Another reason many young people develop an ongoing involvement with porn is that they discover it can help them escape from the stress of their daily lives. Like reading, television, and video games, pornography can beam us out of our own life and into one where we don’t have boring homework, a mom nagging us to clean up our room, friends who spread rumors about us, and someone we have a crush on who doesn’t seem to know we’re alive.
But porn is not limited to just serving as a handy distraction, a readymade form of entertainment and amusement like television. Because it has powerful drug-like properties and the ability to facilitate a mind — and body-altering sexual response, kids in situations in which they feel powerless, neglected, afraid, abandoned, humiliated, attacked, or betrayed on a regular basis and for extended periods of time can easily find themselves becoming mesmerized or obsessed with pornography. If you grew up in a family with alcohol, drug, sexual abuse, or anger issues, for example, you may have found an even stronger reason to lose yourself in porn.
Remember Brad’s experience the summer he and his brother got heavily involved with porn? To some extent Brad’s behavior was triggered by feeling upset about having to spend his summer break stuck at home working in the yard and garden. Brad resented being left alone and not being able to have the freedom to do other things, such as hang out with friends, play baseball, and even spend time with his parents on a vacation. Watching porn videos provided a way to deal with his anger and resentment toward his parents. Porn was his ticket to turning an uncomfortable, boring summer experience into something exciting that he looked forward to. Quite a transformation, given that Brad and his brother watched the same video recording all summer long.
No matter how their childhood challenges varied, we kept hearing the comment that porn was a form of childhood stress management. For example, Kirk Franklin, a Grammy award-winning gospel singer, shared on television that he developed a childhood obsession with porn in large part due to having been abandoned by both of his parents at an early age. As a young boy, Kirk felt rejected and insecure and turned to pornographic magazines and videos for “company.”
For Ethan, a forty-year-old architect, looking at and masturbating to pornography became a way he coped with the chronic anxiety and fear he felt living with an alcoholic father who frequently flew into angry rages. “I was a very anxious and insecure child. My dad was a bully who frightened me. I discovered early that I could find escape and comfort in pornography. It was exciting and it calmed me. Starting when I was seven years old I’d steal porn magazines from my parents’ room and then read them in my room lying across my bed. I had my first orgasm while doing that when I was nine. I’d go through the magazines repeatedly to soothe myself when the stress in the family was high.”
Justin used porn to deal with his own anger as a child growing up in a family that lacked emotional closeness. He told us how he used pornography like a drug to help him deal with his problems. “I was a very unhappy and angry kid. I used to pound on my brothers all the time. Once I actually tried to strangle one of my brothers and was stopped by an uncle who ran into the house and pulled me off him. Pornography was like a drug. I had a hard time with impulse control. The magazines gave me something to obsess over. The fantasies I’d weave about the women in the pictures gave me a sense of artificial intimacy that helped me to control my anger. By the time I was a teenager, I was masturbating to pornography two to four times a day.”
Laura, a thirty-five-year-old businesswoman, began using pornography regularly when she was eleven years old to deal with the stress of having been sexually abused. “My two older brothers got into my dad’s pornography. They showed me the pictures and read me the stories, and then did to me what they had seen and heard. I became their learning tool. It may sound strange but later on I would sneak into their rooms and look through the magazines by myself. I developed a fascination with stories of women who felt threatened in sex. I had a nightly routine of masturbating to the porn. It gave me an escape from the reality of what my brothers were doing to me and enabled me to get to sleep. I used pornography this way even after they stopped abusing me.”
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t is clear from the stories in this chapter that there are many compelling reasons we can get involved with pornography when we are young. Porn can start out as something novel we are curious about and end up as something we use to connect with others, or feel we need regularly to medicate our stresses and help us cope with upsetting experiences and feelings. Although some kids leave behind their early involvement with porn as they grow up and form real relationships, as we shall see in the next chapter, too often early childhood experiences with porn contaminate their lives for decades to come.
Like most kids who get involved with porn, your initial exposure to porn probably wasn’t motivated as a way to get sexual needs met, although it has probably ended up there. Sadly, when children are exposed to porn early in life, it tends to make them prematurely interested and active in sex. In fact, many of the people we interviewed told us that porn became their first ongoing sexual relationship. And our first sexual relationship usually has a powerful, long-lasting effect on our psyche and our sexuality.