Holy Smokes I read this article today that hit the nail on the head with near completely perfect accuracy!
Please read it! It is MOST illuminating. This is the caution to pornography argument that I have been making for years. There is no real data that suggest that unregulated porn access causes an increase in sex crimes which is the usual BS argument. In fact there is lots of data that points the opposite way. But the thing that I found after living in a sex soaked stupor for years was exactly what this article talks about Reality sex VS Porn Fantasy sex. It sort of boils down to a thing called expectation management. Unless you are involved with a partner who is as into porn as you are... then porn is likely to become a problem in your relationship. Maybe not now, maybe not soon but eventually. If however you find your self in a relationship with some one like minded in the porn area... consider it very carefully before you rock that boat. That equality may be very difficult to find again! I am a big fan of porn... but I am subject to its addictive qualities. *** I *** Ruined my marriage with it. After years of self analysis I take full responsibility for that debacle.
I would only add this to the article. Sex Addiction is a like Alcohol addiction this way; not everyone is predisposed to be an alcoholic. Some can drink one drink at dinner on occasion and have liquor in the house with no compulsion to consume all of it at once, once they start. Some people cannot. Some people drink till they pass out… regularly. They ruin their health. They spend more on booze than their budget honestly allows. They lose their jobs drinking on the job. Similarly with porn, online or otherwise, there are men, and women it seems, that will spend loads of money on online porn site memberships, more than they have to spend. They will lose their jobs because they trolled porn online at work.
There are some guys and gals that are likely to become addicted and some that are not. Also I think with “sex addiction” the triggers are more prevalent. There are more women walking around to look at, to rate their ‘doability’ index, to objectify, and fantasize about their breasts…butts… than there are liquor ads or stores so the incidence of dealing with sexual triggers is higher with sex addiction. And advertising uses sex like they use the letter E. This leads to a situation of habit building through repetition.
The metaphor of having to hunt for your food and cooking it over an open fire seeming to make it taste better comes to mind. The ability to get Fat and sugar into your diet used to be DARN tough. You had to run down the fat bearing animal and kill it. Using a stick and a rock made that a long labor intensive process. In general it cost almost as many calories to kill and eat an animal as was in the animal. Now you can just drop into any of thousands of fast food places and get Lots of fat and sugar... fast, easy and cheap. (Fast, easy, cheap... remind you of any one???) Fat and sugar taste good for a reason . You need them in your diet but only a little and because it used to be darn difficult to get into your diet it was sort of self regulating.
Now with Porn shops in every teeny tiny town you can get lots of fast, easy, cheap "sex" into your life... and just like eating too much fat and sugar... it may not be good for you. That's not to say that once in a while fast, easy cheap sex isn't great, a steady diet of it... not so much.
Bottom line porn can be hurtful in an unbalanced relationship. It’s a long and slippery slope. (Long and slippery... never mind me...) Nothing about it is easy.
