"Free" Porn?

Assessment questionnaires aimed at identifying the consequences of sexual compulsion/addiction invariably ask "How much money do you spend on your habit?"

When the person responding is a porn addict/compulsive the answer is often zero dollars, reporting that their porn is of the "free" variety, found copiously all over the Internet. Being able to answer this assessment question with a gleeful $0.00, they don't consider the real "costs" of their habit. They often feel superior to other men who get caught up in the high expense of escort services, virtual sex, massage parlors, strip clubs, etc. Like gloating about sneaking in the back door of a strip club without paying the cover charge that the other men have to pay, these users have an strikingly adolescent short-sightedness to their free porn, their “savings.”

Why? Well, free porn just.....isn't. Let's take a look at some of the real costs.

When any activity one engages in "occasionally" slips over the frequency line and starts eating up more and more of the user's time, which is precisely what happens with many, many porn users (whether or not he's aware of it yet or not), the hard-to-hear truth is that they are well on their way to compulsion/addiction. Time being one of those precious resources there's just not enough of in most people's lives, the porn user's increasing hours at the computer means that time online is taking a big bite out of his time pie. He's likely neglecting something else, most likely many things: time spent with his children,  if they're young: reading to them, helping with their homework, simply being with them, which is so important to a child's sense of being loved and cared for. Teenagers, too, are in great need of high-level time spent with a parent.

Time spent with one's partner is also curtailed in the interest of "working late" or being online in the den behind closed doors. Something I hear often from partners is that they can often feel guilt about secretly being angry. Why are they angry?  Because they feel time-deprived of their loved one, and to stave off nasty conflicts within themselves, they tell themselves that instead, they should be proud of their partner and grateful that they're working overtime, making their life together better. (Note: this is also a big reason for the outrage a partner goes through when they find out they've been duped and the time their partner spent in "the den" was spent viewing porn, not working towards making a better life together)

When a lot of time is spent lost in porn-land it equals time lost that could have been spent pursuing leads for work, networking, research and other career-enhancing activity. A man who's looking forward to getting lost in the euphoric buzz of time spent on porn sites is not concerned with career, time with family and a beloved partner, nor is he thinking about higher matters like contributing something back to his community, nor attending to his spiritual life by meditating, prayer, attendance at a spiritual center, or helping mentor or sponsor others who are newer to the spiritual path. In fact, nothing is as important to the sexual compulsive as planning to act on the urge to indulge in their "habit". Everything, and I do mean everything else falls by the wayside.

At this point, I've often been asked defensively, "What difference does it make if I wanted to watch a few hours of TV, but instead, I prefer to surf porn? Either way, I'm trying to zone out and forget about my day and my problems for awhile. What I do with my downtime should be my business".

Sure. It sounds good from here. So, let's grant that the playing field is level when it comes to "killing time": hours lost are hours lost no matter how you lose them. However, the real problem with pornography are its many insidiously negative side-effects. One of the most seriously damaging is that it shuts down a man's relational circuits which directly affects his primary relationship in often devastating ways. If he's not in a relationship, watch him look at enough porn and see him care less and less about the lack of real relationship, increasingly preferring the fantasy world online to the real world of real people who might actually enhance his life. And by the way, I'm not just referring to primary relationships with a significant other, I'm referring to ANY relationship, including with family or friends. While TV can also become addictive for zoning out, it doesn't generally turn a man's relational circuits off. It doesn't hijack his entire hormonal circuitry, rendering him increasingly disengaged and uncaring about his crucially important relationships. Unlike porn,  regular TV doesn't cause him to feel the urge to sexually relieve himself, often depriving his partner and leaving her sexually confused, frustrated, feeling rejected and/ or abandoned.

An even more devastating consequence of compulsive porn use is that it usually escalates to other, more "progressed" acting out behaviors. The many pop-up ads sponsoring the "free" porn sites use aggressive marketing techniques to tempt viewers to go further than simply viewing, urging him to engage in virtual sex, or actual sex via adult hook-up sites or escort services. Infidelity, especially of the non-intimate variety that paid-for sex entails, is highly addictive because of its supposed "carefree" quality. Porn implants the erroneous  notions that: "Look but don't touch"....shouldn't apply to you, because you're entitled to have it all! Why not? Life is short! Live it to the fullest and to hell with anyone else who has a problem with it! We'll even help you keep your secrets safe from your wife by offering you discreet billing for our adult services!" After being bombarded repeatedly by these ads and their messages, it's no wonder that the statistics are so high on porn progressing to activities which cross "the skin line". And the amazing thing about cheating is that after the first time you do it, the guilt begins to decrease with every time you do it, until it feels like it's just a part of your life. Necessary. Because, you know, you deserve it, and after all, your wife's a nag, men need variety after all, etc. etc. The rationales start moving into the real estate your values once occupied.

I don't know about anyone else, but the possibility of bringing home an STD doesn't feel very "free" to me at all. If you're in a partnership, you'd also be endangering the welfare and life of your partner by exposing her to them. Let's hope it goes without saying that that's not something to take lightly at all. The additional possibility of impregnating someone you're having a "carefree" relationship with, who you thought was being careful, does not feel free to me. It feels like the exact opposite: imprisonment!

But one of the hugest costs of "free" porn is that once it becomes a compulsion, you are in for one expensive ride! The nature of addiction is that it gobbles up your life one bit at a time while you're not looking, but tricks you into thinking you've got everything under control. Eventually, if you're lucky, you realize the wreck that's become your life has you as its' common denominator and that you've become enslaved to your wish-fulfillment machine, the computer. I've never met anyone who could escape that trap all by himself, and I've never met anyone who didn't almost die trying!  For the ones who do get sick of the pain, smarten up and humbly realize they need help, they find themselves facing very costly therapy. Did you realize that recovery from sex addiction takes anywhere from 3-5 years? True, 12-step recovery is free, however for sex addiction, it's also strongly recommended that one work with a specially-trained therapist and those don't come cheaply. There is no quick fix for this condition if one intends to truly master recovery from it forever. Getting deep into the roots of how and why compulsion took hold of one is a very costly therapeutic endeavor indeed.

And we haven't even talked yet about the cost of therapy for healing one's marriage or partnership, should one be lucky enough to have a partner who sticks it out with the compulsive/addict. Add in separate therapy costs for one's partner who is likely deeply traumatized not just by one's compulsion but by all the lying that went to cover it up. Add in the costs of divorce if it comes to that, and if not, a therapeutic separation is very often prescribed by the therapist while the sexual compulsive is doing their early recovery work. That means living expenses on two separate living spaces.

And we haven't even talked about the cost in terms of wreckage to the human hearts and spirits involved in this pernicious addiction. We'll save that for another blog-time.  For now, let's get real about just how un-free "free" porn truly is, should it become your favorite new activity. And with an increasingly aggressive industry behind pushing it, chances are high that it just might become that.

So perhaps the question should be “How much of your potential life is spent on porn usage? Your marriage? Your friendships? Your sleep? Your creativity? That is an expensive “free,” my friend.

Go ahead.  Call me a buzz-kill.  But I learned this one the hard way.  And I prefer to approach free, shiny, new things with deeply suppressed downsides with a mighty: Caveat Emptor!
—Lili