The Porn Circuit | Covenant Eyes Internet Accountability and Filtering

Doidge writes: 4
CHapter 5: ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby
Pornographers promise healthy pleasure and relief from sexual tension, but what they often deliver
is an addiction, tolerance, and an eventual decrease in pleasure. Paradoxically, the male patients I
worked with often craved pornography but didn’t like it.
How porn hurts marital sex
Pornographers want people to believe that viewing porn is harmless entertainment and that it
can even spice up one’s love life, but the opposite is true. Rather than encouraging intimacy,
research shows that porn steals it away.
Porn encourages selfishness rather than an exchange of intimacy. Especially among men, who
are more visually stimulated than women, porn teaches that women are objects for their lust.
Women are just body parts, used for personal gratification.
Pornography trains men to be consumers, 5 to treat sex as a commodity, to think about
sex as something on-tap and made-to-order. As Dr. Mary Anne Layden writes, “It is toxic
miseducation about sex and relationships.” 6
In Dr. Gary Brooks’ book, The Centerfold Syndrome, he explains that because the
women in porn are only glossy magazine pictures or pixels on the screen, they have
no sexual or relational expectations of their own. This trains men to desire the
cheap thrill of fantasy over a committed relationship that requires them to connect
to another human being. Pornography essentially trains men to be digital voyeurs:
looking at women rather than seeking
genuine intimacy. 7
Porn Decreases
sexual satisfaction 10
58%
58% of men say they view porn once a
week or more, and the more frequently
men view it, the more they are likely to
say they are less satisfied with sex and
relationships.
According to a study published in the Journal
of Applied Social Psychology, after only a few
prolonged exposures to pornographic videos,
men and women alike reported less sexual
satisfaction with their intimate partners,
including their partners’ affection, physical
appearance, and sexual performance. 8
Another study that appeared in the Journal
of Sex and Marital Therapy found similar
results. When men and women were
exposed to pictures of female centerfold
models from Playboy and Penthouse, this
significantly lowered their judgments about
the attractiveness of “average” people. 9
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