Last time we looked at some of the reasons why a porn habit is tough to break. We use porn in secret and think that if no one knows, it can’t hurt anyone. A sin that is kept in the dark will grow just like a fungus. The sex saturated society we live it won’t let us forget about how we need to put sex as our number one need. Everywhere we turn there are reminders of how important sex is and how we value it above many other things. When we feast on sex saturated media, we buy into the value system society offers us in regards to porn and sex. We also have been led to believe that use of pornography has no ill effects on the user and that our usage has no effects on anyone around us. As long as we can justify our usage and point out the lack of side effects, no harm, no foul, or so we think. Porn is a tough habit to break and these are just a few of the reasons why we stay enslaved to it.

This time we are going to take a look at what porn does to its users. Contrary to popular culture’s stance on pornography, there are side effects to using porn. Drug companies are legally required to warn you of the possible side effects while taking their product. Many people will never experience all of the side effects listed or they will have one or two of them but won’t attribute them to the drug they are taking. It’s the same thing with porn usage. You will have a side effect, but you may not realize or notice it yourself. Sometimes people around you will notice something that you are blind to. Here are a few of the side effects that may be present in you, some obvious, others not so much.

à It amplifies our selfishness. Pornography focuses on our satisfaction, our needs, and turns us towards ourselves. When you watch porn- who gets the most satisfaction in the film? -The guy. Most pornography elevates the importance of the guy’s pleasure and shows the woman as the willing provider of it. This theme runs throughout the pornography world and will find its way into your life. After hundreds of impressions of these situations, you will find yourself acting more selfishly, especially in your interactions with women. Why? Because the standard pornography theme has subconsciously tricked you into believing that your feelings and satisfaction are greater than anyone else’s. You have satisfied yourself with the images of others who willingly gave in to your desires and needs. Now you are more biased towards your own satisfaction that you will act selfishly towards those around you. It will be hard for you to see this yourself, but you will become more selfish than you already are. Don’t be surprised when someone close to you points this out.

à Pornography changes our perception of women. Women become objects instead of human beings. This goes along with the point above. The most common theme in pornography is a woman giving herself to the man to please him. The woman is portrayed as super eager to please her man, that she will do whatever he wants, even to the point of degrading herself. The focus is on the man getting off. Think about what usually happens in the end of a pornography film. The man gets off and then its over! When he is done, it’s all over. It’s all about the guy. The woman’s need is not considered and then she is degraded by how the guy shows her his thanks… by covering her in his semen.. that is real class, huh. This scene, played over and over before our eyes will make us believe that women are available anytime men are ready and they will do whatever we want because they are here to please us. We will look at them not as humans with personalities and feelings, but as sluts here to please us. You will know that your thinking about women has changed to viewing them as objects when you scan their body and immediately think of them in bed servicing you. You won’t even register their facial features, their smile and the color of their hair or eyes. Immediately your eyes will go to their body and you will start lusting for them. Women are created in the image of God deserving of our honor and respect. They are not here just for our pleasure.

à Pornography robs you of your passion for anything else besides itself. Pornography takes control of our passion and uses it to satisfy itself. Your passions will get consumed by it and you have none left to pursue noble causes. Pornography is a mean task-master, it grabs you and will force you to feed it unmercifully! You will find yourself searching for more time to give to it, plotting out ways to get away to feed it. Your spare moments are spent thinking of the next time you can get lost in pornography. Pornography drains you because so much energy and passion go into feeding it, that you have no energy or passion to put forth into other areas of your life. That is why one of the ways out of pornography is to find a new passion. It is very true that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. Just let yourself be idle and not involved in something and watch pornography knock on the door asking you come in.

à Pornography will destroy your ability to be intimate (emotionally) with your spouse and others. It develops a false intimacy, one where you relate with someone who is attractive, satisfies your physical needs and does not require anything from you. This relationship you have with pornography is very different from real life. In real life, you have to speak with people who don’t always affirm you and actually speak to you, sometimes even in anger. Relationships in porn films are superficial and only for one thing: sex. There very little communication. In real life you cannot just walk up to someone and expect sex after a few words. You may find yourself wanting to disengage from conversations with your spouse and retreating to the world of porn where you create your own adventure. Real emotional intimacy with your spouse is much more work and painful at times verses what happens in the porn world.

à Pornography will destroy your ability to be intimate physically with your spouse. Pornography provides physically attractive women who have all the right proportions you love. The vast variety of women available allows you to be picky about who you choose to get off on. You can have a different woman each time. All the while you are setting yourself up for failure in the bedroom with your spouse. Your spouse will seem boring and not as attractive. You lose the appetite for sex with your wife and your encounters become infrequent. When you do come together you may have a difficult time getting the job done and your mind may also be elsewhere (with a porno star). Your wife knows something is up! Don’t think you can hide it. If you aren’t totally there for her she will be suspicious.

à Pornography will grow the time you spend in fantasy land. Once exposed to this exciting world where anything goes and there are no problems, you will find yourself trying to escape to this place anytime you can. While you are waiting in traffic, mowing the lawn, in the bathroom, trying to fall asleep or anywhere else you can go and put your mind in neutral, you will find yourself fantasizing about sex. Pornography will get in your head and it will expand to take up as much space on your hard drive like a virus! You will become more distant to your spouse when you spend lots of time in fantasy land. Maybe she does have a point when she says you ‘are distant lately’.

à Pornography will make you act differently in the bedroom. Your focus will become more on your own satisfaction and not so much giving your wife pleasure and you will want to try things you saw in pornography. You may not spend the time getting her ready and paying attention to her needs as you are to ‘getting it done’. Think about the pornography scenes you have watched… how many of them involve lengthy kissing and foreplay? Not many. They usually get down to business. This is what you will start to emulate. You will also want to try things that you saw in pornography. Many of the things you saw in pornography are not healthy and should not be done. Anal sex, for example is shown in lots of pornography, but it is unhealthy and will hurt the person done to. You obviously should never force anyone to do something that they are not comfortable with. Have you wanted to ‘talk dirty’ to your wife? Whether or not you have said it, I will bet it has come to your mind.

Take all these points together and don’t you think you wife will get wise to your pornography consumption? Of course she will! She may not be able to finger the problem, but she will be on alert. Maybe you say she will never know because you have had this problem before she knew you. Consider this: When you go through your cycles of pornography usage (going from high usage to no usage) do you think your actions change based on which cycle you’re in? I would say yes. Be honest and remember that whatever you feed will grow!

If you feed your pornography addiction it will grow and you will be displaying many of the side effects given above as you progress in the addiction. When you starve your pornography addiction and redirect your passions into other areas, the side effects of pornography will dissipate and not be as noticeable.

Even if you were using pornography before you met her, you have been through the normal cycles of usage. Chances are you thought that when you got married, you would not need pornography anymore and so you stopped when you first met and were married. The point is, she has seen you at your best (off of pornography) and at your worst (using pornography) and she will notice the difference.

Maybe you aren’t married and are thinking this doesn’t apply to you. You will display some of the side effects of using pornography. These side effects will directly impact how you treat the women you date. They may not want to date you for long, or maybe you get more rejections than you like. Whatever the case, you will be able to identify with some of the side effects and they will be picked up by some people.

Consider these side effects before you consider using porn again. Porn is bad for your health!

Using porn has some unforseen side effects

First exposure to porn

First in a series of understanding porn addiction and putting together your battle plan to get free.

Remember your first exposure to pornography? I do. I remember the rush that overcame my body. I knew it was ‘dirty’ and wrong, but I was very excited and felt my heart beat faster and a high like I had never known before. Right in front of me was a magazine that had a nude woman in it. It was the glimpse that every pre-teen boy daydreamed about.

That first impression for you probably made you feel the same way – a rush of adrenaline that sped your heart up. It doesn’t matter how old you were at that first peek. Even now, years latter you still feel that rush when you expose yourself to porn.

Little did you and I know that at the first exposure we were opening ourselves up to a world that would suck us in and toy with our minds and bodies. That exhilaration we felt and still feel when we take a look at porn is caused by a chemical reaction in the brain. That chemical reaction released endorphins and other potent chemicals that are the same as when a drug addict takes a hit. We have become addicted to that high feeling we get when we take a hit of porn! This chemical reaction not only gets us high, but also is strong enough to imprint the images we are viewing into our minds!

You now know why porn is highly addictive and why we cannot escape the images of sex in our heads! I bet you can recall some scenes from the first porn movie you watched or the pictures out of that magazine you saw years ago.

Pornography is highly addictive because of the addictive chemical properties. We love to feel good don’t we? Alcohol, drugs, porn, or any other addictive substance all alter our state of mind and give us feelings of pleasure and let us escape from our daily grind. Let’s face it, life is tough and many of us use different ways to unplug and get away. Porn makes us feel high and when you combine it with masturbation; you get a double feel good experience!

Those images that get imprinted into your mind also further the addiction. Sex on the brain is the running joke brought against men anyhow. When you imprint sex scenes into your memory banks, they will pop up when you want to recall them and even when you don’t. When you don’t want to recall them they will clamor to get in to your conscience thinking and try to control you. Ever see a pretty girl with a nice body and then BAM, your mind takes you back to the porn scene you watched previously? Now, when you get this scene flashed in front of you, the chemical reaction starts to rev you up and you need an outlet for this energy. You will then turn to porn and masturbation to relieve it. This cycle continues and before you know it, you are spending hours a day feeding your porn habit.

The cycle of porn continues in your life until you decide to do something about it. You know how the cycle goes. A trigger goes off in your head and causes you to get a craving, you try to deny the craving but it won’t go away. Now you figure the only way to get rid of this craving is to give in to it, so you go and use porn. Afterwards you feel so ashamed and guilty. You say to yourself; ‘Why did I go and do that again? I won’t do it again. From here on out, no more porn!’ It isn’t long till one of your triggers knocks at the door. You try to ignore it. It won’t go away. So you give in again.

Next time we will talk about why it is so hard to break free from a porn habit.

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If you use pornography regularly you will notice something happen.  What used to excite you at one time has is less stimulating now.  Porn addiction is like drug use.  When you use regularly, you need a larger or stronger dose of it to experience the same high you did a while ago.  You build up a tolerance to the drug to the point where you need just a bit more to get high each time.

In the world of pornography it works the same way.  When you are first exposed to mild forms or porn you get a high from it.  There is a chemical reaction in your brain similar to what happens when using drugs which gives you a high.  In another entry we will explore this research, but for now let’s stick with this.  You can use mild pornography for a while until you get bored with it and then you will seek out something different.

This is where the start and progression of porn usage scale come in.  I developed this scale to demonstrate where porn addiction starts and how it progresses into using more perverted forms of pornography.  When you slide down this scale to more perverse porn, your behaviors will change as you become willing to take more risks to feed your addiction.  We are not going to address other behaviors outside of porn usage right now, but in another article.  I must add that not everyone will escalate into more perverse forms of porn.  It is not inevitable that you will slide down the scale, but very possible.

Porn usage progresses from mild to more hard core

Step 1:  Sexual themes and innuendos.  This step is what I consider the gateway into pornography.  It seems rather innocent, but consider how 40 years ago sexual themes were taboo.  Sexual themes and innuendos are seen on TV and read in books.  They are usually attractive, flirtatious couples who joke and hint around at having sex.  It may even be implied that they are having sex, but not shown together in bed.  These themes will take your mind down the road to where it should not go.  These themes will ignite the desire to explore sex on your own.

Step 2:  Bikinis, underwear & lingerie.  Scantily clad models seem to be the norm anymore on TV, magazines, and the movies.  You can hardly have the TV on for an hour without seeing one.  The supply of this material is endless.  A young kid will easily be able to find these pictures in magazines and catalogs that come to your house.  If a kid is curious, he will take these for himself and study them.  Once the excitement from these wears off, it will lead to the next step.

Step 3:  Soft Porn- Playboy, topless, nudes.  After looking at scantily clad models, it won’t be too long before you want to see what is under those bikinis.  Access to nude pictures is easy whether on the internet, a garage calendar or from a magazine purchased at the drug store.  This step encompasses models posing nude and not in any suggestively sexual positions.  Playboy magazine was made famous for showing off nude women.

Step 4:  Teasing & suggestive sexual positions.  Once looking at naked women loses its thrill, the next step is to see them in teasing photos and suggestive sexual positions.  This is where Penthouse came to existence.  Penthouse was a bit more hard core than Playboy in such as they had picture sequences of women pretending to masturbate or couples engaging in sex.  The pictures in this progressive step do not show the actual sex act, but suggest it by positioning the models in poses leave the rest to the imagination.

Step 5:  Photos & videos of sex acts.  Once you get a taste of sex from the suggestive photos, you will want to see what those photos do not show.  This step involves viewing photos and videos of couples having intercourse and nothing is left to the imagination.  This step involves normal sexual activity that happens between a man and woman. 

Step 6:  Group Sex, fetishes.  Some people will not progress beyond step 5, but others will get into step six.  Step six includes porn such as group sex (more than 2 people), and fetishes (feet, huge breasts, bi-racial, nylons).  This step breaks from the normal a bit and allows the addict to feed on a specific type of porn.  This porn is a little more perverted, but does not break any laws.

Step 7:  Teens, child porn, gay.  Some people stay at step six, but some will progress into this area which is getting increasingly dangerous and perverted.  Using this type of porn further erodes the moral boundaries of a person.  The person who has progressed to this type of porn is in trouble.  They are in risk of jail time and progressing to the next level.

Step 8:  Beastiality, rape and violent porn.  I considered how this could be merged in with step 7, but to me this type of pornography is the worst.  When someone uses pornography and has gotten to this level, they are in mortal danger of becoming a criminal.  Ted Bundy progressed to this level and he became a murderer.  In an interview, he confessed that pornography and then violent pornography were a big part of his life and the next high he got was from murder. 

This progressive usage of pornography scale is an example of how the addict seeks a stronger dose of porn as he gets bored with a lesser type.  If there is a lesson in this example, it is to quit while you can!  Wake up and access what step you are at on this scale.  How easy has it been to get to the step you are on?  How easy do you think it will be to go on to the next step?

Please leave your comments below.  Tell me if I have misclassified the types or have missed some step altogether.  Your feedback is appreciated.