Yesterday I was discussing the problem of pornography with a college student. It seems we've all been impacted by this addictive yet multi-million dollar industry. Fathers, husbands, brothers, friends...each exposed while young and trapped in the lust cycle that never seems satiated.So when I saw this article in CitizenLink.org on the problem of porn, I knew I had to share.
The article interviews Mary Anne Layden, a psychotherapist at the University of Pennsylvania who treats sexual violence victims, perpetrators, sex addicts and members of the sex industry.
1. What are you finding about the dangers of pornography?
One of the ways I think that people know it’s harmful is when I treat sex addicts. At some point in the treatment I will say to them, Would you want your wife to be a prostitute? You want your daughter to be a stripper? You want your sister to be a porn model? A hundred percent of them say no.
They know it’s damaging. They just don’t want the women they love to be damaged. They want other people’s wives, other people’s daughters, other people’s sisters to engage in those activities. It’s kind of a sexual entitlement with a narcissistic twist to it. I want this pleasure but I don’t want my wife, my sister, my daughter to be damaged.
There’s also research done on the damage done by pornography. There are hundreds of studies that look at hundreds of variables. We see damage in terms of their attitude. They become more callous. They become more judging of women.
2. What does the process look like of people becoming addicted to sexually explicit images?
It does take time, and it depends on when you break into the cycle as to seeing what’s actually happening with them. Regrettably, children are now the ones that are exposed to pornography, because of the Internet. The progress of this problem starts very early. Some studies say that children as young as 7 are being exposed. When you start at 7, by the time you’re 20, 30, you’ve got a couple of decades of exposure to this material. So, you see it building up in the message that is both hostile to women and says that sex is a non-intimate, recreational activity that’s degrading, exploiting. And, that message, hostility to women, mixed with the idea that sex is adversarial and casual and recreational, those are the two factors that ultimately lead to the sexual violence that we’re seeing.
If you have used the material to the point where you are now addicted to it, you absolutely will be living a double life. Part of the addictive process is not just denial that there is a problem. The addict is clearly going to have to lie and hide what he is doing. This kind of behavior starts to take over your life more and more. (You) don’t want to go to social activities because it takes you away from Internet porn.
The hidden life, the day man and the night man, get disassociated from each other. It starts to control you rather than you controlling it. Then you start to see all of these problems come up: Changes in attitude, changes in escalating behavior. These men are more likely to go to prostitutes, to engage in risky sexual behavior.
3. How does it affect women?
Women have talked to me in therapy sessions when their husbands are using pornography. They (the couple) have been to a therapist who suggested that they use pornography. The therapist said, This will spice up your sex life. They’ll (women) tell me initially it did spice up our sex life. We did start having more sex and it was more intense, but over time it decreased our emotional intimacy.
4. How has the Internet worsened the problem?
Pornography used to be something that you had to go to the edge of town: (A) sleazy place, slink in public and go to the porn shop and get it. Now you don’t have to slink anywhere. We have a pornography pipeline into our house available 24-7 so that we don’t even have to go anywhere. It’s available instantly. Much of it is free, so that makes a dramatic change. It’s also anonymous. We don’t have to worry that somebody’s going see us in the porn shop.
5. Is there hope for people dealing with this problem?
There is good treatment. It’s long and involved treatment, and it means a commitment by the addict and a support system in which they look at and acknowledge their behavior – how they’ve broken their own promises and violated their own values. Commit yourself to be psychologically healthy, spiritually healthy and then engage in the process of relearning a healthy sex life; relearning a self-esteem that’s not based on the sexual behaviors that you’re engaged in.
It means backtracking and getting truly clean and sober from the material that you’re using. It’s not a problem that we’re going to solve just with therapists. We’ve got to have society come together and say, This material is toxic to all of us. We need journalists, lawyers, educators, everybody to work together to solve this problem, because we won’t therapize our way out of this. We won’t fix this by just dealing with the victims who have been victimized by this. The whole society has been victimized by this.
No comments:
Post a Comment