Despite the 18+ warning before entering a porn site, literally, every person we know started watching porn much before we were 18 or adults. For most of us, it is our first experience at anything profoundly sexual and hence, we grow up without any sex education assuming what happens in porn must be it.
Some of us grow out of it, but a lot of us don’t. So if you still watch porn every day, here are a few Disadvantages of porn you should be aware of, things that might already be affecting you.
1. It affects your sex life by encouring personal gratification.
Delayed gratification is a very important skill to have while engaging in sexual activities with a partner. It’s something you train your mind to control. It takes discipline and concentration. But when you watch porn, you subconsciously train your mind to quickly find things that are pleasurable to you. So, more often than not, it leads to disappointing sex life.
2. It makes you lower your standards sexually.
Which is fine as long as it’s healthy but more often than not, it isn’t. While you spend hours browsing porn, your brain trains itself to develop certain expectations of what sex looks like. It’s a vicious rabbit hole that you don’t want to fall into.
3. Porn can result in erectile dysfunction.
Frequently watching porn like browsing through Netflix for genres you want to discover ends up becoming an addiction where you can only get aroused by certain kinds of sexual incidents, most of which are just your wildest imagination without a fraction of reality in them.
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4. Porn creates unreal expectations about sex, and what a human body is supposed to look like.
Your private parts or your partner’s aren’t meant to look like clean polished runways! Of course, you can have preferences and you should do your best to look the way you want to look but unless you are a professional, you will very rarely have success looking like pornstars.
People have stretch marks, razor burns among other things. Vaginas don’t always look like they are about to star in a Fair & Lovely ad either. If you engage in sexual encounters expecting what you see in porn, you will not only get disappointed but end up upsetting your partner. Not to forget low self-esteem issues.
5. Since most of porn is based on male fantasies, you will end up watching a lot of deviant stuff, which could make you sexualise people you really shouldn’t.
Porn also changes your definition of consent. Your step-mom, step-sister, teacher, colleague, boss, assistant etc don’t want you to sexualise them. It’s uncivilised, creepy and acting on it would be considered sexual assault.
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6. Watching too much porn encourages social isolation.
Porn demands isolation and secrecy. Watching too much of it can make you carry that shame into the real world, often leading to depression, which makes you shrink back into a shell and thus the cycle continues.
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7. It can blur the lines between reality and fiction through supernormal stimulus
Back in the day, a porn magazine would not provide you with the same stimulus as the real thing. But internet porn changes that. Research confirms that anticipation of reward and novelty amplify one another to increase excitement and rewire the reward circuitry of the brain. This makes you want to take it a notch higher, more hardcore maybe, something different, just to get your brain to send a blast of dopamine. Sooner than later, it changes your perception of reality.
Porn addiction like any other addiction is real and it affects you in worse ways than you can fathom. The first step to getting rid of it is to acknowledge that you have it. It’s difficult and you will feel guilty and shame. But that’s okay. Talk to someone you trust. Get professional help, if need be.
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