Returning back to the rocky road of abstinence in my late 20s, I stumbled on a new form of stimulation, one that I bizarrely believed caused less harm — porn. When GQ magazine released the article: ’10 Reasons Why You Should Quit Watching Porn’, everyone rubbed their eyes and re-read the title. Surely GQ would support an article titled: ’10 Reasons Why You Should Dump Your Girlfriend and Click Online’? Isn’t it mandatory for them to print pictures of the sexiest women wearing nothing but a man’s shirt with hints of skin on every other page?
I knew this had become a cultural issue when such a magazine controversially opposed that which society had accepted into the “tolerate” bracket. I knew we were going too far when David Cameron restricted pornographic websites from the British nation.
Once I began to abstain from sex in my relationship with Caleb – my boyfriend at the time – I still continued to date him; he was very understanding – I guess he could have left – and I still desired him in every way. I turned to pornography to stave off any temptation, thinking I was helping matters. I appeased my needs and even sent Caleb the links to check it out himself, hoping he wouldn’t feel neglected.
Slowly, soft pornography needed to be a little more graphic, a little more rough around the edges, less of a story, less chit chat, more action, more people involved. Before I knew it, only after a few months — long enough to claim it as a habit — I was watching stuff you’d scream at should you stumble on it in the flesh. When it came to a girl being used by one too many men, I caught myself speaking out: “WHAT IN HELL’S NAME AM I WATCHING?”
Friends and I believed the lie that porn didn’t harm anyone, that it was just a little sexual kick, nothing to worry about. That was, until I looked my man in the eyes and realised something had changed. I was no longer rendered breathless by a look from him, nor was he with me. Sensitivity had vanished in our relationship, so respect followed suit. We were stimulated by different, more graphic images; what the internet had to offer became more powerful than our own connection. If evil in the world came down to disassociating ourselves with love and kindness, then surely there was no better way to describe pornography, which filled our brains with lustful images and animalistic excitement before boys and girls even met anyone with whom to fall in love, to serve, to cherish.
My desensitisation was due to what neuroscientists call “opening new neural pathways”, inducing an orgasm from visually pornographic images. This Pavlovian approach was self-serving, the sexual images pervasive. It didn’t encourage love but, instead, dissolved it. In short, the approach made me begin to believe: “I don’t care if your sexual parts belong to you any more, or that they do anything for you; I care about what it does for me.”
Married couples often sought help from therapists when the screen gained more attention than the spouse. When the puppet master of pornography dictated the sex drive, we lost control of what inspired us. Those of us who succumbed believed we didn’t need intimacy when we had porn, but the irony was that porn made me feel lonelier than ever before.
Distorted views of sex could make me feel powerful in the moment, but just as the antonym of the word power is impotence, so too would the exploration into that world make me finally impotent to find freedom and true gratification. Porn was a trap behind closed doors that literally brainwashed humans into believing they were getting their kicks from strangers having sex. Evil cloaked sex in lust, hoping we would mistake it for freedom.
Many of us fell for porn in a bad patch when the soul was dehydrated. We drank and drank, and yet we were still thirsty, and that thirst was never quenched. Those who had fallen into the addictive grip had been poisoned with more lies, detaching the physical from the emotional. However powerful I believed porn was, it was up to me if I wanted to sign up. But in the darkness of the night and the freshness of a new morning, I considered the pinnacle question that began to lead many of my decisions: “Did it bring me life? Or would it bring a slow death? To the world? To my lover? Most importantly, to myself?”
This is an excerpt from Prude: Misconceptions of a Neo-Virgin, which published on 2 February 2016. You can buy your own copy here.