Pornography

Fight The New Drug

To viewers, pornography can appear as a fantasy world of pleasure and thrills. However, those who participate in and create pornography often become a part of a flood of drugs, disease, slavery, trafficking, rape and abuse.

Every Year, porn sites get more visitors per month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined

68 MILLION DAILY PORNOGRAPHIC SEARCHES
88% OF PORNOGRAPHIC FILMS CONTAIN PHYSICAL VIOLENCE TOWARD WOMEN
25% OF ALL INTERNET SEARCHES ARE PORN RELATED
PORNOGRAPHY IS LITTERED WITH GIRLS AND WOMEN WHO ARE ABUSED AND/OR SEX TRAFFICKED

On average, children begin consuming pornography by age 11.

Pornography Addiction Has Resulted In...

•40% of sex addicts lost their spouse

•58% suffered considerable financial losses

•1/3 lost their jobs

•Severe clinical depression was reported 2 x’s as frequently among internet porn users compared to non-users.

As addiction to porn increases, users seek increasingly harder material. The availability of “live” porn has risen as trafficked children & women are forced to perform “on-demand” sex acts in front of web cameras as porn users watch.

Modern science allows us to understand that the underlying nature of an addiction to pornography is chemically nearly identical to a heroin addiction: only the delivery system is different”- Dr. Jeffrey Satinover psychiatrist

In a study of 932 sex addicts, 90% of men and 77% of women indicated that looking at porn played a significant role in their addiction. Chronically viewing porn rewires the brain and drastically influences how dopamine and other chemicals are received and used in the brain.

Porn Is Like A Drug

On the surface, heroin and porn don’t seem to have a lot in common. One is purchased in seedy alleyways; the other is free to download. So where’s the similarity?

Inside The Brain

Deep inside your brain, there’s something called a “reward pathway.” The pathway’s job is to help keep you alive by doing exactly what its name promises: rewarding you. The way it does this is by releasing chemicals in your brain. These chemicals help you feel pleasure, and bond with other people. They motivate you to come back to important activities that make you happy. The problem is that the reward pathway can be hijacked.

The way substances like heroin make users feel high is by triggering the reward pathway to release high levels of dopamine without making the user do any of the work to earn it. Want to guess what else does that? Porn. Dopamine helps to create new brain pathways that lead the user back to the behavior that triggered the chemical release. The more a person uses drugs or looks at porn, the more those pathways get wired into the brain, making it harder for the person to stop.

Over time, the constant overload causes other brain changes as well. A junkie will eventually require more drugs to get a buzz or even feel normal. Porn users can quickly build up a tolerance as their brains adapt to the high levels of dopamine that porn releases. Even though porn is still releasing dopamine into the brain, the user can’t feel its effects as much because the brain is trying to protect itself from dopamine overload. As a result, many porn users have to find more porn, more often.

Once a porn user becomes accustomed to a brain pulsing with chemicals, trying to cut back on the habit can lead to withdrawal symptoms, just like with drugs.

Today’s version of porn is a whole new ball game. Thanks to the Internet, porn now mixes the most powerful natural dopamine release the body can produce with a cocktail of other elements—endless novelty, shock, and surprise—all of which increase the dopamine surge. And because Internet porn offers an endless stream of variety, users can flip to a new image every time their high starts to fade, keeping dopamine levels elevated for hours.

Describing porn’s effect to a U.S. Senate committee, Dr. Jeffrey Satinover of Princeton University said, “It is as though we have devised a form of heroin … usable in the privacy of one’s own home and injected directly to the brain through the eyes.”

Porn Is Addictive

Cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs have something in common. Once they’ve entered the body, they all do the same thing to the brain: flood it with the chemical dopamine. That’s what makes them addictive. And porn does the exact same thing.

Dopamine Makes You Feel Good

For example, your brain produces higher levels of dopamine when you have chocolate cake than it does for whole wheat bread. Porn is basically sexual junk food! When you view porn, your brain thinks you're seeing a potential mating opportunity, and loads the brain with dopamine. Unlike healthy sexual relationships that build over time with a real person, porn offers an endless stream of hyper-sexual images, flooding the brain with high levels of dopamine each time the user clicks a new image.

Setting your brain up for an overload of feel-good chemicals might sound like fun at first, but just like with junk food, what feels like a good thing, isn’t at all. Because porn use floods the brain with high chemical levels, the brain starts to fight back. Over time, the brain will actually cut down on its dopamine receptors— As a result, porn that once excited a person often stops having that effect. This leads a porn addict to more porn (and more hardcore porn) just to get aroused.

Eventually, as the brain acclimates to the overload of dopamine, users often find that they can’t feel normal without that dopamine high.

For teens, the risks are especially high, since a teen brain’s reward pathway has a response two to four times more powerful than an adult brain—which means teen brains release even higher levels of dopamine. Teen brains are extra vulnerable to addiction.

Porn Affects Behavior

Dopamine makes you feel great, but its effects are not just temporary. While you’re enjoying that good feeling, it’s also building new pathways into your brain connecting together the different parts of the experience you had so you can remember to do that again. That’s why the types of behaviors we link our pleasure response to tend to become habits and stick around.

So when someone is looking at porn, while they think they’re just being entertained, their brain is busy at work building pathways between whatever’s happening on their screen and feelings of arousal. Here’s where it gets tricky: The kind of porn a user watches can—and usually does—change over time. So as their brain continually wires together what they’re seeing with feeling aroused, what turns them on can change too.

In a 2012 survey of 1,500 men, 56% said their tastes in porn had become “increasingly extreme or deviant.” Because consistent porn users’ brains quickly become accustomed to the porn they’ve already seen they typically have to constantly be moving on to more extreme forms of pornography to get aroused by it.

Those watching extreme and dangerous sex acts, are being taught that those behaviors are more normal and common than they are. One study found that people exposed to significant amounts of porn thought things like sex with animals and violent sex were twice as common as what those not exposed to porn thought. And when people believe a behavior is normal, they’re more likely to try it.

Research found that watching degrading porn increases users’ dominating and harassing behavior toward women, and leaves the user feeling less compassion for rape victims. Porn watchers are also more likely to express attitudes supporting violence against women

Porn Kills Love

In life, real love requires a real person who has thoughts,ideas and talents. Every person is a unique mix, and it’s that awesome blend that we fall in love with. Of course, pornographers can’t offer that. Instead they capitalize on the fact that the real people in our real lives come with complications. In porn, all of that can be edited out: any physical flaws can be quickly photoshopped. Regardless of what is happening to them, the people on screen can be made to look like they’re having fun.

In porn, no one seems to have needs of their own, opinions, or feelings to consider. Besides, if anyone fails to immediately satisfy, there’s always someone new to click to. The more porn a viewer watches, the more their real relationships don’t seem exciting enough, which gives them a reason to turn back to porn. And the more they watch porn, the more likely they are to be indoctrinated with porn’s version of how relationships should go.

Research found that after men are exposed to pornography, they rate themselves as less in love with their partner than men who do not watch porn and after being exposed to pornographic images, people were more critical of their partner’s appearance.

Over time, those who consistently use porn often may even lose interest in finding love altogether. Frequent porn use is associated with feeling cynical about love in general, less trust in romantic partners, and with feeling like marriage is confining. Porn doesn’t do any favors for the user’s partner, either. Wives and girlfriends often end up feeling like their partner doesn’t really value them. Many partners of porn users end up depressed, anxious, and feeling like they can never measure up.

Over time, those who consistently use porn often may even lose interest in finding love altogether. Frequent porn use is associated with feeling cynical about love in general, less trust in romantic partners, and with feeling like marriage is confining. Porn doesn’t do any favors for the user’s partner, either. Wives and girlfriends often end up feeling like their partner doesn’t really value them. Many partners of porn users end up depressed, anxious, and feeling like they can never measure up.

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