Shooting Straight: Common sense of porn

It seems to make common sense that because pornography and sex in general feel so good, they could become just as addictive as smoking and alcohol. It also makes intuitive sense that, because sex releases neurochemicals in the brain, those neurochemicals could act like drugs on the brain. We hear people talk about starting with some soft form of pornography, like a Playboy magazine, for instance, and later ending up with some extreme hardcore pornographic content.

It makes common sense for us to worry that porn could have a psychological effect that might lead people to pursue harder and harder forms of it, in order to reach higher and higher levels of stimulation. That need for greater stimulation could also make one feel that they would develop unrealistic expectations from the real women in their life. This argument holds as much water as women seeing an action film expecting their husbands and boyfriends to be as tough as the hero on the screen.

I have never understood the panic over children getting exposed to porn. The truth is that for a kid who hasn’t reached sexual awakening, those images won’t mean anything. And once he reaches the age, nature will anyway teach him; he won’t need porn for that. Porn is nothing but a stimulant for sexual desire in the same way as action films are for power. That’s because the desire to seek sexual pleasure and power are the prime motivators of life. I believe that decisions about sexuality are some of the most important decisions that we can make. That and the judgement of others’ sexuality should be made based upon information that is examined carefully, to weigh the influence of assumptions, and to determine whether our speculations are consistent with scientific data.

Adults in our society are so afraid to talk to their kids about sex, and because abstinence-only sex education continues to be so pervasive, kids of today will know only from the Internet about sex. Research says that porn exposure in kids has less than 4 per cent of the variance in adolescent behaviour. This means that 96 per cent of the reasons why kids do the things they have got nothing to do with the fact that they saw porn. The panic that we hear about on a regular basis shows how we are actually paying a lot more attention to porn in unwanted ways than to enjoy it just for what it is.

There’s no scientific evidence that the effect of porn on your brain is any different from that generated by television or video games. It’s a proven fact that greater social access to pornography actually correlates with a decrease in sex crimes. Thinking about choking your boss doesn’t increase the chances of you doing it. As long as porn is around, it makes sense to talk to our kids about it instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist. Medically speaking, you can smoke and drink yourself to death, but sex doesn’t kill. However, in our repressed society, that’s where the maximum restrictions are imposed on.