How Much Porn Is Too Much Porn?

This guest article from Psych Central was written by Robert Weiss, LCSW, CSAT-S

Until 1994, if you wanted to view pornography, you had to get dressed, get in your car, drive to a seedy shop in a bad part of town and fork over hard-earned cash for an overpriced magazine ... all the while hoping not to be seen by the neighbor's teenage kid, your boss, the police or your spouse. Today, thanks to streaming video over the Internet and smart-phones, finding porn doesn't even require getting out of bed. In the digital age, access to stimulating sexual imagery of every ilk imaginable is virtually unlimited and easily and instantly downloaded. And most often it's free.

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For the average person, porn provides a quick and convenient means to a pleasurable end, typically turned to when an emotional or a close physical connection is either not available or not desired. However, current research tells us that for approximately 5 to 8 percent of the adult population, porn use can evolve into an addictive behavior, quickly escalating from a pleasurable distraction to a behavioral compulsion that leads to depression, isolation, loneliness, shame and negative life consequences. I Caught My Husband Looking At Porn! What Do I Do?

As a licensed sexual addiction treatment expert with over 20 years experience in the field, I deal with this challenged group of individuals every day and stand witness to the endless ways that readily available cyber-porn can, for some, ruin intimate relationships, family life, self-esteem and careers.

Consider Mel, a single 26-year-old structural engineer. After graduating a local college, Mel was offered a great job in a major city several hundred miles from the small town in which he grew up. He excelled at his work, earned a quick promotion and even bought his own small condo. As bright as his life appeared on the outside, Mel felt deeply lonely. Why Porn Is Like Junk Food

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After all, he didn't know anyone in his new city. His new life circumstances served to amplify uncomfortable emotions he had always experienced, but never expressed—feelings of deep inner loneliness and unmet longing. Mel found that after a long workday, the quickest way to ease his uncomfortable feelings was to turn on the computer. Soon he was immersed in a daily routine of work followed by long evenings in front of his computer monitor searching for porn.

He would often spend four or five hours a night viewing and masturbating to increasingly more intense content. Over the course of several months, his porn use escalated to material he had never thought he would view, including extreme S/M and adolescent pornography. Eventually, he started viewing porn and masturbating during lunch breaks and after hours at work. Not surprisingly, one of his female coworkers inadvertently saw what he was doing, reported it and he was immediately fired. The Myth Of Internet Sexual Privacy