Q&A: Should I Stop Watching Porn?
Questions you can ask yourself about your relationship with porn.
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Here's a great question from a reader with a pornography quandary:
Q: I'm a big fan and so very grateful for your work! Before finding out about your work I didn't even know sex educators existed.
I have a question please.
I'm considering trying to stop watching porn. I know for sure that I have some elements of porn addiction with the occasional binge watching
What troubles me more though is the nagging wondering whether my partner and I, both porn watchers, have our sexual preference and behaviours influenced by porn to a larger extent than we're aware of and that we'd like. I deeply loath the idea that I would do/like something because porn taught me that way. I also take significant issue with how women are treated in porn
I studied Communication and then Social Media and I'm particularly aware of how exposure to messaging and imagery influences people
What do you think?
A: The short answer: I think it would be a neat experiment to stop watching porn for a while and see what happens. But also it’s fine to keep watching porn if you want to.
Let’s start with the idea of porn “addiction.” You didn’t say what makes you perceive your relationship with porn as addiction, so I’ll just address it generally.
Reasonable people can disagree, but I’m of the mind that “addiction” language around porn is more of a metaphor than a literal experience. From my point of view, people who feel out of control in their relationship to porn are more technically experiencing a compulsion, rather than an addiction. But what really matters is that feeling out of control in your use of or relationship to porn is not about the porn, it’s about how, why, and when you engage with it. Most typically, people with an out-of-control or “maladaptive” relationship with porn are using it as a way to cope with difficult feelings that are only incidentally related to sex. They’re feeling stressed, depressed, anxious, lonely, or repressed rage (we’ve all got it), and they feel incapable of dealing with those difficult emotions, so they numb out or self-medicate with porn.
The difference between an “adaptive” versus “maladaptive” relationship with porn: an adaptive relationship gives you experiences you want and like, with low risk of unwanted consequences. A maladaptive relationship may give you experiences you want and like, but a significant part of what you want or like may be that it numbs out feelings you might otherwise be dealing with more effectively, plus it brings a higher risk of unwanted consequences.
For example, if a person in a relationship is experiencing sexual difficulties or conflict with a partner, and instead of collaborating with their partner to address those difficulties or resolve that conflict, they watch porn alone, that would point toward a maladaptive relationship with porn. What they want or like is numbing their difficult feelings, and it’s leading to an increased risk of unwanted consequences like losing the relationship. Make sense?
On the other hand, if a person decides to spend a Friday night watching porn and masturbating, with or without their partner, if they feel good about it, that could be an adaptive relationship with porn. What they want or like is the pleasure and delicious indulgence, and there’s low risk of unwanted consequences.
If you see yourself in my descriptions of a maladaptive relationship with porn, then there are two equally important strategies to apply:
First, notice when your brain feels motivated to seek out porn. Document the context—that’s both the external circumstances and your internal state—and ask what aspects of the context activated your brain’s urge to see porn. It won’t take long for you to start seeing patterns.
Second, explore adaptive strategies for dealing with those difficult feelings (stress, depression, anxiety, loneliness, repressed rage). You’ll find a lot of those in chapters 1 and 2 in Burnout, the book I co-wrote with my sister. The tricky thing about these adaptive behaviors is that may be more effortful than watching porn—I mean, you wouldn’t be watching porn instead of addressing the conflict in your relationship or allowing your body to move through the grief, rage, or fear it’s experiencing, if watching porn were more difficult than those adaptive strategies. But what makes the adaptive strategies worth it is that you get what you want, with a lower risk of unwanted consequences, even if it’s more difficult in the short-term.
Apart from a potentially maladaptive relationship with porn, the reason I say it’s fine is that the worst consequence you mentioned porn is having on you, your partner, or your relationship, is that you’re worried about the effect it could be having on your preferences or behaviors. You don’t want to like or do something just because porn taught you to.
If you had said that you felt like one or both of you wasn’t able to engage sexually without the porn, I might feel a little more inclined to say it could be beneficial to try not watching porn for a while, to practice sexual arousal, connection, and pleasure without porn. If you had said that you were doing things sexually that you do not want or like, just because you saw it in porn, I’d definitely want you to liberate yourself from someone else’s sexual script so you can write your own scripts together, based solely on what feels pleasurable in your bodies. If you had said that one or the other of you didn’t want to watch porn but felt like you had to because the other partner wanted to, I would definitely encourage you to take a porn hiatus. No one should feel like they have to do anything they do not want or like, when it comes to sex.
None of those things are what you said.
You did mention another worry about porn, that’s less about you or your relationship and more about the social justice aspect of porn. You disagree with the way women are treated in porn. The solution for this one is pretty straightforward: feminist porn or ethical porn. There are lots of production companies now that create porn and erotica that is transparent in the way it handles consent and makes concerted efforts to add diversity to their performers… But that’s another post. I’ll write one soon and link it here when I do.
Hope that helps!
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