Many of us in the sex-addiction recovery community--especially here in the blogosphere--have grown pretty accustomed to rolling our eyes at the way the mainstream media seems to treat sex addiction; the vast majority of journalists just don't seem to get it. Today, however, I came across this article by Natasha Walter in the London Times, which I thought was pretty darn brilliant. Titled "How Teenage Access to Pornography is Killing Intimacy in Sex," the article is an excerpt from Walter's book Living Dolls, out February 4th. In it, she interviews a porn addict named Jim, his ex-partner Ali, and Ellie, a sex worker. Here are some highlights:
Jim says: “I was unable to think of women except as potential pornography. I looked at them in a purely sexual way. I remember one day I was walking to school, I was about 15, and I got talking to a girl who must have been about 18. I immediately said I wanted to grope her breasts. I had no idea how to interact with women as people.”
Even though Jim began to have girlfriends from the age of 19, he never managed to shrug off the power of the fantasy world. “The power of pornography has continued throughout my adult life. Nothing has really measured up to the world of porn, for me. I’ve seen thousands of strangers having sex. So when I have sex, I am watching myself having sex.”
Ali says: “Pornography has made him only able to see sex one way. He has always seen sex as something that has to be performed, not felt.”
She would like to see a public debate about the effects of pornography. “Porn has been so normalised that anyone objecting to it now is just going to be laughed at. I think we need to hear again about how pornography threatens intimacy.”
“Once someone like Jim was unusual, now every boy has seen all of that. I know what it does to young minds, and now it is more and more prevalent. God knows how we can begin to challenge this. Once upon a time, kids could experiment, you know, privately, but now all the innocence is lost.”
Walter writes: For an increasing number of young people, pornography is no longer something that goes alongside sex but something that precedes sex. Before they have touched another person sexually or entered into any kind of sexual relationship, many children have seen hundreds of adult strangers having sex.
When I spoke to one teenager who is studying for his A-levels and quoted statistics to him that said that the majority of young teenagers have looked at pornography, he laughed.
“More like 100%,” he said. “It’s when you’re 13 and 14 that everyone starts looking and talking about it at school — before you’re having sex, you’re watching it.
Anyway, those are only a few of the observations that stuck out at me. The article is quite in-depth, and definitely worth a read.
9 comments:
that's an excellent article and put to words many things I've been thinking about my sexual relationship with my husband and what "I can't put my finger on" in our intimacy.
Thank you for sharing this. Sadly most media outlets have the same sort of sordid look at sex addiction or misunderstandings of addiction in general.
Gabi
Anybeth--Wasn't it great? I'm sure a lot of people can relate to that article. It's such a widespread phenomenon in our culture.
I'm going to go check it out now, Margaux. Thanks for the heads up!
Wow, Margaux, that's incredible. Thanks for sharing your find. I want to send this to my non-S-Anon friend, who thinks that watching porn is 'healthy.'
I was talking to my 11 and 13 year old boys about this the other day. How the smut that is on the internet is not the way it is supposed to be. And how it robs them of innocence. My 13 year old has a girl at his school who is 13 and pregnant. FOR THE SECOND TIME.
Misery Marketing--I think it's awesome that you can be so open with your sons, and I think it's a huge step in getting kids to think and question what they might be seeing. I would guess that a lot of parents have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy when it comes to porn.
What you shared about the 13 year old girl, sadly, doesn't surprise me. A few years ago, a friend of mine told me that his little sister, who was 12 at the time, boasted to him about her sexual conquests. We were both like, "What?!" When I was 12, sex was the furthest thing from my actual experience.
It makes me sad to think of adding all that pressure...I can't imagine going into sex that way...When I was 13 I was just worried about being a good kisser on my future first kiss!
Thanks for posting this, Margaux. While sex addiction is excrutiating on relationships at any age, it is not a surprise to me that more and more young people aren't getting married until they are nearly 30. They are so overstimulated by free exposure to every form of sex imaginable in their teens and 20s that the idea of intimacy is a very foggy concept.
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