THE PORN DRUG SERIES:
This series was the idea of my young webmaster Mark, because he knows how easy it is for teens to find pornography on the Internet, and how it has a lure that has some unexpected dangers to it. As a very young person, Mark asks a thought-provoking question and comment: “Do you think porn is just an innocent pleasure? Think again as we describe some of the many harmful effects porn has on teens.”
This series of blogs will comment on some unexpected and unwanted effects of porn on teens. Let’s start with the first one:
1. The Escalation Effect
It all starts off with a quick glimpse of someone in a skimpy outfit, then leads to a night of online swimsuit photo viewing. However, this doesn’t satisfy your sexual urge, so you venture on to soft-core porn images (and maybe a quick mpeg here and there). But yet you still crave more intense and explicit porn, which leads you to “stumble” upon hard-core porn sites. Eventually, the most explicit images do not satisfy you. You long for more and more extreme, however, it is never enough. You are hooked and keep coming back for more, whatever the cost.
Some psychologists have pointed out that when you separate sexual pleasure from a loving relationship with a real person, you are easily “satiated” with pictures you have seen, and because porn is sexual arousal without a human person to relate to, it does not ultimately satisfy. For that reason, over a period of time, one set of pictures or a video is no longer as exciting as it was at first, so you go looking for more visual images. But then you quickly become satiated on those, so you go look for some new ones, and so on, and so on. It is an endless search for satisfaction that is never completely satisfied.
Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists provide psychotherapy for people with problems, including sexual problems. And they have found that over a period of years and months, teens and young adults who become repeat users of pornography often progress from normal images to a little bit wierd sexual images and finally to really strange sexual fixations. It goes like this. First, just seeing a picture of a topless young woman is exciting. Then those kinds of pictures get boring, so the young person looks for video images of intercourse. But over enough time, those get boring, so the young person starts getting interested in porn with “kinky” or wierd sexual deviations.
As you may know, I am a clinical psychologist myself. I have had psychotherapy patients who described this progression that happened over months and sometimes years of involvement with porn, to the point that the patient develops a strange sexual deviation and cannot have normal sexual relations with his wife without bringing wierd porn into the bedroom with her. Needless to say, many wives find this repulsive and refuse to go along with it. Then it becomes a serious marital problem, and sometimes the couple comes with this problem to a mental health professional for marriage counseling.
No teen that I have talked to (and I have talked with hundreds of them over my career) ever expects “The Escalation Effect.” But it is a common problem for those who stick with viewing porn repeatedly. “The Escalation Effect” is an unexpected effect. And when it is fully developed, it is a difficult problem to solve. And the best approach is to prevent it from happening in the first place.
Let me know if you have any question or comment on “The Escalation Effect.” In the meantime, check back at this website because we have a series started now, and my webmaster Mark and I will be writing about a half dozen other effects of porn on teens.
–Professor George
George A. Rekers, Ph.D., FAACP
Distinguished Professor of Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Science Emeritus
University of South Carolina School of Medicine
© Copyright, 2008, Professor George LLC
www.ProfessorGeorge.com
CANNOT get my husband and my son to believe what you have here in this article. It worries me.