The Problem with Porn

All right, and welcome back. So on today's episode, we're going to talk about the problem with porn.

And what I mean by that is not the problem in the sense is porn good or bad in the kind of traditional moral sense of the arguments that have been had many, many, many times. You know, I will say ethically, a lot of porn production not the greatest thing in terms of the ways it's used and abused many of the participants over the years. That's somewhat changing as the industry restructures around just user generated content and the fact that doesn't require porn studios in the same way it used to.

But still, there's a lot to consider there. That truth be told, I think other people will have a better job of exploring is more of an ethically or morally neutral stance. Not anti porn itself, not necessarily pro porn itself. Gonna focus more on what's the actual impact it has on our lives as men. And so I share this because, you know, a lot of men these days have some kind of experience with or relationship to porn.

A lot of guys I work with, and me myself as well. You can hear a little bit more about my story in an episode of the Dear Men podcast. I'll link to in the show notes. But so what do I mean the problem with? Well, this is what I really mean in terms of what's the impact it has on our lives as men and why do a lot of men use it? And that second thing I think is the place to start really in this conversation.

Contrary to a lot of belief, most men don't use porn just because they're horny. Yes, it happens. Yes, it can be part of the male experience. But most men I know that struggle with some kind of porn use aren't necessarily using it purely for pleasure. Right. Instead, it is probably one of the most common and powerful tools, other than maybe alcohol in our culture that most men use to regulate.

So to regulate their emotional feeling state. Now what does that mean, to regulate? To regulate means just how do I deal with energy and emotion in my body, particularly energy that I don't want to be feeling? How do I come back to some kind of more relaxed place? Now, I share this because it's not that this is necessarily the best tool for it, but it's a tool a lot of men have access to.

So I know for me on my journey, a big part of porn had to do with stress and being overwhelmed or feeling stuck in life. And rather than being present to the uncomfortable feelings I was having in my body, in my emotions, in my heart, porn became a way to kind of turn that off or avoid those feelings. It's a powerful way to change our state, to just flood our system with hormones and chemicals and energy and in all the things that go around, in all the things that come from arousal.

It's something that, in retrospect, I can see was always most involved in my life when I was the most stressed out in some kind of way, most overwhelmed or uncertain, like I said, about some different part of my life. So porn was a way to regulate, a way to feel control over the state in my body, and sometimes also a way to just help me wind down and go to sleep.

You know, porn's a pretty tricky one in this sense because guys tend to use it late at night in front of a computer screen, which simultaneously tells your body to wake up. But then the act of ejaculation generally helps most men sleep, and that alone can become a habitual pattern for a lot and lot of guys. So taking out the moral side of things and just saying, hey, a lot of guys use it to regulate, to help them.

To help them feel control over their energy state, over. Over how they're feeling in their body now, where the problems tend to come in and certainly did for me, are around, you know, what's the impact of that in my life? Like I've said, and this is where, regardless of the moral side of things, porn generally doesn't support most men in really getting what they want in life.

Now, that shows up in a bunch of different ways. One, and I know this firsthand. It's an enormous time sink. You know, one of the things that kind of changed me and shocked me a little bit was when I installed one of those little trackers you can put on your computer that tallies up your time. And it's pretty intense to actually see how many hours I would log over weeks or months.

And that's time I wasn't investing into other things in my life. Quite simply, it's time I was not investing into other things in my life. On top of that, like I said, a lot of men use porn at night, and what that does is impact our sleep. So we stay up later and sleep less, which then rolls over into the next Day making us feel worse, generally feeling pretty tired by the end of the night, which increases our stress and it just cycles back into itself.

So we turn to porn again to find some release and to help us wind down. And it's very easy to stay up late, burning away hours that could be used for healthy, healthy rest. Now, again, outside of the ethics of this, porn use tends to have an impact on men's sexuality and wiring. And what I mean by that is, you know, the process of turn on and attraction. And porn, as so many people know, is not necessarily representative of the real world.

And that can start to shape men's expectations and visual turn on of what they think they should be getting in the world, which are real people versus porn people, which tend to be kind of heightened versions of the real. That process of maximum stimulation and then release also tends to get encoded in our turn on system as mention, and gets woven in pretty early.

You know, these days, a lot of men start pornography use as teenagers and probably even earlier with each new generation because of just how easy it is to access compared to, you know, years past where you had to actually physically get your hands on things. Now it's just boom, instant, anywhere on your phone, anytime now. That easy access and that high level of excitation it causes, it creates, right?

There's a way that by using pornography you can literally consume more varieties of the feminine than really any man could in real life, right? Our biology isn't really prepared for it, isn't really able to handle that much imagery and stimulation. That's part of what just kind of floods our system and creates these really unrealistic hormone surges in us that some men then have a hard time recreating with.

Something that some men that have porn use definitely struggle with. Not all men, but some. So it has an impact on us quite literally physically, oftentimes because of how much time we put in and how that impacts our sleep and then the way it impacts our wiring for Turn on and sexuality now in a deeper level. One of the places I see this really harm a lot of men as well is just around some of the ethical pieces, right?

And what I mean by that is because porn has such a negative connotation in a lot of ways in our culture, for a lot of men, porn use and shame go hand in hand. So it's something they tend to hide. Hide from partners, hide from friends, hide from spouses, you name it. That act, that holding of that shame alone, then changes the nature of their relationships, and you named it causes a type of stress.

Because if I'm doing this thing that's not good, I must not be good. It's a pattern I've seen a lot. A lot of men have to deal with. The other problem with it is for a lot of men, it's easier to view porn than it is to have a relationship. So to actually do the work of going out into the world, meeting a partner, dating, building connection emotionally and physically, and eventually having sex, it can be much easier to just stay home and watch some porn and fall asleep and not go through all that work.

You know, I know that was one that trapped me more than one time, where the easy access to porn actually prevented me from going out and engaging in the world, from putting in the time. And then the act of ejaculation that often accompanies porn use for most men kind of doubles down on that. You know, I'm not a purist in the sense that men should never ejaculate, but it definitely has an impact. And that's something I work with guys on that do my coaching program for dating and relationships, to have an embodied experience of what kind of impact it has on you, depending on how often you ejaculate.

And for a lot of guys that get into habitual porn use, which would be a couple times a week, maybe even nightly, that's a lot of ejaculation. And that tends to impact our energy level and what in the Eastern sense we would call our chi or our fire. And this is noticeable, right? For any man's probably had this experience of the desire for sex building horniness, we could call it whatever. And it actually feels like an impulse in our body that helps us move or get things done.

It's a sometimes uncomfortable sensation that we want to release. Now, optimally, to do that, that energy is harnessed to go out and connect with a woman. But with the ease of porn, it's easy to kind of just disperse that, to let the steam out. So to Speak night after night after night after night after night, and suddenly there's just no gas in the tank. I've seen this for a lot of different men and definitely had to engage with this myself.

As someone who frequently over ejaculated and just always kind of felt tired. As that changed and I changed my relationship to porn and I essentially stopped ejaculating from masturbation, my energy levels completely transformed, my health and my body completely transformed. And it's an experience I think most men should at least experiment with at some point. Because that fire, that sexual fire, that building up of that energy is what helps us create change and cause action in the world, makes us actually go out and do things.

These are energies that arise in our body demanding to be felt. Energy in motion, something I've talked about in previous episodes, emotion. And optimally, they drive us to some kind of action porn, like a lot of different regulating tools that men turn to, a way to kind of disperse that, to disperse that energy, just push it back down without really feeling it, you know, it's a way to kind of keep ourselves as men in neutral.

All that energy comes up, that uncomfortableness, that sensation, that fire, whatever it might be. And rather than it being direct, experienced, harnessed and moved, we eject it, right? We ejaculate it, we get rid of it, we disperse it, and then we're kind of back in that empty place, in that neutral place. And it's easy, it's really easy to get stuck there for many, many years.

I certainly know I did. And so the problem with porn is not so much it's a good or bad thing, but as I tell guys I work with, the main problem with porn is it rarely leads us closer to the life we actually want to be living, right? Just as a mechanism, as a place to spend our time, it rarely gets. Gets us closer to where we want to be, which for a lot of guys is in a thriving relationship full of really great sex, whether that's with a woman or a man, and then having a kick ass job that's meaningful and pays well.

Porn use doesn't really get us closer there. Instead, it often keeps us in the same place over and over and over again, right? Energy builds, we disperse it stuck in the same place. Uncomfortable emotion builds, we disperse it stuck in the same place. And that is probably the biggest problem with porn is it keeps us stuck in the same place and doesn't help us drive forward to what we actually want.

And it has deep impact on us physically through the time we invest, often late at night, the light of the computer screens, the hormonal changes it offers us. And emotionally, in terms of the shame that most men hold while carrying it around. And it's crazy, you know, this is just anecdotal, but something I definitely noticed in my experience, and something some of the guys I've worked with have noticed as well, is that emotional shame reaction shows up in our physicality or can show up for some of us, at least in our physicality.

And what I mean by that is, is it became really clear to me as I became more self aware of the impact this was having on me that when I was using a lot of porn, staying up late, getting tired, all those things I've talked about, I would make less eye contact in the world afterward, right? Whether it be the next day or whenever, I would actually be less open and less connected to the human beings around me.

As my porn use went down, I noticed my eye contact went up. Now that's a pretty impactful thing, particularly if you're a man who's looking for some kind of relationship or who's in a relationship and seeking more intimacy and connection with the partner you already have. Eye contact drives so much of connection when it comes to intimacy and our sexuality.

So again, in just so many ways, it rarely gets us closer to the things we actually want. And instead, whether that's going cold turkey or somehow changing the relationship to porn. And one of my mentors, Robert Masters, was the first one that really helped this important insight click to me of it's not so much you want to stop using porn, which tends to be really hard for guys, right?

When we try not to do something anymore, particularly if that something has been one of the few types of medicines we've had for self regulation, and instead we want to outgrow its use. What does that mean? Well, to outgrow it means the needs that are driving us towards it are fulfilled in other ways, more whole ways and in more nourishing ways. Meaning we actually find other tools to help us self regulate and we find relationships that help us self regulate.

Now, if you've listened to the show. You know, I'm a big fan of men's groups, which is one of the many, many reasons I trumpet them so much, because they can become one of these other tools for self regulation. Feeling lonely, overwhelmed with emotion, is one of the main things that drives a lot of porn use for men. Now, even if it's just getting connection from other guys who can support us in being in our feelings, that starts to change our relationship to why we use porn.

And when our stress levels don't drop to a certain place. You know, I kind of think of the porn addiction I had is it was almost like a program that would just play out under certain conditions, right? Stressed out this much, didn't have so much in the bank, didn't sleep enough, and my body would become a little overwhelmed and boom, the desire for porn would kick in and that desire to self regulate with it would kick in.

What I noticed as I moved away from it and made major shifts in my life through embodiment work, men's groups, and all the things I teach men with that program, that impulse just didn't come up. And it wasn't so much that I had to stop myself looking at porn, but I remember there was a point one time where I was like, wow, I haven't even thought about using porn for weeks. That program just didn't come up because I was getting nourished and I was fulfilled and I was taking care of myself in other ways.

Now as I got stressed again in the future, hey, noticed it came back up. So that correlation between our stress levels and our desire to turn towards it is just so true for a lot of men. So to outgrow porn often involves making bigger changes in our lives, in the network of our lives, in the structure of our lives, in the structure of our relationships.

And it's those big changes that tend to fulfill us in different ways and nourish us in different ways, preventing us from having to turn to porn in the first place. So again, I'm not here to rail on porn because it's necessarily a bad thing. I think ethically created porn can totally be used in relationship or in self pleasure practice for some intentional conscious uses.

The thing is, most men are not using it in that way. Instead they're using it as a numbing agent, as a way to disperse feelings they don't want to feel and to not have to deal with life. So they're using it to regulate and feel some control in a way that doesn't really impact much in the long term and in so many ways keeps them stuck in the same place and not getting closer to where they want to go in life.

It makes us stay up late, it creates shame in us. It changes our eye contact, it changes our energy levels. It has a powerful, powerful effect when used too much by men. And the truth is, for a lot of men it's really hard to get away from it because again, our biology isn't wired to say no in the sense, right, we have more instant access to this highly stimulating thing than we've ever had before.

It's kind of the equivalent of junk food in terms of nutrition to our sexuality, right? Something like sweets and sugar, actually a rare seasonal thing in nature. And because they often had some different vitamins and nutrients in them, we would consume as much as we could. The thing is, there was a limit, right? There was a natural limit to sweets in our natural environments because there's only so much fruit you could access in a local area and it would go out of season a lot of times and then your body would shift to other nutrients.

Now, that's a long explanation, but there's some truth to that with sexuality, right? That because of the dynamics of how we lived as human beings in community with other human beings, it wasn't possible to just have endless amounts of sexual partners. And it wasn't actually economical or good for survival necessarily. Bonding tended to create longer sustainable families and whatnot.

But the point is, biologically, we were never supposed to be exposed to this raw amount of sexuality. And men are visual creatures and it's like the endless pixy stick of sugar for our sexuality. A lot of men have a hard time getting out of that loop and that's where having some support can really make a difference, right?

Again, bringing things back to something like a men's group or a coaching relationship where we can really start to change the dynamics of how porn shows up in our life and what we do with the feelings that are often driving us to it. So if you want to get some support on porn or any other kind of self regulating tools in your life, you can check out one of my drop in men's groups at Evolutionary Men events. And if you want to go all the way, change your relationship, learn how to show up fully and purpose in the world and in relationships.

And check out my group coaching program by watching my free training evolutionary red webinar.