Introduction

I don’t like alcohol. I’ve never used drugs. I don’t like tobacco. That’s not my thing. My thing is porn.

—Alex

wenty-five years ago, we’d never have written a book on por­nography. Back in the 1980s when our practices treating sex, intimacy, and relationship problems were just getting started, we truthfully weren’t that concerned about pornography. Like many others in our field, we felt that while porn was often crude and degrad­ing, most of it was essentially harmless. In fact, when we would go to sex therapy trainings and read journals and materials in the field, it was often suggested that x-rated videos and pornographic stories were something we could recommend to our clients to help them become more intimate with their partners.

But our view on pornography began to change in the mid-1990s. It was then that we started seeing a troubling increase in the number of cli­ents coming to us with porn-related problems that were interfering with their ability to maintain healthy relationships. It soon became clear how easily sexual interests and desires could be twisted by pornography, away from real intimacy, and toward technological devices, people, and situa­tions that didn’t actually exist. Porn’s emphasis had moved from helping couples become more sexually intimate with each other to arousing the user to have a sexual relationship with it.

That’s an important distinction: unlike many early erotic videos, magazines, and books that were produced to help spice up lovemaking

for couples, porn began to offer itself as the object of desire. Today’s porn teaches users to think only about body parts and specific sexual actions, robbing them of the ability to experience romance, passion, and emo­tional and physical closeness with a real partner. It competes with partners as a sexual outlet.