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Given that porn has become nearly ubiquitous in our culture, many people think it doesn’t hurt anyone. Here’s three ways it can hurt you.
Harm #1: Porn Hurts Your Soul
Years ago, I talked with a young man who was habitually looking at porn. After he opened up to me about his habit, I asked him a simple question: “How does it affect you?” I will never forget his tepid response: “I can’t look at a woman without undressing her in my mind.”
This young man is not alone in terms of having his worldview shaped by viewing porn. (And just to be clear, porn is an issue for males and females both.) A major study by a group of four researchers concluded that young people who look at porn are more likely to be sexually aggressive, have more permissive sexual attitudes, accept the notion of casual sex, engage in risky sexual behavior, engage in sexual harassment, and be clinically depressed.[i]
You might be thinking this study merely reveals correlation but not causation—that these things are related but not caused by porn. This is a fair caution to raise, but the research points beyond correlation alone. Consider loneliness. While lonely people are often drawn to pornography for relief, there is good reason to believe porn fosters feelings of loneliness and isolation. According to Dr. Grant Benner, in an article for Psychology Today, “Pornography use begets loneliness, and loneliness begets pornography use.”[ii] It’s a two-way street.
Harm #2: Porn Hurts Your Values
Perhaps the best way to see how porn affects people is to consider the script of pornography. We all have scripts about how we are supposed to behave in different settings. We have a script about how to behave in an elevator (face forward and don’t say much), which is different from the script of how to behave at a football game (cheer for your team and boo the referee for a bad call).
Most of us were not formally taught how to behave in an elevator or at a football game; we simply observed people and followed along. We have learned scripts about how to behave at church, in a library, at a concert, at the dinner table, and so on. Here’s the pressing question: Where did you learn your script about sex? While I don’t know your story, I know your generation has gotten much of its sexual script from porn.
Here’s why this is so important: porn offers an unrealistic, exaggerated, and harmful script of sex. Porn portrays marital sex as boring but extramarital sex as exciting. It presents women not as individuals to be loved and cherished but as sex objects to be used by men for pleasure. Violent porn sends the message that women can be harmed if men enjoy it. No wonder so many girls feel pressure to perform oral sex on boys, engage in anal sex, or tolerate emotional or physical abuse from boys: they’ve been influenced by the porn script.
Harm #3: Porn Hurts Your Brain
When I was in elementary school, my father led a national campaign on sexual purity. After one of his lectures, a woman approached him for counsel. She shared how her husband could not be sexually intimate with her without having a pornographic magazine on the pillow next to her head. Heartbroken, she asked my father for advice.
Even though I was young, I remember feeling sad for her. Why did her husband “need” porn? The answer is revealing: he had rewired his brain through habitual porn use to respond sexually to an image of a person rather than to a real person. Sadly, he couldn’t fully love his wife as his wife was without bringing pornography into their relationship. Can you imagine how demeaned she felt?
Few people realize how deeply porn rewires the brain and thus shapes human behavior. The younger someone is, the more looking at porn shapes the development of his or her brain, which can have a lifelong impact. Research shows that it is far easier to quit gambling, alcohol addiction, heroin, and cocaine than porn. Why? Because of what it does to your brain.
This blog is just the beginning of the hurt caused by porn. As my friend Joshua Broome, a former porn star who is now a pastor, noted, porn also hurts actors and actresses.
Here’s the main reason porn harms people: It is rooted in a lie. To help young people see the truth about sex, love, and marriage, check out my latest book: A Rebel’s Manifesto: Choosing Truth, Real Justice, & Love Amid the Noise of Today’s World.
[i] Eric W. Owens et al., “The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents: A Review of the Research,” Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity 19, no. 1 (January 2012): 99–122, https://doi.org/10.1080/10720162.2012.660431.
[ii] Grant Hilary Brenner, “4 Ways Porn Use Causes Problems,” Psychology Today, March 5, 2018, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/201803/4-ways-porn-use-causes-problems.