WATCHING X-rated footage has an alarming effect on your brain and sex life.
WATCHING X-rated footage has an alarming effect on your brain and sex life. With access to the internet easier than ever, more people are watching porn than ever before. Even Teenagers as young as 13 are regularly watching adult movies. But while porn might boost your sex drive or even improve your relationship, it may also be having a detrimental effect on your health - from triggering addictive tendencies to shrinking your brain. Continue after the cut.
1. Porn Means You Can’t Get Aroused by “Just” Your Spouse
Porn stimulates the arousal centers in the brain. When it’s accompanied by orgasm (sexual release through masturbation), then a chemical reaction happens and hormones are released. In effect, our brains start to associate arousal with an image, an idea, or a video, rather than a person. When you don’t watch porn and save yourself until marriage, then all of those chemicals and hormones are released for the first time when you’re with your spouse, and it causes you to bond intensely (and sexually) to your spouse. But when you spend a ton of time teaching your brain to associate arousal and release with pornography, your brain can’t associate arousal and release with a person anymore. Either you have to fantasize about the porn and get those images there, or you have to watch porn first. Often, people can “complete the act”, but it’s not intense for them the way porn is. You’ve rewired your brain, and now you’re salivating at the wrong thing.
2. Porn Wrecks Your Libido
It’s only natural that many people who use porn in the past, or who use porn in the present, have virtually no libido when it comes to making love to their spouse. The spouse is not what turns them on, and so the natural drive that we have for sex is transferred somewhere else. Many young women in their twenties have often complained about sex in their marriage - with some saying: “my husband and I were both virgins when we married, and I thought he would want sex all the time. But after our honeymoon, sex went to maybe twice a month, and that’s only if I pressure him. He says he just isn’t interested.” With so many men growing up on porn, this is just to be expected.
3. Porn Makes You Sexually Lazy
In porn, everyone is turned on all the time. You don’t have to make any effort to arouse someone; it’s automatic. There is no foreplay in porn. And so if your spouse isn’t aroused, you start to think that it’s somehow their fault. There’s no expectation that we will have to “woo” someone or be affectionate and help jump-start that arousal process. It’s almost as if we approach sex as two different beings and we’re just using each other, rather than thinking of each other. And thus we never learn how to please the other or become a good lover because we’re always thinking that the other is somehow “frigid”. Sex is about getting my needs met; it isn’t about meeting someone else’s needs or experiencing something wonderful together.
4. Porn Turns “Making Love” into a Foreign Concept
Those arousal centers and pleasure centers in our brain are supposed to associate sex with physical pleasure and a real sense of intimacy. But the intimacy doesn’t happen with porn, and so the pleasure is all that registers. Thus, sex becomes about the body, and not about intimacy. In fact, the idea of being intimate isn’t even sexy anymore. We may call “having sex” “making love”, but in reality they aren’t necessarily the same thing. Someone who has used porn extensively often has a difficult time experiencing any intimacy during sex, because those arousal and pleasure centers zero in only on the body. God made sex to actually unite us and draw us together; He even gave us a bonding hormone that’s released at orgasm so that we would feel closer. But if that hormone is released when no one is present, it stops having its effects. Sex no longer bonds you together.
5. Porn Makes Regular Intercourse Seem Boring
An alcoholic drinks alcohol for the “buzz”. But after a while your body begins to tolerate it. To get the same buzz, you need more alcohol. And so the alcoholic begins to drink harder liquor, or drink larger quantities. The same thing happens with porn. Because porn teaches us that sex is all about the body, and not about intimacy, then the only way to get a greater “high” or that same buzz is to watch weirder and weirder porn.
6. Porn Trains You to Have Immediate Gratification and Have a Difficult Time Lasting Long
With porn, when you’re aroused, you reach orgasm very quickly, because porn users tend to masturbate at the same time. Thus, orgasm tends to be very fast. The porn user hasn’t trained his body to draw out sex so that his spouse can get pleasure; his body is programmed to orgasm quickly. Many porn users, then, suffer from premature ejaculation. Some porn users go to the other extreme when they start suffering from erectile dysfunction. They have a difficult time remaining “hard” enough during sex because the stimulation isn’t enough. In their case, orgasm can take an eternity, if it’s possible at all.
8. Porn Gives You a Warped View of what Attractive Is
Sex is supposed to bond you physically, emotionally and spiritually with your spouse. But if porn has made the chemical pathways in your brain go haywire, then sex becomes only about the body. And porn shows you that only certain body types are attractive. It’s not about the whole person; it’s just a certain type of person. If a woman gains even ten pounds, then, she’s no longer attractive, and the porn user has a difficult time getting aroused because he associates only a certain body type with arousal.
9. Porn Causes Selfishness
All of this causes a spiral of selfishness where the person ignores his spouse’s needs and is focused only on getting what he wants, and getting it instantly. You shouldn’t have to work to get what you want. Your needs are paramount. People who think that porn is harmless and simply helps people “get in the mood”, or “relieves frustration”, are kidding themselves. The chemical processes in our brains are really complicated, and when you start messing with them, it’s really difficult to develop a healthy sexuality again.
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