Freedom from Pornography

What's the cause of the addiction?

Dopamine is most notably involved in helping us feel pleasure as part of the brain’s reward system. Sex, running, eating chocolate — all these things can cause a dopamine release in the brain. 

This feel-good neurotransmitter is also involved in reinforcement. That’s why we go back to repeat the experience.  The darker side of dopamine is the intense feeling of reward people feel when they take chemical drugs and it's addictive.

What's the problem? When you think about the subject, an addiction to watching pornography can damage our health in a number of ways. 

• Sex is a basic, natural function and its purpose is for procreation. It's a beautiful thing in a loving relationship but like all good things, it can be subject to abuse when what was once good becomes harmful and love is displaced by objectification. That will lead the relationship one way - downhill.
  
• You see a pornographic image or movie and you instantly become a voyeur, aroused and sexually excited which generally leads to self-gratification as you become a virtual participant. 
• You may tell yourself that it's wrong but you return to the scene of the past excitement, hoping and likely searching for something even more exciting and this cycle repeats over and over again.
• You may spend an increasing amount of time watching porn, perhaps for many hours late at night until the early morning. That could be hundreds of hours a year; precious time you'll never get back.
• Inevitably, you will become tired and disengaged, not in your best mental state which becomes blunted and prolonged viewing late until the early hours may cause your auto-immune system to  become impaired, when you become more susceptible to picking up an infection such as flu.
• Your mood is likely to change after prolonged viewing, especially if you are married or in a steady relationship, watching secretly.
• The addiction could last for many years, and you could experience a loss of libido over time.
• These are just a few of the physical and psychological effects that may beset you from an addiction to porn but there is another aspect of your being that you will compromise and I cover that on a later page.
  
  

    You and countless millions like you are being exploited with every new advance in technology

The purpose of porn was and always has been to publicize the world of lust, making money by exploitation of the human pleasure of sex already described. First there were erotic stories - words from someone's imagination put into print. Then still photo images were added and an industry was born that progressed to the publication of widely distributed magazines. With the advent of moving celluloid film, pornographic images were brought to life. Up to that point, viewers and readers of porn paid to consume it and it wasn't mainstream.  It was a 'nudge nudge, wink wink' phenomena and barely spoken about. And it was mostly soft porn.

Damned Statistics

One very well known porn website published statistics for the year 2019

• There were over 42 billion visits in that year to that one site alone.
• Every minute to that site, there were 80,000 visits, 78,000 searches, 220,000 video views, 11,000 hours of video watched and 3 hours worth of viewing uploaded from 14 new videos. That's a staggering 7 million plus videos in a single year uploaded.

No wonder, 30% + of the internet comprises porn.

The age of exploitation has decreased rapidly, from adults to children. In just 30 years, hard-core porn can be viewed by anybody with a device connected to the internet for free. If a child lies about their age when accessing a porn website, they can view it. If you are a parent or guardian, at the very least check your child's web use regularly (check history) and BLOCK all 'adult content'.

Introducing her second (see PDF link below) report to UK's Pariament, the Children's Commissioner wrote the following: 

'My first report, published in January 2023, “A lot of it is actually just abuse”, set out findings from a survey of over a thousand 16-21-year-olds and focus groups with teenagers.

It established that the average age at which children first view pornography is now 13 years old. Substantial proportions of young people surveyed who had seen pornography viewed it at a much younger age than 13 – 27% by age 11 and 10% by the age of 9.

Young people spoke about the unbearable pressure to view hardcore pornography even if they do not want to, much of which depicts degrading acts and violence against women. Our survey analysis also demonstrated a significant link between an early age of first exposure to pornography and frequency of exposure in later years. The age of first exposure and frequency of exposure were shown to be closely linked to the likelihood of a young person viewing violent content online. Frequent users of pornography were also more likely to have real-life experience of an aggressive or degrading sex act.'