Inner Emptiness
The pornography industry is huge, with revenues larger than the combined revenues of all professional basketball, baseball, and football franchises, and larger than the combined revenues of CBS, NBC, and ABC. Last year, on just one of the major porn sites, 91,980,225,000 videos were watched.
Why?
Sometimes couples use erotic videos to enhance their sex life, and if both of them enjoy it and their sexuality is based on love, it is not a problem. But the problem with most pornography is it’s exploitive of children and women and it’s used alone - addictively.
Viewing porn is often part of a sexual addiction - using some form of sex to avoid painful feelings and fill the emptiness of aloneness and loneliness. The intensity of the sexual feelings generated from porn can momentarily drown out fear, anxiety or depression. All of this without having to run the risk of facing your deepest fears - your fears of inadequacy, rejection or engulfment. There is no performance anxiety when you can have a relationship with a photo or video on your computer.
This is a major lure of pornography: all the intensity and release with none of the risk of actual relationships. You don't have to please anyone. You don't have to perform, and you especially don't have to run the risk of real intimacy. You can blot out your fear and pain and momentarily feel good.
You don't have to open your heart. Your ego wounded self can be totally in charge, feeling satiated from the stimulation without having to care about anyone. It is easier than having sex with a partner. You can masturbate without ever having to deal with difficult issues such as love, connection, caring, emotional intimacy or emotional vulnerability. You don't have to risk being hurt.
The lure of porn is like the lure of food, or the lure of drugs, or the lure of gambling, spending and so on. It has become a major way that many people, especially males, avoid taking responsibility for their feelings. If you are feeling anxious, alone, lonely, depressed, inadequate, needy - why not just masturbate with porn and blot out your feelings?
The problem with this, as with any addiction, is that it does nothing to address the real problems. As long as you use porn - or any addiction - to avoid responsibility for your feelings, you are stuck behaving in ways that are not good for you and not good for the planet. Objectifying people sexually can never lead to self-worth. While your ego wounded self may justify this addiction by saying that it is not hurting anyone, this is definitely not true.
All our thoughts and actions go into the collective unconscious and affect our entire planet. Whenever you are thinking or behaving in ways that are hurtful to you or others – and porn is hurting your own soul - you are not behaving with integrity, and you are perpetuating unloving behavior on our planet. This is especially concerning with child pornography, which is now a huge industry. How can anyone, in good conscience, support an industry that uses and exploits children? It is a sad commentary on our society that people are making money on using children in this way - and it would not be successful if people did not participate in watching it.
It is interesting for me to note that the phrase that receives the most hits to my Inner Bonding website from Google and other search engines is "fear of intimacy." I have no doubt that fears of intimacy and the use of porn are related. Deep intimacy is so much more satisfying and fulfilling than porn, yet fears of getting hurt are so great that many people avoid intimacy and turn to porn instead.
If people did their inner work and learned how to take loving care of their feelings instead of avoiding them with addictions, the porn industry would suffer.
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