A DOUBLEEDGED SWORD
PORN CAN BE AN ENABLER OR A DISRUPTOR. IT’S FOR YOU TO CORRAL IT TO SERVE YOUR NEEDS
HE WAS UNABLE TO GET AROUSED. He found her unattractive. But he loved her and didn’t want to end it. So he thought of a way out—get himself aroused beforehand and then come to bed. That way, he didn’t have to face up to his own inadequacy.
She was always wanting different things. She found she was slacking into a sexless life. She would put on her DVDs and make the most of what she saw there. After all, it was easier to imitate than to innovate.
They didn’t know how to spice up their sex life. With little idea about the way ahead, the couple used porn to ‘educate’ themselves about how best to rev it up.
All the above people were using porn for their benefit. It’s true, porn works well when one uses it to minimise anxiety of performance, as in the case of the gentleman in the first example. Or when one uses methods watched in these films for self-pleasuring, as did the lady. Or when couples use it together to learn and educate themselves about revving up their sex life.
But when does this become detrimental, when does it come in the way of healthy happy relating? The dictionary defines ‘addiction’ as a persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmful.
As clinical psychologists and psychotherapists specialising in the field of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, we define addiction when it becomes an ‘exclusive’ way of life, without which a person cannot function. So a porn ‘addict’ is a person who can have sexual relations with a partner or oneself only and when the sexual activity is accompanied by porn. Watching porn for that person has become a kind of a ‘fetish’, a ‘fixation’ without which no sexual relations can take place. Of course, people becoming ‘addicts’ depends on many factors, including their own personality. However, one cannot say that a preference for porn or any substance for that matter construes an addiction. The operative word in addiction is dysfunction or inability to act without its presence.
He found it hard to accept any woman as his partner. His idea about how a woman should look and how ‘horny’ she should be was constructed by what he had seen in his growing years—in the porn videos, in the girlie magazines describing how ‘sexy’ women should look. No woman was thus ‘good’ enough and he kept flitting from one to another.
She was always dissatisfied with her partners. To her, they were never ‘big’ enough. She too was under a fictional fantasy created by years of watching porn that exaggerated and laid seeds of what a man’s manhood should be.
This is what repetitive reiteration of imagery and beliefs can do. Especially to those unwilling to question what they see or hear. Even though the adage ‘seeing is believing’ is somewhat true—an unthinking porn-watcher doesn’t question the air-brushing and embellishments of what is put out. They make themselves miserable believing they are not getting what their delusional selves believe they should! And in the bargain make a mess of their sex lives. Often, in their need to imitate, they fall in their own esteem suffering from feelings of worthlessness and/ or are so agitated with their partners for not meeting those ‘standards’ that they often retract into a sexless existence. Because they have defined their sexual encounters in an all-or-nothing way!
These false reinforcements about how wonderfully endowed a woman or man can be, an abetment of an idea that great sex lasts for eons, that multiple orgasms are ‘the way’, that intercourse is the holy grail, that positions in sex is a must for enhanced satisfaction and similar such attitudes are unthinkingly lapped up. And it is then that porn-watching can start to get detrimental.
So, it’s not the porn per se that affects our ideologies but what we ‘make’ of what we watch. In the first part of this article, people used porn to their advantage and helped themselves through it. The second set ‘developed’ unrealistic views and were the poorer for it. We are the land of the Kama Sutra, but puritanical ideas still thrive. Instead of passing moral judgement, let us see pornography for what it can prove to be—a double- edged sword.
IN A BID TO DO WHAT THEY SEE, PORN ADDICTS LOSE SELF-ESTEEM