Are Loneliness and Violence the Products of Porn Addiction?

In 1997, I worked in the banking industry. It was my first “real job” and I was taking my promotion from teller to commercial loan assistant very seriously. Internet usage hadn’t quite yet gone completely mainstream, though it was well on its way (that would happen only two years later). But this was the banking industry, and it was expected that we keep abreast of the digital trends. As such, there was one computer behind the concierge desk in the lobby that had full Internet access. Every member of staff, including the vice president of the bank, took turns working for 15 minutes at concierge. While there, you were allowed to surf the Web when not engaged with costumers. It was expected that you’d be using this time to bone up on the day’s Wall Street earnings or reading about news in the housing markets.

One cold, leafless Friday afternoon when everyone was likely hoping to head out the doors as soon as bank hours were finished, we were called into an emergency staff meeting; all hands on deck. The meeting was about that concierge computer and Internet pornography. Someone had been using his time at concierge to watch porn.

The majority of homes in the U.S. did not have Internet access until 2002, thus issues of Internet safety were still a fledgling matter. That winter Friday was the first time in my working memory that anyone I knew had been warned never to consume pornography at work. If porn was found on the concierge computer’s history again, users would risk termination. We were all given passwords in order to connect and so that our use could be tracked back to us. But someone did watch porn on that computer again, and he was fired for it. Perhaps he simply couldn’t stop.

Not a Small Problem

This story reminds me of the news reports in 2010 of the high level Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC ) staffers who were found to have spent hours perusing pornographic websites on government-issued computers during time they were paid to have been policing the financial system. This occurred leading up to the financial collapse, and is believed to have assisted its occurrence. “Seventeen of the employees were ‘at a senior level,’ earning salaries of up to $222,418.”

In a recent TV documentary appearing on Britain’s Channel 4, former editor of Loaded magazine, Martin Daubney, now a parent, took a look at the way pornography is affecting a generation of young people. In a review of the documentary, Chris Chambers blogged for The Guardian, commenting that Porn on the Brain revealed:

… an impressive neuroscience study involving Channel 4 and Dr. Valerie Voon from the University of Cambridge. In it, Voon conducts a functional MRI experiment to test whether a group of men who admit to being compulsive porn users show different patterns of brain activity to a control group. The study hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, so caution is needed, but preliminary results reveal an interesting trend – compulsive users tend to show heightened responses to porn-related images within brain networks that mediate reward and motivation. These responses are, on the face of it, quite similar to those observed in people with drug or alcohol addictions.

The flagrant misogyny of many extreme images seen in pornography can be argued to have harmful consequences. In Porn on the Brain Daubney explains, “We did a survey and the girls in particular are traumatized by lots of what they’re seeing because it’s expected of them in the real world. There is a danger I feel that pornography is setting a sexual template of what young people are expected to do, and a lot of that stuff isn’t particularly pleasant for girls.” But these harmful consequences affect both girls and boys, men and women.

Pornography has been likened to the “crack cocaine of sex addictions.” Porn on the Brain producers spoke with young people who considered themselves to be highly addicted to porn and who wished to address the consequences they felt their addiction had in their lives, particularly on their inability to form positive bonds with others.

In another documentary, Porndemic, a British psychotherapist and researcher took on the subject of cultural consequences to the growing rate of porn addictions: “If we don’t get the feeling back into relationships, we’re going to lose a generation of relationships. There’s going to be more broken relationships. There’s going to be more violence and there’s going to be more loneliness.…”