All names are fictitious to protect the privacy of the families I work with.
Lucas is 17. His parents reached out to my agency in search of a Sober Companion because Lucas threatened them and turned violent every time they tried to limit his screen time on his phone and laptop. He was addicted to pornography which he consumed for hours, day and night. Two weeks into working with Lucas and seeking to implement structure and top line behaviors in his life, I confiscated both of his devices and locked them in a safe1. When I walked down from their upstairs guest bedroom where I slept and left the safe, Lucas had his 47-year-old mother in a headlock with a knife to her throat.
Hassan and Bridgette were set to be married on the weekend of July 4th in Malibu. Jessica caught her fiance of 10 months using pornography for the fourth time in their two-year relationship a week before the big day. She called off the marriage and moved out. Despondent and suicidal, Hassan contacted me to help guide him through withdrawal from a powerful drug that impacts an estimated 40 million Americans – pornography.
Francisco is a 22-year-old successful model. He has landed gigs and billboards from Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing to New York City’s Time Square. He knew intrinsically that porn was draining, misdirecting and siphoning off his energy and affected his work performance. An insomniac and occasional bedwetter since he was first sexually abused by a family “friend” at nine, Franscisco scrolled through porn for hours. He told me embarrassed but curious that he was not even aroused by the merry-go-round of naked, defenseless zombies, but he was transfixed. And most importantly, numbed.
Marty was addicted to child pornography. We did an intervention at his sister’s request because the FBI was patrolling him and closing in on him. Surely 99 percent of readers have already condemned Marty for his addiction. Marty was mildly autistic. He was bullied, sexually abused and tortured as a child. No one ever cared about “the local retard.” Do you hate Marty or do you hate the sexual trauma he was reenacting?
The drug matters little; the escape itself is the fix.
I work as a Sober Companion supporting other men and teenagers through one of the most simultaneously harrowing and liberating human processes – Withdrawal. The majority of withdrawals I assist in are from benzos, alcohol, opioids and other drugs. But increasingly, the United States is waking up to an addiction that has been on the rise since the advent of the internet and social media age and has destroyed untold lives and relationships – pornography.
Porn, in its current expression, is the exploitation of frozen images and vulnerable, dehumanized, captured, inanimate bodies. One 12-step recovery group explains pornography as participating in another’s trauma.
How do we understand and confront this modern-day plague, arguably the most global of all?
Misogyny is Big Business
This essay is not a moralistic commentary on what we should or should not watch. Porn is not the root problem. It is a symptom. Like the suicide epidemic, “random” mass shootings, more that 200 just on the first day of this year, and Black Death Porn2, pornography is part and parcel of the normalization of a general societal demoralization.
Pornography is a $100 billion dollar industry. For comparison, all social media nets $231 billion in revenue per year. Sex tourism produces $20 billion in revenue for the global overlords of Thailand, The Dominican Republic and other sex tourism neocolonies. Pornography is the most profitable manifestation of the hyper-sexualization of our society and youth.
Veteran sex workers warn about the growing trend towards rape porn and other violent porn. They recounted how porn was comparatively more “lovey dovey” in the past. One BBC study indicated that 88 percent of porn videos contain physical aggression towards women. As any addict knows, addiction is progressive. I have sponsored and worked with men who started with “soft porn” and descended into Dante’s lower rungs of porn that shows illegal material, content with underage young people, children, rape scenes and seemingly endless variations of violence, humiliation and misogyny. The porn pandemic has long been out of control. Racist fetishes like “the submissive Asian” or “spicy Latina” dominate porn menus. For many men, this reinforces their racism and misogyny and may be their only “interaction” with these demographics. For many women, they measure themselves according to the metrics of their abusers and oppressors, internalizing dominant “beauty” standards and concluding that they will never measure up.
Who Cashes in on Porn?
Porn critic Amy Leather writes: “Cable companies and distributors like Time Warner Cable in the U.S. make millions from adult video on demand and pay per view sales. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo make money from people accessing porn. So the porn industry has links to mainstream finance, media and communications businesses. It has powerful allies.”
Not satisfied with the damage done to men and teenage boys, the porn industry targets ever younger audiences through the use of Artificial Intelligence, avatars and cartoons. They strategically place advertisements on movie and videogame websites to lure more vulnerable minds into their grip.
@OnlyFans presents yet another modern form of sexual exploitation and artificial form of human connection. The $2.5 billion dollar British startup delivers cheap parasocial dopamine hits for mostly male clients and an abundance of risks for the sex workers seeking to put food on the table. Younger women or girls look up to their more-experienced peers and are forced to compete in the free market of sexual exploitation. Such videos can be leaked and later used to discriminate against women workers. The need for immediate gain and survival stares down the reality of systemic sexism and permanent consequences.
Pharmaceutical companies also cash in on the hyper-sexualization trends. Barceloneta is a small town in PR that twenty years ago produced pineapples. Today the pueblo is America’s top viagra producer. On March 27, 1998, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Pfizer’s miracle drug for limp pensises, raking in how many tens of billions of dollars in profits in the past quarter century plus? There are natural cures for Erectile Dysfunction but doctors encouraging people to study nutrition and exercise is not profitable. Dependency and addiction are.
Survival in Hostile Neoliberal Economic Terrain
Sex workers did not create the plague of unemployment, the gigification of the economy and inflation. No Brazilian or Filipino woman determined that their currency would be worth a fraction of an American or European’s money. No Honduran or Haitian woman decided that sex work could pay much more than vanishing sweatshop jobs making clothes for Western fashion behemoths like Victory Secret or Nike. Victim-blaming and victim-shaming is the capitalist art of deflecting blame from the origins of these myriad manifestations of violence against women and children.
A pathological society can only produce pathological people.
The research questions before us are not a matter of when a woman in New York City will be harassed or a child in Oakland will be traumatized. These two phenomena are inevitable under the prevailing social relations we inhabit. The relevant research questions are at what rates is this transpiring? Only the Marxist researchers will go deeper and dare to ask how we can transcend this insidious chapter of human prehistory.
Take Back Your Dopamine
What happens when the dark web and other murky corners of the internet become your sex education? There is a competitive campaign of shock and awe to get likes, with necrophilia, gore porn, bestiality and beyond at the center of the new soul harvesting. 50 percent of videos on Pornhub contain incestuous content. Like the 3-headed cerberus, the beasts of desensitization offer infinite dopamine hits, stealing any sense of self-respect and sexualizing children. All obnoxiousness is a cry for help. Our children are warning us in 1,000 ways. Spikes in autism, school shootings and other forms of addiction are our sons and daughters wailing “enough!”
Will we heed the warnings contained within their screams?
The United States of Porn promotes further isolation. It is a centerpiece of Incel culture.
The Hollywood blockbuster “Don Jon” starring Scarlett Johansson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks at a relationship interrupted by the protagonist’s addiction to porn. In the 2013 movie “Her,” Joaquin Phoenix’s character “Theodore” falls in love with a woman created from artificial intelligence on his computer. Porn is but one part of a much larger pandemic, Sex Addiction. Strip clubs, the dark web, massage parlors, sex work, sex tourism and child trafficking belong under the same umbrella of sexual exploitation and sexually acting out. Capitalism and patriarchy have taught us men to sexualize our rage, isolation, sadness, low self-esteem and trauma. Perhaps the most common male character defect and socially-sanctioned emotion, since we are not allowed to grieve and be vulnerable, is rage. Anger is the superficial facade hiding our deep-seated sadness, pain and trauma. The Old Norse word for anger is “angra,” meaning grief. Porn, in its addictive form, is but one soother we use to repress what often needs to come up from our childhoods.
Located somewhere between coffee and cocaine on the dopamine scale, a sexual release floods the brain with this bewildering chemical. According to Dopamine Nation author Dr. Anna Lembke, coffee increases dopamine flow by 50 percent, sex by 100 percent and crystal meth by 1000 percent. From the outside, colleagues, family members and friends can objectively observe addicts’ compulsive need to continue to chew on shiny razor blades, but from the skewed viewpoint of the addict, they are trapped in the quest for the next hit. Dr. Lembke’s book, well-known in recovery circles, takes up big, necessary questions related to dopamine fasting, self-binding and healthy sources of substitute dopamine for the addict experiencing “loss.”
How many of us could benefit on the life journey from dopa-mean to dopa-serene3?
Withdrawal: The War to End All Wars
Men are 543 percent more likely to be addicted to porn than women. Just in one year, there were 109,012,068,000 videos watched on Pornhub, that is enough for every human being to have watched 4 porn videos. “Porn addicts” collectively consumed over 5,824,699,200 hours of porn just on Pornhub in that same year. These were 6 billion hours that were not spent studying different cultures, languages and peace. 4 out of 5 Americans only speak English, but how many are fluent in the language and cruelty that characterizes the porn industry. We are what we eat. We are both enveloped by and devoured by the insidiousness.
18% of porn addicts between 25 and 34 consider porn a threat to their job and family. 60 percent of all searches on the web are for porn. The largest porn sites in the world are Pornhub, XVideos, and XNXX which have a combined total of over 5,810,000,000 billion site visits per month. This means that every month, a number approaching the world population, which is 8,045,311,447, engages with porn. Porn Nation is quickly becoming The Porn Globe.
Has any pandemic ever been so global? Pornhub, XVideos, and XNXX alone receive 134,491 visits per minute. Porn is miswiring humanity.
This crisis will not heal itself. What is the way forward?
Withdrawal is the Way
The withdrawal symptoms from pornography mirror what any of us addicts who have tried to quit know all too well – anxiety, insomnia, depression, stomach issues, haunting, ruminating obsessions. Young men talk about how when they don’t get their P&M fix (porn and masturbation), they “get the jitters.”
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense explained, struggled and died to establish that Capitalism + Dope = Genocide. Similarly today, Capitalism + Social Alienation = A Porn Plague. The Porn Plague – like “mass shootings,” sexual violence and addiction in general – are reflections of a sick society. The largest economy in the history of the world – with an unprecedented Gross Domestic Product of $25.46 Trillion – specializes in producing alienation. We are disconnected from the work we do, estranged from the products of our labor, one another and from ourselves. In a society based on hyper-profits, materialism, individualism and conquest, are we really surprised as the social pandemics that surround us? As Malcolm X accurately told us in 1964, “the chickens are coming home to roost.” The multiple plagues we are living through, unprecedented in human history, are easily explained through the social sciences4. The only logical conclusion the social sciences can draw is that at this rate, our days are numbered. Capitalism is the end of life. Our choice, as Rosa Luxembourg told us, is between Socialism and Barbarism.
From Shame to Grace: The Revolution within the Revolution
We have dwelled on the problem long enough; recovery teaches us we must live in the solution.
There are many anonymous 12-step programs that speak directly to this particular addiction from different angles – Sex Addicts Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, Sexual Recovery Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous, Codependents Anonymous and Sexual Compulsives Anonymous. There are online and in-person meetings for different communities across the country. Fusing recovery and Marxist language, top line behaviors are the only solution for empty negation. As every addict let’s go, let’s g-o-d5 and let’s good, they dive into new activities, hobbies, travels, languages and beyond. Recovery cannot be experienced as loss. We are only as dark as our secrets. Porn use is often wrapped up in a web of lies and secrecy. Open up to a friend, spiritual leader, therapist or fellow.
Again, this is not an attack on pornography and a human being’s right to participate in what could under a different societal power arrangement, arguably, reflect art. For example, there are women directing porn to prioritize women’s pleasure. The new forms of human and sexual interactions that will be ushered in by a system of egalitarianism are mere fantasies at this point on the human timeline. The German documentary “Do Communists Have Better Sex” makes the argument that emancipation in the economic realm reverberates to all areas of social life, even the bedroom. Professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies, Kristen R. Ghodsee argues in her book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism that collective creches and state support freed up human beings from economic duress so they could at last stop surviving, and begin living…
Withdrawal from porn, as with withdrawal from all addictions, represents a journey from Shame to Grace…
- 1. This is recovery talk for substitute activities we addicts implement to replace the lost dopamine hits that come from our DOC, Drug of Choice, whatever it may be. ↩︎
2. Black Death Porn refers to the sensationalistic violence pushed by mainstream television and corporate-dominated social media. As a society, how many images are we exposed to everyday showing images of decontextualized “senseless” horizontal violence in Black America, Haiti and some African countries? There is no “Black-on-Black crime.” There is only Oppressed-On-Oppressed internalized violence promoted by the power structure. ↩︎
3. An anonymous quote from an anonymous sober men. ↩︎
4. Some people mistakenly call the modern social sciences “Marxism.” Should we then call Physics “Einsteinism?” Marx was but the ultimate synthesizer of centuries of accumulating contributions to a knowledge base the Hegelian dialectician built upon. ↩︎
5. The traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous which all other 12-step programs descend from encourage fellows to connect with a g-o-d of their own understanding. For some, it is nature. For others, the universe. For others, a deity or deities. Recovery is in no way religious, but it is spiritual in that we believe there is something beyond our own selfish needs and self-seeking behavior. ↩︎
