In connection with my photography work, I’ve happened across an increasing number of discussions about the need for metrics to impose more of a “truth in advertising” for images of people that have been re-touched.
My wife often refers to a true story from a women in one of my divorce support groups. The woman’s husband complained that she didn’t “look like Pamela Anderson.”
To which my wife says: “No woman does. Not even Pamela Anderson.” Such is our post-Photoshop world.
Scripture is replete with prohibitions instructing husbands not to look elsewhere, of course.
Exodus 20:17 includes words about not coveting “your neighbor’s wife.” Jesus equates look with deed in Matthew 5:28.
But such cautions mean more than simply a laundry list of thou shalt nots. Here, as always, I note and marvel at the reality of God’s love as expressed through His direction in The Bible. The Ten Commandments aren’t there to spoil our fun; they were carved in stone to protect us.
Here’s another example of how science backs that up.
Last summer, Psychology Today ran a feature titled, “Porn-Induced Sexual Dysfunction Is a Growing Problem,” by Marnia Robinson. Pornography first victimizes the one who gazes upon it.
Ms Robinson begins with the fact that pornography has been around for a long time. And it’s that very fact that makes it easy to miss as potential causation in other personal and societal dysfunctions. Based on my wife’s Pamela Anderson comment, I’d say divorce. Certainly undermining relationships through the notion that what one has isn’t as good as it could be, based on what appears to be available elsewhere. Marnia Robinson says it hurts the person, as an individual.
Why?
Because it is both easier to “create” perfect images, and those perfect images are increasingly ubiquitous. Barriers to consumption have been lowered to effective non-existence. Authorities and role models aren’t there to even suggest pornography should be avoided. Nor that there are, like in almost everything we do, any consequences whatsoever.
To wit:
… a never-ending stream of dopamine spikes. Today’s users can force its release by watching porn in multiple windows, searching endlessly, fast-forwarding to the bits they find hottest, switching to live sex chat, viewing constant novelty, firing up their mirror neurons with video action and cam-2-cam, or escalating to extreme genres and anxiety-producing material…. Overstimulation of the reward circuitry in the brain is a very real possibility today.
Many men don’t realize their brain’s sensitivity is declining toward normal sex because Internet erotica delivers endless dopamine hits — making erection and climax possible where normal encounters would not. When they try to have actual intercourse and cannot, they understandably panic.
The brain changes causing porn-induced erectile dysfunction arise from actual physical addiction processes (among them, numbing of the pleasure response of the brain)….
The science of how pornography can literally re-wire one’s brain. As the article points out, this sort of dysfunction can be reversed. But that often means a time-consuming, uncomfortable process.
So it’s important for both husbands and wives to be aware of this as they work through intimacy challenges in their marriages. Pornography is not a benign choice.
Nor is divorce likely to result in a “real” relationship where either party “looks like those people do on magazine covers.”
Tags: divorce, erectile dysfunction, images, internet, lust, masturbation, pornography, sex, sexual addiction, sexual performance
