What is it about pornography?

It draws so many of us to crouch, haggard, in darkened rooms, massaging our genitalia to lonely climax in in the cold glow of LCD. Then, in the horrid aftermath, with towel in one hand and the evidence of our strange foray strewn in windows across the screen, with the other hand we reach into menus. Click. History. Click. Delete history.

View All History

I was, as a child, filmed by the men who sexually abused me. Others, including my father, took photographs of the abuse. My acceptance and processing of these early experiences has now freed me from my pornography addiction as an adult. This was a long journey. I am now porn free.

As an adult I had unconsciously used pornography as a way of temporarily escaping from the world and into a place where I had complete control. A place where endless streams of beautiful women reassured me that I had value; that I was desirable. I regularly flooded my dopamine receptors with the cocaine-like rush that high-speed internet pornography dispenses. I would then fall into a bleak stupor. The cycle repeated.

I used pornography, as an adult, for the same reason the heroin addict loads up his little spoon, heats it up, and shoots it into his cardiovascular system: I was in pain. Pornography was self-medication for that pain.

As Dr Gabor Maté famously said, “Don’t ask: Why the addiction? Ask: Why the pain?”

Pornography is one of our most powerful and readily available painkillers. For most of the time I was using it, I had no idea this was its function for me, because I had not taken the time and space to investigate my own past. Instead of meditating deeply into my feelings of loneliness and inadequacy, I would seek to block out those feelings. I was repelled by the idea of tracing them back to their origin. I was scared of opening the basement door to find myself, a lost, hopeless child crouched there in the shadows. Much easier to click. Click. Click. Delete history. Everyone’s doing it, right?

Right?

Delete History

If the primary psychological purpose of pornography could be expressed in just two words, it would be these: Delete History.

Deleting my own history was the reason I reached for pornography, and deleting my browser history was the way I hid from myself the extent of my addiction.

Like Gollum, in Lord of the Rings, I desperately hoped that just one more encounter with porn would bring me the satisfaction I craved. Couldn’t I use it this one last time? Could Precious really be killing me when it felt so good for that brief moment when we were reunited? But, what was I looking for in wearing the ring of porn?

What I actually needed was something porn rarely depicted: A hug; some kind words; compassion; friendship and closeness. All those things that I was rarely given as a child. This was everything that pornography promised, and everything it could never provide. Pixels can’t hug you. Pixels can’t love you. But they promise they can.

“Just wear the Ring of Power one more time,” they say. “This time it will be different.”

Choose your category

Take a look at the categories available on the average porn site, and you’ll see the deleted history of humanity: Violence; incest; exploitation; domination. I wonder now if a psychologist could accurately map the repressed early sexual experiences of a person simply by observing their preferences in pornography.

As is widely know by depth psychologists: What is not talked about is acted-out. And so much is acted out in the realm of pornography. Both by the adult performers (the majority of whom are survivors of childhood sexual abuse) and by the consumers of porn (many of whom are unconsciously reliving abuse dynamics from their own childhoods). Of course, if you are still using porn, I don’t expect you to accept this. I wouldn’t have accepted it either. Much easier to just click. Click. Click. Delete History.

Remember, or Repeat?

A friend of mine told me she was often drawn to watching porn videos of women being handled roughly. She later came to realize this was because this same thing had been done to her by an ex-boyfriend, and by her father when they sexually abused her. Unconsciously, she had been watching these videos to place herself in a position of power during a scene in which she had originally felt so helpless. But, now, in remembering and feeling these difficult experiences, she no longer feels the need to repeat the experience by watching porn. Remembering meant that she no longer needed to repeat.

The porn we watch watches us

Associative conditioning likely underlies the bulk of porn preferences in the general population.

When a child is subjected to sexual abuse, the child’s brain begins to connect sex with violence, or with specific objects or experiences. As neurobiologists say, “What fires together, wires together.”

This is called associative conditioning and was researched by the psychologist Pavlov.

Associative conditioning is where one thing is paired with another thing in the mind. In other words, a stimulus is paired with a response. Pavlov would ring a bell before feeding his dog, and he kept doing this until the dog began to associate the sound of the bell with the arrival of food. Eventually, Pavlov could simply ring the bell and the dog would begin to salivate in anticipation of the food.

This is associative conditioning at its most basic.

The same thing happens with sexuality. If a child’s sexual response is paired with an early childhood experience of abuse then, as an adult, that person may seek the same dynamic in their sexual encounters.

I know many survivors of childhood sexual abuse who were drawn to re-enact aspects of that abuse in adult relationships. They sought partners who were cruel and abusive to them, and they also sought out adult pornography that depicted aspects of their own abuse.

It is tragic that so many of us never wake up to the connections between our past and our present. If we did, the entire pornography industry, as we know it, would collapse overnight.

Porn is the commodification of our social disconnection.

Our society has been largely shaped by international pedophile rings like the Catholic Church, who preach in the front-room that sex is shameful while they rape children on an industrial scale in the back-room.

By raping children, and then shaming adults about sex, the church, and other institutions, have created the perfect storm: Psychosexually arresting the natural development of human beings and then selling the ‘cure’ back to them. The result is that many adults feel unable to have open, free sexual relationships with each other, and are ushered into spaces where sex can be sold to us.

In effect, what was in the commons — sexuality — has been privatized and sold back to the people. The natural function of adult sexuality: To bind communities, build connections and intensify existing intimacy, has been nominally outlawed by the priesthood, and then commodified for private profit.

Is some porn ok?

I wanted to address this question, because I think is a fair one to ask. I feel there may be a tiny subset of porn that is consensual, loving and educational. It is not impossible to depict more caring human relationships on film. But it is extremely difficult, not least because the entire dynamic of porn and the nature of a camera which (and the use of language here is interesting) 'shoots' people, is invasive.

Aside from the difficulty of sensitively depicting gentle human relations, there is the problem that this 'gentle' porn would sit within the troubled forest of all the current pornographic material. The users of even the most gentle pornography would find themselves walking though dense woodland with ghouls and ghosts lining the pathways, eager to usher them into the darkness.

Personally, I feel no need to walk in that forest again.

Porn for pawns?

All the time that porn was using me, I was a pawn. A pawn in a sickening game of chess played by master-psychologists. I have come to understand that it no accident that children are raped, then taken into the porn industry as adults and encouraged to unconsciously re-enact their abuse.

It is no accident that these porn videos are then used to build advertising revenue by luring millions of unconscious survivors of abuse into watching adult performers abused and manipulated on camera.

It is fair to question whether a group of people actively sat down and contrived this system.

But imagine if, as a group of rulers, you wanted power and control. What if you had observed on Earth that human sexuality forged connections and community? What if you had observed that loving, connected sex, was one of the most powerful means of joining adults and communities together, wouldn’t you seek a way of destroying it? Wouldn’t you seek a way to make people ashamed of it? Wouldn’t you find a way to profit from it?

Our ‘leaders’ have a long history of stealing community resources and then selling them back to that community. But, I’m no longer buying their product. For me, as a survivor of pornography, both as a forced-participant as a child, and using adult pornography for self-medication later in life, I see the truth of the substance: It masked my pain and hid my past.

I refuse to Delete History anymore.
Because awareness is freedom.
And history is worth remembering.