What's Wrong With Watching Porn?

Science and research is telling us over and over again that pornography is addictive. It changes and rewires the way the brain works, much like drugs.

The truth is simple: more people are watching porn today than at any other time in human history. It’s cheaper, more accessible, and more hardcore than it’s ever been. See, back in the day, if you wanted to get an “X-rated movie,” you would have to sneak into a roped-off room in the back of a video store, go to the sketchy side of town to an “adult theater,” or go to the local convenience store and try not to make eye contact with the cashier as you purchased a centerfold magazine. They also checked your ID in the checkout line to make sure you were of age, like they now do with cigarettes.

Now compare that to today where the most hardcore porn imaginable is just a Google search away, with so much of it being free of charge. So it makes sense that in the last decade, with this influx of access, that the world has begun to question how harmful pornography really is and whether porn is addictive or not.

As of 2014, ‘pornography addiction’ had yet to be formally declared a diagnosable medical disorder and was instead considered by some experts as a type of ‘compulsive behavior.’ But science and research is coming out daily that forces experts to regard porn addiction as a medical/clinical condition similar to alcohol and drug addictions.

However, there is still the general public who seems to largely believe that pornography addiction is a myth, just a matter of opinion formed by religious or political beliefs.

Regardless of what the popularly accepted term is for it, the facts remain the same: porn is harmful and research is proving it. Dr. Victor Cline, a PhD in psychology from Berkeley, was noted researcher and counselor on the effects of pornography. He stated:

“In the scientific world the question of pornography effects is no longer a hot issue. It’s really not debated anymore. The scientists and professionals are no longer ‘pretending not to know.’ The new pornography commission is almost redundant. Everybody knows that pornography can cause harm, it can also change people’s sexual appetites, values and behavior. . . . It’s a power form of education. It can also condition people into deviancy. It can also addict. There are too many articles in the scientific journals as well as current books reviewing research attesting to this for anybody to deny its effects anymore.”

Yet, still not everyone believes that porn is a real addiction. And this is not the only time in history that it’s taken society a while to accept what science finds out first.