I have heard pornography be described as drinking water, that is, salt water. Salt water makes you thistier and thistier. This is true of any addiction as well as one’s tendency towards pornography whether you consider yourself addicted or not. So why keep returning? Why do we, like a dog, return to our vomit? Why do we keep going back regardless of the consequences? Why do we continue to rationalize and ignore the truth?
Well, it is exciting, thrilling, exhilerating, tantilizing, even energizing while at the same time draining us of our energy, passion, and nullifying our senses encouraging us to go for more and more to achieve the same level of excitement or “high.” And immediately after, maybe even during the ultimate climax or orgasm, we feel an immense amount of pain, shame, guilt, and embarrassment. It is so consuming that everything else falls away, the important along with the un-important. We lose track of time, like a video gamer playing online games for hours on end thinking that they were there for only minutes. We lose control of our senses failing to notice people around us, people coming and going, etc. It is equivalent to a chemical high (which some researchers believe that a sexual high contains a natural chemical high) and the ultimate buzz or state of drunkenness. All life’s problems are remiss and gone if only briefly.
Furthermore, while physical sex with others whether a prostitute or an affair, there is another physical person involved who has something at stake whether it’s emotion or money. Instead online pornography or cybersex fully allows the user to completely objectify the other person, where this could not fully happen before. Now with computer generated pictures, viritual people, virtual rooms, virtual sex, and chatting, one can rationalize that the person does not exist (and even in some cases they don’t!).
Even beyond this, cybersex and online pornography is a way out of the guilt, shame, and embarrassment. It is cyclical! It’s its own solution. It also serves as a punishment and reward system for the person too.
So why do we keep returning? It’s so simple, yet complex at the same time. Simpy put, it’s the excitement and the chemical dependency. Yet it is also the cyclical process: preoccupation or entertainment of sexual thoughts, the ritualization or the habitual process, the sexual experience or acting out (sexual cumpulsivity), and finally the shame/despair/guilt. Each of these “steps” may or maynot have their own cycle that needs to be broken depending on the person.
