THAT'S MEN:Porn has negative consequences for relationships, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
SEX THERAPIST Wendy Maltz recalls talking to a woman who found a stash of hard-core porn videos and magazines in her father’s bedroom after he died.
"No matter how much I tried not to let it bother me, it changed the way I think about him," Maltz, in an article in Psychotherapy Networker, recalls her saying.
Maltz has been dealing with the issue of porn for many years and once used it in her work and her marriage. Since the internet porn explosion, though, she has increasingly seen the negative side of porn, especially on relationships.
Most of the clients who come to her about problems with porn are the female partners of male pornography consumers.
The reaction of these partners tends to be the same as the reaction of those who discover their husbands having affairs: they feel betrayed and angry. One woman told Maltz that her trust in and respect for her husband had gone.
Many men who use porn, she writes, find these reactions difficult to understand. They see it as nothing personal and something that lots of guys do.
In the US, 40 million people visit internet porn sites once a month at least. About a quarter of employees use porn at work.
The age range of people who use porn is wide. Maltz talks about clients ranging from 90-year-old men to nine-year-old girls who have problems with pornography.
And teenagers, as perhaps you might expect, are drawn to readily available porn. Maltz cites a Columbia University study in 2004 in which 45 per cent of teenagers questioned said they had friends who regularly used porn on the internet.
Given the explosion of broadband and the availability of the internet on smart phones and other devices, there is every chance that the proportion is higher today.
None of this would matter if nobody got hurt, but people suffer in a variety of ways. Many men become addicted to porn and find it extremely difficult to break the habit, even though it makes them feel dirty and ashamed.
Why the addiction? On a neurological level, looking at porn increases the brain’s production of dopamine which is also associated with drug highs. It releases a whole range of other “feel-good chemicals”, as she calls them, even including oxytocin which is involved in feelings of love.
Porn also damages sexual relationships. The porn user may seek demeaning forms of sexual activity that the partner is unwilling to engage in. Indeed, he may find “ordinary” sex with his partner no longer satisfying.
Maltz points out that research shows monogamous sex to be the most satisfying of all – yet the opposite message is pushed again and again and again to the user of porn. It is unsurprising then, that porn is also increasingly a factor in marriage breakdown.
Maltz herself used pornography in her sex therapy work and her marriage. However, she became increasingly disillusioned, not only by the harm which she saw porn doing to its users but also by the dangerous and degrading use and abuse of women and children in the making of it.
She and her husband Larry are the authors of The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography.
She acknowledges that some people use pornography without getting hooked by it. She points out, though, that while pornography isn’t a problem for everyone, it can become so for anyone.
In particular, porn is a problem if it reduces the user’s self-esteem, if it upsets the user’s partner, if it has become a preoccupation, if it shapes desires and behaviours and, perhaps most importantly, if its continuing use will have negative consequences.
She advocates that porn and its repercussions be talked about more openly in society, including educating children on the consequences of porn use.
To read Maltz’s article, type “psychotherapy networker wendy maltz” (without the quotation marks) into a search engine.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy