Class will be meeting next on Sunday, May 12.
Last time, we discussed how pornography kills love, degrades persons, and harms relationships. It also leads to a loss of personal freedom and often to addiction.
Key points:
Porn is any media — songs, stories, images, or videos — intended to arouse lust by showing nudity or sexual behavior.
Porn can harm the user by leading to an addiction. Especially in younger persons, it can lead to serious addictions and a warped understanding of love and sexuality.
- Addiction is being enslaved to a habit, practice, or substance. See post below for more information on addiction.
- Porn consumption actually rewires a user's brain, leading to a progressive loss of personal freedom and — if it continues — ultimately to addiction.
- Porn addiction is significantly more common in males, but does occur in women as well.
The Attraction Center is part of your "feeling brain" (limbic system); it's extremely powerful because it has a vital job, namely, to bring men and women together to create families.
Pornography can trick the attraction center and divert it from its proper purpose — instead of attraction turning us outward to love another person, porn turns the user in on himself.
Because it hijacks the powerful attraction center, porn is likely more addictive than drugs.
Brain changes occur on a continuum, and a person doesn't have to be a full-blown addict to experience negative effects on his relationships and life.
The ways porn harms relationships (verified in studies) include training the user to:
- value women / men based on how much lust is felt, instead of as a person
- have unrealistic expectations (of other's looks, own feelings, etc.)
- move on as soon as he gets bored, and — at the same time — to get bored quickly
- focus on selfish desires and completely ignore the needs of the other person
- in short, treat others as objects for one's pleasure instead of persons with dignity
- Porn also teaches a completely false view of love and sexuality and an unhealthy idea of the kind of relationships that should exist between men and women.
- It is especially harmful to the young.
In short, pornography is an illusion and a fake, a counterfeit of real love that damages the user and makes it hard for him (or her) to have healthy relationships. It kills love by obscuring the human dignity of persons involved and treating persons as things.
What to do if you encounter pornography? Take the CAN DO approach:
C - Close my eyes / browser / computer / whatever right away. Minimize the time I see it.
A - Always tell a parent / mentor / mature friend / etc. who will help me stay pure
N - Name it, saying, "That's pornography!" This helps my rational mind reject it.
D - Distract myself with something positive, interesting, or requiring physical effort.
O - Order my thinking brain to be in charge, if it comes back to mind. e.g. "Feeling brain, you may be curious, but I choose to stay free of pornography. I want REAL love, not a fake."
- BONUS! Strengthen your rational mind and train your passions by regularly recalling the precious goods that chastity protects. We will come up with a list in class!
Quotes to ponder:
“Porn kills love.” ~ fightthenewdrug.org
“A wise man rules his passions; a fool obeys them.” ~ Publius Syrus
“Pornographic images reduce the person being lusted over to body parts only. There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.”
~ Mark Houck, based on Pope John Paul II
Resources:
See this link at the class blog for resources on this topic.
Just for fun:
James Veitch's TED Talk: This is what happens when you reply to spam email
Assignment:
Consider: What is the essential problem with porn? Is it the harms it causes, or something else?
If you missed missed class or want to review:
Please let me know if you want my detailed notes for this class since the information is not in the workbook.
Future class dates:
May
12 - Emotional Virtue & Dating Game Theory
26 - Final class: Chp 12 - Living the Good (and Free!) Life