The Men that say NO to Porn
Description
Matt is a handsome, personable doctor aged 36. He grew up in suburban Derby, with middle class parents who scrimped and saved and sent him to a local private school.
He is one of a growing number of men that has given up pornography.
Matt’s first experience with porn came when it became easy to access via a BlackBerry, “I was 14 and we had dial-up internet, no smartphones.” Sites like Pornhub were free and easily available. But a few years after he started using porn, he began to feel he was doing something harmful.
Matt
He tells me he wasn't very good at maintaining long-term relationships, because he would write women off for being imperfect as soon as they fell foul of an “imaginary standard that I'd invented for them… so my twenties were about me being a bit clumsy and selfish and inconsiderate.”
Matt’s use of porn escalated to the point where it had become habitual. “I never tried to influence women to watch it with me, and my tastes never got more extreme, but it just became quite solidly entrenched.”
Then he met the love of his life. On one of their first dates, he asked if she ever watched porn, thinking she would find this edgy. But she said, “No I don’t, and neither should you.”
He started watching anti-porn activists, including me, Gail Dines, and others on YouTube.
Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality, and a number of other books on the harm of porn
He wanted to understand why he had started to feel that porn was bad for men, as well as women. Then Matt decided to stop. Since then, he has met other men who have also given up porn – not for religious reasons or because they are anti-sex, but because they recognise the harm it does both to women, and to themselves.
More than half of those who start using porn before they reach their teens will experience erectile dysfunction as young men. Shockingly, boys as young as eight are accessing hardcore images on their smartphones, egged on by schoolfriends.
In Edinburgh last month I attended a conference organised by the women-only sexual assault centre, Beira’s Place*, founded and funded by JK Rowling, on the impact of internet pornography, including rising levels of sexual violence towards young women.
One of the speakers is Michael Conroy, 57, the director of Men At Work, an organisation which delivers professional training in supporting the healthy personal development of boys and young men.
Michael Conroy
If attendees disclose that they’ve been watching pornography, they are given the chance to talk about it openly without stigma or shame. Some disclose their ambivalence. One boy, having watched an asphyxiation porn film with his school friends during break, asked Michael, “Sir, do I have to choke her?”.
Michael has learned how to provide boys with the tools they need to acknowledge the reality of porn and its harms – without suggesting to them that sexual feelings are shameful or wrong.
I also meet Sam* at the conference, a 20-year-old who has sworn off ever using porn again. “I became so addicted to it I was watching it on the packed bus, and I was so humiliated when a woman who looked like my grandma started shouting at me, calling me ‘disgusting’. That was the very last time I ever looked at porn.”
Sam was introduced to porn aged 11, by his football coach who used it as a grooming tactic. “He showed me some pretty hard-core stuff, often on a weekly basis, and when I became sexually aroused, which I had no control over, he abused me.”
