Have you ever felt that you have been hijacked? Not with physical explosives, but with visual images exploding in your brain?
If so, you are not the only one. Men, you, more than women, are usually the ones who are being mentally and emotionally hijacked by pornography. With at least 200 new pornographic websites opening up daily on the Internet, according to the Los Angeles Times, you are becoming more vulnerable to psychological, emotional, mental and social harms each day.
Porn is a drug. You can never get enough — more is always needed. And those that partake are ultimately responsible for the havoc it wreaks. The myth that pornography is a victimless crime is too often repeated. The victims of pornography are first, those who make it, those who view it and finally those bound in a relationship with those who view it.
What harm does it cause, you ask? The visual images are themselves often crime scene photos of actual rapes.
According to Psychology Today blogger, Dr. William Struthers, a man’s brain is particularly designed as “a sexual mosaic influenced by hormone levels in the womb and in puberty and molded by his psychological experience.”
When there is prolonged exposure to explicitly obscene images, any man or boy is plunged onto “a one-way neurological superhighway where a man’s mental life is over-sexualized and narrowed. This superhighway has countless on-ramps but very few off-ramps,” said Struthers.
If you are in a relationship with someone who accesses or views porn, you, women (more often than not), may feel hijacked, as well. Men might make excuses for themselves by saying “we are visually stimulated.”
One reader in Mademoiselle drew the comparison when saying that if her boyfriend was going to keep up being “visually stimulated” she was going to start planning and having coffee with other men since she is “conversationally stimulated.” Both external stimuli ruin the relationship — so help each other out and stop marginalizing the other person by seeking stimulation externally.
Porn is one-dimensional. It reflects a skewed sense of reality. And it forces women into the role of a titillating toy.
As humans, we are naturally inclined to intimacy. But pornography offers false intimacy by stimulating the sexual drive at any time it is accessed.
Intimacy itself is a good desire. But when endeavors to achieve it are through viewing pornography — you will end up hijacking your own mind, relationships and life.
If you have felt that you have been hijacked, you can take action to protect yourself from future explosions by setting up filters online, not going to or patronizing sexually oriented businesses, and turning your optical nerves away from soft and hard porn when thrust in front of your eyes.
The point: don’t let pornography hijack you.
Reach Catherine at catherine.e.smith@asu.edu
