TRANSCRIPT
So I’d like to give a few reasons why I don’t like pornography. And more than that, why I think pornography is unhealthy. And more than that, why I know pornography is unhealthy.
For starters, pornography has done nothing to help me in my life. And it started when I was young. When I was a teenager, I found my friend’s father’s pornography. I remember that happening once. A friend of mine and I were looking in his father’s attic for some toy or something like that, and we found this whole stash of pornographic magazines. We looked at it, and it was kind of exciting. It was amazing! Ooh, naked women! We hadn’t seen this before. And we were looking and looking and looking, and yet it poisoned me. It was something that, like, I was way too young to be seeing this. I was way too young to be seeing women who were in their late teens, early 20s, late 20s even, standing there naked, doing strange and naked sexual things that I’d never seen before or never even thought about before. It caused me to be disturbed in some ways, to lose my innocence.
Then another time, my family gave me access to different pornography. Both of my parents let me have it, and I remember seeing it. I was, what, 13, 14 years old? And it was like some of it was hardcore porn, and it was like twisting me. It made it difficult for me, again, to look at women, even to look at men in the same ways, to think about things that I wasn’t remotely ready to be thinking about. I never held hands with a girl. I never kissed a girl. And here I was, seeing people do things that were really extreme, really perverse, really twisted, not about love at all. It didn’t set me up to think, “Oh, men and women can be having loving relationships.” And some of it was women and women. I’d never even thought of homosexuality or lesbianism or anything like this, and suddenly I’m seeing some extreme manifestation of it. Really terrible loss of my innocence. There was something that I was not ready to handle and certainly did not help me develop more healthy friendships with girls of my age. It made me look at them in ways that I wasn’t ready to be looking at them.
And the thing I think is so sad is this is going back 30 years. Nowadays, with the advent of the internet being so exploded, I’ve heard this idea that the Internet has a large percentage of it being just about pornography. Children seeing pornography, children having easy access to pornography. I remember a few years ago talking with a friend of mine who had two daughters, and she told me a story about her young daughter, six, seven years old. The daughter was playing some computer game on her dad’s computer, and suddenly a pop-up came up. Apparently, her dad was using pornography, but the mom didn’t realize what happened. She looked over at her daughter, who had this very, very strange look on her face. The mom couldn’t place what the look was, but knew something was not quite right with the look on her daughter’s face. She couldn’t see what her daughter was watching on the computer, but somehow her radar went up. Her daughter shouldn’t have this expression on her face. The mom went over, and the daughter was trying to hide it, but the mom got to it in time. Well, the daughter was watching these two adults engage in hardcore sexual interaction, and the daughter was watching this, totally not expecting this. She was playing some little Disney game or something like this, and then this popped up in front of her.
The problem is, once a little child sees that, it never is gonna get out of their mind. And I’ve seen this, and I’ve talked to parents who talk about this with their children, that their children saw porn. They hear their children having conversations about porn that they’ve seen on the internet, maybe at a friend’s house. And it’s like, once that cat is out of the bag, it is never gonna go back in. And that, like, really twists a child’s mind. But that’s just children. That’s obvious. I don’t think anybody’s gonna be arguing with me that children should not be seeing porn. But then there’s adults. Adults looking at stuff that they shouldn’t be seeing. And why do I say they shouldn’t be seeing it? The main reason I think is that adults, even though they look like adults, they may have the ages of adults, below the surface, often on an emotional level, we all, to some degree, are just hurt children. We actually all are innocent little hurt children who have been violated in all sorts of different ways and are still stuck in it and are trying to find their ways out of it, to heal it or not to heal it.
And when people look at porn, it taps right into the place that helps us bypass the healing process, go back into dissociation, lose ourselves, lose our souls, get lost, get confused, find ways of feeling quick, easy pleasure, diversion, loss of good healthy consciousness in order to watch things that people shouldn’t be watching. Also, what is porn if it’s not voyeurism? Watching other people who are exhibitionistic doing things that actually are private, and yet they’re doing it in front of a camera, often for money. And that’s the overt, ostensibly reason that they’re doing it. They’re doing it on the camera for exhibitionism, for money, for popularity, for fame, for views. But underneath it, why would someone really do porn? Well, then there’s the idea, oh, men, especially in heterosexual porn, men do porn because it makes them look like men. They’re porn stars. They’re tough guys. They’re the ultimate in masculinity. And women, why would women do porn? Because they’re sexy, because they want to show off their bodies. I’ve heard some people say, “Oh, they’re doing it because it empowers them.” But it doesn’t empower people, really. And I think for the people who engage in pornography, it’s lose-lose, or better said, lose-lose-lose-lose.
I mean, first off, the number of porn stars who end up getting sexually transmitted diseases, that’s almost nothing about what I’m even talking about. I’m talking more at an emotional level. People looking for love, but they’re not gonna find love through this. Oh, people saying, “Oh, sex isn’t about anything. It’s just about expressing who you are. It’s not about emotions at all.” What’s wrong with showing who you are, especially when you’re young and you’re strong and you’re fit? But troubled people do pornography. This isn’t something that healthy people want to engage in. Healthy people don’t want to show their bodies, their fully nude bodies, in front of complete strangers, in front of people on the internet.
Also, another thing, when I was a therapist, sometimes I worked with people who did pornography, who engaged in it, had been paid to do it, or sometimes even were forced to do it and didn’t get paid for it. And what I heard again and again and again, both from the men who engaged in doing pornography and the women who engaged in it, is that they had been sexually violated when they were younger. Their boundaries had been violated when they were younger. They had already prior experience in their lives before they ever started doing pornography, to not being allowed to have their boundaries, to learning that their boundaries didn’t count, that their self didn’t count, that their bodies didn’t count. And not infrequently, they’re just replicating that pattern when they are doing pornography. And sometimes they’re replicating the pattern of what had already been done to them. They’re repeating their history of sexual violation, and they’re trying to do it now from a power position where they feel like they are more in control of the situation. Maybe they feel good, just, “At least I’m getting paid for it.” I’ve heard people say. But really, I think underneath it, it’s just a striving to heal or striving to make sense of the horrible things that happened to them, make sense of the confusing dynamics that often came right out of their families of origin. Not infrequently, I’ve heard from people who did pornography that they were incest ‘add in their families of origin. Their basic, basic relationships that they had with the people who were supposed to love them were so confusing and so mixed up with violation and not love and disrespect. The disrespecting themselves, disrespecting their most private selves, their bodies, their thoughts, their actions was normal to them.
That norm can get played out in front of the camera for the world to watch and not to help heal the world. Not to help make use of their painful experience for the world. It’s so sad. It’s like confused, hurt people ending up being more confused in what they do as they get older and hurting other people as a byproduct.
Now, I remember once upon a time hearing someone make the argument, “Well, actually, pornography is harm reduction. It’s better at least that some men watch a lot of pornography than going out and raping women.” I remember hearing that argument thinking, “Well, I don’t know if that’s actually true. Is it true that people actually could watch pornography in lieu of being rapists?” I’m not sure about that. But what I would say most clearly is both of these things are obviously not doing anything for the person themselves to help them heal from their traumas. There’s no grieving in this. There’s no moving forward and making sense of what happened to them. Both of these things are disconnected from doing any, any, any processing of their traumas.
And then I think of this argument. God, who is that serial killer? I can’t remember his name, but he was down in Florida. That’s where they actually ended up putting him to death. And I’ll put his name right here somewhere when I do remember it. But this fellow, I remember him saying that pornography actually contributed to him being a sexual serial killer, a rapist, a sadist. And it’s like, well, I don’t think at root he became a serial killer because of pornography, which is what he said, what I remember at least him saying. I think it was more like his terrible history of violation, his terrible history of abandonment when he was a child. I think that’s what really set him up to do what he did. But I certainly don’t think pornography did anything to help him in any way.
And then there’s the other thing. There’s the idea of people who really profit from pornography. The people who own the porn companies and who own the websites. Are these people actually getting anything out of it aside for money? What I think is this is harming their soul. Yes, they might be making money from it, just like the people who are the porn stars. They might be making money from it. But making money when you’re doing something unethical, making money when you’re doing something that’s furthering addiction in the world, furthering harm, furthering trauma, that’s blocking people from actually dealing with what really happened to them. These people are doing something that’s bad for the world.
And I think from what I’ve seen, when people do things that are bad for the world, even if they profit from it and make lots of money for it, their soul dies because of it. And they’re not spreading goodness, and they don’t get self-esteem from it. I’ve never once heard someone who did pornography, who made money from pornography, feel like they get self-esteem from it. It may give them some grandiose sense of confidence in some ways, but that’s not self-esteem. That’s false self-esteem. Real self-esteem comes through healing. Real self-esteem comes through grieving what happened to us and connecting with the truth inside of us and then being able to do healthy esteem about actions that actually are useful and valuable to other people.
And then I think, as I close this, I’m going to get back to again the people who watch pornography. The millions and probably billions of people who watched pornography. Myself being someone who has looked at pornography also as an adult and has personal experience with it and knows firsthand. So I can speak for, I think, a lot of people. A lot of people I’ve talked to who have porn addictions, it’s nothing that helped me. Nothing that helped me in my relationships with other people. Nothing that really helped me connect better with myself on the inside. Nothing that made me love myself more. Nothing that made me love my body more. Nothing that helped me have better relationships with women, better friendships with men. Nothing that made me look at people with more respect. Instead, it was something that dirtied, made dirtied my mind.
I’d go outside. I remember this after having watched pornography, then going out and having a conversation with a woman who was a friend of a friend of mine and not being able to interact with her in the healthiest way. And then I think of all these guys who are actually married or who have girlfriends to whom they are committed, and yet they’re using pornography. And it disrupts their relationships with their romantic partners. Gay people too. Pornography, gay porn disrupting their romantic relationships with their partners. And women too who use pornography, who use the fantasy of what they’re watching to get certain sexual needs met and not getting those so-called needs met through their relationship with their partners.
And that’s another thing I will come back to you right before I am. The whole idea of sexual needs. I think there’s this idea in our modern society that people have these sexual needs. I think it’s blown way out of proportion compared to what people really actually need sexually. Yes, we as adults have hormones. We have bodies. Often we do need some sort of sexual release. But we don’t need to actually have sexual release with other people. This can happen through our dreams. People can have nocturnal emissions. Men can have this. This naturally happens even if you don’t masturbate. So the idea that we need release, that we need to use pornography, that we need to have sex with others, to me, from what I’ve seen, not true at all.
And what I have seen is all this use of pornography, again, it’s a way for people to have distance from themselves, distance from real actual relationships with other people, and distance from love for others, respect for others, and love for ourselves on the inside.