What I hadn’t expected was how quickly he became a much better person after he quit looking at porn. It did not last - he returned to his habit as soon as the pornography-blocking software went down.
Privacy laws block me from naming this man. I can only say I knew he become a self-centered jerk before I knew he used pornography, and I noticed a profound improvement before I found out he’d quit. Because he “did not have a problem,” he returned to pornography as soon as he could. And he changed again.
The odds are good I am not the only one who knows someone who regularly uses pornography. When the Utah Coalition Against Pornography and its sister organization, Fight the New Drug, hosted their 11th annual conference in Salt Lake City in May, people were still talking about a 2009 Harvard study that found Utah led the nation with its number of online pornography subscriptions.
Ben Edelman, a Harvard lawyer and researcher, analyzed subscriptions nationwide by zip codes and demographic data to get his results, which were published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Why Utah? Edelman’s research indicates pornography users are more likely to live in an urban environment. These subscribers live in households that are more likely to be politically and religiously conservative households. These people are also more likely to have undergraduate college degrees, giving them an above average education.
Pornography is called a drug because it leads to changes in the viewers’ brain chemistry. Pornography is not addictive in the same way as cigarettes, alcohol or heroin. Instead, people become addicted to a behavior that changes the brain chemistry instead of a substance
This frequently cited statement is corroborated by at least one academic journal. “Pornography Addicton: A Neuroscience Perspective” was published in 2011 in Surgical Neurology International, a professional journal. The physical and biochemical changes are called “hypofrontal syndrome.”
This means we are what we do. This is not a separate part of life.
Getting there in the first place indicates an underlying self loathing.
Because this is such a pernicious problem, there are many organizations to help. Going to a therapist is not enough: It should be a therapist who has worked with sexual addictions. Because this requires a a support system, options in addition to therapy can be Covenant Eyes website and other guardian programs to monitor on-line use.
There is also www.outinthelight.com and combatingpornography.org.
One might wonder what happened to this man. He is a man, although 20 to 30 percent of porn users are women.
I don’t know. Pornography kills relationships.
