Pornography Should be Banned Because It is Sexual Exploitation of Men

December 13, 2019

#SlayDemonsKing

For whatever reason, there has been a huge debate raging on Twitter and various other platforms about whether pornography should be banned.

Obviously, I believe it should be. I recently wrote a long piece about the effects of pornography and masturbation on men’s bodies and psyches.

However, in witnessing these arguments, I am seeing a lot of people on my side of the issue making very poor arguments. In particular, some people are saying that pornography should be banned in order to rescue the girls involved in the industry. This is a weak, pathetic argument.

Arguments against pornography should be entirely based on what it does to the men who are exploited by it, rather than claiming that the women who go and willingly partake in it for money are being “exploited.”

Sex Trafficking? Really?

The claim that there is “sex trafficking” involved appears to simply be false on the face of it. Obviously, there are thousands upon thousands of girls who are willing to take cash to have sex on video, so what would be the point of engaging in illegal activity?

If you look at the actual claims of “sex trafficking,” they are using the term so loosely, and so inappropriately, that it is if they are discussing a kind of metaphorical sex trafficking. A high-profile case involving the website “GirlsDoPorn,” reported on in the New York Times in October of this year, explains that pornographers were charged by the feds with “sex trafficking” for “tricking” the girls into thinking the videos wouldn’t be posted online.

However, the girls signed contracts saying the videos could be used anywhere, and literally recorded statements saying they were not under duress and agree to the footage being used anywhere – and the feds admit they have these contracts and videos. None of the girls are claiming that any form of physical force was used.

So ultimately, the claim of “sex trafficking” comes down to “they played mind tricks on the girls which caused them to voluntarily do things against their will.”

Virtually All Decisions Women Make are Bad Decisions

Does being in pornography psychologically damage women? I would assume so. But all kinds of things women do damage them physically and psychologically. I do not believe that women should have the legal right to make their own decisions, because they will, almost every single time, make very bad decisions, which harm themselves and others.

If women were not making the decision to be involved in pornography, they would be making other horrible life decisions. So the premise of “outlaw pornography because it hurts the women involved in it” becomes “outlaw a thing that enables women to make bad decisions.” If we’re going to go full-Socrates here, we would then be asking why it is we don’t ban everything that enables women to make bad decisions. And you would then have a very long list of things that need to be banned.

For example:

• Alcohol
• Fast food
• Tattoo parlors
• Cellphones
• Credit cards
• Loans
• Ice cream
• Pre-marital sex
• Birth control
• Divorce
• Going outside at night
• Going outside during the day
• Voting
• Sharp objects
• The entire internet
• Cats
• All professional employment
• Cars

And many, many other things. Again, if you put a woman in any situation where she is given a decision to make, she will almost always make the one that is the most harmful to herself, to those around her and to random people she doesn’t even know.

Of course, it is easy to come to the conclusion that women simply should not be allowed by society to make their own decisions, and should be legal wards of their fathers and then of their husbands. I would be so bold as to say that it is simply objective fact that our society will be destroyed if we do not severely regulate the decision-making privileges of women.

But as you can see, this goes far outside of the context of the discussion of the legal status of pornographic materials.

I fully understand that there is a sharp reflexive mechanism in the male psyche to protect women, and those who are using the “women are being exploited” argument are appealing to that instinct, which is a key component of evolutionary psychology. However, the biggest danger a woman faces is her own decision-making. If we want to protect women, we have to remove their ability to make decisions, not go around cleaning up every single mess they make.

Removing the decision-making privileges of women would immediately end the pornography industry, because no father or husband is going to permit a female under his care to engage in this, but that is not the discussion.

Men are the Ones Being Exploited

These women are not being “exploited” by pornographers in any terms other than those of Marxism, where labor working for capital is always a form of exploitation. I don’t think that is where any anti-pornography advocates want to go. They are signing contracts, they are willingly doing the sex, they are getting paid the money.

Arguably, the pornographers are exploiting the legally-enshrined rights of women to make decisions. Again, we are entering into a much larger political and philosophical discussion about the role of women in society. It is very difficult to argue that they are exploiting the individual women who answer ads to be in these pornographic films.

Men, on the other hand, are clearly being exploited by the pornographic industry. They are not being paid to view pornography. Often they are paying for it, and if they are not, they are viewing ads which produce a profit for the pornographers. This is an addictive substance, that men are exposed to at a young age, and then they are drained by lifelong addiction.

If you are a millennial, then you were, statistically, first exposed to pornography between the ages of 11 and 13, and that exposure was likely accidental, according to the American Psychiatric Association.

In a 2012 article about “how to talk to your kids about pornography,” the New York Times states that accidental exposure to pornography is inevitable for children:

There is no set script, and no predictable moment for the conversation. It can happen at as early an age as 6 or 7, when a child may not yet understand the basic mechanics of sex. It is typically set off by a child’s accidental wanderings online or the deliberate searches of a curious teenager on a smartphone, laptop, tablet or one of the other devices that have made it nearly impossible to grow up without encountering sexually explicit material. Even a quick Twitter or Facebook search reveals that older students report seeing pornography on others’ laptops or phones in class, usually with an “OMG” attached.

As Elizabeth Schroeder, the executive director of Answer, a national sex-education organization based at Rutgers University, said: “Your child is going to look at porn at some point. It’s inevitable.”

You probably remember the first time you saw pornography. You were shocked, scandalized, and highly intrigued. There is a shame about it, but there is also a strong desire to see more. And, if you are going through puberty, you will get an erection upon viewing it.

This is because the male body’s natural response to seeing a naked, sexualized woman is to prepare to have sex with her, because this is how we reproduce. As I often point out, there is no ability for the subconscious mind to understand what digital images are. If you are seeing something in front of you, your subconscious mind registers that it is happening in front of you. But it isn’t happening in front of you, and you cannot have sex with the woman, so the urge to have sex with her is translated into an urge to masturbate.

Masturbation to ejaculation while watching pornography is satisfying, because it releases large amounts of dopamine into the brain, and it is extremely addictive. After doing it the first time, most people develop lifelong internet pornography addictions that can only be broken through sheer will.

This process is the definition of exploitation.

Imagine if someone injected you with heroin, without your consent. You would feel great, because like masturbation, heroin dumps dopamine into your brain. Also like masturbation, heroin is extremely addictive. Then imagine that the person who injected you told you you could have unlimited amounts of heroin, for the rest of your life, in exchange for watching advertisements or paying $19.99 per month.

This is fundamentally the exact same situation.

In fact, pornography forms the same type of addiction pathways in the brain as heroin.

The pornographic industry is engaged in the systematic sexual exploitation of men for a profit.

Pornography Crushes Your Soul

Contrary to what many in academia have claimed, pornography is not healthy to consume.

Here are several items to consider:

• Frequent masturbation lowers testosterone utilization
• Three weeks of abstinence increases testosterone levels
• Masturbation is associated with lower psychological health and reproductive well-being
• Sperm contains compounds that prolong lifespan, fight cancer & heart disease
• Masturbation decreases dopamine
• Watching porn reduces gray matter in prefrontal cortex
• Porn addiction has similar mechanism with substance addiction
• Making sperm shortens lifespan of male worms
• Masturbating 3 days in a row decreases sperm count by 20%
• Increasing ejaculation frequency decreases sperm count significantly
• Prevalence of erectile dysfunction doubled between 2004 and 2013
• Pornography consumption associated with mental health issues

Pornography can wreck your life like heroin or any other drug wrecks your life. It is simply that the side effects are more subtle, and harder to link to the addiction.

You may not know that your sluggishness, your lack of motivation, your depression, your social anxiety, or any of the other problems that are associated with pornography addiction are linked to this pathological behavior.

Because after all, you’ve been told that this addiction is normal and that it is in fact healthy. Schools and universities teach that. This is another level of exploitation. Imagine if heroin addicts were told that doing heroin is healthy.

What’s perhaps most shocking is that pornography is literally an attack on your soul. The more you watch it, the less likely you are to believe in God.

Samuel Perry of the University of Oklahoma and George Hayward of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill conducted a study on this.

Here is the abstract:

Pornography has become increasingly accessible in the United States, and particularly for younger Americans. While some research considers how pornography use affects the sexual and psychological health of adolescents and emerging adults, sociologists have given little attention to how viewing pornography may shape young Americans’ connection to key social and cultural institutions, like religion. This article examines whether viewing pornography may actually have a secularizing effect, reducing young Americans’ personal religiosity over time. To test for this, we use data from three waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion. Fixed-effects regression models show that more frequent pornography viewing diminishes religious service attendance, importance of religious faith, prayer frequency, and perceived closeness to God, while increasing religious doubts. These effects hold regardless of gender. The effects of viewing pornography on importance of faith, closeness to God, and religious doubts are stronger for teenagers compared to emerging adults. In light of the rapidly growing availability and acceptance of pornography for young Americans, our findings suggest that scholars must consider how increasingly pervasive pornography consumption may shape both the religious lives of young adults and also the future landscape of American religion more broadly.

Read the entire study at the National Institutes for Health.

Along with the harrowing spiritual implications of the fact that pornography literally removes a belief in God, this is also more anti-natalism. Pornography on its own decreases the drive to procreate, and because a belief in God is a factor highly associated with successful reproduction, the fact that pornography removes that compounds the anti-natal effects of this material.

Pornography is evil, it is destroying men, and until now, it has barely been talked about. I am very happy to see that it is now being talked about. The discussion is long overdue.

They’re Not Going to Ban It, But the Discussion is What Matters

Presently, as a result of the liberation of women, we have innumerable men who do not have sexual partners. Under any normal circumstances, this situation would lead to an open revolt by these young men. But these are not normal circumstances. These are circumstances wherein unlimited amounts of high-definition pornography is being pumped directly into the bedrooms of these young men.

Given this fact alone – without even mentioning the widespread support among the general population for the continued supply – there is zero chance that it will be banned in any scenario that falls short of a total revolution.

However, that is not the point of the debate about whether or not it should be banned. This debate is about alerting men to the dangers of this activity. The more men we have free of an addiction to pornography, the stronger our society becomes.

Furthermore, this is a righteous cause for the right-wing to take up and fight for. Once you understand just how evil pornography is, and free yourself from it, you have a strong desire to help other men do the same. It is a very easy hot button to push. And it is very difficult for the other side to defend it without simply looking slimy.

In your arguing, do not fall into the trap of claiming that you are against pornography because of how it affects the women who appear in it. That argument is silly, it is confusing, and it is ultimately worthless because it is based on false premises. Any opponent can break that down by stating the clear fact that these women choose to engage in the pornography.

Attack the issue from the stance of how it affects boys and men, how it exploits boys and men, and how it destroys boys and men, for the profit of corporations.

Go Easy on Yourself

If you are reading this, you are most likely addicted to pornography.

A 2018 study conducted in America and Canada found that of their sample group, 98% of men reported having viewed pornography in the last 6 months, and 80% had viewed it in the last week.

So this is not something you are alone in. I am loath to say “you shouldn’t be ashamed,” because really, you should be ashamed. This is a vile and disgusting crime against your own body that you are engaging in.

However, I will say that this is not your fault, as an individual. Something that virtually 100% of men are involved in can’t possibly be something that is your fault. This is a trap that has been set for men, and it works nearly 100% of the time because of the primal mechanisms that it exploits.

You should not be too hard on yourself about this. Understand that you are a victim.

Although it needs to be elaborated on, because pornography usage is inversely correlated with religiosity and a connection to God, the reverse also must be true: a stronger connection to God will lead to an ability to resist pornography. As you become closer to God, you will begin to understand, in your heart and in your mind, that when you die, you will sit before the throne of God and He will judge you for what you have done on this earth.

You are not likely to be judged for having fallen into pornography addiction, because again, we all have. But you will be judged for your ability to come up out of that vile state, to rise and to become something better.

Go with humility before God, and ask that Jesus Christ and his angels be with you, and help you to resist this temptation. Tell God who it is you want to be. Tell him that you wish to serve Him, and that you want to make yourself stronger so that you may serve Him better.

Furthermore, on the most practical level, I have to assume that all of you reading this probably want to have higher testosterone, to have higher energy, to be more socially and professionally confident, to feel more at ease with yourself, to be more creative and to reduce negative thoughts. Disconnecting from pornography is perhaps the single most straightforward way to make yourself into a better, stronger man.

Avoid triggers. Don’t go to websites which you know post pornographic imagery, which might trigger you. Especially in the early days of recovery.

If you have a pattern of pornography usage – a certain time of day when you do it – then schedule something for that time slot. Go out for a coffee, go to the gym, or even play a video game, if that works for you.

If you relapse, don’t consider it the end of the world. Don’t say “well, I’ve already broken my no-fap streak, so I might as well just start masturbating again.” Count the days you didn’t do it as a win, and don’t act like you’re “starting all over again” because you relapsed. If you are used to masturbating every day, and you make it 9 days without masturbating and then relapse, consider that you’ve masturbated 90% less than you did before.

Physical activity is a winning strategy. Get to the gym. Focus on winning at the gym. And realize that masturbation will negatively affect your testosterone, and so makes you weaker.

Stay strong. And help each other. As shameful as it may be, it is something most everyone is doing, and you should be able to talk to your close friends about your struggles with this habit. Support from other men will help you, as you work together to overcome this evil which has wrapped itself around all of our souls.

With everything you do, work to become a man that the boy you once were would stand in awe of.