“The more one uses pornography, the more lonely one becomes,” says Dr. Gary Brooks, a psychologist who has worked with porn addicts for the last 30 years. “Anytime [a person] spends much time with the usual pornography usage cycle, it can’t help but be a depressing, demeaning, self-loathing kind of experience.” The worse people feel about themselves, the more they seek comfort wherever they can get it. Normally, they would be able to rely on the people closest to them to help them through their hard times—a partner, friend, or family member. But most porn users aren’t exactly excited to tell anyone about their porn habits, least of all their partner. So they turn to the easiest source of “comfort” available: more porn.

“When one partner uses porn at a high frequency,” explains researcher Dr. Ana Bridges, “there can be a tendency to withdraw emotionally from the relationship.” That’s partly because porn use causes the brain to rewire itself to connect sexual arousal with porn’s fantasies, making it harder for the user to become aroused by a real person in a real relationship.

According to Bridges, as a porn consumer withdraws from his or her relationships, they experience “increased secrecy, less intimacy and also more depression.” Studies have found that when people engage in an ongoing pattern of “self-concealment,”—which is when they do things they’re not proud of and keep them a secret—it not only hurts their relationships and leaves them feeling lonely, but also makes them more vulnerable to serious psychological issues. For both male and female porn consumers, their habit is often accompanied by problems with anxiety, body-image issues, poor self-image, relationship problems, insecurity, and depression.

Pornography can destroy everyone because it is full of lies.
It is fulfilling
It is harmless

Porn is more available now than at any time in history—especially to kids. Ninety-three percent of boys and 62 percent of girls have seen Internet porn before they turn 18, according to a 2008 study in CyberPsychology & Behavior. Seventy percent of boys have spent more than 30 minutes looking at porn, as have 23 percent of girls. Eighty-three percent of boys and 57 percent of girls have seen group sex online. Eighteen percent of boys and 10 percent of girls have seen rape or sexual violence.

Leading relationship experts, Doctors John and Julie Gottman have expressed serious concern about the effects of pornography on couple relationships. They explain, “Pornography may be just such a supernormal stimulus. With pornography use, much more of a normal stimulus may eventually be needed to achieve the response a supernormal stimulus evokes. In contrast, ordinary levels of the stimulus are no longer interesting. This may be how normal sex becomes much less interesting for porn users. The data supports this conclusion. In fact, use of pornography by one partner leads the couple to have far less sex and ultimately reduces relationship satisfaction.”

This lie is especially troubling because many young porn consumers really do rely on the warped fantasy of porn to form their ideas and expectations about sex. That’s scary for a lot of reasons. Young people who use porn often expect their partners to act out what they’ve seen, even if it’s painful, degrading, or dangerous. They tend to believe that what they see in porn is normal and acceptable, even as their tastes in porn grow more extreme over time. And as people adopt the unrealistic standards of porn, they end up feeling bad about themselves and dissatisfied with their partners.

Learning about sex from porn also means absorbing a lot of dangerous ideas about sexuality and women. Amateur porn, which claims to be more natural and real, actually teaches the same attitudes and reproduces the same false stereotypes as professionally produced porn—sometimes worse!

Pornography can destroy everyone because it is full of lies.
It is fulfilling
It is harmless
You Can't Escape