Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The Science of How Internet Pornography Radically Alters the Human Brain and Body
Mark B. Kastleman (2001) Granite Publishing: Orem, Utah
A Review by Val Peter
1. According to tobacco companies, cigarettes aren’t addictive and they don’t cause cancer.
But anybody with a little common sense knows that’s not true, that cigarettes are addictive and they do cause cancer.
2. The people who make pornography say that it is not addictive, nor is cybersex, but any intelligent person knows that the real experts say it is very addictive.
3. Scientists are beginning to understand the relationship between seeing pornography (flesh) and the brain’s release of its own intoxicating chemicals (drugs).
At the essence of pornography is an image of flesh used as a drug (a way of numbing psychic pain) and this drug lasts only as long as a man stares at the image. For the addict the rush is more than an attraction. He is helpless before it and completely out of control. In the case of all drugs, the promised happiness and relief lasts only momentarily.
4. So pornography and cybersex are not harmless outlets for teens or men and women to satisfy normal healthy urges. It is just the opposite. For so many pornography and cybersex become a habit-forming drug used as an escape from the pressures of life, from stress and pain, from fear, loneliness, emptiness, regret, rejection, childhood abuse and a host of other human emotions. But they are only a temporary relief.
The chemicals released include: epinephrine (an adrenal gland hormone that “locks-in” memories of experiences occurring at times of high arousal), adrenaline, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), noradrenaline, norepinephrine and testosterone, among others.
Thus, pornography and cybersex provide the addict with sexual arousal and also a way to “self-medicate” in order to escape the realities of life in order to make the pain go away for a little time.
5. The four stages of pornography addiction:
• Stage I - Addiction
The first change that takes place is the addiction effect, namely, the porn consumer gets hooked.
Please note that Dr. Victor Cline found that once addicted, men, teenage boys, and in some cases, women, “could not throw off their dependencies on the pornography by themselves, despite many negative consequences…”
The higher their education the more prone people are to becoming addicted to this material and the more money they have to spend.
• With the passage of time, the porn addict requires rougher, more explicit, more defiant, and more kinky kinds of sexual material to get their highs and their sexual turn-ons. It’s like drug addiction. Over time it escalates.
Being married does not solve the problem because oftentimes addicts prefer their sexual imagery accompanied by masturbation to sexual intercourse with their spouse. This diminishes their capacity to love and express affection to their spouse. Their sex drive is diverted away from their spouse and the wife can easily sense this and feel very lonely and rejected. A wife often reports that her husband prefers to masturbate to pornography rather than make love to her.
• Desensitization…this third phase according to Dr. Cline involves material originally seen as shocking, taboo-breaking, illegal, repulsive and immoral, and yet, still sexually arising comes in time to be seen as very common place and quite acceptable in the sense that “everybody does it.” Even though the activity is illegal and contrary to moral beliefs and personal standards “everybody does it” the kindly Dr. Jekyll is transformed into the brutal Mr. Hyde through the process of desensitization.
• Acting out sexually is the fourth phase occurring with an increasing tendency to act out sexually the behaviors viewed in the pornography that the porn consumers have been repeatedly exposed to. This includes compulsive promiscuity, exhibitionism, group sex, voyeurism, frequenting massage parlors, having sex with minor children, rape and inflicting pain on themselves or a partner during sex. They find themselves locked into this and unable to change no matter what the negative consequences.
6. How do Internet pornographers use the mind and body science to attract and addict their customers?
• Their reticular formation (a region of densely packed nerve cells in the center of the brain) decides which messages to let through to the brain. Some it allows in and others it keeps in holding patterns guarding against sensory overload.
The more exciting, interesting, threatening, horrifying, arousing, stimulating an image is, the more quickly it will be let through by the reticular formation and stored in the brain. And it will be allotted more storage space. Internet pornography can evoke one of the most powerful neurological and physiological responses to humankind. How does this work? There are four steps:
Step 1: The pornographer uses as a primary tool the element of shock to get a sexual image locked onto its target. A teenager is shocked by what he sees, dazzled, hypnotized and the reticular formation lets the image through and stores it. Pornographers know this and their first step is to shock you.
Step 2: The second step is that the cellular-memory group in your brain and body will leave a deep impression on you and will be easily remembered and retrieved.
Step 3: Here the new pornographic images will be linked to some meaning from his past.
• If a person masturbates and reaches orgasm with Internet pornography as a stimulus, his brain and body links the images to all the cellular-memory groups associated with sexual climax. And when this network is linked up, addiction happens easily.
• Or if you were abused as a child or if you begin to view Internet porn as violence these images can be devastating in the sense that you begin to link nude females and sexual orgasm with rape, torture, anger, fear and murder.
• Or you simply link the porn with all the R rated movies containing sex, nudity and violence you’ve already seen and you begin to believe that it is not particularly bad and you are easily addicted.
• Or you begin to view porn as a way to escape from real life and you begin to live a private life that is more meaningful than your wife or children.
Step 4: You now begin to feel also shame and guilt and fear and stress from being addicted.
Step 5: You are now not just addicted but hopelessly addicted.
7. There have been a lot of studies done that show what happens to a person who is exposed to a significant amount of increasingly graphic pornography. These studies are virtually unanimous in their conclusions:
• In as little as six weeks you begin to trivialize rape and not think of it as a criminal offense. In fact, you no longer consider it a crime at all.
• You develop distorted perceptions about sexuality.
• You develop an appetite for bizarre, violent types of pornography. (Normal sex no longer seems to do the job.)
• You devalue the importance of marriage and you lack confidence in marriage as something you would like to be in or is worthwhile or is lasting.
• You view casual relationships as normal and natural.
In addition, pornography teaches incest.
• One day surfing on the Internet a man comes to a site promoting incest, portraying fathers having sex with their teenage daughters. Remember our brains do not distinguish between fantasy and reality and these images are stored for future retrieval. Before long the father begins fantasizing and masturbating while viewing these images. And he is now no longer shocked but stimulated. Teenage girls want to have sex with older men. He thinks it is terrific.
Then one evening dad’s conflict deepens as he walks past his daughter’s open bedroom door and sees her stretched out on the bed in a T-shirt and panties talking on the phone.
Cellular-memory groups will be activated in his mind and body. Neural pathways will provide the image of his daughter and connecting his daughter with “lusting nude teenage girls who want sex with an older man.”
• The rest is too horrible to put in words here.
8. The male brain and the female brain are different. Yes, men and women are wired differently.
Women place emphasis on the “whole” while males focus primarily on the “parts.” These differences center around how men and women use the right and left hemispheres of their brains. The male brain is narrow and highly specialized with the right side of the brain being used for visual activities and the left for verbal activities. Women, on the other hand, use both sides of the brain for both verbal and visual activities.
The chief perceptual sense in the male is vision. Testosterone takes the already narrowing male brain and magnifies the narrowing tendency and capacity even further. Estrogen, the primary female hormone, actually increases the female brain’s diffusing or broadening capacity by building more dendrite projections or spines on each nerve cell, thereby increasing the number of connecting links between nerve cells. Thus, estrogen facilitates the flow of information among neurons.
Men have as much as 20% more testosterone in their system than do women. This makes men typically more aggressive, dominant and more narrowly focused on the physical aspects of sex. In men the dominant perceptual sense is vision which is not the case with women usually.
An easy way to say this is: Women see relationships, whereas men see body parts.
9. John, a man with a typical Internet porn addiction problem, said, “I would be going
through a normal day and then suddenly I would get this urge to look at porn. Once the urge hit me, it was like everything around me became unimportant. All I could think about was getting to a computer. It was like I was being pulled by some powerful force. I would cancel meetings, or make up excuses, do anything necessary to get to the computer. Once there, I blocked out everything else. I would spend hours looking at porn on the Internet. It was like I was in a cave and the rest of the world didn’t exist. These sessions always ended with masturbation, after which it was like I was suddenly coming out of a cave and seeing the world again. I remember being shocked when I would look at my watch and realize how long I was out of commission. It was almost like I didn’t know where I’d been-like waking up from a dream or something.”
With virtually every male it is the same story. Each male addict describes being pulled or pushed down the funnel almost as if its sides were greased. And once they had begun their downward plunge, pulling up was next to impossible.
They all talked about being trapped in the narrow tunnel, glued to images, riveted by desire, completely consumed, out of control. They referred to everything around them as blocked out, blurred, or of little significance. And in every case they described the sensation of emerging from the narrow tunnel after masturbation and suddenly coming to their senses, stepping out of the dark, once more being aware of everything.
This person describes glancing at their watch and saying: “Four o’clock!” You were in there for over three hours. But how? Suddenly you feel ashamed; regret and guilt wash over you like a wave. Something happened in that tunnel-something you’re not particularly proud of, something you wish you hadn’t done.
The female brain operates differently. Yes, a woman can slip and slide down the funnel, but with important differences:
• Women do not indicate they have ever been pulled uncontrollably down the funnel with no way to stop. Each used one word to describe their descent, namely, choice. It was a conscious choice rather than an uncontrollable compulsion.
• They all agreed they had never narrowed to the point where everything was completely blocked out.
• The women maintained that although orgasm was highly enjoyable, it was not their signal focus as it was for males. They contended that other elements of intimacy were required even without orgasm. And no male says that.
• Porn shows women writhing in pleasure, achieving orgasm at the drop of a hat and yet these responses are obviously staged. Few if any women could become aroused so easily.
• Women did not suddenly regain their reasoning when coming out of the tunnel because basic reasoning was connected to the process all the time.
• The female funnel is wider at the top and narrows more gradually with more exits and rest stops suggesting women more slowly narrow and can halt the process at will. No so with men.
10. Male viewers want to see body parts. Pornographers know full well the male brain’s predisposition to narrowly focus on parts rather than the whole--to objectify and compartmentalize everything. Internet porn geared to the male audience is a continuous wave of one specific male body part doing everything imaginable to every conceivable female body part, from head to toe. Much of this material involves extreme close-ups of one body part after another. This is always completely devoid of any emotion, romance or tenderness. Rather, it is designed to be sexually intense but without commitment or emotion-the perfect visual male stimulus.
11. The male viewer wants to visualize having sex with the perfect female sex partner. Most Internet porn geared to the male market shows the “man in control.” The female is “servicing” the male, subservient to whatever he wants done to him or to whatever he wants to do to her. And she is nearly always shown as completely lusting after him and enjoying every moment of their sexual activities, even though in real life many of these activities would be painful and/or distasteful to most women.
This “male-in-control/female-wanting-and enjoying-it” combination, in effect creates a female that is responding sexually the way a male would, which in turn supplies the male viewer with his “perfect sex partner” fantasy. He is in total control, while having done to him, or doing, exactly what turns him on most. This is male sexual fantasy at the highest level of stimulation.
12. In his work Pornography’s Effects on Adults & Children, clinical psychologist Dr. Victor Cline reports:
In research conducted by Dr. W. Marshall, almost half of the rapists that he studied used pornography depicting consenting sex to arouse themselves preparatory to seeking out a victim to rape. Another investigator, Dr. M. J. Goldstein, found that for more of the sex offenders than the non-offenders he studied wished to, and often did, emulate the acts they saw depicted in pornography.
In still another study, most of Dr. E. G. Abel’s sex offenders said that pornography increased their appetites for deviant activities (and these were the men who reported the least control over their deviant activities). Other investigators have reported that rapists and child molesters use pornographic materials fully, both immediately prior to their crimes and during the actual assaults.
Still another type of evidence comes from a study conducted by Darrell Pope, a former Michigan State Police officer, who found that of 38,000 cases of sexual assault on file in Michigan, 41% involved pornography exposure just prior to the act or during the act.
Porn users don’t live in a vacuum; they live among people, real, living, breathing people: spouses, children, neighbors, co-workers. Any or all of these can be hurt when a porn addict spins out of control.
13. Cathy’s Story – The Future of Women and Internet Pornography
This is a telephone interview with a woman called “Cathy.” Before this interview, the book had been all but completed and titled: How Internet Pornography Makes Men Stupid. As a direct result of this interview, together with interaction with Willie Draughon, retired Assistant Chief of Criminal Investigations with the State Attorney General’s Office, he returned to the drawing board.
Since then, the book was revised to include the rising and devastating problem of female Internet porn and cybersex addiction.
The following is a brief overview Cathy provided prior to a telephone interview:
“My first contact with the Internet is an experience that I will never forget. I was curious about how far a person would go to expose their body for all the world to see so I got on a pornography site…The more I saw the more I wanted to see. I found myself looking for time when no one was around so I could get on the Internet. I began having sexual fantasies about what I saw there (sometimes involving masturbation). Before long I realized that I didn’t want to just imagine sex with a partner, I wanted to physically have sex with someone.
One day I got bold enough to find a person online and we arranged to meet for the sole purpose of having sex. I didn’t know this person. I had never met him before in my life and that is the way I wanted it. For six months I forgot what life was. All I wanted to do was live for myself and fulfill my selfish physical desires. My circle of friends changed. I now wanted to hang around the people who wanted a life such as mine.
I began going to bars. I didn’t drink or smoke but I went there to socialize with the kind of people that I could take home and have a one-night stand with…My life was one of sex and gratification, and all because of curiosity about porn sites.
I know of many women who have fallen in the same trap that I did for one reason or another. It’s a slow, subtle process that takes you on a trip to hell. I was addicted to sex, fantasies, physical desire, and I didn’t even know it until it was too late.
The detrimental effects that those six months had on me are too great to mention in detail, but I can tell you the worst of them. My family was nearly destroyed. My children have lost respect for their mother. Somewhere along the way I contracted Chlamydia, a serious sexually transmitted disease. But worst of all, I lost respect for myself and it took a lot of time to get my life back.
Internet pornography is a world of subtlety. It is the first lurid step in a long staircase that leads both men and women into a life of misery.
Cathy stated very clearly that she was “heavily involved with cybersex chat rooms.” “My initial curiosity with Internet porn led me to the chat rooms, which in turn led me to actual face-to-face sexual encounters. Chat rooms had a much more powerful attraction to me than the pornography itself. I spent many hundreds of hours in sexually graphic conversations with men in cybersex chat rooms. The Internet porn was simply a convenient tool that aided in my romantic/sexual fantasizing.”
There are those reading this who might assume that Cathy was simply a loose woman, slutty, not unlike a prostitute in her mind-set. Actually, prior to her introduction to Internet pornography and her subsequent addiction to cybersex chat rooms and illicit sex, she was an exemplary wife and mother, a model citizen in her community, an active participant in her church. Now she lives alone, divorced, virtually ignored and despised by her children.
Like it has done to so many men, Internet pornography/cybersex chat takes decent, intelligent, respected and successful women and makes them stupid! Just as it does for men, Internet porn/cybersex becomes a “drug of choice” where women find pleasure, relief and escape (self-medication) from the pain, stress and realities of everyday life.
14. What to do? Here are a few simple ideas:
a. The three-second rule: Establish a practice of not allowing pornography to continue for more than three seconds – not an addictive behavior. Immediately turn off such action as fantasizing, scooping out an attractive woman, channel surfing, listening to certain kinds of “trigger” music, etc.
b. Remember to the mindbody, meaning is everything. So rather than gazing at a woman’s body parts, look her in the eye and say to her: “This is a human being, not an object. This is someone’s daughter, sister, mother.”
c. Speed up the video to the end. Rather than focusing on the sexual acting out, watch yourself confessing to your wife, saying goodbye to your children as you are hauled away to prison, seeing your name spattered on the front page as a pervert for all the community to see.
d. Change the meaning of pain, stress, loneliness and other trigger actions. Let the emotions pass through you and realize that it is not earth shattering to have pain. It will not destroy you and you will survive. Learn to develop healthy pain management.
e. Acknowledge the trigger and let it go. “That’s a very attractive woman, isn’t it great to be a man?” “I wonder what’s for dinner tonight…” Rather than commencing some giant battle of will power and blowing the woman up into some fantasy sex goddess, let the image and experience “move through you”-change its meaning.
This is one of the best books I have ever read on pornography. Please buy it:
The Science of How Internet Pornography Radically Alters the Human Brain and Body
Mark B. Kastleman (2001) Granite Publishing: Orem, Utah
Mark B. Kastleman (2001) Granite Publishing: Orem, Utah
A Review by Val Peter
1. According to tobacco companies, cigarettes aren’t addictive and they don’t cause cancer.
But anybody with a little common sense knows that’s not true, that cigarettes are addictive and they do cause cancer.
2. The people who make pornography say that it is not addictive, nor is cybersex, but any intelligent person knows that the real experts say it is very addictive.
3. Scientists are beginning to understand the relationship between seeing pornography (flesh) and the brain’s release of its own intoxicating chemicals (drugs).
At the essence of pornography is an image of flesh used as a drug (a way of numbing psychic pain) and this drug lasts only as long as a man stares at the image. For the addict the rush is more than an attraction. He is helpless before it and completely out of control. In the case of all drugs, the promised happiness and relief lasts only momentarily.
4. So pornography and cybersex are not harmless outlets for teens or men and women to satisfy normal healthy urges. It is just the opposite. For so many pornography and cybersex become a habit-forming drug used as an escape from the pressures of life, from stress and pain, from fear, loneliness, emptiness, regret, rejection, childhood abuse and a host of other human emotions. But they are only a temporary relief.
The chemicals released include: epinephrine (an adrenal gland hormone that “locks-in” memories of experiences occurring at times of high arousal), adrenaline, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), noradrenaline, norepinephrine and testosterone, among others.
Thus, pornography and cybersex provide the addict with sexual arousal and also a way to “self-medicate” in order to escape the realities of life in order to make the pain go away for a little time.
5. The four stages of pornography addiction:
• Stage I - Addiction
The first change that takes place is the addiction effect, namely, the porn consumer gets hooked.
Please note that Dr. Victor Cline found that once addicted, men, teenage boys, and in some cases, women, “could not throw off their dependencies on the pornography by themselves, despite many negative consequences…”
The higher their education the more prone people are to becoming addicted to this material and the more money they have to spend.
• With the passage of time, the porn addict requires rougher, more explicit, more defiant, and more kinky kinds of sexual material to get their highs and their sexual turn-ons. It’s like drug addiction. Over time it escalates.
Being married does not solve the problem because oftentimes addicts prefer their sexual imagery accompanied by masturbation to sexual intercourse with their spouse. This diminishes their capacity to love and express affection to their spouse. Their sex drive is diverted away from their spouse and the wife can easily sense this and feel very lonely and rejected. A wife often reports that her husband prefers to masturbate to pornography rather than make love to her.
• Desensitization…this third phase according to Dr. Cline involves material originally seen as shocking, taboo-breaking, illegal, repulsive and immoral, and yet, still sexually arising comes in time to be seen as very common place and quite acceptable in the sense that “everybody does it.” Even though the activity is illegal and contrary to moral beliefs and personal standards “everybody does it” the kindly Dr. Jekyll is transformed into the brutal Mr. Hyde through the process of desensitization.
• Acting out sexually is the fourth phase occurring with an increasing tendency to act out sexually the behaviors viewed in the pornography that the porn consumers have been repeatedly exposed to. This includes compulsive promiscuity, exhibitionism, group sex, voyeurism, frequenting massage parlors, having sex with minor children, rape and inflicting pain on themselves or a partner during sex. They find themselves locked into this and unable to change no matter what the negative consequences.
6. How do Internet pornographers use the mind and body science to attract and addict their customers?
• Their reticular formation (a region of densely packed nerve cells in the center of the brain) decides which messages to let through to the brain. Some it allows in and others it keeps in holding patterns guarding against sensory overload.
The more exciting, interesting, threatening, horrifying, arousing, stimulating an image is, the more quickly it will be let through by the reticular formation and stored in the brain. And it will be allotted more storage space. Internet pornography can evoke one of the most powerful neurological and physiological responses to humankind. How does this work? There are four steps:
Step 1: The pornographer uses as a primary tool the element of shock to get a sexual image locked onto its target. A teenager is shocked by what he sees, dazzled, hypnotized and the reticular formation lets the image through and stores it. Pornographers know this and their first step is to shock you.
Step 2: The second step is that the cellular-memory group in your brain and body will leave a deep impression on you and will be easily remembered and retrieved.
Step 3: Here the new pornographic images will be linked to some meaning from his past.
• If a person masturbates and reaches orgasm with Internet pornography as a stimulus, his brain and body links the images to all the cellular-memory groups associated with sexual climax. And when this network is linked up, addiction happens easily.
• Or if you were abused as a child or if you begin to view Internet porn as violence these images can be devastating in the sense that you begin to link nude females and sexual orgasm with rape, torture, anger, fear and murder.
• Or you simply link the porn with all the R rated movies containing sex, nudity and violence you’ve already seen and you begin to believe that it is not particularly bad and you are easily addicted.
• Or you begin to view porn as a way to escape from real life and you begin to live a private life that is more meaningful than your wife or children.
Step 4: You now begin to feel also shame and guilt and fear and stress from being addicted.
Step 5: You are now not just addicted but hopelessly addicted.
7. There have been a lot of studies done that show what happens to a person who is exposed to a significant amount of increasingly graphic pornography. These studies are virtually unanimous in their conclusions:
• In as little as six weeks you begin to trivialize rape and not think of it as a criminal offense. In fact, you no longer consider it a crime at all.
• You develop distorted perceptions about sexuality.
• You develop an appetite for bizarre, violent types of pornography. (Normal sex no longer seems to do the job.)
• You devalue the importance of marriage and you lack confidence in marriage as something you would like to be in or is worthwhile or is lasting.
• You view casual relationships as normal and natural.
In addition, pornography teaches incest.
• One day surfing on the Internet a man comes to a site promoting incest, portraying fathers having sex with their teenage daughters. Remember our brains do not distinguish between fantasy and reality and these images are stored for future retrieval. Before long the father begins fantasizing and masturbating while viewing these images. And he is now no longer shocked but stimulated. Teenage girls want to have sex with older men. He thinks it is terrific.
Then one evening dad’s conflict deepens as he walks past his daughter’s open bedroom door and sees her stretched out on the bed in a T-shirt and panties talking on the phone.
Cellular-memory groups will be activated in his mind and body. Neural pathways will provide the image of his daughter and connecting his daughter with “lusting nude teenage girls who want sex with an older man.”
• The rest is too horrible to put in words here.
8. The male brain and the female brain are different. Yes, men and women are wired differently.
Women place emphasis on the “whole” while males focus primarily on the “parts.” These differences center around how men and women use the right and left hemispheres of their brains. The male brain is narrow and highly specialized with the right side of the brain being used for visual activities and the left for verbal activities. Women, on the other hand, use both sides of the brain for both verbal and visual activities.
The chief perceptual sense in the male is vision. Testosterone takes the already narrowing male brain and magnifies the narrowing tendency and capacity even further. Estrogen, the primary female hormone, actually increases the female brain’s diffusing or broadening capacity by building more dendrite projections or spines on each nerve cell, thereby increasing the number of connecting links between nerve cells. Thus, estrogen facilitates the flow of information among neurons.
Men have as much as 20% more testosterone in their system than do women. This makes men typically more aggressive, dominant and more narrowly focused on the physical aspects of sex. In men the dominant perceptual sense is vision which is not the case with women usually.
An easy way to say this is: Women see relationships, whereas men see body parts.
9. John, a man with a typical Internet porn addiction problem, said, “I would be going
through a normal day and then suddenly I would get this urge to look at porn. Once the urge hit me, it was like everything around me became unimportant. All I could think about was getting to a computer. It was like I was being pulled by some powerful force. I would cancel meetings, or make up excuses, do anything necessary to get to the computer. Once there, I blocked out everything else. I would spend hours looking at porn on the Internet. It was like I was in a cave and the rest of the world didn’t exist. These sessions always ended with masturbation, after which it was like I was suddenly coming out of a cave and seeing the world again. I remember being shocked when I would look at my watch and realize how long I was out of commission. It was almost like I didn’t know where I’d been-like waking up from a dream or something.”
With virtually every male it is the same story. Each male addict describes being pulled or pushed down the funnel almost as if its sides were greased. And once they had begun their downward plunge, pulling up was next to impossible.
They all talked about being trapped in the narrow tunnel, glued to images, riveted by desire, completely consumed, out of control. They referred to everything around them as blocked out, blurred, or of little significance. And in every case they described the sensation of emerging from the narrow tunnel after masturbation and suddenly coming to their senses, stepping out of the dark, once more being aware of everything.
This person describes glancing at their watch and saying: “Four o’clock!” You were in there for over three hours. But how? Suddenly you feel ashamed; regret and guilt wash over you like a wave. Something happened in that tunnel-something you’re not particularly proud of, something you wish you hadn’t done.
The female brain operates differently. Yes, a woman can slip and slide down the funnel, but with important differences:
• Women do not indicate they have ever been pulled uncontrollably down the funnel with no way to stop. Each used one word to describe their descent, namely, choice. It was a conscious choice rather than an uncontrollable compulsion.
• They all agreed they had never narrowed to the point where everything was completely blocked out.
• The women maintained that although orgasm was highly enjoyable, it was not their signal focus as it was for males. They contended that other elements of intimacy were required even without orgasm. And no male says that.
• Porn shows women writhing in pleasure, achieving orgasm at the drop of a hat and yet these responses are obviously staged. Few if any women could become aroused so easily.
• Women did not suddenly regain their reasoning when coming out of the tunnel because basic reasoning was connected to the process all the time.
• The female funnel is wider at the top and narrows more gradually with more exits and rest stops suggesting women more slowly narrow and can halt the process at will. No so with men.
10. Male viewers want to see body parts. Pornographers know full well the male brain’s predisposition to narrowly focus on parts rather than the whole--to objectify and compartmentalize everything. Internet porn geared to the male audience is a continuous wave of one specific male body part doing everything imaginable to every conceivable female body part, from head to toe. Much of this material involves extreme close-ups of one body part after another. This is always completely devoid of any emotion, romance or tenderness. Rather, it is designed to be sexually intense but without commitment or emotion-the perfect visual male stimulus.
11. The male viewer wants to visualize having sex with the perfect female sex partner. Most Internet porn geared to the male market shows the “man in control.” The female is “servicing” the male, subservient to whatever he wants done to him or to whatever he wants to do to her. And she is nearly always shown as completely lusting after him and enjoying every moment of their sexual activities, even though in real life many of these activities would be painful and/or distasteful to most women.
This “male-in-control/female-wanting-and enjoying-it” combination, in effect creates a female that is responding sexually the way a male would, which in turn supplies the male viewer with his “perfect sex partner” fantasy. He is in total control, while having done to him, or doing, exactly what turns him on most. This is male sexual fantasy at the highest level of stimulation.
12. In his work Pornography’s Effects on Adults & Children, clinical psychologist Dr. Victor Cline reports:
In research conducted by Dr. W. Marshall, almost half of the rapists that he studied used pornography depicting consenting sex to arouse themselves preparatory to seeking out a victim to rape. Another investigator, Dr. M. J. Goldstein, found that for more of the sex offenders than the non-offenders he studied wished to, and often did, emulate the acts they saw depicted in pornography.
In still another study, most of Dr. E. G. Abel’s sex offenders said that pornography increased their appetites for deviant activities (and these were the men who reported the least control over their deviant activities). Other investigators have reported that rapists and child molesters use pornographic materials fully, both immediately prior to their crimes and during the actual assaults.
Still another type of evidence comes from a study conducted by Darrell Pope, a former Michigan State Police officer, who found that of 38,000 cases of sexual assault on file in Michigan, 41% involved pornography exposure just prior to the act or during the act.
Porn users don’t live in a vacuum; they live among people, real, living, breathing people: spouses, children, neighbors, co-workers. Any or all of these can be hurt when a porn addict spins out of control.
13. Cathy’s Story – The Future of Women and Internet Pornography
This is a telephone interview with a woman called “Cathy.” Before this interview, the book had been all but completed and titled: How Internet Pornography Makes Men Stupid. As a direct result of this interview, together with interaction with Willie Draughon, retired Assistant Chief of Criminal Investigations with the State Attorney General’s Office, he returned to the drawing board.
Since then, the book was revised to include the rising and devastating problem of female Internet porn and cybersex addiction.
The following is a brief overview Cathy provided prior to a telephone interview:
“My first contact with the Internet is an experience that I will never forget. I was curious about how far a person would go to expose their body for all the world to see so I got on a pornography site…The more I saw the more I wanted to see. I found myself looking for time when no one was around so I could get on the Internet. I began having sexual fantasies about what I saw there (sometimes involving masturbation). Before long I realized that I didn’t want to just imagine sex with a partner, I wanted to physically have sex with someone.
One day I got bold enough to find a person online and we arranged to meet for the sole purpose of having sex. I didn’t know this person. I had never met him before in my life and that is the way I wanted it. For six months I forgot what life was. All I wanted to do was live for myself and fulfill my selfish physical desires. My circle of friends changed. I now wanted to hang around the people who wanted a life such as mine.
I began going to bars. I didn’t drink or smoke but I went there to socialize with the kind of people that I could take home and have a one-night stand with…My life was one of sex and gratification, and all because of curiosity about porn sites.
I know of many women who have fallen in the same trap that I did for one reason or another. It’s a slow, subtle process that takes you on a trip to hell. I was addicted to sex, fantasies, physical desire, and I didn’t even know it until it was too late.
The detrimental effects that those six months had on me are too great to mention in detail, but I can tell you the worst of them. My family was nearly destroyed. My children have lost respect for their mother. Somewhere along the way I contracted Chlamydia, a serious sexually transmitted disease. But worst of all, I lost respect for myself and it took a lot of time to get my life back.
Internet pornography is a world of subtlety. It is the first lurid step in a long staircase that leads both men and women into a life of misery.
Cathy stated very clearly that she was “heavily involved with cybersex chat rooms.” “My initial curiosity with Internet porn led me to the chat rooms, which in turn led me to actual face-to-face sexual encounters. Chat rooms had a much more powerful attraction to me than the pornography itself. I spent many hundreds of hours in sexually graphic conversations with men in cybersex chat rooms. The Internet porn was simply a convenient tool that aided in my romantic/sexual fantasizing.”
There are those reading this who might assume that Cathy was simply a loose woman, slutty, not unlike a prostitute in her mind-set. Actually, prior to her introduction to Internet pornography and her subsequent addiction to cybersex chat rooms and illicit sex, she was an exemplary wife and mother, a model citizen in her community, an active participant in her church. Now she lives alone, divorced, virtually ignored and despised by her children.
Like it has done to so many men, Internet pornography/cybersex chat takes decent, intelligent, respected and successful women and makes them stupid! Just as it does for men, Internet porn/cybersex becomes a “drug of choice” where women find pleasure, relief and escape (self-medication) from the pain, stress and realities of everyday life.
14. What to do? Here are a few simple ideas:
a. The three-second rule: Establish a practice of not allowing pornography to continue for more than three seconds – not an addictive behavior. Immediately turn off such action as fantasizing, scooping out an attractive woman, channel surfing, listening to certain kinds of “trigger” music, etc.
b. Remember to the mindbody, meaning is everything. So rather than gazing at a woman’s body parts, look her in the eye and say to her: “This is a human being, not an object. This is someone’s daughter, sister, mother.”
c. Speed up the video to the end. Rather than focusing on the sexual acting out, watch yourself confessing to your wife, saying goodbye to your children as you are hauled away to prison, seeing your name spattered on the front page as a pervert for all the community to see.
d. Change the meaning of pain, stress, loneliness and other trigger actions. Let the emotions pass through you and realize that it is not earth shattering to have pain. It will not destroy you and you will survive. Learn to develop healthy pain management.
e. Acknowledge the trigger and let it go. “That’s a very attractive woman, isn’t it great to be a man?” “I wonder what’s for dinner tonight…” Rather than commencing some giant battle of will power and blowing the woman up into some fantasy sex goddess, let the image and experience “move through you”-change its meaning.
This is one of the best books I have ever read on pornography. Please buy it:
The Science of How Internet Pornography Radically Alters the Human Brain and Body
Mark B. Kastleman (2001) Granite Publishing: Orem, Utah
posted by Fr. Peter | 3:11 PM
