Gregory’s Story __________________
Gregory had always been fascinated by technology. He loved computers and the access they granted him to the Internet. As a researcher for a top pharmaceutical company, he worked long hours staring into computer screens. By accident, he discovered pornography and found that he liked having brief diversions throughout the day. He rationalized that he was able to concentrate better after he indulged in what he called a bit of “recreational Internet use.”
His world began coming apart when he was summoned to human resources and presented with a printout showing the number of hours he had been looking at pornography over the previous four months. He was astounded to learn that he was averaging more than five hours a day on porn sites, and some days as much as seven hours—all of it on work time.
Gregory has been out of work for the past two months and hopes to be able to get back into research with another company. Now, his days are spent searching the Internet for a job. To break up the boredom of that task, he occasionally seeks out pornography sites. He says that porn is not really a problem and that he can quit it if he wants. Gregory was appalled when his wife found his pornography stash on their computer and suggested that he may be addicted. He is sure that he is not an addict and has promised to stop.
Many, many people like Gregory believe that pornography is not harmful. They maintain this belief in spite of losing jobs, relationships, and self-respect. When evidence of their out-of-control behavior is presented to them they excuse it as a temporary problem.
According to Porn Hub, in 2015, 4,392,486,580 hours of pornography were viewed on the Internet. Pornography was streamed at a rate of seventy-five gigabytes per second. That’s the equivalent of filling all of the available storage space on all smart phones sold in 2015 with pornography. Further, nearly 88 billion pornography videos were viewed. Averaged out, that’s enough for every person on Earth to view twelve porn videos!19
The Barna Group conducted a nationwide survey for ProvenMen.org20 (a Christian-based organization) that included 1,000 households in the US. Ninety-two percent of those beginning the survey agreed to continue to the targeted questions. Here are some of the highlights of the study:
• Approximately two-thirds (64 percent) of US men view pornography at least monthly.
• The number of Christian men viewing pornography virtually mirrors the national average, and Christian men watch pornography at work at the same rate as the national average.
• Broken down by age:
• One-third (33 percent) of men between the ages of eighteen and thirty either think that they are addicted or are unsure if they are addicted to pornography.
• 18 percent of all men (approximately 21 million) either think that they are addicted or are unsure if they are addicted to pornography.
• More than four in ten men (44 percent) believe they should either view pornography less often or were unsure if they should view it less.21
What about you? How often do you view pornography? How many times have you tried to stop and failed? How many times have you promised your wife that you would quit only to be caught again in the same behavior?
Pornography can destroy your life. The more a person watches it, the more he feels he needs it. This is the essence of the addiction dynamic. The phenomenon of tolerance builds as images/videos that previously satisfied are no longer good enough. Immediate pleasure becomes more illusive over time. Images that once repulsed a person may become the norm as he searches for the perfect image to feed his fantasies as they progress. Satisfaction is increasingly difficult to come by and ever more short-lived.
Some men search for hours for a video that satisfies their particular sexual desires. They may employ programs that crawl the Internet in search of pornography that they save and catalog on multiple hard drives totaling many terabytes. Some have collected more pornography than they could view in a lifetime yet they continue searching, hoping to find some pornographic offering that will make them feel whole. Sadly, some of those who use such programs have been arrested for possessing child pornography, even though they were unaware their pornography crawlers had saved this illegal material.
Pornography can have such a hold on people that some lose job after job due to accessing porn at work. Others forfeit educational opportunities because pornography monopolizes their time and attention. Married men may be so addicted to pornography that they no longer find being sexual with their wives satisfying. It is often shocking to women to find out that their husbands are addicted to pornography because they express little or no desire to be sexual with their wives.
Recent research indicates that teens and young adults use pornography more than other groups. Young adults, ages eighteen to twenty-four, are both more likely to actively seek porn regularly and more likely to come across porn more often. Fifty-seven percent report seeking out porn at least once or twice a month, compared to 37 percent of teens, 43 percent of older Millennials, 41 percent of Gen-Xers, and 17 percent of Baby Boomers.22
Some people try to argue that pornography can be good for relationships or that within certain parameters pornography has value. Others say that pornography is helpful in that it can be a tool for sex education. A growing amount of data proves this is not the case.
The pornography industry has coalesced around themes of violence and female degradation.23 Rather than educating people about healthy sexuality, pornography depicts sexuality as being base, degrading, and abusive. It is no wonder that people of all ages who regularly consume pornography have distorted views of sexuality.
A study was conducted of 487 college men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine to see if the pornography themes of violence and female degradation guided their sexual experiences. The results of the study indicate that the more pornography the men consumed, the more likely it was that they would request their partners to participate in activities they viewed. The study also found that the men would deliberately conjure up those pornographic images to maintain arousal during sex, and that the greater the use of pornography, the less the men enjoyed sex with their partners.24
Two additional studies were conducted that involved nearly 2,000 college-age men. The study wanted to see if pornography had any impact on the practice of “hooking up”—that is, engaging in casual, high-risk sex with relative strangers. The studies found that the greater the study subject’s use of pornography, the higher the incidence of hooking up.25
Is addiction to pornography different from sex addiction?
The short answer is no—addiction to pornography is simply a form of sex addiction. Sometimes people try to minimize their behavior by saying they “only” have an addiction to pornography. Sex addiction has many expressions and can take many forms. It is progressive and one type of sexual acting out often progresses to another.
Those who believe their addiction is not as bad as that of other people because their compulsive behavior has thus far been confined to viewing pornography need to take a more objective look at the consequences of their actions. Sex addiction, even when confined to viewing pornography, results in many of the following losses: