Demonizing porn increases addiction

People usually forgeting, that there are a lot of types of porn. I don't think, that to produce hentai real people suffer because of exploitation. The same for artworks, some artists draws porn, because they see art in this or just it is their money source. Same for animated porn. There is nothing demonic about it.

 

If you go to one extreme, there's always a chance you'll boomerang back the other direction.

We don't demonize children for playing war, or get really upset about which side they are playing on and take a side in it - we're just not that interested. We know it isn't real. We can say they express their freedom by the war game, or the sex game or whatever else, but such freedom typically involves a narrow range of expression. People are concerned with being free TO express their desires in that one activity and never free FROM it as well - much less any other number of things in life they are free to do and are even good for them and humanity but don't do.

 

Lots of great input on this very interesting thread.
I find that the greater the shame one feels, the greater the likelihood that they will relapse. Shame is just another way of your addiction keeping you down. Therefore, I don't like to frame the addiction in terms of porn being a "demon" or fighting the addiction as a kind of "battle."
As for free will, I know that I would watch porn sometimes if I could and continue to live a normal life. But I just cannot. I have to make a choice, but I'd be lying if I said I was giving it up because of how evil or demonic it is. I need to give it up so I can be a better, healthier, happier man. Feeling shame is not going to help me do that.
Happy New Year to all!

 

I grew up in a community that used demonization and guilt. Neither is useful. Demonization puffs up the "bad thing" and makes it seem hopeless to counter. Guilt damages the individual and closes off avenues of recovery.

Yes, porn is very diverse, especially as inexpensive digital cameras and internet access became widely available. There is definitely porn made by consenting adults, without coercion or deception. Sadly much involves lack of consent, deception and/or coercion. The 'amateur' category is the most difficult to assess, because in most cases there is no way to know if she thought the picture would be kept private (and I think the presumption should be she expected privacy).

The ethics of porn is complicated - bigger than I want to tackle in this post. After all, I'm working on not using porn at all. Demonization, shame and guilt are hindrances. Seeing things clearly, understanding, compassion, love - these are the tools of recovery.

 

If someone will introduce pill, that removes all negative affects of the porn, I will return to porn. But I don't think, that it will happen in near 20 years.

 

Ethics and morals aside, p0rn destroys mens brains and erections! Can't ignore the demonic physical effects...

 

I'll start by saying that i decided to quit porn after reading what it does to your mind and body, the fact that i was harming myself was a powerful reason, deciding to quit because porn was "bad" wouldn't have achieved the same result.

On the main topic : I used to watch (and fap to) a lot of photos of naked womens made by this association of women that considered posing nude as a form of art and expression, and i was honestly baffled at how could they consider it anything different than potential pornographic material, i still recognized that there was a lot of "artistic" effort in those photos and i felt that fapping to them was less harmful than to porn(might just be that an image would be less harmful than a video), i used to return to fapping to them when i was in a period in wich i started to edge and that made me stop edging (again not a strong correlation, but i felt that it was related).
It was only not long ago that i realized that yes, they can just see it as art and personal expression and that there is nothing inherently wrong with it.

 

I did a lot of things "of my own free will" when I was young. I was no hooligan, but...looking back, I wonder what in hell possessed me to do those things. They were dangerous for myself and others. At best they were just immature. At worst, maybe jail or a permanent record. And I wasn't much different from tons of other people, I know that.
So whenever I see porn stars smiling and saying they love their jobs and they enjoy it, I can't help but think that 99% of them are seriously going to regret their "stardom." I sure hope not. I hope they emerge okay, but reality argues otherwise.

 

In the excerpt from the original post, I've changed only the words in bold text:

Today I read an article which has changed my perspective on this. It was about a woman that has volunteerly quit her job and started dealing heroin to people all ages, because this was what she actually liked to do. Her parents respected this.

For me it was like a shock because it showed me that dealing herion was something that people would use in order to express their freedom and that not every one was a black sheep.
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It's pretty clear to me it's a moot point when we consider that she's harming others for profit. (Not to mention, she's probably a rare case, and quite plausibly deceitful)

 

Demonization is the objectification of evil, and all objectification isolates the thing which in effect hinders one from understanding it - since understanding involves how something interacts with other things. We can also say the same logic applies to the objectification of beauty, in which case it is less likely the perceiver would appreciate beauty in a more spread out form such as nature or simply how a synchronicity came together in a life situation. Obsession with sex is of course concerned with the local phenomenon of the act whether that be what is portrayed in a video and/or the physical act of masturbation or both - everything else is tuned out at that point.

I mention this because kind of getting the basic "physics" of it in a general way is important to understanding how something works. People here know something about how the porn industry works, that could not happen if the mind was only perceiving in terms of objectification all the time - it would only be interested in what's on the screen then.

For anyone religious reading, there is no position that says you have to stop thinking if you believe something to be good or bad is there? It just means you are interested in understanding why that is the case.

 

All very interesting comments! I think there is a point being made about whether or not people can practically reduce relapse and porn use by avoiding shame and the demonizing of porn. I think this is a very important question. If we assume there are people not addicted to porn and ask them about their position on porn as good and bad my guess is on the balance they are indifferent.

To be obsessed with either avoiding porn or embracing porn is a tell tale addiction indicator. When I think about all the things I'm not addicted to, the overwhelming majority of them are morally neutral or at the most largely dependent on context. I typically don't demonize the things I'm not addicted to, but with porn I can easily fall into the trap of labeling because it affects me more then anything else and there is a desire to lash out against this "force" controlling me. I do sense relief when I don't demonize porn and it leads to greater sobriety and peace from my porn addiction.

 

And lets remember morality in its essence involves ACTION, or interaction. If nobody is making or viewing porn, it can be there but it is just some recorded media. Action relates to cause and effect, which again relates to an understanding of how things work. If you need someone who really understands the cause and effect of say how a computer works, you would NEVER just go with someone that says the computer is morally bad - that says nothing about how it works or the dysfunction or how to repair it.

And that's also why people talk about judging the behavior rather than the person.

Of course that said, we all know it can be very triggering. Just yesterday I was reading about how one of the main guys responsible for behavior modification algorithms is making the point that we need to look deeply at our mind and motivation, and frankly I do find that kind of douchy and am not going to spend any money buying his book especially when there's no evidence he is even offering any real helpful insight that's actually new. But I do think it is important to be able to think about the whole process, otherwise you will always be reacting to how it's bad and also not even recognize subtler dangers like the non-pornographic behavior manipulation online.