Legend has it that some of the first websites on the internet were adult content sharing sites.
It isn’t clear whether or not that’s true (it probably isn’t), but even before it was possible to upload pictures on to computers, men were creating and sharing nude “pictures” out of letters to create crude ASCI images, as early as the 1950s.
Sexual artwork and “dirty pictures” seem to have been around since the dawn of man’s ability to create images. We find neolithic nude artwork featuring large phalluses and fertile women.
While pornography is generally frowned upon today, it is hard to imagine that something so universal and consistent in human history is intrinsically bad.
But despite the primordial history of sexually arousing depictions, something seems to be different about internet pornography. At some point, we went from “dirty pictures” to “pornography,” perhaps with the advent of video. While video pornography predated the internet (possibly as early as 1907 with El Satario), it did not become widely available until the advent of the world-wide web, which not only brought high-quality pornographic content to millions of men, but eventually did so for free. This pornography is wildly popular, but has also caused tremendous shame and guilt for men, and emotional distress for women. It is hardly surprising that wives dislike their husbands watching other women naked, but that “dislike” can range from mild disapproval to feelings of physical inadequacy and emotional betrayal, and has killed thousands upon thousands of marriages.
But for men, the compulsion to look at pornography is so deep and powerful that the judgment of women for this desire can feel like condemnation for original sin.
We didn’t choose to be wired this way.
Such an experience might look vaguely familiar to any women who has ever felt the attraction of second wave feminism, and its famous rejection of the conservative purity-culture which treated all female expressions of sexuality as immoral and sinful.
Every healthy man with access to the internet struggles with porn. Any man who denies this is lying (and he can’t prove a negative anyhow). By “struggles with,” I don’t mean he “is an addict,” but rather that he has to fight the urge to look, that it is effortful not to look, as though he was a recovering addict.
(Show me the man who claims this is “projection,” that it’s just me (lol) and that he — along with many, many others — does not share in this struggle, and I’ll show you the not-so-proud owner of terabytes of adult content. With those “holier than thou” types, it’s more likely to be underage material.)
This is not an excuse, but a statement of the severity of the problem, which is not just a problem for women, but a problem for men on male terms, at least when those men wish to be free from mind-altering addictions.
There is some kind of important difference in “user-experience” between low-quality images that one must either acquire through great and often secret effort (or make oneself) and high-quality video that is readily available on every cell-phone. Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman once pointed out that vaping is far more addictive than regular cigarettes because of the speed with which vaping delivers nicotine to the brain. The speed of feedback seems to be a key feature in the formation of addictions, and digital video pornography both increases the speed of access and reduces the psychological friction of actually having to imagine the act from the visual prompt of a still image. The moving picture does that work for you.
These seemingly subtle shifts in media have turned the ancient art of the “dirty picture” into a completely overpowering hijacking of the male brain which we call “pornography.” It’s fairly established that this new technology is harmful, though the extent of this harm is still unclear, and probably varies from person to person.
So what are we to do with all of this?
Most approaches to helping men quit porn involve some combination of digital regulation and accountability. The idea is to outsource your own self-control, since self-control obviously isn’t going to cut it. Conceptually, this approach seems to grasp the nature of the problem, and isn’t a bad idea. However, it carries a problem shared by most addiction-treatment approaches (like the 12-step program for alcohol): it turns the addiction into an identity.
The recovering alcoholic in the 12-step program is never supposed to say that he is a “former” alcoholic. “Once an addict, always an addict” is the idea. This is supposed to keep you on your toes, on guard against temptation, but often it simply keeps the addict’s mind on their former addiction. Like an inexperienced motorcyclist staring in horror at exactly where he doesn’t want to go, the focus often sets up exactly the psychological circumstances for failure. And that aside, a life of eternal guilt is no way to live (unless your religion calls for it, I suppose).
Not to mention, the pornography equivalent to complete abstinence of alcohol might require abstinence not only from images, but from the sex that has become associated with those images.
If the porn already hurt your marriage, physical abstinence will absolutely kill it.
Maybe most importantly, there is something inhuman in the immoralization of men watching porn.
This is not to say that watching porn is fine and healthy, but that the personal struggle against pornography is a struggle against a part of our brain, a part which happens to be older and stronger than our prefrontal cortex. Fighting against the urge to look at naked women is not unlike fighting the urge to eat when you’re hungry. It is an animal compulsion unique to men which women might have a hard time even comprehending, let alone empathizing with.
So how do we deal with this problem?
And again, it very much is a problem.
Maybe the best way to deal with it is to make it not a problem.
I don’t mean we simply define it away (we can leave that to sociologists, economists, and other vulgar academics). Rather, we find some alternative mode of satiation which is less prone to addiction, and which is less demoralizing to our wives. The latter point is not merely about preserving the feelings of women; it is also a selfish project for preserving the slutty sexuality of women for ourselves. As a general rule, not only is being a porn addict extremely unattractive, but looking at other women can cause your wife to feel inadequate, uncertain, self-conscious, and everything else antithetical to confident sexuality. That’s no recipe for a good time.
We want our women to feel cherished and adored exclusively for our own enjoyment, as well as their own feelings of security and satisfaction.
So how do we accomplish this? How do we satiate the otherwise indomitable desire for sexual stimulation in a way that isn’t a problem?
I think the answer is a sublimation of the pornographic compulsion, which is accomplished in two parts:
- Switching to slower mediums of satiation
- Incorporating and centering our wives within our medium
I would give personal examples of this kind of sublimation, but as a matter of taste, allow me to use a more prominent and more skilled example: Frank Frazetta.
Anyone familiar with Frazetta’s work knows that he spent a great deal of time thinking about naked women (unlike normal men, of course…). But unlike modern men, Frazetta’s primary medium of exploration was painting. Not only is this is a much slower, less physiologically addicting medium than simply staring at free videos—it actually develops a skill.
And if the development of this skill is motivated by lust… what of it? Most creation, warfare, and male competition and ambition is motivated by sex.
Aside from Frazetta’s artistic and creative (rather than merely consumptive) medium—which deters some of the worst addictive tendencies of pornography—Frazetta’s depictions of women were often indirectly or directly inspired by his wife, Eleanor.
This two-fold approach which recognizes the deep, psychological origin of the male drive for sex within the impulse towards pornography mitigates the worst effects of pornography—on yourself and on your spouse.
I think this recognition is important, because treating pornography as a moral problem, rather than an animal one for sexually-motivated mammals like ourselves, simply motivates concealment of the habit. It turns a part of our nature into something inherently sinful and corrupt, rather than an important part of our psyche that is responsible for—among other things—the continuation of life. The ancient and primitive nature of this drive makes it more susceptible to being gamed and manipulated (just as it is easier to fool more primitive forms of life with simulated stimuli), and digital pornography does just that. But this primitiveness does not mean that part of ourselves is evil or less human, something obsolete or embarrassing. Rather, the primitiveness is evidence of its foundational importance and significance.
Recognizing the significance of our sexuality does not get us any closer to overcoming the problems of pornography. But recognizing the tools employed by pornography to manipulate our own nature might, in their own way, open up tools for us to pro-actively take back control of our bodies artistically, in a way that is functional for our relationships and for our own sense of agency, without requiring us to abandon our mammalian nature.
At least, this approach has worked pretty well for me.
