Why is using too much internet pornography a problem?
Internet pornography can become addictive in a way that leaves the user less able to cope with the frustrations of relationships in real life. Real people disappoint and conflict inevitable. The user can feel that online life is more appealing but then they become stuck. Life can become repetitive and deadening.
The appeal of watching two-dimensional sex on a screen brings the myth of Ixion to mind. Ixion tried to seduce Hera, the wife of Zeus. Hera told Zeus, who of course was angry. To punish Ixion, he turned Hera into a cloud in Hera’s likeness which he put in Ixion’s bed. Ixion ravished the cloud, bringing to mind the way in which many people today are ‘turned on’ by an image on a screen. Ixion wanted an illusion with no demands placed on him, but the price he paid was dissatisfaction, because it was impossible to consummate his desire or for it to be reciprocated. It was auto erotic in the same way that pornography is a simulation of sex with another body. Unlike desire born from satisfaction, the sexual excitement dissipates and has to be rekindled. For Ixion, and for patients who compulsively use internet pornography, the illusion leaves them perpetually hungry. Desire remains unconsummated and relationships are associated with frustration.
Because he could not stop Ixion lusting after his wife, Zeus devised a further punishment: he fixed Ixion to a wheel that spun endlessly in the sky. This archetypal image resonates as it describes the endless, torturous repetition that characterizes addictive behaviour. The fact that the wheel was spinning in the air is important. A wheel struggles with friction in the same way addicted patients struggle with reality, but without friction there is no movement. As Thomas Hardy pointed out in relation to Ixion, ‘The peculiar motion involved in turning a wheel has a wonderful tendency to numb the mind’ (Hardy 1874/2008, p. 128). In a similar way, patients of mine have described the way internet pornography flattens emotions.
Moving from this addictive cycle involves suffering frustration. Frustration and disappointment get a bad press but those experiences provide the friction that allow us to grow. We can create relationships that grow deeper and more satisfying than the seduction of an illusion.
Hardy, T. (1874/2007). Far from the Madding Crowd. London: Penguin.
Image credited to Mark Cartwright
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