Let’s get one thing straight from the start: all men use porn. And do not simply take our word for this; that’s the assessment of Robert Weiss, co-author of Always Switched on: Sex Addiction in the Digital Age
, who spoke to redOrbit about careful casual use, the warning signs for when a universal habit becomes dangerous, and how America should adjust its general attitude towards sex.
“With regard to boys and teenagers, there are three basic porn-related questions,” Weiss told us: “How many boys and teenagers use porn? The length of time are they spending with porn? How is porn affecting them?”
He states that: “The first real question is actually easy to answer. All of them! Relatively recently, a Canadian scholar tried to perform research around the effects of porn use among adolescent males but couldn’t C while he was unable to find any potential test subjects who weren’t already using porn! (Without a control group, there was no method for him to make comparisons.)”
This is not a sign that we are witnessing the end of civilization in the age of decadence. Most people would fall under Weiss’s first category of consumption:? Casual Porn Users. This is the category we’ll take a look at in the following paragraphs, before taking a look at more dangerous use within another.
Weiss states that Casual Porn Users are “people who find pornography entertaining, fun and perhaps distracting. They like porn intermittently, depending on their life circumstances, although not on a regular basis. Usually they see porn like a part of a healthy sexual life.”
The thought of porn being healthy might not sit well with some people, but Weiss says that: “For a wide variety of cultural, religious and historical reasons, Americans are in times highly sex-phobic. In truth, many societies around the world are much more accepting and open about sexuality being natural and not shameful.” (Though he points out that some cultures are of course far more conservative).
The writer adds that: “Parents particularly tend to panic if/when they catch their children with porn, even if the parents used porn themselves when they were kids. Instead of worrying or not worrying, it’s easier to develop open lines of communication among family members, especially with kids, letting everyone realize that sexual topics can be discussed without anxiety about judgment and/or reprimand.”
An advantage of a society that talks more openly about sex, inside a healthy, everyday sense, is that it is needed people to avoid one of the perils of pornography for casual users, that is a skewing of the items we believe is common in sex.
Weiss says: “The fear that parents and professionals typically have C and this fear isn’t necessarily unfounded C is that adolescent males’ brains are now being rewired to continually demand the unrealistic levels of novelty and perfection that pornography consistently provides, and that they are therefore becoming out of sync with real world romance.”
If young men have only porn because the driving force in their sexual development, before their own sexual encounters as well as before getting the chance to have responsible discussions about sex, then this is obviously a danger for their sexual thinking.
Whilst attempting to resist porn use within society makes about as much sense as trying to have automobiles banned because cars are dangerous, you will find things to be mindful of for all users, and these things could be discussed more openly, included in a wholesome sexual discussion overall.
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Robert Weiss, LCSW, CSAT-S, is author of Always Switched on: Sex Addiction in the Digital Age, and Senior V . p . of Clinical Development with Elements Behavioral Health.
