In the end, porn doesn’t whet men’s appetites—it turns them off the real thing.

• By Naomi Wolf
• Published Oct 13, 2024

At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had, Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as David Amsden says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?

She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.

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Experts compare effect on brain to that of heroin or crack cocaine

updated 6:57 a.m. PT, Fri., Nov. 19, 2004

WASHINGTON - Comparing pornography to heroin, researchers are calling on Congress to finance studies on “porn addiction” and launch a public health campaign about its dangers.

Internet pornography is corrupting children and hooking adults into an addiction that threatens their jobs and families, a panel of anti-porn advocates told a hearing organized Thursday by Senator Sam Brownback, chairman of the Commerce subcommittee on science.

Mary Anne Layden, co-director of a sexual trauma program at the University of Pennsylvania, said pornography’s effect on the brain mirrors addiction to heroin or crack cocaine. She told of one patient, a business executive, who arrived at his office at 9 a.m. each day, logged onto Internet porn sites, and didn’t log off until 5 p.m.

Layden called for billboards and bus ads warning people to avoid pornography, strip clubs and prostitutes.

“We’re so afraid to talk about sex in our society that we really give carte blanche to the people who are producing this kind of material,” said James Weaver, a Virginia Tech professor who studies the impact of pornography.

Brownback, a Republican from Kansas and an outspoken Christian conservative who has championed efforts to curb indecency on television and the Internet, said the public is beginning to realize “they don’t just have to take it.”

But he acknowledged the First Amendment right to free speech has limited congressional efforts.

In June, the Supreme Court blocked a law designed to shield Web-surfing children from pornography, ruling that requiring adults to register or use access codes before viewing objectionable material would infringe on their rights.

Brownback said scientific data is needed to help his cause.

Weaver acknowledged that research “directly assessing the impact of pornography addiction on families and communities is rather limited.”

But he pointed to studies that show prolonged use of pornography leads to “sexual callousness, the erosion of family values and diminished sexual satisfaction.”

The following statistics, from both secular and religious sources reveal that porn is now as American as Apple Pie, and has found a place in every corner of our society, including the church. The statistics on porn use among Christians are near the end.

* At 13.3 billion, the 2006 revenues of the sex and porn industry in the U.S. are bigger than the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball combined. Worldwide sex industry sales for 2006 are reported to be 97 billion. To put this in perspective, Microsoft, who sells the operating system used on most of the computers in the world (in addition to other software) reported sales of 44.8 billion in 2006.
Internet Filter Review

* US Sex Industry breakdown for 2006:
Video Sales and Rentals: 3.62 billion
Internet: 2.84 billion
Cable/PPV/In-room/Mobile phone sex: 2.19 billion
Exotic Dance Clubs: 2 billion
Novelties: 1.73 billion
Magazines: .95 billion
Total - 13.3 billion.
2005 Sex Industry sales - 12.62 billion
Internet Filter Review

* 60% of all website visits are sexual in nature
MSNBC Survey 2000

* The No. 1 search term used at search engine sites is the word “sex”. Users searched for “sex” more than other terms such as “games,” “travel,” “music,” “jokes,” “cars,” “weather,” “health” and “jobs” combined. The study also found that “pornography/porno” was the fourth-most searched for subject.
Alexa Research

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Pornography is ubiquitous, more profitable, more acceptable than ever. We argue about the effects on women participants but scant attention is given to the millions of mainly male users. What does porn do to men? Edward Marriott investigates

Saturday November 8, 2024
The Guardian

There’s an episode of Friends - The One With The Free Porn - in which Chandler and Joey discover they have tuned into a porn channel. And it’s free. They leave the TV on, afraid switching off will mean no more pornography. By the end of the episode, Chandler is seeing the world through porn-tinted spectacles. “I was just at the bank,” he complains, “and the teller didn’t ask me to go do it with her in the vault.” Joey, bewildered, reports a similar reaction from the pizza-delivery girl. “You know what,” decides Chandler, “we have to turn off the porn.”

As a society, however, we are further from turning off the porn than we have ever been. Pornography is everywhere - it masquerades as “gentlemen’s entertainment” in the form of clubs such as Spearmint Rhino, it infiltrates advertising and it will soon be available in our back pockets, thanks to a deal by adult entertainment giant Private Media Group to beam porn to UK mobile phones.

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By Amy Sohn

There are many reasons couples break up, but a new, and increasingly common, one is that one partner becomes obsessed with Internet pornography. Now that porn is so easy to watch at home or at work, many men are spending enough time and energy on it that they drive their female partners to end the relationship. In fact, Internet porn has so changed American relationships that in a 2003 survey of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, more than half said the Internet played a “significant role” in divorces in the past year, and that online porn contributed to half of these cases. Once upon a time, a woman’s greatest fear was a good-looking, buxom blonde. These days, her greatest fear is thousands of them.

Dale Lach, a paralegal who helps people represent themselves in their own divorces, says she’s seeing more and more women who want to leave their husbands because of porn. She says the availability has made it an issue in relationships. It used to be that a man who needed a fix had to leave the home to go buy a magazine or watch a movie. “It’s so convenient now,” says Lach, “that they don’t even have to say, ‘I’m going to go bowling tonight.’ They just go into the home office and close the door.”

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Updated: 2024-05-29 17:27 The Sydney Morning Herald spent two months charting a social phenomenon that is poisoning couples and destroying families. Adele Horin reports.

The internet has brought an explosion of pornography into the home and workplace of virtually every Australian. Just a mouse-click away are images that exceed the bounds of fantasy or imagination. In 1961 the introduction of the pill helped usher in a sexual revolution. It had a profound effect on sexual attitudes, practices and relationships. It brought worry-free sex first to married couples, then to singles. And now there are experts - psychiatrists, sociologists and relationship counsellors among them - who argue that the social and psychological impact of internet pornography is potentially as huge.

For some Australians, the rising tide of internet pornography has offered a form of sex education. It has helped extend sexual repertoires, re-invigorated flagging sex lives, and assuaged anxieties or hang-ups. It has been, some argue, a liberation.

But internet pornography is also emerging as the new marriage-wrecker. More and more clients, counsellors say, have begun to cite internet pornography as a factor in their relationship breakdowns.

The technology has created what some call an addiction. Others are more cautious, describing it as a compulsion. Whatever the label, internet pornography is becoming yet another outlet for those with pre-existing compulsive personalities while for others, it has made it easier to do the things that a former head of the American Academy for Matrimonial Lawyers, J.Lindsey Short, says “traditionally lead to divorce”.

An increasing number of men appear to be hooked, and the women in their lives are flailing about in unhappiness, self-doubt and self-blame.

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Internet porn is everywhere; even “nice” guys are hooked. So where does that leave their girlfriends?

By David Amsden

Illustration by Owen Smith

For Jonathan—an attractive, Ivy League– educated musician and adjunct professor—it all started a couple of years ago, when he was working as a temp in the sleek offices of a Madison Avenue ad agency. There he was, seated at his desk, half-heartedly going over pitches for new accounts, when a colleague tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey, man, you gotta check this out.” The co-worker spoke in a whisper.

“What?”

“Just come over here.”

Jonathan—who is 33 and speaks with the hapless charm of a Nick Hornby protagonist—made his way over to the neighboring cubicle, where, on the Mac’s fifteen-inch screen, a pixelated young woman was making love to a machine that resembled a Pilates apparatus. The image, he says, “wasn’t for me,” but it did send an impossible-to-ignore signal to that region of the male brain where curiosity and testosterone intersect. “I was like, Oh, I want to see what’s out there,” he says. “At the time, I barely understood what a ‘link’ was, but it didn’t take too long to figure it all out.”

Indeed not. Suddenly, cyberporn seemed to be everywhere Jonathan went. While in the recording studio, he found that the producer, “a real straight-up guy,” was constantly procrastinating with Internet porn. “Sometimes I’d drop in unexpectedly, like when he was supposed to be mixing my stuff, and he’d be at the computer, staring at pornography, going, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ ” Jonathan recalls. “At first, he had the attitude like, Look at how awful this is, because, obviously, we were both supposed to be these educated men. And I’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s awful.’ But the whole time, we’d be exchanging these knowing glances like, But it’s kind of cool, too, isn’t it?”

It became a once-a-day habit—one that, these days, Jonathan admits has gotten somewhat out of hand. For instance, before most dates, he finds himself logging onto TheHun.net, one of many sites that cull and categorize free porn daily, “so I’m not so anxious.” He now jokes about the Internet as “the vortex of self-hatred” because of how it can turn mere diversion into a self-destructive act: “I’ll have a ton of papers to grade, but instead I’ll be like, Let’s jerk off to the Internet first. So I go online, but then I despise myself. I look up, and my computer says I’ve been online for 47 minutes and I’m like, What the hell have I been doing?!”

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“How the Playboy magnate won the culture war, lost his soul, and left us with a mess to clean up”

Read Mercer Schuchardt | posted 12/01/2024 12:00AM

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Playboy magazine, which some proclaim as a cultural watershed for a new liberation. As a young recipient of this cultural inheritance, Read Mercer Schuchardt, founder of cleave: The Counter Agency, begs to differ. The following article originally appeared in the Gen-x magazine re:generation quarterly, and is reprinted with permission.

One of the occupational hazards of Christian cultural analysis is the tendency to see Satan behind every sociological phenomenon with which you’ve personally struggled. One of the secret pleasures of this habit, however, is that occasionally you really do find him.

It’s pretty hard to deny the complete cultural victory of pornography in America today. Hollywood releases 400 films each year, while the pornography industry releases 700 movies each month. The domain name business.com recently sold for a record-breaking $7.5 million—but in a recent court case, sex.com was valued at $65 million. Not surprising, since porn is, at a minimum, a $10 billion a year business. Porn stars are making their way off the screen into mainstream culture, showing up everywhere from Cannes to Maxim. Fifty years ago an American girl would have been ashamed to be seen in public with too little on. Now she’s embarrassed to be seen with too much on—even if she’s in church.

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If there’s one lesson boys learn when growing up, it’s the value of being tough, the value of winning.

The heroes of the big screen portray the ideal man as rough and rugged. James Bond never gives up. Neither did the characters played by John Wayne. And Rocky always won the big fight - or if he didn’t win, he at least “goes the distance.” Those guys never gave up. And we don’t want to give up either.

That resistance to raising the white flag serves men well during war or in a job situation that requires perseverance. It can help us hang in there when times are tough in a relationship. But when it comes to compulsive behavior, a refusal to give up only prolongs our agony. It leads to greater enslavement and harm.

Of course, most of us won’t surrender until we know we’re beaten or we know defeat is on the way. Maybe you’re not convinced you even have a problem, or if you are, you’re not sure how serious it is.

[Addictive Stages | Moment of truth]

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Some people see pornography as a potential addiction. This can happen when people spend increasing amounts of time using pornography and begin using increasingly more extreme pornographic material. This increase in use occurs even though the use has negative consequences. Some people find that their entire sex life revolves around pornography and they are unable to be sexually involved with a real person without the use of pornography.

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