Soli Deo Gloria

World’s Growing Addiction: Pornography

By Timothy Paular

Living in a world with endless access to anything and everything, the Internet
allows us to get information on any topic. From words to define, assignments to
answer, news and blogs to read, buy and sell, jobs to apply in, social media profiles
to update, videos to watch, virtually anything one can imagine of doing. Indulgence
in this technology is so alluring that it blinds us on its adverse effects. One of those
is Pornography, intended for recreation; it becomes one of world’s accepted addiction.

Webster defines Pornography as, “depiction of sexual acts or behavior, as in

writing, photographs, motion pictures, etc., to stimulate erotic feelings.” The porn
industry is rarely talked about nowadays, but in the deep web, it is a fast growing
business and addictive drugs of teenagers as well as the adults. Researchers found
out that in more than one million hits to Google’s mobile search sites, more than 1
in 5 searches are for pornography and on 400 million web searches, 1 in 8 of all
searches are for erotic content. Internationally, porn industry makes more combined
revenue than Major League Baseball (MLB), National Football League (NFL), and
National Basketball Association (NBA) annually. Porn sites comprise 12% of the
Internet and 28,000 people are watching it every second. By 2015, global adult
content and services reached $20 billion and expected to be tripled by 2018.

This bizarre statistic only scratches the surface of what is really happening.
Underground investigations proved that 17% of performers use condoms in
heterosexual porn films, 66% of porn performers have herpes, and 70% have HIV.
Even the use of illegal drugs is inevitable, as they have to get its effects, 79% of porn
stars use marijuana, 50% use ecstasy, 44% use cocaine, and 39% use hallucinogens.

What is alarming here is that most of the consumers are young people. 93%
of boys and 62% of girls were exposed to pornography before age 18. According to
numerous studies, prolonged exposure of youth to pornography leads to distortion of
men’s affection; cynicism about love; trust issues between intimate couples; a belief
that promiscuity is the natural state and marriage is sexually confining; and, lack of
attraction to family building and child raising.

If not stopped at once, porn user’s brain will be rewired as the neurons, which
are involved with the process on how to mimic a behavior, containing motor system,
will be connected to the planning out of a behavior. This will result in aggressive
sexual behavior towards other people. The Dopamine, which is a reward-driven
learning chemical will increase its level the same as in use of addictive drugs,
including stimulants such as cocaine, amphetamine, and methamphetamine. Because
erotic imagery triggers more dopamine than sex with a familiar partner, exposure to
pornography leads to "arousal addiction" and teaches the brain to prefer images and
videos. Sooner, Overstimulation will occur as Dopamine receptors drop after too
much stimulation, the brain does not respond as much, and one feels less reward
from pleasure. This tends to seek out more extreme sexual stimuli, longer porn
sessions, and more frequent viewing.

Pornography as an addictive drug is under-rated as compared to

methamphetamine (shabu), cocaine, marijuana, and all sorts that we have heard and
seen on media, but unlike those drugs, porn does not eventually activate the brain’s
natural aversion system. Therefore, understanding how pornography affects one’s
brain is essential to help everyone to prepare solutions for breaking this destructive
habit.

Seeing Pornography for what it really is should compel us to act against it. This
addiction also needs attention for it is sexualizing the world, so to speak.