Pinupmutant writes on XPT:
I found an article from 4 years ago on The Guardian. The full text can be found here, but here are some salient points for the ADHD crowd:
No doubt (though we’d never have admitted it then) my friends and I were driven to use porn through loneliness: being away from home, we longed for love, closeness, unquestioning acceptance. The women over whom we masturbated – the surrogate mothers, if you like – seemed to be offering this but, of course, they were never going to provide it. The untruths it taught me on top of this disappointment – that women are always available, that sex is about what a man can do to a woman – I am only now, more than two decades on, finally succeeding in unlearning.
David Morgan, consultant clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Portman Clinic in London, which specialises in problems relating to sexuality and violence, describes this phase as "transitional, like a rehearsal for the real thing. The problem with pornography begins when, instead of being a temporary stop on the way to full sexual relations, it becomes a full-time place of residence." Morgan’s experience of counselling men addicted to porn has convinced him that "the more time you spend in this fantasy world, the more difficult it becomes to make the transition to reality. Just like drugs, pornography provides a quick fix, a masturbatory universe people can get stuck in. This can result in their not being able to involve anyone else."
Men, say psychologists, also feel threatened by the "emotional power" they perceive women wielding over them. Unable to feel alive except when in relationships with women, they are at the same time painfully aware that their only salvation from isolation comes in being sexually acceptable to women. This sense of neediness can provoke intense anger that, all too often, finds expression in porn. Unlike real life, the pornographic world is a place in which men find their authority unchallenged and in which women are their willing, even grateful servants. "The illusion is created," as one male writer on pornography puts it, "that women are really in their rightful place and that there is, after all, no real and serious challenge to male authority."
Your comments, please?
Dr. Mordo posts: "I’m not convinced that this is a bad thing. I think in the end that relationships drain us more than they replenish us, and that if porn provides liberation than it can hardly be bad."
