The Porn Myth: Exposing the Reality Behind the Fantasy of Pornography

FOREWORD

When I was ten years old, a friend and I were riding our bikes around our neighborhood one day, looking for something to do. We soon found ourselves behind a local gas station, where many neighborhood kids would often spend their afternoons because of its privacy and quick access to candy and soda. When we arrived that day, no one else was there. What happened next will forever be burned into my mind. I can still recall the vivid images over twenty years later.

My friend hopped off his bike and was pulled like a magnet toward a pile of magazines containing a seemingly endless number of images of nude women. My mind could hardly comprehend what it was consuming. I felt scared, excited, and a little confused.

Over the next several years, I found myself seeking out more of what I had seen, more often, and in more hardcore versions. Porn began to consume me, and it took me a long time to regain control and put it behind me.

What I experienced at ten years old was nothing compared with what youth are experiencing today. Not only has pornography become more accessible than at any other time in history, but its very nature has drastically changed from those magazines behind the gas station. Few things in our society are more concerning than pornography. Research is beginning to show just how harmful it is. We now know that pornography plays a role in sex trafficking, child exploitation, and sexual violence. Pornography also affects the developing brains of youth and shapes the sexual template of our entire society. We are seeing unprecedented levels of sexual dysfunction in many young men, and experts are attributing the trend to high levels of porn consumption.

Yet many of us have been duped into believing that pornography is healthy and normal. We’ve collectively adopted this myth and many others related to pornography (all of which are debunked in this book). As a result, the way we think and talk about topics such as sex, intimacy, and love has been warped, and our ability to form meaningful and fulfilling relationships with the opposite sex has been eroded. And that’s putting it mildly.

Stating the case more strongly, countless relationships have been damaged or destroyed because of porn. Families have been torn apart. Lives have been consumed.

Pornography helped to land my cousin in jail in his early twenties. His pornography addiction was so severe that he eventually needed more than pixels to satisfy his cravings.

In college, seeing the impact of pornography led some friends and me to do some research. What we found shocked us. And we were angry that for much of our lives we and our peers had been led to believe that porn was just a harmless pastime.

This newfound knowledge would change the course of our lives. We felt a responsibility to help others to understand the truth about porn. We started the organization Fight the New Drug in an effort to educate youth about the harmful effects of pornography and to help them in their pursuit of real love.

Since then, we’ve received thousands upon thousands of e-mails from people all over the world, telling us their heartbreaking stories—stories that show just how damaging porn is, stories such as this one:

I have been watching porn at least every day for the last 10 years. I am 23 years old. I got married when I was 21, and I still haven’t had sex with my wife. Not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t. I can’t stop watching porn, and I’m unable to become aroused enough to have sex with her. It has been two years, and I can see the pain in her eyes every time we try. I would do anything to change the last 10 years. I would do anything to choose love over porn. I want to love her with everything that I have, but my addiction to pornography has broken down our relationship to the point that we are now separated until I change or we agree on a divorce. I still haven’t been aroused by anything other than pixels on a screen for years. I would do anything to go back and choose love.

We received this message from a teenager in high school:

I’m addicted to porn. I watch it every single day. I’ve probably spent over 100 dollars on sex chats. I feel like I have no control over what I do. No matter how disciplined or in control I think I am, I always have porn on the back of my mind and I always want more. . . . This is no way to live. I’ve realized that and I want to change it. I need to change it.

The reality is that today’s rising generation is dealing with this issue like no other generation before them. Porn’s widespread acceptance and accessibility have evolved much faster than our public awareness of it. This topic has been pushed aside as a moral or religious one and therefore does not hold any weight in public health or public policy discussions.

Not anymore.

Thanks to new research on pornography’s harmful effects on the brain, on relationships, and on society, we are seeing a wave of passionate individuals trying to change the cultural norm—inspiring others to pursue real love and to avoid its hollow counterfeit.

Our generation is ready for a new kind of love—a love that is untainted by warped perceptions of intimacy and by selfish desires, a love that is unburdened by deflated interest and unhealthy compulsions. Millions are now recognizing pornography for what it is and rejecting its influence in their lives. This book is part of that movement.

The Porn Myth can help you not only to separate the myths from the reality about porn but also to reclaim real love. Matt Fradd masterfully articulates and dispels the falsehoods that have helped to spread porn addiction and sexual dysfunction, and he inspires us to take action against them.

But let’s be realistic. Information is only the first step in changing a cultural norm: there is also a lot of work to do. But that’s okay. We can do it. It has taken years for pornography to become widely accepted as a harmless pastime and a way of life, and it will take time and effort to reverse that public perspective. Are you up for it?

If so, read this book. Put into practice what you learn from it. Then share the message with others.

Clay Olsen, CEO and

Cofounder of Fight the New Drug

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many of the insights and arguments I present in this book are not original, and I’ve tried hard to give credit where it is due. In particular, I’m grateful for the work of J. Budziszewski, Noah Church, Gabe Deem, Gail Dines, April Garris, Luke Gilkerson, Dawn Hawkins, Donald Hilton Jr., Fr. Sean Kilcawley, Peter Kleponis, Mary Anne Layden, Jill Manning, Clay Olsen, Pamela Paul, Alexander Rhodes, Marnia Robinson, Roger Scruton, Kevin Skinner, William Struthers, Patrick Trueman, Christopher West, Gary Wilson, and—if I don’t stop soon this will be a book of its own—the many knowledgeable anti-porn activists who have taught and influenced me. I’m also deeply thankful to the team at Ignatius Press—especially Mark Brumley—who saw the value in a nonreligious response to pro-porn arguments. Finally, I’m thankful to Jason Evert, without whose work, example, and friendship this book almost certainly wouldn’t exist.

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the myth that pornography is good and the many other falsehoods about pornography that many of us believe.

But before I get to those, a word about moths.

In 1869, in an attempt to spur a growing American silk industry, the entomologist Leopold Trouvelot made the big mistake of bringing the gypsy moth from Europe to Boston. Within ten years, swarms of gypsy moths were devastating forests with their voracious appetite. Attempts to eradicate this moth failed time and again, and for the next hundred years, it was an uncontrollable pest. Then, in the 1960s and ‘70s, scientists devised a new strategy. Biologists knew that the male gypsy moth found the female moth by following her scent—her pheromone. So scientists developed massive quantities of a synthetic version of this pheromone and scattered small pellets of it from the air over infested forests.

The effect was overpowering for the males. They were so overwhelmed by the highly concentrated pheromone that they either became confused and didn’t know where to turn to find the female or became desensitized to the lower levels of pheromone naturally produced by the female. Either way, the moths failed to reproduce themselves, and their population declined precipitously.

By way of analogy, this is what pornography is in our society: a synthetic, highly concentrated pheromone. Having been overexposed to it, many people are either confused about or disinterested in real sexual intimacy. As this book will show, all over the globe, people are reporting the ill effects of pornography—even those who have no moral qualms with it. From the findings of neuroscience to the clinical investigations of psychologists to the couches of licensed counselors, there are widespread concerns about pornography’s impact on our minds and on our culture. Pornography, says neurosurgeon Donald Hilton, is "a visual pheromone, a powerful 100 billion dollar per year brain drug that is changing human sexuality".¹

In a 2011 TED talk, psychologist Philip Zimbardo said that studies show a growing, widespread fear of intimacy and a social awkwardness among men—more and more men don’t know how to engage in face-to-face communication with women. Why? Zimbardo says this is caused by disproportionate Internet use in general and excessive new access to pornography in particular. Boys’ brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way, for change, novelty, excitement.²

Perhaps these quotes sound like gross overstatements. Porn as a brain drug? Digitally rewiring the mind? Sure, we think, pornography has a seedy side. Sure, some people can get carried away with it. Sure, there are probably some unsavory characters out there using it and making it. But why all the fuss about it? Porn is just consenting adults watching consenting adults have sex. Right?

What Is Porn? (Just So We’re Clear)

Pornography can be notoriously difficult to define. Part of the reason for this is that different definitions of it have an impact on the sphere of lawmaking. If we define pornography too liberally, we might end up penalizing certain legitimate art forms. If we define pornography too narrowly, we might miss all the diversity in the pornographic landscape. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s now famous I know it when I see it definition, though humorously true to life, is not at all specific.

Perhaps a history lesson is in order here. The term pornography entered the English language in the mid-nineteenth century, meaning writings or engravings of or about prostitutes. In some sense, pornography is therefore an extension of prostitution. The producers of pornography intend for the consumer to interact with the material as one interacts with a prostitute—it is a product that serves an erotic function.

Pornography, therefore, consists of visual materials containing explicit displays of sexual organs or sexual activities, whether real or simulated, in order to arouse erotic rather than aesthetic sensations. Or more briefly, pornography is material that depicts erotic behavior intended to cause sexual arousal.

Big Porn, Big Business

In some ways, I have to acknowledge that this book is about two decades too late. Sweeping cultural change is always possible, but given the current state of things, pornography is here to stay. Unless you’ve been living under a rock on a different planet, you probably already know that pornography use is common. And because it is so common, pornography is a huge industry, and it isn’t going to go away any time soon.

It’s hard to measure the revenue generated by porn. According to the Free Speech Coalition, mainstream news sources have tried to estimate gross income totals for the porn industry, but exact figures are simply not available.³ Still, we know that there’s big money being made in porn. The porn industry generates $13 billion each year in the United States.⁴ The old adage sex sells takes on an entirely new meaning when sex is your main product.

It is safe to say that porn is no longer the exception in entertainment but is the norm. In their exhaustive search of the one million most-trafficked websites in the world, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam found that 42,337 of these are sex-related sites. After their analysis of the top 400 million web searches, researchers concluded that about one in eight searches is for erotic content.⁵ Among millennials (18- to 30-year-olds), 63 percent of men and 21 percent of women say they view pornography at least several times a week—and that says nothing of those who view pornography somewhat less frequently.⁶

Internet-safety advocate Donna Rice Hughes succinctly states, Online pornography is the first consistently successful e-commerce product.⁷ A key factor in the growth of pornography is the growth of Internet technologies, which, because of the apparent anonymity of the World Wide Web, have made it easier for people to access porn without being seen by others. Because porn consumers are a large market segment, this has accelerated the development of media technologies, from file-sharing networks to streaming video to mobile video. Blaise Cronin and Elisabeth Davenport, writing for Information Society, say that it is universally acknowledged by information-technology experts that the porn industry has been on the leading edge when it comes to building high-performance websites.⁸

The porn industry’s big players are multimillion-dollar giants—not just household names such as Playboy and Hustler, but Time Warner, Hilton, and Rupert Murdoch. Pornography is no longer driven by a few business-savvy culture changers willing to risk jail time for their sexually liberal beliefs. Stephen Yagielowicz, senior editor for XBIZ, comments:

The corporatization of porn isn’t something that will happen or is happening, it is something that happened—and if you’re unaware of that fact then there truly is no longer a seat at the table for you. It’s Las Vegas all over again: the independent owners, the renegade mobsters and visionary entrepreneurs pushed aside by mega-corporations that saw a better way of doing things and brought the discipline needed to attain a whole new level of success to the remaining players.⁹

To say pornography is big business is not to say it doesn’t experience its own recessions. In 2007, Bloomberg Businessweek estimated global porn revenues at $20 billion, about half of that in the United States. But only five years later, those revenues were estimated to have dropped by 50 percent, due to the easy accessibility of free pornography on the Internet.¹⁰ Porn provider Alec Helmy says, Consumer psychology has changed due to free porn. Customers are reluctant to pay for pornographic content when they can get it free.¹¹ In other words, though porn profits are declining, this is not because pornography’s popularity is waning, but because the use of free pornography is ubiquitous.

This saturation of free porn in online spaces has required porn companies to get creative. Like any good marketers, adult businesses have a vested interest in studying the psychology of consumer behavior. Jack Morrison, writing for Adult Video News, says porn companies have sought the advice of clinicians who help people to overcome cyber-sex addictions on how to attract more customers to their websites. Companies that heed the advice have the potential to turn huge profits.¹²

Pornography is no longer a black market enterprise. Andrew Edmond, CEO of Flying Crocodile, a $20 million Internet porn company, stated, A lot of people [outside the porn industry] get distracted from the business model by [the sex]. It is just as sophisticated and multilayered as any other marketplace. We operate just like any Fortune 500 company.¹³ Porn companies have their own investment firms; enter comarketing initiatives with other corporations; organize trade shows; undergo mergers and acquisitions; hire managers, janitors, and secretaries; and raise capital as any mainstream business does.

Big Porn makes big money, and for good reason: it plays to our strong desire for sexual pleasure.

What This Book Is Not

Lest I be misunderstood, the purpose of this book is not to rob us of the pleasure of our sexuality but instead to insist that perhaps sex can be more pleasurable when it isn’t on tap or made-to-order. If you are an avid porn consumer and have never given a moment’s thought to whether it is good or bad, right or wrong, my objective here is not to condemn you. Though I won’t flinch in saying your mentality about pornography is wrong, your desire for sexual fulfillment is rooted in something very good. We all want our lives to flourish, and it is my contention that, as a society, we can do a whole lot better with respect to our sexuality than what porn offers us.

This book is also not a religious treatise on the evils of pornography. Everyone has ideas about ultimate reality, and I am no exception. While I have my own assumptions about how human beings flourish, just as you do, this book will not lean on traditional religious scriptures or authorities.

Furthermore, this book is not about censorship, nor does it argue against the legality of pornography. We live in a global economy, and pornography is consumed in every nation on the planet. National laws, judicial systems, and regulatory agencies tend to move far more slowly than the rapid acceleration of technology, and I have no brilliant ideas about how to change that. Time and space simply do not permit a treatment of a legal subject so vast and complex. Plus, in my opinion, some versions of censoring pornography seem a lot like prohibition laws in America in the 1920s, unnecessarily turning relatively normal citizens into criminals, and that is not my intention here. Laws are important, of course, but my aim here is to challenge our mentalities about porn. The assertion I’m making in this book is not whether porn should be denied as a form of protected free speech—though that is worth debating—but, rather, whether porn is a form of expression deserving of tough criticism.

What This Book Is

The goal of this book is to expose the myth that pornography is good or at least not that bad. Along the way it will debunk the most commonly held beliefs about pornography, either explicitly stated or implicitly understood.

This book covers a wide range of topics—from the porn industry itself to the impact of porn on our physiology and our relationships. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At first glance, this book might appear to be saying that pornography can be a problem, that there are certain consequences to the abuse of porn, that porn is morally neutral—like a gun, which can be used for good or for evil. The argument of this book, however, is something altogether different.

Myths about porn exist largely because they make pornography more acceptable. For those who hold to more traditional values, belief in some of these myths amounts to