Porn Makes Me Normalize/Accept Behavior and Content I Never Thought I Would
Have you ever thought to yourself, what am I doing? I’m sure most of us, if not all of us, have experienced this type of self-questioning in our lives. Unfortunately for some this type of reflection only happens on the backside of personal destruction. Look at the daily stories that flood the news. First there is the Michigan pastor who was arrested for killing a 24 year old mother in his attempt to fulfill a pornographically fueled sex fantasy. Then we have the sex scandal motivated resignation of General Petraeus. Of course, who can forget the Jerry Sandusky case, trial, and all of its tragic stories? Here’s the thing, I’m relatively certain at some point all of these men thought to themselves how did I let it get this far? How on earth did I get to a point where I was somehow OK with what I was doing? The sad fact is that while these are extreme cases of sexual misconduct and violence these men all started out somewhere.
Understand that few if any men go to bed one night a sexually healthy individual and wake up an adulterer, escort user, child molester, or rapist. These types of behaviors do not just happen over night … they begin with something and that something is often porn. Now before you think that I’m saying, “look at porn and you will molest kids” … I’M NOT! However, porn is an avenue for bigger things even if it’s just harder or more explicit forms of porn. Do you think I’m wrong? For those of you reading this that have a porn addiction let me ask you this … do you still enjoy soft core pornography or is that just too boring? Does the SI swimsuit issue still get your motor revving or does it just keep it barely idling? Porn never satisfies. No matter what you watch eventually it grows old and you need more. You need something new and “improved.” Maybe that’s just more porn, harder porn, younger or “barely legal” porn, or maybe it’s not even porn but the real deal … escorts, massage parlors, you name it. The point is that porn makes you numb and leads you to watch content or engage in activities you never would have dreamed of before. Need more evidence? Look at the industry itself. Straight one-on-one sex is not the norm … porn these days is about group sex, anal sex, violent sex, “exploited” sex, or even simulated underage age sex. The simple fact is that the porn industry knows their consumer wants more and they are more than happy to fill that need.
There’s also another major normalizing effect of porn. Porn, or rather porn addiction, often leads to the acceptance of other unacceptable behaviors. It may be viewing porn at work; it may be masturbation in public places; it may be lying to your spouse or running up the credit card on porn site subscriptions; whatever the case those addicted to porn often give themselves permission to do things that just aren’t acceptable, sometimes even deviant. It may be the need for a fix, the desire to push the edge, or just a desperate attempt to cover your tracks but a life steeped in porn if usually a life steeped in other problematic behavior.
Listen, you can chalk this off to the rantings of a lunatic or a “religious zealot” but the studies, the confessions, and the stories of those in our recovery groups tell the tale. Pornography normalizes the abnormal and condones the unacceptable. It’s just what porn does. Don’t settle for the normalcy of porn … you can do better.