asked me to spit on it. I think I saw that in a porn once. I was aghast.” Women in their fifties are finding, as they date men in their thirties, that many of them grew up on a steady stream of dehumanizing pornography.

As porn of all types flies at viewers at the speed of WiFi, they develop fetishes and paraphilias. A guy who previously was delighted with a naked woman and soft lighting will now need her to wear a very specific stocking, carry a whip, and call him daddy — every time. If you need something very specific to get off, you have developed a type of addiction.

Porn sets up unrealistic ideas about sex and women.

Most people know that women are people who choose what happens to them as often as possible. Pornography flies in the face of that, and some men really start to take this depiction seriously. Most men know that their wives would laugh if they asked them to behave like the women in pornography, but some men really do expect it, and are angry when they don’t get what they want. Doesn’t everybody want to be held upside on a playground while performing oral sex?!

Additionally, porn actors go through preparatory phases for various sex acts that virtually no one does in real life. Bleaching one’s anus, performing multiple enemas in case anal sex is on the table…I’m not sure how anyone can enjoy watching DVDA knowing that actress has just spent an hour or more on the toilet.

Porn encourages performance anxiety.

This naturally follows from the last section, because if you’re so empathetic that you don’t expect your partner to perform like a porn star, you may take that burden upon yourself. Men start to believe it’s normal to be stimulated by a number of means for twenty minutes and still not ejaculate. That’s just not true. Not only do porn actors benefit from cutting and editing, they also have so much sex that it’s kind of boring for them (also sad). And porn sets are anything but sexy. You try ejaculating in front of a bunch of surly teamsters.

Women sometimes also strive to perform like porn stars, whether mimicking their course language and loud utterances, or even trying the more athletic positions. Sex is like basketball. Few are Jordan or LaBron. It’s okay to just have a fun pick up game at home. Not everything needs to be a three pointer, ladies. Healthy men are just happy to see you naked. If you want to get crazy, turn on the lights.

Porn turns you into a consumer rather than a doer.

What benefit do you think watching workout videos has toward your fitness goals, versus doing them? And how full do you feel after watching a cooking show?

Porn makes people lazy. Some people become aroused by porn alone, living in an impossible fantasy with thousands of faces and bodies they never need court, argue with, or grow old with, ever. This strips the humanity out of sex. It takes the world’s greatest couple’s sport (sorry, pairs figure skating) and turns it into little more than a binge watch. That’s incredibly sad.

Like sugar and booze, seeing one porn is probably not going to ruin your life any more than one cookie or one drink. But if you’re the kind of person who views porn like most people eat Pringles, you may want to talk to somebody. It could be rewiring your brain.