Why I’m Passionate About Porn

Last week, I posted this video on Facebook:

I should have known better, of course. I mean, I hate controversy, and I have several Facebook friends who are in the pro-porn camp. So, of course, controversy came.

As I realized that, no, I really couldn’t just go into avoidance mode on this one, it occurred to me that I probably should do a full blog post on this. After all, not everyone follows my workplace’s blog; not everyone just knows the same research I know. So, y’know, share the knowledge and what not (in what I hope was as loving a manner as possible).

What follows is my really long commented reply to some of the points, cleaned up a bit for my blog. It’s a pretty good overview of why I do care about porn use–about why it’s not just some personal moral issue that I wouldn’t force on others. It’s about health.

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There are a few common misconceptions regarding porn. First is the spiraling effect of porn. In my industry, it’s easy to speak in hyperbole (e.g. “You look at porn, you’re gonna turn into a rapist!) In reality, not all porn users will become addicted, and even fewer will spiral into things like child porn and sex trafficking.

However, we do know that porn rewires the brain. Basically, sexual acts cause you to bond to whatever you’re interacting with…so the more sex you have with one person, the more you’ll be turned on by that person. Conversely, porn causes you to bond to variety…instead of one partner, it makes you bond to hundreds and thousands of images. Eventually you need more and more hits and harder and harder stuff. In all the reports I’ve read and testimonies I’ve heard, the people facing jail time for the really hardcore stuff – child porn and what have you – were originally disgusted by the concept. Eventually, it became the only thing that would turn them on. Here’s one story as an example.

Even for the many who never descend to that level, they often have physical outcomes in their relationships. Many porn users report no longer being satisfied with their partners because they’ve rewired their brain to only be turned on by the images. You can check out more from decidedly non-Christian perspectives…just check out the “no-fap” group on Reddit (their sex lives improved dramatically when they stopped using porn) and the website Your Brain on Porn.

So that covers the physical side of things. For the record, when I first started at Covenant Eyes, I only passively cared about it from a moral standpoint: I may disagree with it, but I wouldn’t force someone who doesn’t subscribe to my belief system to also disagree. No: it was the physical ramifications that really made me start to care.

As for the sex trafficking side, I’ll admit I’m a bit weaker on that research. There are two types of trafficking though: the obvious side, the horror stories of children being sold by their parents into brothels in India or Cambodia; and the digital side of pornography.

The obvious side first: sex tourism is a real thing. So is virtual sex tourism, apparently. In the Philippines, kids are being forced to do sex acts on camera for men worldwide. The demand would not be nearly so great if people hadn’t been hardwiring their brains to require harder and harder stuff to get their fix.

For more info on the sex slavery side of things, check out Rape for Profit, which deals with the issue…in Washington state.

Then there are the porn stars themselves. We’ve heard from a lot of ex-porn stars (Shelley Lubben, for one) that the industry is full of women with drug abuse issues; they need their fix to perform increasingly hardcore scenes, or multiple scenes in rapid succession. We’ve had reports of women being coerced into porn. And there are STDs…The law about condom use helps porn stars in California, sure, but with online distribution, I’d expect the production of porn to be increasingly decentralized. Are there “humane” porn directors? Sure. Are there some stars who truly get into porn voluntarily? Sure. But for every one of those there is another person being coerced into it. Oh, and for the record, a study in the Journal of Sex Research found that 42% of porn contains violence.

All of that is a long way to say: Noel, in the video, was being a bit hyperbolic: there’s not a one-to-one correlation between watching a porn vid and a child being abused. But it’s a much higher correlation than you might think, and his goal (stated later to me) was to make as many people disgusted by porn as possible.

And really, that’s a goal I can–and do!–stand by.