Porn and the Brain & Emotional Health

 Quick Findings from the Experts

I hope that in addition to helping you to understand more about the destructive nature of porn on individuals, relationships, and society, this book will help you to explain these things to others. To that end, in addition to the many research findings already discussed, in this appendix I have provided findings concerning porn’s effects on (1) the brain, (2) emotional health, (3) sexual tastes, (4) sexual violence, (5) erectile dysfunction, (6) marriage, and (7) adolescence.

Porn and the Brain

1. When researchers compared brain scans of porn users with scans of nonusers, they found that the more porn the person had used, the less his reward center activated when porn images were flashed on a screen.1 The researchers said, “This is in line with the hypothesis that intense exposure of pornographic stimuli results in a downregulation of the natural neural response to sexual stimuli.”22. With a dulled reward center, a person can’t feel dopamine’s effects as well as they used to. As a result, the porn a person is using can stop producing the same excitement it did before. This leads many users to go in search of more hard-core material to get a bigger dopamine burst.3

3. People with Internet addiction have been found to have less gray matter in several important areas of the brain, including the frontal lobes (which oversee things such as planning, prioritizing, and controlling impulses), the striatum (which is involved with the reward center and with self-control), and the insula (an area involved with feeling empathy and compassion for others). The vast majority of people with porn addictions have Internet addictions.44. One study showed that even moderate porn use correlated with having reduced gray matter. Though it did not conclusively show that porn had caused the reduction, the study led researchers to conclude that porn use was the most likely explanation. They even subtitled their study “The Brain on Porn”. The study also found a correction between the length of time spent watching porn and the amount of gray matter reduction in the brain’s reward circuitry, which is important in motivation and decision-making. This reduction is also indicative of having a numbed pleasure response. The researchers interpreted the reduction as an effect of porn use.55. Addiction researchers have found that brain problems seen in Internet addicts, similar to the problems seen among porn users, improved with abstinence and treatment, indicating that the addiction was the problem, not a preexisting condition.6

6. Almost every study on addiction has demonstrated atrophy of multiple areas of the brain, particularly those associated with frontal volitional control and reward salience centers. This is true for addictions to drugs such as cocaine,7 methamphetamine,8 and opioids,9 and also for behavioral conditions associated with pathologic overconsumption of food,10 sex,11 and the Internet.127. The journal NeuroImage published a study in 2008 demonstrating that as men are sexually aroused by pornography, the mirror neurons in the brain also fire. This means that the brain naturally imagines the porn viewer in the scene. The man is not merely responding to the naked woman. His brain is mirroring the pornographic scene with the viewer as the main character, heightening arousal.138. When a person continually strengthens the brain maps linking sexual excitement to porn, those maps enlarge and can crowd out maps linking sexual excitement to a real person or to real sex.14

9. In 2005, Dr. Eric Nestler wrote a landmark paper describing addiction as a dysfunction of the reward centers of the brain. Addiction occurs, he explained, when pleasure-reward pathways are hijacked by certain euphoria-inducing activities, such as eating, taking drugs, or having sex.15Porn and Emotional Health

1. Studies have found that frequency of porn use correlates with depression, anxiety, stress, and social problems.16 It shouldn’t be surprising that porn use is associated with depression, given that porn has the ability to mess with the user’s dopamine system.17 Research has found that dopamine signaling is a main factor in depression.182. Dopamine significantly affects our motivation to pursue goals and build relationships, so when the brain can’t feel dopamine’s effects as well, our interest in doing those things can start to slide.19

3. Studies have found that porn use is correlated with having less sexual and relationship satisfaction and changed sexual tastes.20

4. Studies have found that porn use is correlated with lowered quality of life and poorer health.215. Studies have found that porn use is correlated with intimacy problems.22

6. Researchers at Oxford University found that moderate to severe Internet addiction is associated with increased risk of harming oneself.23

7. Even moderate porn use is correlated with damage to parts of the brain involved with motivation and decision-making.24

8. Researchers have also found that moderate porn use is correlated with shrunken gray matter in parts of the brain that oversee cognitive function.259. A study that looked at Internet addicts (pornography was a main online activity for the subjects) found that they suffered from “negative moods” when they went offline.26

10. Researchers in Belgium looked at fourteen-year-old boys’ academic performance twice and compared the two scores. They found that “an increased use of Internet pornography decreased boys’ academic performance six months later.”27

Porn and Sexual Tastes

1. Studies have found that porn use is correlated with less sexual and relationship satisfaction and changed sexual tastes.282. Sexual interests are conditionable—we can train them, as Pavlov trained a dog to salivate when it heard a bell.29

3. The brain’s reward center doesn’t know the difference between “porn that’s ‘acceptable’ to use” and “porn that’s not cool”. All it knows is that it likes dopamine. So, when something sick or disturbing pops up and is linked with sexual arousal, the brain stores the connection.30 “Neurons that fire together wire together, and feeling pleasure in the presence of [something normally unappealing] causes it to get wired into the brain as a source of delight.”314. As a porn user builds up tolerance “the pleasure of sexual discharge must be supplemented with the pleasure of an aggressive release, and sexual and aggressive images are increasingly mingled—hence the increase in sadomasochistic themes in hardcore porn.”32

5. Researchers have found that women become less sexually aroused by repeated viewing of the same porn, but become aroused again when novel porn is introduced.33

6. In a 2012 NoFap poll of users, more than half of the respondents agreed with the statement “My tastes became increasingly ‘extreme’ or ‘deviant’.”347. In a study, researchers found that when male subjects saw the same porn film repeatedly, they were progressively less aroused by it. When researchers introduced a new video after eighteen viewings of the old one, subjects’ arousal spiked.35

8. When a person uses porn, his brain wires together what is seen with the feelings of arousal it creates, building new brain maps for both what he thinks is sexy and what he expects from his partner.36

9. Researchers have found that the younger the age of first porn use, the more likely a porn consumer is to use bestiality or child porn.37Porn and Sexual Violence

1. In a meta-analysis of forty-six studies published from 1962 to 1995, comprising a total sample of 12,323 people, researchers concluded that pornographic material puts one at increased risk of the following:

    • developing sexually deviant tendencies (31 percent increase in risk)

    • committing sexual offenses (22 percent increase in risk)

    • accepting rape myths (31 percent increase in risk)38

2. A study that both exposed participants to pornography and asked them about their pornography use found that high pornography use corresponds to higher acceptance of rape myth, acceptance of violence against women, adversarial sex beliefs, likelihood of committing rape and forced sex acts, and sexual callousness.39

THE PORN MYTH

Exposing the Reality Behind the Fantasy of Pornography

Matt Fradd

It was like he was possessed ...

 night.”1Schiro’s behavior was a function of pornography. Pornography got him drinking, and once he was drunk and his inhibitions were lowered he felt compelled to act out the fantasies he had seen in the X-rated book stores. When Schiro and Mary Lee moved to Evansville, his behavior got worse. He began to beat her, at one point knocking her two front teeth out. By the late fall of 1980 he was all but out of control. When Lee was at work Schiro would take her two-year-old son Willie to the Evansville mall and use him as a prop for panhandling, saying that he needed the money to feed his child. He would then take the money and spend it at adult bookstores. Sometimes he would spend $20 on one session at what he called the “quarter movies.” These were the peep shows at the adult bookstores. For a quarter Schiro could see two or three minutes of a 15 minute film loop. The contents of the quarter movies were generally the most hard core of all the offerings at the adult book stores. When Mary Lee once asked Schiro where he had got the idea for a particularly bizarre form of sexual behavior, he answered by saying that he had learned it from these film strips.

In early December Schiro told his employer at Tri-State Repair, Robert Wheeler, that he had seen one of the women living at the house across the street come out to get the mail clad only in a pajama top and panties. The scene was the type of thing that Schiro never forgot. Over the next two months the image sank into his pornography-saturated psyche and emerged later as a fantasy that demanded action. He had made up his mind that he was going to rape the woman who lived across the street from where he worked. By February 4 the fantasy had become irresistible. According to the testimony of Mary Lee, Schiro said that when he woke up he just knew that something was wrong. He said the feeling got stronger and stronger, that he became afraid that something bad was going to happen.

Schiro spent the day of February 4, 1981, slowly being drawn into his own pornography-inspired obsessions. He was being inexorably transformed into an actor in his own quarter movie. Throughout the day on the job Schiro intoxicated himself by inhaling an industrial solvent. After leaving

work at 2:30 in the afternoon, he went to a local tavern where he stole a pint of whiskey. He then took the whiskey to an X-rated book store and consumed it as he initiated his ritual of perusing first the magazines and then working his way back; to the harder-core quarter movies. Dr. Frank Osanka, a psychologist who specializes in child abuse and pornography, testified at Schiro’s trial that the quarter movies were in general more sado-masochistic, more rape-oriented, and more violent than the generic movies at adult bookstores. As Schiro became more intoxicated, his behavior became correspondingly more belligerent. At one point he ran out of quarters and went for change, exposing himself to the cashier. The woman attendant gave him his change, and he went back and purchased some more movie time. The next time he ran out of quarters, he returned to the cashier still exposed but this time was belligerent about it. This time the woman threw out. At this point he began making his way toward a house at 1210 Tennessee Street to keep his appointment with the woman who had gone out to get the mail in her pajama top and panties.

He never found her. He found her roommate instead. Laura Jane Lueb-behusenhad put on a robe for the evening. She was having a mixed drink and watching television, planning to take a bath and then go to bed. She had moved to Evansville from Ferdinand, Indiana, a small town fifty some miles off to the northeast. She worked as a truck driver for Charles Chips. She was a lesbian and living with the younger, prettier woman Schiro had seen from his work place. Her name was Darlene Hooper. She worked as a hostess at the Executive Inn in Evansville. She had been married and, in fact, was to spend the night of February 4 with her ex-husband. There is evidence that the lesbian relationship between Hooper and Luebbehusen was threatening to break up. In a note found in the trash can after the murder, Luebbehusen wrote to Hooper: “Honey, I do love you and don’t want to leave either. So what we have to do is quit fighting. I love you, Laura.”2At 9:30 PM Schiro knocked on the door of 1210 E. Tennessee. “My car broke down,” he said to Luebbehusen. “Can I use your phone? I want to call my dad.”

“Sure,” said Laura Jane, and she let him into the house.

Had Mary Lee had the benefit of reading the Lockhart Commission Report, she would have known that “exposure to erotica had no impact upon moral character”3 and that “the increased availability of explicit sexual materials [in Denmark, at least] has been accompanied by a decrease in the incidence of sexual crime.”4 She also mighthave learned that “available research indicates that sex offenders have had less adolescent experience with erotica than other adults.” In sum, she would have learned that “empirical research designed to clarify the question has found no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior among youth or adults.”

Since Mary Lee did not have the benefit of reading the Lockhart Commission Report, she ended up doing empirical research of her own and this entailed getting beaten repeatedly and having her two front teeth knocked out as Schiro’s behavior degenerated into the savagery that pornography generated passions create. Her testimony contains first hand observation of how pornography inspires behavior by arousing the passions to the point where they are no longer under rational control. Mary Lee observed “the same pattern,” which began with the “[pornographic film] loops,” followed by liquor and dope and then deviant sexual behavior. Once the pattern got established, it was impossible to predict Schiro’s behavior. “Like if we would be talking, having conversation or watching TV or something, all of a sudden he would be really angry, like I said something that he didn’t like or I don’t know but just boom and he was mad.” It was a unpredictable moments like that that Mary got her two front teeth knocked out. At another point Schiro gave her bruised ribs and a black eye. At another point he bit her and then chased her down the street. “It was horrible,” she recounted to the court. “It was like he was possessed. ... It was almost an inhuman laugh and he kept saying, ‘you can’t get away from me.’”6In his more lucid moments, Schiro seemed aware that he had become the thrall of his own disordered passions. During one of his assaults on Mary Lee, he would repeat to her, “you are making me do this. I don’t want to do this, but I can’t stop, and you are making me do this.”7

Lee’s testimony gives a graphic account of the bondage that pornography creates in its victims.

“He knew that people said it was wrong and he knew that someone who was normal didn’t do these things and he didn’t want to do them. He just couldn’t stop though. Something would get inside of him and there he would go. He had no control over it though because he hated doing it. He would cry and say, ‘why do I do these things? Help me stop. What can I do to quit this. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ He wanted to be like the guy next door, you know, with the car in the garage and the dog. I hate the things that he had done but I can’t say I hate Tom because I know that he is sick. He couldn’t stop doing the things he did.”

The same pattern repeated itself in the encounter with Laura Jane. After gaining entrance to the house by lying about his car, Schiro persuaded her to have consensual intercourse. Then after waking, he became enraged at her for no apparent reason and began beating her over the head with first a bottle and then an iron, Laura Jane continued to struggle until Schiro strangled her. Then he dragged her into the living room of the house and sodomized her corpse. While doing this he was, according to Lee’s testimony, “crying the whole time and saying, ‘God, please stop me. Don’t let me do this. Please help me. God, I just can’t quit.’”8Schiro’s trial received some attention at the time of the Meese hearings

on pornography in the mid-’80s. In general, however, the testimony of those whose addiction to pornography led to murder and other crimes was generally suppressed by the media which sought to portray masturbation to pornography as not only harmless but also as an expression of freedom. Something similar happened to the testimony of mass-murderer Ted Bundy, who told Dr. James Dobson hours before Bundy was executed that pornography led him to do what he did. The editor of the Evansville newspaper told me after handing me a copy of Schiro’s autobiography that pornography had no effect on behavior, even though Schiro and his girlfriend said the exact opposite. This suppression of the truth continues for a number of reasons. First of all, because the publishing industry is now heavily involved in pornography, and it is not in their interest to explain to the public that they are in the business of enslaving people. Secondly, the great myth of the enlightenment is “liberation.” If it could be shown that the sexual liberation brings about bondage, then those who use the term to their advantage would be powerless to control behavior. Finally, no one wants to admit that passions can get out of control because it contradicts the central Promethean myth of the Enlightenment. Just as Ben Franklin harnessed electricity for mankind’s benefit, so the sexual revolutionaries have liberated sexual energy from the moral law for the same end. To say that “liberated” passions were imperious masters who enslaved those who unleashed them would be to deny the most sacred tenet of the Enlightenment thinker. Therefore, evidence which supports that proposition is suppressed.

Thirteen hours after Schiro arrived at the door, Darlene Hooper discovered Laura Jane’s battered body just inside the front door of their house on the living room floor. Rigor mortis had set in. The body’s face and hair were covered with blood. A blood-stained pair of jeans was lying a few feet away. A ski jacket and insulated undershirt were pulled up around the neck of the victim, who had been raped while alive, beaten over the head with a whiskey bottle and an iron and then strangled. The body had also been raped and sodomized after death. Given Schiro’s state of mind and given the internal logic of pornography, it was only a matter of time until somebody got killed. Death runs like a leitmotif through all pornographic practice. Necrophilia is only the logical extension of the tendencies already there. There are those who get killed by asphyxiating themselves while masturbating; there are those who murder their victims, particularly children, because they are afraid of getting caught; there are those who accidentally kill their victims in the process of some bondage routines, and there are those like Schiro, who, according to psychologist Frank Osanka, “saw just enough of the simulated sex and murder situations that he just had to try it himself.”9“After several times in my interview with him,” Osanka continued, “I Finally concluded that he knew he was going to kill this woman when he went in there, and so I just said to him, ‘Did you intend to kill her?’ and [he said]

lYes.’ He was fairly consistent on that. And when I asked why, he would say that he had never done that before.”10

Thomas Schiro’s behavior could be predicted from the type of pornography he had internalized. His life paralleled the trajectory which pornography had traveled since his birth in 1961. Sometime during 1967, the same year the Lockhart Commission on obscenity and pornography was formed, six-year-old Tom Schiro discovered some films owned by his father. One of them was called Bedtime; it was a World War II-vintage pornography film. Accounts on how Schiro became acquainted with the film vary. Schiro claims his father showed it to him. The father claims that Schiro discovered it on his own. One thing is certain; once Schiro saw the film, he never forgot it. It never lost its fascination for him. In fact, when he moved in with Mary Lee fourteen years later he insisted on showing it to her. She remembers it as an old film that “was broken into a million pieces. I think he said it came from World War II... but he said he had been looking at it for years. “ According to Osanka, “Bedtime is a film that depicts a man and a woman in bed in various acts of sexual involvement. The significant point of the film is that the camera keeps coming back to the woman’s face.

“The woman’s face consistently is one in which she is looking as if she is feeling uncomfortable, and she is looking as if she is in pain, and she is looking as if that this is a disagreeable experience and at the same time her body is reacting in enthusiastic fashion. The fact that the camera kept going back and forth between the genital contact and her face gives the impression that her body was so enthusiastic in the sexual contacts but her face was distorted or angry or in pain so you get the impression that she’s enjoying pain from the sex.”'1 It was a lesson in sex education that young Schiro never forgot. When pressed on the issue of the woman’s face, Osanka conceded that she could be conveying distaste or even boredom as much as pain. The point is that the six-year-old Schiro was confronted with material he had no way of understanding. There was nothing in his experience that could act as a check on his conclusions. There was no one to interpret this film as a sordid simulacrum of the real meaning of human sexuality. The film became the explicator of sex for Schiro. This lesson was only confirmed later on as Schiro became exposed to progressively more violent and perverted examples of pornography. The stimulus was so powerful it caused Schiro to act in a certain way, causing life to imitate art. Once Schiro internalized the film as his first most powerful lesson in sex education, his behavior became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sex meant violation and pain, but Schiro concluded that the victim enjoyed the experience nonetheless. Schiro’s experience once he began to act out his fantasies only confirmed him in his pornography-nurtured view of sex.

According to Osanka,

what has occurred with Tom happens in many pedophiliacs, that is the individuals who habitually abuse children, that is that he had a psychosex-drive, halting as a result of premature unguided exposure to erotica before he was physically or psychologically ready to integrate that into his personality. Much of his subsequentsexual behavior, sexual aggression is repetitive of the film. For example, peeping here is not a great deal of difference between peeping in windows, which are a screen, and masturbating and watching a film and masturbating. *

Schiro’s life provides a textbook-like illustration of the trajectory that pornography addiction takes in an individual’s life. Schiro’s life became a quest for erotic materials, from nudist-type picture magazines of the type one would find in drug stores to sneaking into X-rated drive-in theaters, where he could watch the sado-masochistic movies and snuff movies, in which people are portrayed as being killed through sexual assault. According to testimony to Osanka, Schiro enjoyed these movies immensely, taking particular pleasure in the pain he could see on the victims’ faces. Schiro came of age when the stream of pornography in this country was increasing to a flood-tide. It was his misf ortune to be swept away by it and the misf ortune of his victims to be swept away with him.

Schiro saw his first hard-core sado-masochist film in 1971 at the age of eleven. As with Bedtime he could retain the details of what he saw years afterward. He recounted to Osanka at least ten years later scenes of extreme violence, women being raped and knifed, men being flagellated. It was obvious to Osanka that he enjoyed recalling these particular scenes. ‘They are important to him,” the psychologist told the court during Schiro’s trial, “because of the disorder he is suffering. He is overpowered by this need for orgasmic release, which he had conditioned and developed over a period of years, and the only release is through more and more bizarre forms of masturbation. For example, in relating the number of rapes and the specifics of the rapes he would say that very often by the time he broke into a home he would not have an erection, and so he would have to lie on the floor and use his picture books in order to be able to get an erection in order to be able to go into the next room to start the ritual of hovering over the body of the victim in order to ejaculate in the face of the victim. The whole practice of ejaculating on the victim is a recurring theme in pornography today. He very specifically likes those parts of the films when he watches the peep shows.” Schiro was by no means only indebted to hard-core material as his educator in depravity. He claimed that he learned the technique for breaking into homes to commit rapes from the made-for-television movie called Cry Rape.

The crucial fact of Schiro’s life was that pornography influences behavior. It functions as an aid to masturbation. Even more significant though is the fact that when these pornographic images got incorporated into Schiro’s masturbatory f antasies, they demanded to be acted out. Acting out is the only way that the addict can find the stimulation he needs to complete his act of masturbation. According to Osanka, “most people who look at pornography over any extended period masturbate in conjunction with the material. People don’t masturbate to train magazines or baseball magazines, but they do to pornography magazines. What happens is that the masturbation coupled with the visual image places the individual in the situation to the point where in some people it goes past fantasy to the point where people really believe that they can achieve those types of thing and there’s an increased desire for acting them out. Since he started so early, all sexuality is masturbation to Schiro. With the women he’d rape he’d have a hard time unless he was masturbating.”13Edward Donnerstein, an authority on pornography and sexual aggression, testified at Schiro’s trial that “there is a direct link between exposure to certain types of pornography, particularly images that are aggressive in nature - in fact images which Mr. Schiro was exposed to very, very early and found very sexually stimulating - and increases in calloused attitudes about rape, increases in the belief that women desire and enjoy being raped and increases in a willingness, in fact, to say one would commit rape and also increases in aggressive behavior against women.... Mr. Schiro believes in fact the victim finds these types of aggressive acts very pleasurable.”14According to Donnerstein, Schiro “viewed pornography which showed rapes of women, pornography which showed sadistic acts against women and against men and pornography which is showing masochistic very aggressive types of acts, and he consistently said in interviews that he finds those very, very sexually arousing so sexually arousing particularly in the instances where he was drinking that he literally wanted to, if he could, rip the page out and rape the woman or have intercourse with the woman on the page, but since he couldn’t he would seek out an unwilling victim.”15

In spite of its flaws and the fact that the Congress which brought the commission into being rejected its findings, the Lockhart Commission report was widely disseminated throughout the liberal media establishment as “proof’ that pornography was harmless. The recommendation that existing laws be repealed, along with the fact that prosecution of obscenity cases virtually ceased, created the impression in the public mind that the obscenity laws had infact been repealed. Clive Bames epitomizing the liberal reaction to the commission in the very act of disseminating its results could conclude that “women are the underprivileged sex when it comes to erotica and that this underprivilege derives from male supremacy.”16 The conclusion was that more smut would make America a better place.

LIBIDO DOMINANDI

Sexual Liberation and Political Control

E. Michael Jones

Porn

 

Porn is a matter of bare life on display. The antagonist of eros, it annihilates even sexuality. In this respect, it is more effective than morality: “Sexuality does not fade into sublimation, repression and morality, but fades much more surely into the more sexual than sex: porn.”1 Pornography derives its appeal from the “anticipation of dead sex in living sexuality.”2 What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all. Today, sexuality is not threatened by that “pure reason” which puritanically avoids sex as something “dirty,”3 but by pornography. Porn is not sex in virtual space. Today, even real sex is turning into porn.

The pornographication of the world is unfolding as the profanation of the world. Porn profanes the erotic. Agamben’s “In Praise of Profanation” fails to recognize this social process. “Profanation” means using things that have been set aside for the gods through consecration (sacrare) and stand removed from regular contact. It involves practicing “a special form of negligence”4 with respect to what has been set apart in this manner. Hereby, Agamben adopts the thesis of secularization, assuming that every instance of setting-apart has an authentically religious core. In this light, the museum represents a secularized form of the temple — here, too, objects are placed at a remove and made unavailable for use. Likewise, Agamben considers tourism a secularized version of pilgrimage: pious journeys from holy site to holy site correspond, today, to sightseers’ restless trips through a world that has become one big museum.

Agamben places profanation alongside secularization. What has been made to stand apart should be made available for use again. However, the examples of profanation he provides range from the tenuous to the outlandish:

What could it mean to “profane defecation”? Certainly not to regain a supposed naturalness, or simply to enjoy it as a perverse transgression (which is still better than nothing). Rather, it is a matter of archaeologically arriving at defecation as a field of polar tensions between nature and culture, private and public, singular and common. That is: to learn a new use for feces, just as babies tried to do in their way, before repression and separation intervened.5

Sade’s libertine consuming a woman’s excrement practices eroticism as transgression, in Bataille’s sense. But how can defecation be profaned beyond the threshold of transgression and renaturalization? Agamben’s “profanation” is meant to suspend the repression that a theological (or moral) dispositive has cast over things. The example he finds in nature is a cat playing:

The cat who plays with a ball of yarn as if it were a mouse —just as the child plays with ancient religious symbols or objects that once belonged to the economic sphere— knowingly uses the characteristic behaviors of predatory activity… in vain. These behaviors are not effaced, but, thanks to the substitution of the yarn for the mouse…, deactivated and thus opened up for a new, possible use.6

Agamben sees compulsion or constraint behind every purpose; the profanation he proposes would liberate things into “means without ends.”

Agamben’s thesis of secularization blinds him to the particularity of a phenomenon that can no longer be traced back to religious practice and even stands opposed to it. It may well be that in a museum objects stand “at a remove,” as they do in a temple. However, musealization and exhibition are precisely what destroy their cult value and replace it with exhibition value. Likewise, tourism and pilgrimage stand in opposition to each other. Tourism creates “nonsites,” whereas pilgrimage is tied to places. According to Heidegger, the quality that makes human dwelling (Wohnen) possible is the “divine.” Such sites are constituted by history, memory, and identity. These same features are missing in the “non-sites” of tourism, where people pass by instead of lingering and spending time. Likewise, Agamben seeks to understand nakedness beyond the dispositive of theology — that is, “beyond the prestige of grace and the chimeras of corrupt nature.”7 He claims that exhibition offers an excellent opportunity to profane nudity:

It is this brazen-faced indifference that fashion models, porn stars, and others whose profession it is to show themselves must learn to acquire: they show nothing but the showing itself (that is, one’s own absolute mediality). In this way, the face is loaded until it bursts with exhibition-value. Yet, precisely through this nullification of expressivity, eroticism penetrates where it could have no place: the human face. […] Shown as a pure means beyond any concrete expressivity, it becomes available for a new use, a new form of erotic communication.8

However, nudity that is displayed without secrecy or expression approaches pornographic bareness. What is more, the pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery: “From one figure to the other, from seduction to love, then to desire, sexuality, finally to pure and simple porno; the farther you go, the closer you come to the lesser secret, the smaller enigma.”9 In contrast, the erotic is never free of secrecy. Contra Agamben, a face loaded with exhibition-value to the point of bursting promises no “new collective use of sexuality.”10 Indeed, exhibition destroys any and all possibilities for erotic communication. A naked face without mystery or expression —reduced simply to being on display— is obscene and pornographic. Capitalism is aggravating the pornographication of society by making everything a commodity and putting it on display. Knowing no other use for sexuality, it profanes eros — into porn. On this score, Agamben’s “profanation” amounts to just so much profanity.

This profanation is unfolding as deritualization and desacralization. Today, ritual spaces and actions are disappearing. The world is becoming more naked and more obscene. Bataille’s conception of “holy eroticism” still included ritualized communication: festivals and ceremonial games providing particularized sites, places at a remove. Today, love —inasmuch as it is supposed to amount only to warmth, intimacy, and pleasant arousal— points to the destruction of sacred eros. By the same token, pornography is eliminating erotic seduction, which toys with scenic illusion and deceptive appearances. Indeed, Baudrillard sets seduction in opposition to love: “Ritual is in the realm of seduction. Love is born from the destruction of ritual forms, from their liberation. Its energy is an energy of the dissolution of these forms.”11 Pornography completes the deritualization of love. Agamben’s profanation even promotes the deritualization and pornographication of the world in that it suspects ritual spaces of constituting compulsive forms of sequestration.

1. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Phil Beitchmann (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2008), 30.

2. Ibid., 53.

3. See Robert Pfaller, Das schmutzige Heilige und die reine Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008).

4. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone, 2007), 75.

5. Ibid., 86.

6. Ibid., 85.

7. Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 57.

8. Agamben, Profanations, 90.

9. Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 137–138.

10. Agamben, Profanations, 91.

11. Ibid., 133.

The agony of eros 

 Byung-Chul Han

Like the rats in the cages of the NIH, pressing the bar to get a shot

Dr. Victor Cline is a psychologist and psychotherapist who, by his own reckoning, has treated approximately 300 sex addicts, delinquents, and victims of sex abuse. He concludes from his therapeutic experience that pornography consumption has a causal relationship to obsession and crime. Dr. Cline describes the process as consisting of four stages:

1. Addiction

The first change to happen was an addiction effect. The porn consumers got hooked. Once involved in pornographic materials, they kept coming back for more and still more. The material seemed to provide a very powerful sexual stimulant or aphrodisiac effect, followed by sexual release, most often through masturbation. The  pornography provided very exciting and powerful imagery, which they would frequently recall to mind and elaborate on in their fantasies.Once addicted, they could not throw off their dependence on the material by themselves, despite many negative consequences such as divorce, loss of family, or problems with the law (as with sexual assault, harassment or abuse of fellow employees).

2. Escalation

The second phase was an escalation effect. With the passage of time, the addicted required rougher, more explicit, more deviant, and “kinkier” kinds of sexual material to get their “highs” and “sexual turn-ons.” It was reminiscent of individuals afflicted with drug addictions. Over time there is nearly always an increasing need for more of the stimulant to get the same initial effect.

3. Desensitization

The third phase that happened was desensitization. Material (in books, magazines or film/videos) which was originally perceived as shocking, taboo-breaking, illegal, repulsive or immoral, though still sexually arousing, in time came to be seen as acceptable and commonplace. The sexual activity depicted in the pornography (no matter how antisocial or deviant) became legitimized. There was increasingly a sense that “everybody does it” and that this gave them permission to also do it, even though the activity was possibly illegal and contrary to their previous moral beliefs and personal standards.

4. Acting Out Sexually

The fourth phase that occurred was an increasing tendency to act out sexually the behaviors viewed in the pornography that the porn consumers had been repeatedly exposed to, including compulsive promiscuity, exhibitionism, group sex, voyeurism, frequenting massage parlors, having sex with children, rape, and inflicting pain on themselves or a partner during sex. This behavior frequently grew into a sexual addiction which they found themselves locked into and unable to change or reverse—no matter what the negative consequences were in their life.* Those who start using pornography generally aren’t aware that looking at pornographic images can quickly lead to a clinical addiction. And  if adults aren’t aware of it, then children and teenagers certainly aren’t either. After they stumble upon it—perhaps it confronts them unprompted through their cellphones or computer screens—children realize at some point that they have been caught. The addict does what he doesn’t want to do, and doesn’t want to do what he does. To feel “good” temporarily, he has to damage himself. And he becomes blind to damage he may inflict on others.

It starts with the “discovery” that they can seemingly escape unpleasant feelings, such as those of frustration, anxiety, loneliness, or inferiority. The real problem isn’t solved, so momentary relief is sought again and again, temporarily to bring on a feeling of pleasure or dull a feeling of pain. The dose has to be increased; the addictive behavior takes over more and more of the person’s life, and begins to destroy those support structures that still exist—marriage, family and friends. If the addict tries to escape the cycle, he suffers withdrawal symptoms that he may no longer have the strength to endure.

At the beginning there may be the power and will to tough it out through the unpleasant feelings and to seek a positive solution. With addictive consumption, the suffering is much greater, the consequences are more devastating, but the will submits to the addiction again and again and is much weaker than at the beginning—a dynamic similar to falling into debt.

Pornography addiction is among the substance-independent addictions, such as gambling addiction, workaholism and anorexia. Strangely enough, however, these induce biochemical processes in the brain similar to those of substance-dependent addictions. The brain’s self-reward system starts to break down, atrophies due to excessive use, so the dose has to be increased. The frontal lobes—which are responsible for discernment—start to shrink.

Modern brain research shows that the brain is actually changed through pornography addiction. Author and researcher Norman Doidge states that pornography, by offering an endless harem of sexual objects, hyper-activates the appetitive system. Porn viewers develop new maps in their brains, based on the photos and videos they see. Because it is a use-it-or-lose-it brain, when we develop a map area, we long to keep it activated. Just as our muscles become impatient for exercise if we’ve been sitting all day, so too our senses hunger to be stimulated. The men at their computers [addicted to] looking at porn [are] uncannily like the rats in the cages of the NIH, pressing the bar to get a shot of dopamine or its equivalent. Though they [don’t] know it, they [have]  been seduced into pornographic training sessions that [meet] all the conditions required for plastic change of brain maps.**

***
Signs of addiction include:

• The inability to quit voluntarily.
• The declining effect of the same sort of sexual activities, and therefore the need for stronger stimuli.
• A constant preoccupation with sexual thoughts, images and desires.
• Withdrawal symptoms when attempting to quit.
• More and more time wasted. Social, professional and family obligations and leisure activities neglected.
• The behavior continues despite its destructive effect on the addict’s own psyche, family and work.

The research studies agree that the pornography consumer finds himself on a slippery slope to ever-more abnormal sexual practices. He has to up the dose, and thereby increasingly loses moral inhibition.

* htt://www.catholicnewsagency.com/resources/life-and-family/pornography/pornographys-effects-on-adults-and-children/ (accessed August 20 , 2015 ).

**Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (London: Penguin Books, 2007 ), 108

Gabriele Kuby
The Global Sexual Revolution: The Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.

Driven by a craving for ever-newer, stronger stimuli

ConsumerWhat are people doing when they look at porno movies? They watch strangers engaged in sex acts, people who are degrading and humiliating themselves by publicly using their bodies as a tool of lust, allowing themselves to be filmed so that multitudes of strangers can get sexually aroused over them. This body is that of a still-living person who was once born as an innocent baby, has a father and mother, a memory, feelings; a person who feels joy and sadness, has a soul and a yearning for happiness and love, although perhaps barely any remaining hope of fulfilling these aspirations. The person must typically be drugged or given alcohol to be able to do at all that she is paid for—and they are often coerced. She may be one of many millions of victims of the traffic in women, girls and children from poor countries, from which criminal gangs extract billions, using them as prostitutes to sate the sex addiction of millions of men in rich countries, whether live or on screen.Do people who sit at the screen seeking sexual excitement ever stop to think that it could be their own daughter, sister, wife, mother or even their own son, brother or husband before the camera? Given the high mortality rate in the porn industry, do they stop to think that the object of their lust may already have tragically died? Why do pornography consumers not realize that these are human beings through whose degradation and humiliation the consumers degrade and humiliate themselves.

*
Even the consumer just watching “totally normal” soft porn on the  screen degrades himself and reduces himself to an animal’s drive for physical gratification. He is driven by a craving for ever-newer, stronger stimuli, because the intensity decreases the more he views pornographic images and thus is caught in the cycle of addiction. The drive becomes a slave driver, robs him of his freedom, and forces him into behaviors that destroy his life and that of fellow human beings. And the longer it goes on, the worse it gets. Weren’t people talking about “mature adults” whose freedom shouldn’t be limited by a pornography ban? How “free” are the millions of pornography addicts? How “mature” are they?Yet our society considers this completely “normal.”



Gabriele Kuby

The Global Sexual Revolution: The Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom

The perversion itself is no longer stigmatized, but the actual word "perversion" is.

The child pornography market is booming the fastest. Every day, there are approximately 116 ,000 online searches for child pornography.* I is estimated that 2 million children worldwide have been offered on the web or depicted in sexualized violence. According to the annual report of ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes ), in the European Union alone, several hundred thousand children are trafficked every year. Many thousands of children are abducted and never seen again. This traffic in children serves the Internet supply and demand.

*
While 50 years ago, a kiss on the lips was all that was shown on screen, today we are bombarded all day with images of sexual activity that have just one purpose: to sexually stimulate the viewer and prompt him to buy products of all types, from cars to tabloid newspapers to sexual services—and to increase TV ratings. There is barely a movie anymore that does not turn the viewer into a sexual voyeur. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines voyeurism as “human sexual behavior involving achievement of sexual arousal through viewing the sexual activities of others or through watching others disrobe.” Since this occurs publicly at every movie theater and privately in front of computer screens, this perversion is now everyday behavior. The perversion itself is no longer stigmatized, but the actual word perversion is.

*

The pornification of our world has catastrophic consequences for individuals, the family, children, and youth: the whole society. Pornography has social costs for those involved at the primary level (consumers and producers, be they men, women or children) and secondary level (usually women and children). Mary Eberstadt and Mary Anne Layden have summarized the social costs of pornography. They say :Research and data suggest that the habitual use of pornography—and especially of internet pornography—can have a range of damaging effects on human beings of all ages and of both sexes, affecting their happiness, their productivity, their relationships with one another, and their functioning in society.**

*J.S. Carroll, et al., “Generation XXX: Pornography Acceptance and Use Among Emerging Adults,” Journal of Adolescent Research23 , no. 1 (2008 ): 6 et seq.

**Mary Eberstadt and Mary Anne Layden, The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations (New Jersey: The Witherspoon Institute, 2010 ), 10 .



Gabriele Kuby

The Global Sexual Revolution: The Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.

While the body has mechanisms for excreting poisons, the soul does not

The media has brought new, lasting injury to the human psyche: images of evil. They settle in, unleash uncontrollable forces, occupy thoughts, fantasies and dreams, and affect people’s behavior. And most people are not aware of it. People have strict standards for the purity of water, air, and food, but they consume without reservation the most wretched pornographic filth, dreadful violence, and hair-raising horror as “entertainment.” While the body has mechanisms for excreting poisons, the soul does not. Man has no power over his memory: images burn into the mind forever. This is reported by every pornography addict who fights to free himself of the obsession.

Gabriele Kuby

No need for gulags for those who consent to their own chains.

Lasha Darkmoon

Pornography’s Effect on the Brain

NEMO REPENTE FUIT TURPISSIMUS
“No one became extremely wicked all at once.” — Juvenal, Satires

The aim of this essay is a controversial one: to provide evidence in support of the thesis that porn addiction, especially when accompanied by compulsive masturbation over a long period, alters brain chemistry and can eventually produce brain damage. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an intellectually defensible thesis for which there is now a growing body of scientific evidence.

Perhaps the quickest way to tame and tranquilize an unruly nation is to turn its citizens into sex addicts: for just as children are easily taken in by predators who tempt them with candy, most people are only too pleased to live under governments that offer them the seductive pleasures of porn: that is to say, cheap and easy orgasms as substitutes for happiness.

Sex addiction, especially when fueled by internet pornography, has been likened to crack cocaine or heroin addiction, only much worse. It allows its victims no respite. It is a sickness of the soul that drives many to suicide, transforming its worst sufferers, like Ted Bundy and Gary Bishop, into serial killers. (See here and here).

The striking similarity between orgasm and the heroin rush was confirmed in 2003 when Dutch scientist Gert Holstege announced in a press release relating to his research that brain scans of orgasm resembled brain scans of shooting heroin. Laboratory rats know all about this, as a famous experiment in the 1950s by James Olds and Peter Milner conclusively demonstrated.

1.  UNDERSTANDING  BEHAVIOR  MODIFICATION

Rats go into a veritable frenzy pressing levers (in Skinner boxes) in order to give themselves powerful pleasurable sensations, even if it means depriving themselves of food and life. “Some rats,” we are told, “would self-stimulate as often as 2000 times per hour for 24 hours, to the exclusion of all other activities. They had to be unhooked from the apparatus to prevent death by self-starvation. Pressing that lever became their entire world.”

In a subsequent related experiment involving humans, a woman suffering from severe pain was allowed to stimulate the pleasure centers of her brain by turning an amplitude dial: so much so that she developed a chronic ulceration at her fingertip. She became so addicted to erotic self-stimulationthat she had to beg her family to limit her access to the stimulator. (See also here)

OPERANT CONDITIONING CHAMBER OR “SKINNER BOX”

American behaviorist psychologist BF Skinner (1904-1990) devised the operant conditioning chamber or Skinner box in the early 1930s. His object was to experiment with behavior modification in animals and then apply the same results to human beings. His major discovery was the concept of reinforcement: behavior that receives positive reinforcement (reward) tends to be repeated and strengthened, and behavior that receives negative reinforcement (punishment) tends to be extinguished. When placed in the Skinner box, the rat will learn to press a lever. This will trigger a reinforcing stimulus such as food or water, or a punishing stimulus such as an electric shock. The rat will rapidly learn to press the right lever and avoid the wrong one. In short, good habits can be acquired and bad habits destroyed in a systematic and scientific way under laboratory conditions.

Seven important points are worth noting here. These will allow the reader to trace the connection between operant conditioning and porn addiction.

(1) In the 1950s, psychologists James Olds and Peter Milner made a vitally important breakthrough in behavior modification research: they introduced innovations to the Skinner box so that the lever, instead of delivering food pellets when pressed, would now deliver direct brain stimulation through electrodes planted deep in the brain. Rats would now press the lever as many as 7000 times an hour to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brains. All other activities, including eating and drinking, were neglected. Every single moment was spent in pleasurable self-stimulation.

(2) How does this relate to porn addiction? Quite simply, the porn addict is behaving exactly like the rat in a Skinner box. His lever is masturbation, and his positive reinforcement or reward is the orgasm. His addiction is the result of self-imposed operant conditioning, i.e., he is conditioning himself without knowing it. The buildup to orgasm and the orgasm itself is accompanied by direct brain stimulation through the release of psychotropic chemicals into the bloodstream, especially dopamine, that produce precisely the same feelings of elation and euphoria in the porn addict which the rat experiences by the stimulation of the electrodes implanted in its brain.

(3) What triggers the release of the psychotropic chemicals into the bloodstream? The exciting erotic images. So it goes like this: Erotic mind pictures —> trigger psychotropic chemicals  —> which stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain —> which in turn produces obsessive-compulsive behavior (or addiction) in an attempt to relive the pleasurable sensations  —> which finally cause neuroplastic changes in brain structure as a result of constant chemical bombardment.

(4) Further brain research was to give rise to truly spectacular results in behavior modification, but this was at the cost of “deeply unethical experiments”, to quote one politically correct academic researcher. This research, conducted by two daring and enterprising scientists called Drs. Moan and Heath, was abruptly halted because, among other things, it had come up with a possible cure for homosexuality. Moan and Heath had obtained permission to engage the services of a hooker to see if she could turn on a confirmed homosexual male in the laboratory. Initially, the sight of this sexy young woman not only left patient B-19 completely cold but actually disgusted him. He found the idea of having sex with an attractive female quite repulsive. However, on being wired up and having the pleasure centers of his brain stimulated with electrodes, while the hooker proceeded to perform her tricks on him, patient B-19 began to perk up and soon experienced an impressive  erection. “And then, despite the milieu and the encumbrance of the electrode wires [poor B-19 was attached to an EEG machine the whole time], he successfully ejaculated [in her vagina].”

(5)  Needless to say, such experimentation could not be allowed to continue, even with B-19’s full consent and cooperation and even though many homosexuals might want to become heterosexual and start families. It was political dynamite. So the experiments were abruptly halted, with Drs. Moan and Heath receiving a sharp rap on the knuckles and the stern disapproval of their politically correct peers. Since we are expected to believe that homosexuality is as “normal” and “healthy” a practice as heterosexuality, it follows that it is deeply offensive and “homophobic” to suggest that homosexuals might want to undergo heterosexual conditioning to “normalize” them. Even if they should wish to become heterosexuals, they should not be allowed to do so “on ethical grounds.” After all, one does not allow people to self-mutilate or commit suicide. One needs to protect them from themselves. In the same way, homosexuals, for their own good, need the state to protect them from the threat of heterosexuality.

(6)  The blocking of research into sensitive areas of behavior modification for political reasons has had far-reaching consequences which cannot be discussed here in detail. Suffice to say that if it is considered “ethically wrong” (= politically incorrect) to permit research that would yield an effective cure for homosexuality, then huge sacrifices in knowledge are deliberately being made in order to maintain the status quo on behalf of a corrupt elite—an elite that is not only against the idea of heterosexualizing gays but is actually committed to the homosexualization of America … beginning with the homosexualization of children and their corruption by exposing them to child porn in the classroom.

(7)  It is clear that successful behavior modification could, in theory, produce a Utopian society of model citizens. There need be no more sociopathic and criminal behavior in society, no more personality disorders, no more phobias and manias, no more neuroses, no more depression, no more crippling addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, eating, shopping, and self-harming.  Such vast improvements in the mental health of society clearly cannot be permitted. If there were no more criminals, what would the police and legal profession do? There would no longer be a need for their services. That cannot be allowed. They need criminals. Fighting crime is their job. Similarly, if there are no more sick people, what would Big Pharma and the medical profession do? They need sick people. Fighting sickness is their job. A sad situation indeed when the greatest threat to the established order is a Utopian society of model citizens who have nothing wrong with them! Perfection, if it were ever achieved, would have to be banned.

(For further details on some of the points listed above, see here, here and here)

2.  PORN ADDICTION COMPARED TO HEROIN OR CRACK COCAINE ADDICTION

Columbia university neurologist Dr Norman Doidge, in his book The Brain That Changes Itself, describes how pornography causes rewiring of the neural circuits. He notes that in a study of men viewing internet pornography, the men looked “uncannily” like rats pushing the levers in experimental Skinner boxes. “Like the addicted rats,” Dr Doidge points out, “the men were desperately seeking their next fix, clicking the mouse just as the rats pushed the lever.”

All addictions, Dr Dodge tells goes on to tell us, cause “lifelong, neuroplastic changes in the brain.” This includes porn addiction:

Dopamine is also involved in plastic change. The same surge of dopamine that thrills us also consolidates neuronal connections. An important link with porn is that dopamine is also released in sexual excitement, increasing the sex drive in both sexes, facilitating orgasm, and activating the brain’s pleasure centers. Hence the addictive power of pornography.

The men at their computers looking at porn were uncannily like the rats in the cages of the NIH, pressing the bar to get a shot of dopamine or its equivalent. Though they didn’t know it, they had been seduced into pornographic training sessions that met all the conditions required for plastic change of brain maps. Since neurons that fire together wire together, these men got massive amounts of practice wiring these images into the pleasure centers of the brain, with the rapt attention necessary for plastic change.

They imagined these images when away from their computers, or while having sex with their girlfriends, reinforcing them. Each time they felt sexual excitement and had an orgasm when they masturbated, a “spritz of dopamine,” the reward neurotransmitter, consolidated the connections made in the brain during the sessions. (See here)

It is in this way that pornography becomes a serious addiction, comparable to heroin or crack cocaine addiction, and begins its slow and deadly assault on the brain.  And as other researchhas shown, it facilitates callousness in sexual relationships—sex completely divorced from love and an interest in family and children.

3.  PORNOGRAPHY AND BRAIN DAMAGE: IS THERE A LINK?

Recent research has shown that pornographic images become permanently embedded in the brain, releasing large amounts of naturally occurring chemicals into the bloodstream: e.g., dopamine, epinephrine, oxytocin, serotonin, vasopressin, prolactin, and enkephalins or endogenous opiods, i.e., the brain’s own endorphins. People who view porn obsessively become literally intoxicated: drunk with an overdose of psychotropic chemicals. These mind-altering substances are now known as erototoxins, a relatively recent neologism meaning “sex poisons”. This poison-bearing pornography, it has been shown in recent laboratory tests, “actually alters brain chemistry” and will in time produce brain damage.

Just as alcohol in large quantities consumed over a long period will damage the liver and kidneys, and just as long-term tobacco addiction will adversely affect the  lungs and cardiovascular system, so highly charged erotic imagery accompanied by compulsive masturbation can eventually, it is argued, lead to chemico-biological brain damage. This will of course be strenuously denied by the Masturbation Lobby, but the claim has nevertheless been made by responsible medical researchers.

Dr. Gary Lynch, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Irvine, in discussing the effect that a single highly erotic image can have on the brain, points out ominously:  “What we are saying here is that an event which lasts half a second [image imprint], within five to ten minutes has produced a structural change that is in some ways as profound as the structural changes one sees in [brain] damage.” (See here)

Dr Judith Reisman goes one step further. She refers to this brain damage as “brain sabotage”, thereby implying that pornographers are in fact engaged in a species of “sex terrorism”. She asks:

How does this “brain sabotage” occur? Brain scientists tell us that “in 3/10 of a second a visual image passes from the eye through the brain, and whether or not one wants to, the brain is structurally changed and memories are created; ‘we literally grow new brain’ with each visual experience.” Children and others who cannot read can instantly decode and experience images…. In fact, erotic (any highly arousing) images commonly subvert left hemisphere cognition.

Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, Psychiatrist and Professor at Princeton University, in his testimony to a Senate subcommittee on pornography toxicity, expresses himself even more forcefully:

Like cigarettes, that particular form of expression we call pornography is a delivery system that has a distinct and powerful effect upon the human brain and nervous system. Exactly like cigarettes, this effect is to cause a powerful addiction. Like any other addiction, the addiction is both to the delivery system itself—the pornography—and to the chemicals that the delivery system delivers.

It may seem surprising that I should speak of “chemicals,” when one might be thinking instead of “sex.” But, in fact, modern science allows us to understand that the underlying nature of an addiction to pornography is chemically nearly identical to a heroin addiction. (Emphasis added)

The pornography addict soon forgets about everything and everyone else in favor of an ever more elusive sexual jolt. He will eventually be able to find it only among other “junkies” like himself, and he will place at risk his career, his friends, his family. He will indulge his habit anywhere and everywhere, at any time. No one, no matter how highly placed, is immune. (See here)

Porn addiction, we are told by practicing neurosurgeon Donald L. Hilton, Jr., MD, produces long-term brain damage in which

the frontal lobes atrophy or shrink. Addiction scientists have called this condition hypofrontality and have noted a similarity in the behavior of [porn] addicted persons to the behavior of patients with frontal brain damage… [which] can also result from a car wreck.

All addictions create, in addition to chemical changes in the brain, anatomical and pathological changes which result in various manifestations of cerebral dysfunction collectively labeled hypofrontal syndromes. In these syndromes, the underlying defect, reduced to its simplest description, is damage to the “braking system” of the brain.

They are well known to clinical neuroscientists, especially neurologists and neurosurgeons, for they are also seen with tumors, strokes, and trauma. Indeed, anatomically, loss of these frontal control systems is most apparent following trauma, exemplified by progressive atrophy of the frontal lobes seen in serial MRI scans over time.

Not a peep of any of this in the mainstream media. You don’t need three guesses to know why. The world porn industry generates $97 billion a year in revenues. If porn damages your brain, this is the last thing the wealthy elitists who run the world and control the mass media would wish to tell you. “The publishing industry is now heavily involved in pornography,” Dr E. Michaels Jones points out, “and it is not in their interests to explain to the public that they are in the business of enslaving people.” (p.560)

Is one a Victorian prude for suggesting there is something seriously amiss here? The simple fact is that one awkward question remains unanswered by all these self-appointed “sex experts”—many of them egregious frauds and sexual pervertslike Kinsey and Reich—and it is this: how can all this compulsive masturbation and porn consumption be good for you if they end up damaging your brain?

Masturbation doesn’t necessarily make you blind. Let’s hope it doesn’t. Maybe it’s not the eyes, but the brain, that ardent aficionados of the solitary vice need to worry about..

4.  PORN ADDICTION AND FRONTAL  LOBE  SYNDROME

It seems that frontal lobe damage, caused by long-term porn addiction and the compulsive masturbation that accompanies it, will give rise to a constellation of behaviors called “frontal lobe syndrome”. These include four main behavior patterns:  (1) Impulsive behavior with little regard to consequences. (2) Compulsive behavior, often leading to total loss of control. (3) Emotionally labile behavior, i.e., sudden and unpredictable mood swings. (4) Impaired judgment, leading to disastrous decision making.

All these conditions, it is now clear, are caused by frontal lobe damage. Though they can be produced instantaneously by a car crash or other serious trauma to the brain, they can also occur as a gradual process by the habit of compulsive masturbation to pornography over a long period of time. “Nemo repente fuit turpissimus,” the Roman satirist Juvenal noted long ago. “No one became extremely wicked all at once.” It happens by slow degrees, step by painful step. Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny. Whoever said that was certainly on to something.

Dr. Victor Cline, possibly the world’s foremost expert on sex addiction, has this to say on pornography and compulsive masturbation in his classic essay Pornography’s Effects on Adult and Child:

In my experience as a sexual therapist, any individual who regularly masturbates to pornography is at risk of becoming, in time, a sexual addict, as well as conditioning himself into having a sexual deviancy.

A frequent side effect is that it also dramatically reduces their capacity to love. Their sexual side becomes in a sense dehumanized. Many of them develop an “alien ego state” (or dark side), whose core is antisocial lust devoid of most values.

In time, the “high” obtained from masturbating to pornography becomes more important than real life relationships. It has been commonly thought by health educators that masturbation has negligible consequences, but one exception would appear to be in the area of repeatedly masturbating to deviant pornographic imagery which risks (via conditioning) the acquiring of sexual addictions and/or other sexual pathology.

It makes no difference if one is an eminent physician, attorney, minister, athlete, corporate executive, college president, unskilled laborer, or an average 15-year-old boy. All can be conditioned into deviancy.

The process of masturbatory conditioning is inexorable and does not spontaneously remiss. The course of this illness may be slow and is nearly always hidden from view. It is usually a secret part of the man’s life, and like a cancer, it keeps growing and spreading. It rarely ever reverses itself, and it is also very difficult to treat and heal. (See here)

The Frontal lobe, located directly behind the forehead, involves several different functions but is concerned above all with judgment and behavior control, i.e., the ability to recognize the consequences of one’s actions and to avoid reckless and impulsive behavior inimical to one’s survival. 

5.  A PORN ADDICTION  CASE  HISTORY

Before we go any further, it is necessary to convince the reader that porn addiction is indeed a serious problem—in fact, an epidemic unprecedented in human history.

Pornography is no longer the relatively mild aphrodisiac it used to be in the Summer of Love, 1967, when the Sexual Revolution first began to take off.  With the advent of the internet and the advance in audiovisual communications, its lethality has increased exponentially. Future advances in the area of holographic images and reality drugs threaten to make porn so irresistible to future generations that ordinary sex as we know it will pale into insignificance and fail to exercise its customary charms. Autoeroticism will then reign supreme; and the zombie sex addict, dead-eyed and drooling with unquenchable lust, will inherit the earth and turn it into a vast masturbatorium.

This is one vision of the sex dystopia to come: a science fiction nightmare that has every chance of being realized. This is a world in which only the sexually fit will survive as the masters, those schooled to self-discipline and impulse control. The weak-willed and degenerate will not necessarily die out. They will simply sink into the amorphous lumpenproletariat as permanent slaves.

I will now allow Dr Victor Cline to present one of his most revealing case histories of porn addiction:

One of my patients was so deeply addicted that he could not stay away from pornography for 90 days, even for $1,000. It is difficult for non-addicts to comprehend the totally driven nature of a sex addict. When the “wave” hits them, nothing can stand in the way of getting what they want—whether that be pornography accompanied by masturbation, sex from a prostitute, molesting a child, or raping a woman.

An example might help illustrate this problem. Ralph was a sexual addict, married 12 years with three children. He was active in his church and held sincere, high moral principles. He believed in the Ten Commandments and opposed adultery. Yet his particular cycle involved pornography use, followed by paid sex with prostitutes. After each incident, he begged God for forgiveness and swore that it would never happen again. But it did, again and again.

Since the trigger of each adulterous act was pornography-use, we decided to try to free him from his dependence on this material. I asked him to write me a check for $1,000, indicating that I would return it if he went 90 days without using pornography. Ralph loved to hang on to his money and was quite attracted to our strategy. “There’s no way I’d look at dirty videos or magazines if I knew it would cost me a thousand dollars!” he said.

He managed to resist temptation remarkably well for a while. But on the 87th day, he drove past an “adult” bookstore in an unfamiliar city while on a business trip. He slammed on the brakes, entered the store, and went virtually berserk for 90 minutes. When I saw him the following week, he tearfully confessed that he had lost his $1,000. Since he had gone 87 days “sober,” I decided to give him another chance.

So we started another 90-day “sobriety” cycle. We both felt that if he could go 87 days, he could certainly make 90 if we tried again, especially if it meant recovering his $1,000.

This time he went only 14 days before he relapsed. He lost his money, which was given to a charity. He was extremely committed to quit in order to save his marriage and to live in harmony with his religious principles. But that was not the case. In my opinion, even if he had given me $10,000, he still would have relapsed. When the wave hits them, these men are consumed by their appetite, regardless of the costs or consequences. Their addiction virtually rules their lives.  (See here)

Every act of masturbation to pornography draws the fish, so to speak, deeper and deeper into the net. Professor Donald L. Hilton, making use of the fish-in-net metaphor, explains the whole process in the technical language of science:

Pornography is a triple hook, consisting of cortical hypofrontality, dopaminergic downgrading, and oxytocin/vasopressin bonding. Each of these hooks is powerful, and they are synergistic. Pornography sets its hooks very quickly and deeply, and as the addiction progresses, it progressively tightens the dopamine drag until there is no more play in the line. The person is drawn ever closer to the boat and the waiting net.

The claim that pornography addiction can cause brain damage is admittedly still controversial at this time—see the section entitled ‘Frontal Lobe Damage’ here, written by practicing neurosurgeon and associate professor of Neurology, Donald L. Hilton, quoted above—but the claim that tobacco addiction could lead to lung cancer and heart disease was equally controversial when it was first aired. Nevertheless, given the neurobiological findings discussed above, there is little doubt that brain areas underlying sexual reward become structurally altered with the result that individuals are far more powerfully motivated by sexually arousing imagery. Whether one wants to call this brain damage seems moot. The main point is that the result is an exaggerated attraction to sexual reward at the expense of other emotions—in particular, love.

In any case, we are dealing here with an addiction that is arguably worse than crack cocaine or heroin addiction. This is not even controversial nowadays. It is a claim made so often by sex addiction therapists that no one who has researched the subject is surprised by it any longer.

6.  COCAINE AND METHAMPHETAMINE: THEIR ROLE IN PORN ADDICTION

Particular drugs potentiate sex. This is well known to anyone who has ever taken drugs. Under the influence of the drug, the intensity of the sex experience can be increased tenfold: becoming either sacred or satanic, divine or demonic, depending on one’s state of mind, but always piquant, frenzied, and quasi-mystical. Drug addiction and sex addiction therefore often go together, intensifying each other and making the sex junkie’s dual addiction an exquisite pleasure indistinguishable from a stabbing pain.

Two of the most potent aphrodisiacs in use today are cocaine and methamphetamine. The easy availability of these drugs nowadays has increased not only the number of sex addicts in society but also the intensity of their addiction. It will be found that both cocaine and methamphetamine are used extensively in combination with pornography. The result is compulsive masturbation on an epic scale, such as few societies in the past have ever known. Indeed, ours is the first civilization in history to make masturbation a competitive sport.

For centuries, cocaine has been known for its potent aphrodisiacal properties. In fact, one of the reasons people take cocaine it is to get a sexual “super high”. In the early 1900s, cocaine gained notoriety for its ability to induce “sexual frenzy” and “uncontrollable lust” in the stereotypical “dope fiend”. Today, in San Francisco and other big cities, cocaine is openly sold in gay bathhouses where it leads to suicidal unprotected sex:

In my own city, Toronto, promiscuous unsafe sex is a popular feature of the bathhouses which have been springing up over the past few years. Some of them are now licensed to sell beer, which they supplement, unofficially, with poppers and crack cocaine (smoke it in your room) as additional perks.

Methamphetamine (“meth”) would appear to be an even stronger aphrodisiac. This is more popular with women than cocaine because it produces rapid weight loss, at any rate initially. Common features found among both cocaine and methamphetamine addicts are communal orgies, sex binges, and bouts of compulsive masturbation with the help of pornography. (See here)

The trajectory of the typical methamphetamine addict is particularly grim. No amount of orgiastic sex will compensate for the ravages of time.

         *            *       

It is not without significance that the sex-obsessed Satanist Aleister Crowley and the Father of the Sexual Revolution, Sigmund Freud, were both cocaine addicts. Here is Crowley waxing eloquent on cocaine in the context of “sex magick.” Freud, whose early psychoanalytical theory was reportedly a by-product of his cocaine use, recommended cocaine as an analgesic and antidepressant while discreetly omitting to mention its aphrodisiacal qualities. (See here)

A bizarre added feature found in cocaine addicts, seldom mentioned outside specialist publications, is that this is one drug that often manages to turn heterosexual males into homosexuals—even against their natural inclinations and much to their subsequent disgust. Gay porn apparently does the trick, easing the way into homosexuality for the doped-up male heterosexual. Straight females, it is said, can take cocaine without necessarily becoming lesbians. I personally doubt this. My own experience in observing others convinces me that bisexuality can be induced in both sexes by a combination of drugs and sex.

Chronic high doses of cocaine [we are told] can result in aberrant sexual behavior such as compulsive masturbation and multiple partner marathons. The disinhibiting effects of cocaine or methamphetamine open the flood gates to sexual adventurousness. Only under the influence of cocaine or methamphetamine do some heterosexuals engage in homosexual fantasies and behaviors….

The combination of stimulant drug use and sex, two extremely potent reinforcers, creates a “super high” that is more addicting than the drug use alone. For these individuals, drugs and sex are inseparable….

Similar to cocaine but even more dramatically, methamphetamine increases sex drive, lowers inhibitions, delays orgasm, and improves sexual performance in many users. The aphrodisiacal effects of methamphetamine are considerably longer lasting than those of cocaine … it [is] especially appealing to individuals seeking prolonged, highly erotic, and uninhibited sexual experiences….

An interesting phenomenon noted many years ago by one of the present authors, but discussed rarely in the literature, is the ability of cocaine to stimulate homosexual fantasies and engender homosexual behaviors in men who identify themselves as heterosexual. These men report that when high on cocaine, they experience erotic fantasies to have sex with other men. This may lead to a pattern of compulsive masturbation [while] viewing gay male pornography, or to sexual encounters with gay male prostitutes, often transvestites known as “shemales” or “half and halves”— men who have a female persona and breast implants, but male genitalia.

After the drug wears off, many of these men report feeling extremely dysphoric and upset about their homosexual behavior. Many experience intense feelings of shame. It appears that the overwhelming majority of these men are fundamentally heterosexual. (See here)        

7.  CONCLUSION

That pornography damages the character, weakens the will, and produces sexual deviance in those it infects, can no longer be doubted. That it can even, under the influence of drugs such as cocaine, occasionally turn heterosexuals into homosexuals, is an even more sinister development.

That long-term pornography use, accompanied by compulsive masturbation, actually causes structural changes in the brain is now beyond dispute. Whether this amounts to “brain damage” in the classic sense is a contentious issue and will be hotly denied by the Masturbation Lobby and all those who believe, erroneously, that masturbation is a stress reliever and a cure for depression. Porn addiction and its invariable accompaniment, compulsive masturbation, are in fact stress increasers. They are often found as major symptoms in obsessive-compulsive disorders. Far from relieving depression, they intensify it. Indeed, they are all too often the underlying cause of the depression in that they generate a huge loss of self-esteem. These are truisms, patently obvious to all except the merchants of lies.

Meanwhile, there is little doubt that the virulent sex epidemicwe witness all around us is a deliberately planned sex psyop. This is what governments want. The Puppet Masters who pull the hidden strings of our Western regimes, all masquerading as democracies, have managed to manufacture exactly what we see when we look around us: widespread neurosis, mass misery, the collapse of moral values, Christianity in ruins, and the coarse brutalization of the common man.

No need for gulags for those who consent to their own chains.