Fight The New Drug: Quit Watching Porn

Interesting resource you should check out:

‘Fight the New Drug’ (FTND) is a non-religious and non-legislative organization that exists to provide individuals the opportunity to make an informed decision regarding pornography by raising awareness on its harmful effects using only science, facts, and personal accounts.

• We Are Research-Based. We carefully review, summarize, and present peer-reviewed research about pornography in a clear and concise way that’s engaging and easy for Fighters to understand.
• We Are Not Religiously Affiliated. As an organization, we do not associate with any faith or belief system, nor do we discuss porn and sexual exploitation from a religious or moral perspective.

I’m 100% in support of dropping porn consumption. Free your mind, gain some discipline, be forced to develop connections with real people. No downsides noted. Minus the dopamine rush, which is exactly why they aptly titled their mission ‘Fight the New Drug’.

This is especially true when you consider that just recently a 16-year-old girl in Australia ripped her bowel so badly during group anal sex while trying to imitate porn that she needs to use a colostomy bag for the rest of her life.

They break it down in three ways:

• Porn affects the brain
  • By creating an escalating behavior
  • By affecting sexual tastes
  • By being addictive
  • By changing the neuro chemistry of the brain
  • By having similar attributes as a drug
• Porn affects relationships
  • By leaving consumers lonely
  • By hurting consumers partners
  • By damaging sex lives
  • By killing love
• Porn affects society
  • By changing culture and attitudes toward sex and women
  • By fueling sex trafficking and costs attributed toward that trafficking
  • By warping ideas and beliefs surrounding sexual pleasure
  • By leading to violence
  • By harming the porn industries working men and women

Fight The New Drug – Quit Watching Porn

A few interesting quotations from the site:

Porn is an escalating behavior because as some consumers develop tolerance, the porn that used to excite them starts to seem boring. Predictably, they often try to compensate by spending more time with porn and/or seeking out more hardcore material in an effort to regain the excitement they used to feel. Many porn consumers find themes of aggression, violence, and increasingly “edgy” acts creeping into their porn habits and fantasies. But no matter how shocking their tastes become, you can bet there will be pornographers waiting to sell it to them.

Skeptics of pornography’s danger point out that porn has been around a long time. After all, the ancient Greeks painted sexual images on their pottery. But comparing paintings on Greek vases to today’s endless stream of live-action, hardcore videos is like comparing apples to…um…kumquats. Technology is changing not only the content of porn, but how, when, and at what age it’s being consumed.

Many porn consumers find themselves getting aroused by things that used to disgust them or things that they might have previously considered to be inappropriate or unethical. As individuals consume more extreme and dangerous sex acts, they gradually begin to feel that those behaviors are more common and acceptable than they really are.

Those chemicals do more than make you feel great. While you’re enjoying that good feeling, your brain is also building new nerve pathways to connect the pleasure you’re feeling to the activity you’re doing. It’s the brain’s way of making sure that whatever you’re doing, you’ll come back to it again. The association between the activity and the “reward” happens automatically, even if you don’t intend it, because “neurons that fire together, wire together.”

In a survey of 1,500 young adult men, 56% said their tastes in porn had become “increasingly extreme or deviant.” Just like the rats, many porn consumers eventually find themselves getting aroused by things that used to disgust them or things that they might have previously considered to be inappropriate or unethical. In many cases, porn consumers find their tastes so changed that they can no longer respond sexually to their actual partners, though they can still respond to porn.

Repeated consumption of porn causes the brain to literally rewire itself. It triggers the brain to pump out chemicals and form new nerve pathways, leading to profound and lasting changes in the brain.

Porn happens to be fantastic at forming new, long-lasting pathways in the brain. In fact, porn is such a ferocious competitor that hardly any other activity can compete with it, including actual sex with a real partner. That’s right, porn can actually overpower the brain’s natural ability to have real sex! Why? As Dr. Norman Doidge, a researcher at Columbia University, explains, porn creates the perfect conditions and triggers the release of the right chemicals to make lasting changes in the brain.

One recent study examined men who used internet porn compulsively and found that, in 11 out of 19 subjects, porn consumption had lowered their sex drive and/or ability to maintain erections in physical relationships with real women. Oddly enough, those men were still able to respond sexually to porn. Like Tinbergen’s butterflies, porn can leave people preferring internet porn over an actual partner. Chances are, your partner is not okay with that.

This lie is especially troubling because many young porn consumers really do rely on the warped fantasy of porn to form their ideas and expectations about sex. That’s scary for a lot of reasons. Young people who consume porn often expect their partners to act out what they’ve seen, even if it’s painful, degrading, or dangerous. They tend to believe that what they see in porn is normal and acceptable, even as their tastes in porn grow more extreme over time. And as people adopt the unrealistic standards of porn, they end up feeling bad about themselves and dissatisfied with their partners.

Whether they want to or not, the majority of teens are getting some of their sex education from porn. Researchers have repeatedly found that people who have seen a significant amount of porn are more likely to start having sex sooner and with more partners; and to engage in riskier kinds of sex, putting them at greater risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections.

“It’s sad,” says Dr. Gary Brooks, a psychology professor who studies the effects of porn. “Boys who are initiated in [to] sex through these images become indoctrinated in a way that can potentially stay with them for the rest of their lives.” And think about it, what messages does that send to young women and girls who are consuming this content as well? That’s what porn is: indoctrination, the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. It isn’t just entertainment. It isn’t just titillating. It teaches a detrimental message from a specific worldview. We can limit the advancement of porn’s ideals by spreading the truth, especially to young people. And for those who feel caught up in porn’s web, it’s never too late to stop and even turn back its harmful effects.

What a great mission they are trying to achieve. Definitely give them a read.

There are sources for every single thing they say. Typically, these sources include numerous peer-reviewed studies.

I encourage everyone to check them out and start taking the steps toward quitting porn entirely. Build yourself up, clean your mind, focus on better things in life. Don’t waste your time jacking off to a computer screen.

Fight The New Drug