Pornography and Loneliness – Part 1
Feeling a little lonely? It isn’t completely off base to think that viewing a little porn might provide some relief for both the emotional need and the accompanying sexual frustration or desire. Yet consuming porn as a remedy for loneliness, or for a lack of adequate and fulfilling relationships, can mean danger. But what is so dangerous about using electronic sex to meet the need?
The first problem is chemical. When you use porn to combat a negative feeling such as stress or pain or loneliness, the brain responds with a flood of dopamine to the brain’s reward center. Suddenly the imposing feelings you are trying to escape seem to fade away and there is a feeling of calm, fulfillment and reward in its place. And it doesn’t take your brain long to pick up on the connection. Regardless of what your rational mind may think, your chemical brain begins to configure porn or cybersex, and subsequent orgasm through masturbation, as the antidote to the negative feeling you were experiencing prior to the experience. Soon, when even an inkling of that feeling returns, your brain, bent on maintaining happy equilibrium, rushes to rescue you from distress with the suggestion of porn. And you comply.
It is not impossible to believe that a person who is lonely may come to desire the pseudo-partnership of porn. There is, in porn, a façade of the closeness that comes from physical intimacy with another person. But in this instance the “cure” is more injurious than the disease. The viewing of porn is not a neutral activity—something you can do once in a while and be done with. Porn consumption, especially the high-speed porn afforded by the current velocity of in-home Internet, is progressive.
The vital thing to remember is that porn is not sex. It is not intimate, or even representative of any kind of human closeness. Yet in a society that is becoming more and more confused by our relationship with electronic and computer entities, it is easy to see how a person could be lured in by the falsified closeness of Internet porn.
Intimacy, relationship and belonging are basic human needs and they are meant to be fulfilled by being in relationship and community with other people—not via electronic devices. Porn cannot, in any way, fulfill the inherent human need for human contact and a sense of belonging—even if it feels like it does. You have, in effect, been responding to a placebo. And it works for a while. But while it is “working,” your brain is being rewired to continue to want that dopamine rush, though you may be progressively coming to realize that it is not satiating the real need. By that time, however, no matter how sick of the porn you may be, no matter how you see it damaging your life, no matter how you see it sapping your libido for real sexual partners, there is no stopping it. The brain is in charge now and the brain craves it so intensely that the reward center is overriding your rational capabilities. Thus an addiction is born.
And something else has happened in the process. The more you have needed the porn, the more you gradually began to isolate from the people around you. Relationships become superficial and the normal activities of daily life become boring—nothing compares to the hyper imagery and novelty of porn. Suddenly it is preferable to stay home with your computer in the absence of all emotional challenges or relational expectations. The screen is safe. There is no judgment there. Actual people pose risks that begin to look less and less attractive.
And the loneliness you so wanted to escape has only intensified as you have put your relational energies into an electronic phantasm. You crave people, yet you have lost your ability to engage with them, desire to be around them or interact comfortably. Social anxiety increases and your life turns in on itself, creating an ever more solitary existence. Stigma adds to the problem. The addict has to isolate because the need is seen as shameful—it cannot be shared. But the urge must be met, and so he or she retreats further and further from the world and the challenge of relationships and commitments. At this point it can barely be called a life. The addict is lonelier and more alone than ever.