Why I am Anti-Pornography

1.0 introduction

This will not be a long blog post, but it will explain my thoughts and sentiments on this topic. In this day and age pornography in society has become normalized. It is expected and taken for granted that young teens, and even children at very young ages will watch pornography and masturbate to it. Among adults it is normalized as well even if said person is in a healthy and loving relationship with another person this person may still watch pornography and masturbate to it. I am not going to equate this to cheating or even microcheating, I don’t think that is the case. I am currently in a loving and healthy relationship with my significant other for almost 3 years now, and since that time I have barely watched any pornography and masturbated to it. When I stopped watching porn it increased my confidence and my self-esteem. 1 year ago I stopped watching it in its entirety, and my relationship with my significant other improved. We started having longer and healthier conversations. I became more driven, and more focused in my life. Now, all of this is anecdotal evidence, and it does not necessarily mean much apart from that. I encourage everyone to stop watching porn, and see and feel what it does to them. However, I shall explain theoretically what I mean and try to create a narrative as to why I think pornography is; 1) psychologically damaging to people of every age, but especially young teens 2) it creates a positive feedback loop through dopamine kicks, which encourages behaviour that results in nothing other than more dopamine kicks 3) it damages relationships between men and women 4) it creates a distorted view of sexuality to young men and women.

2.0 The Argument

Now all of these are related to each other. Firstly, let us unpack the dopamine kicks and the posititive feedback loop, and shall flesh out that argument further. When you watch pornography and reach climax, your body releases dopamine, which makes you feel good. Firstly, the act in and of itself makes you feel good, and with the dopamine kick it makes you feel good on a psychological level. So it is a double wammy, and it encourages your brain to pursue more of those dopamine kicks. For example, exercising and training makes your brain release dopamine kicks, and it makes you feel tired and good. Furthermore, it is not a fruitless endeavour, if done correctly, it will make your stronger, faster, more agile or whatever the exercise is meant for. Exercise also is good for your mental state and your brain. It helps trigger endorphins, which improve the prioritizing functions of the brain. After exercise, your ability to sort out priorities improves, allowing you to block out distractions and better concentrate on the task at hand. It makes your more focused and it helps you become more concentrated. Now, let us compare that with pornography, and therein lies my point. Pornograhpy and exercising releases the same dopamine kicks, which encourages you to do the activity again, but pornography does not lead to anything worthy of note. Sure, you can find studies that say that masturbation helps against prostate cancer. However, these studies have massive methodological errors that they do not address, as in you cannot infer a causation on the basis of a mere correlation. In addition, watching the woman/man that you want to have intercourse with and that you find attractive have intercourse with another woman/man encourages cuckoldry. You are releasing dopamine kicks by watching someone else have intercourse with the person you want to have intercourse with. I think that if a young teenager does this it will create a warped and twisted way to look at sexuality and sex, but also damage relationships that he will have. It is not healthy. Young teens are very often already fragile and insecure about themselves and their body and when you couple this with pornography, then it will further create fragility and insecurity. They will become insecure about their body and their own reproductive organ or for women their breasts as well. This will create a feeling and a insecurity of not being good enough, that there is something wrong with their body and something wrong with them. This is incredibly harmful behaviour. On the other hand, exercising and training will make you feel the opposite way, it will make you feel good about yourself, your body and improve your self-esteem, while also releasing the same dopamine kicks. This creates a positive feedback loop but it damages and is harmful to young adults and teenagers, especially considering your brain is not fully formed until you are 25. Meaning during their formative years they are profoundly altering the chemistry of their brain. This creates a warped and twisted reward system, where every single time you watch it and reach climax, your brain releases happiness hormones for a short while until you start feeling bad about yourself. And to feel happy about yourself again, then you proceed to do it again and again. You watch the person you wanted to have intercourse with do it with someone else while you watch and masturbate. Pornography is twisted and it will twist your brain without you even recognizing it. Now, there may be some upsides to pornography, and I am not disputing that there may be some positive benefit, but the negatives far, far, far outweigh the positives.