The lyrics of the song "Someone You Loved" written and performed by Lewis Capaldi can be applied to a relationship affected by a partner who is addicted to porn. (We are not suggesting that Lewis Capaldi suffers from porn addiction or any other sexually compulsive behaviour. We are simply using the lyrics to demonstrate how porn addiction can cause similar thinking).
The song begins with a husband/boyfriend being confused by the wife's/girlfriend's request for an 'all or nothing way of loving.' She wants sexual exclusivity, but he is struggling with that concept and a separation ensues. He painfully admits that 'now it's got me sleeping without you.' The wife/girlfriend is credited with helping the porn addict do for him what porn does for him. 'I kind of like the way you helped me escape.' She 'numbed all the pain' and he again wants her to provide physical comfort when he is feeling lonely, isolated and misunderstood. Since the wife/girlfriend has set a healthy boundary for the relationship that includes sexual exclusivity, the husband/boyfriend finds it difficult living with the separation that has come as a consequence of him being 'unable' to live without his porn/adultery. He resorts to fantasy again, and visualises that he is back in the wife's/girlfriend's arms and he feels some comfort until reality hits him again when he wakes up from his sleep/fantasy.
The porn addict husband/boyfriend could have a beautiful relationship with his wife/girlfriend, but his refusal, or recognition of the fear of his inability to maintain a sexually exclusive relationship, causes the relationship to end. Instead of the husband/boyfriend taking responsibility due to his own decision for the breakdown of the relationship, he blames the wife/girlfriend. "I let my guard down, then you pulled the rug." The husband/boyfriend thinks that by allowing himself to become emotionally intimate with his wife/girlfriend, 'he let his guard down.' His distorted thinking is that becoming emotionally intimate is dangerous when in reality, sexual intimacy that is devoid of emotional intimacy is driving force behind the addiction of porn. Just as porn teaches its slaves to blame their problems on their partners, so the husband/boyfriend will see the wife/girlfriend as being physically inadequate and emotionally too demanding.
Note: Porn manipulates both men and women to be both consumers and commodities. We are presenting the most common presentations where the male is regarded as the consumer while the female is forced into the role of the commodity.
Wounded Men - Deprived of Maternal and Paternal Nurturing
Porn manipulates men into transferring and projecting their anger, for unmet nurturing needs, onto women.
Ideally, a child has two loving, connected parents who demonstrate to the child what love looks like in relationships – in their own marriage relationship and in the parent child relationship. When the marriage is dysfunctional, the child’s needs for nurturing and learning about relationships are not met. Mothers are blamed for failing to provide nurturing, but fathers escape blame most often for failing to provide vital information and skills on how to establish and maintain a loving and emotionally intimate relationship.
Porn capitalises on the dysfunctional parenting and dysfunctional relationship.
Consider the common situation where a mother withheld nurturing from her son. Nurturing would provide the boy with a feeling of being valued and it is the basic and most vital form of emotional intimacy. His mother had the power to provide the need but withheld it. Not having that need met caused deep wounding and constant emotional pain – he is not good enough, he's unwanted, he's a burden to her. The injured boy searches for an emotional attachment from a nurturing parent because instinctively the child understands that nurturing would heal his heartache. Nurturing would have prevented the wounds from occurring in the first place. So the boy doesn't know why he is not considered worthy of his mother's love. He asks himself, "What's wrong with me that Mummy doesn't love me?" (Many little girls ask the same question when they too are denied love by their parents. What's wrong with me? Like the boys, girls also begin to ask others for approval, but they are never sure that they are worth loving. The boy becomes angry because he sees no reason why he should be abandoned and rejected. He feels his wound intensely. He has been devalued and rejected by a very important and powerful woman who he knows should value him, but for some reason, she doesn’t and he can not change her low perception of him. He experiences powerless at his mother's hands. He tries to win her love but over time, something in him changes and he knows that his efforts are futile. He stops trying to win her love, but he still feels that he is not 'good enough' for her. So he is angry and sometimes, he allows resentment to build up in his heart against his mother (and/or father). He builds an emotional barrier between himself and his powerful mother in order to protect himself. Sometimes, this young man will move into the cycle where pay back becomes important to him. His mother will pay for withholding her love. She will pay for abandoning him, devaluing him, rejecting him. When the boy becomes the man, he will be the most powerful person and he will disempower women to ensure that he is no longer going to feel the horrendous experience of being powerless and unloved, unwanted and rejected. Mother is the target, but it is the other women in the young man's life who will pay the price. Those other women will pay, but so will the boy.
Porn manipulates the boy to project his emotional pain of being rejected emotionally onto women and typically onto romantic partners. Porn creates a venue where the men are fed a distorted view of women. Unvalued, unloved, nurture-deprived men believe that women are mean. They dress provocatively to tease men. Such women are considered to be wielding their sexual power over them deliberately, but they withhold the 'goods.' The women delight in displaying her power over the men. She is considered powerful but withholding affection (just like his cold mother). Porn intentionally convinces men that love is the equivalent of sexual activity. In reality, the act of sex can only occur between two committed, sexually exclusive, loving partners. All other sexual activity is sexual abuse.
In the perversion of pornified thinking, men believe that 'normal' women display their bodies to the men's view, but they withhold any sexual interaction. Porn grasps the opportunity to abuse these men and enslave them into the porn industry as consumers. Porn will produce women who become powerless to the previously powerless men. Porn will show women who are only too anxious to receive the sexual attention from the love/nurturing deprived men. Men will experience the copious sexual activity as being 'loved,' 'desired' and 'nurtured' and temporarily, the men feel powerful over those porn women. As porn themes of disempowering women escalate, the porn becomes more denigrating of women and more violent toward them. Porn performers allow their privacy and dignity to be violated, and not to object to being maltreated and disempowered exactly so that the wounded, devalued men can form a fantasy in his mind of being powerful over women and of being desired and wanted, nurtured and loved and the same time. Some men however, are no longer seeking to receive the nurturing from women that they failed to receive from their mothers and they just want to experience feeling powerful over the women. These porn performers choose to endure violence and abuse, both physical and emotional, so that men will achieve their deep 'need' of feeling powerful over a woman. The porn performers must smile or whimper with pain but they must not resist or 'put up a fight' as that would destroy the feeling of being powerful over the man.
For the man who does still long for nurturing from his mother, it is transferred to the porn performer. Such men will be motivated to search for a certain kind of porn performer who seems to show nurturing and emotional closeness. She will also be submissive to the man, accepting all the sexual requests without objection. No position is too difficult; she doesn't tire easily or become 'worn out' and need to rest. She continues to smile and show warmth and appreciation for his powerful manhood. He satisfies her deeply as a woman (in his mind). He knows this is an illusion, but it's an illusion he wants to have because the reality is so cruel. He sees himself as powerless over women and that they are so uncaring that they withhold emotional and physical/sexual needs from him. His need for nurturing has never really been met and he doesn't know how to go about developing intimacy with a woman. But porn anchors the pressing emotional needs for power and nurturing onto the drive for sexual activity. He becomes indoctrinated, pornified. He is trained to "See woman, think sexual opportunity." He objectifies women as the source of sexual stimulation and hopefully, sexual relief. Sometimes, this same anchoring system, is tweaked to anchor men's sexual arousal response onto other men, children, animals and inanimate objects.
The man realises that he is powerless again because the women all seem to withhold sex from him. Like his mother, these women have the power to provide the need, but they withhold it. Just like ‘Mummy’ withheld a valid need from the boy, so these women withhold 'sex' from him as a man. Some men respond to this manipulation by porn and they start to think that women, just like his 'Mummy,' are mean and nasty. They delight in playing push/pull games with his mind. They seem to be offering 'love' (sexual connection) but then they withdraw when he tries to connect with them. This again, sparks feelings of anger. He think that the women are heartless teasers. They are evil and they need to be taught a lesson. They need to be disempowered, humiliated, slapped around and punished so they can feel the pain that they cause him. Payback time Mummy! Other boys keep searching for Mummy's acceptance and love and are drawn to older, nurturing women.
Whether they are angry men or men who are drawn to their mothers, neither of these wounded men are happy in their relationships with women. They don't find happiness from these relationships because a man needs more than getting revenge on his mother. He also needs more than to receive motherly nurturing in a relationship to be fulfilled.
Boys are entitled to receive nurture from their mothers. Nurturing is what stops the emotional pain. Receiving nurture provides emotional intimacy and relieves the stress of being emotionally rejected and failing to receive nurturing. Porn manipulates boys to substitute nurture and emotional intimacy for sexual activity. Porn replaces emotional intimacy and the sexual union that FOLLOWS that natural progression, and insists that men MUST restrict themselves to emotionally disconnected sexual activity or just to fantasise receiving it. Investing energy into developing a truly nurturing relationship with a woman outside the porn 'industry' is overwhelming for injured men who simply don't seem to have a clue how to choose a suitable partner or how to develop true intimacy. Porn is the injured, and often hypersexualised man's cop-out. He accepts a short-cut to the goal, but it doesn't work in the long run.
So porn caters to two types of wounded men. Both feel powerless, angry and resentful toward women for 'withholding nurturing and affection,' but some men wish to:
punish women in order to feel powerful. These men seem to transfer their angry at being rejected by their mothers, onto the porn women. The men have 'given up' trying to gain mother's affection and they refuse to show any nurturing or affection during the sexual activity, but delight in seeing the porn women disempowered and violated. The whole sexual activity is to punish the woman; and
be desired by porn women to feel powerful over them and to receive affection. These men don't want to denegrate porn women in the process but they want them to be submissive. They wish to experience the fantasy of being desired, perhaps to receive nurturing and affection from porn women (but in reality, the affection is not received).
In essence, the porn merchants skilfully anchors nurturing to emotionally disconnected sexual activity. This is the new 'normal' and it creates a pornified, hypersexualised society.
The wounded man projects his misplaced anger and his search for nurturing onto women who in his mind, are sex providers. He is not aware that he has sexually objectified women. Women can't be 'friends' because women are for sexual activity. Women can't be regarded as people because they are sexualised. In his mind, all women are evaluated for their ability to arouse him sexually. Her 'sexuality' is what gives her value in his eyes. See woman, think sexual opportunity. Her ability to provide him sexual activity - that is the value of a woman. This is the sermon, the brain-washing, the gospel according to Porn. Thus many men form the belief that they are entitled to receive ‘sex’ from women and that women who withhold 'sex' from men are spiteful and mean - like their cold and distant mothers.
So the dangerous transference is made.
Boys are angry at their mothers for withholding nurturing – and grown up boys (who are still emotionally wounded little boys) are trained to believe that they are entitled to be angry at women for withholding sex. This belief of entitlement is a common, almost predictable outcome of attachment injuries in childhood. The desire to get even, pay-back or get revenge on the instigator of their pain (the mother or substitute person) is also a progression of that entitlement.
Not many women appreciate dating men who are angry at them when they refuse to allow the man sexual access to their bodies. Most women don't appreciate being regarded as just another convenient receptical for a man's sexual activity. Most women don't appreciate dating a man who pressures them for sexual activity when she clearly does not feel valued for anything other than her sexuality. Healthy, normal women and men are both interested in seeking an emotional connection and secure attachment with some form of exclusive commitment prior to entering into a sexual relationship.
Normal mothering teaches boys that nurturing is necessary in male – female relationships – talking, caring, providing, being emotionally connected and that sex is the final level of emotional intimacy that a man can have with a woman. The mother and father’s example provides the knowledge sex only takes place between a man and a woman who have already established the nurturing relationship. They nurture each other and then sex occurs in that special relationship.
Porn makes men connect nurture with emotionally detached sexual activity. His anger at being denied emotional connection (nurturing) is projected onto women for for denying his ‘sex’ needs.
Sadistic sexual murderers put their rage at being denied and rejected in violent action against women. Their entitled belief system is the attitude used to justify their sexual abuse of and violence toward women.
Visual Rape Women who dress provocatively are not just extending an invitation to a man asking if he will engage with her in sexual foreplay. Women who sexualise themselves are issuing a demand that a man engage with her in responding to her sexual display. She is forcing visual sexual stimuli on a man without giving him the respect he deserves. She doesn’t ask for his consent. Do you want to view my sexually explicit, designed-to-be-arousing partially clad, especially presented body? The man’s consent has not been requested and his right to consent or refuse is not regarded as necessary by the women. The women do no issue a polite invitation to engage sexually; it is a demand and it can also be an assault if the man is not seeking sexual arousal. A man is placed in a position where his right to avoid the visual display is not respected. He might feel assaulted, violated and displeased at being disrespected. A man has no choice but to respond in one of two ways.
A non-hypersexualised man’s response might well be to try to reject the unwanted visual assault as an insult. He can only do this by looking away from the display after already having been visually assaulted. Only in his mind and by his gaze can he confer the message, “I won’t have sexual interaction with you. You are a stranger to me. We don’t have an intimate emotional relationship. You are not my wife. I’m not in any way attracted to your sexualised bodily display and I will not engage in sexual activity with you. You are not getting any attention from my body or my mind. You are not getting a power hit from me.”
A hypersexualised man’s response often is “Yes, I’m keen to engage in visual sexual foreplay with you. I don’t care who you are and I don’t care about you, but I’m happy to evaluate your body and get a rise out of it.” Many hypersexualised men appear to develop an attitude of resentment toward women when they are continually exposed to provocatively dressed women who when approached for sex, turn them down. It seems that the disrespect intensifies as the man perceivesthe sexual bullying and manipulation that the women are purposely doing by dressing provocatively. Another stage is reached and the hypersexualised man, sensing he has been manipulated thinks, “... if these women won’t go all the way and agree to sexual copulation they are just users and ‘teasers.' They advertise that they want sexual connection and they incite and excite sexual arousal on purpose. They initiate foreplay with me and then they renig. That’s not being fair. It’s like telling lies and false advertising. A woman says she wants me, but when I take the bait and show interest in her body, she retracts the offer and rebuffs me. She doesn’t want to have a sexual connection with me. She tells me that I’m not good enough for her. Who does she think she is anyway? I’ll show her that she’s not better than me.” Rape ensues.
The woman is the aggressor. It is her definite proposition and intended sexual advance that she places before all men for sexual interaction. All sex begins in the mind and the women push the visual stimuli onto the men who have not solicited it or requested interaction. Women assume that ALL men will appreciate the sight of her sexually provocatively presented body.
Done with intention, with full knowledge, women present their bodies in a manipulative way to cause a reaction of sexual arousal. Women can say by their dress and presentation, “I am trying to sexually arouse you and I will get your attention. I will ensure that you see my body and I am aware that you have no option not to see my sexualised body. I will force this view on you knowing that you haven’t requested it and I don’t care if you want to see my body or not because I will shock you and traumatise you and I don’t care about your freedom of choice not to be visually exposed. This real situation is rarely vocalised or verbalised in society. What women say to society is, “I have the right to dress in whatever way I want. If men have a problem with it, that’s their problem.”
Smokers used to assert their right to pollute other people’s air too, but they didn’t mention that non-smokers had rights to breath clean air. In the same way, men and women have the right not to have their sexual atmosphere polluted with non-verbal solicitations from scantily clad women.
Body language says the opposite to the words the women are verbalising. The verbal language is non-sexual, but the body language confirms the true intention is sexual. The woman wants a power hit by gaining the male sexual attention. Men receive mixed messages and don’t understand at first, that they are being purposely manipulated. Men criticise themselves believing that they are the ones with the problem. They are so highly sexed – have a high libido – that they can’t control their body’s sexual arousal in the presence of a partially clad woman. A man was not created to have to fight his body’s sexual arousal response because if the only woman he saw undressed was his loving wife, there would rarely be any need to continually and repeatedly suppress his natural response to the sight of her naked body. It is not the normal man who has a problem with his response to a woman’s nakedness – it is the women’s determination to abuse male sexuality that is the problem.
The Porn-Wound Connection
There is a connection between having legitimate desires for emotional connection and emotional intimacy (which should have been met as a child) and how people try to legitimise participating in porn.
A healthy child learns that their loving parents will meet his needs. He knows that he can depend on his relationship with his parents to joyfully and lovingly provide what he needs. This is an emotional connection and it is vital for the child's emotional growth. This is where the child learns how to have become a social member. He learns how to network with others, recognise their emotional states and respond emotionally accordingly. He learns how to interact with others in an emotionally secure environment and he makes respectful, secure, emotionally intimate relationships. This education is vital for the child to mature as an emotionally healthy and stable person, capable of interacting responsibly, respectfully, with empathy and caringly in adult relationships. The emotional intimacy education must precede any sexual ‘intimacy’ (sexual abuse) or the basis for emotional intimacy (trust in others) is destroyed also. Sexual connection without a strong emotional connection causes devastation to the emotional health of both men and women.
A child from an emotionally needy/neglected/abused childhood, learns that he can’t depend on relationships with others to meet his needs (emotional, physical). He can see that his parent’s ‘rules’ (selfishness) are wrong and that he is denied his basic emotional needs – the experience of being valued and cherished purely for being a son. The rules that are made by harmful parents (ie emotionally injured, selfish/inept/otherwise occupied/mentally handicapped/uncaring) or organisations are interpreted to being enforced to injure and control the child’s freedom – an effort to ensure the child is kept miserable without their needs being met. The child learns that those people who should care about him, do care and in fact are more interested in maintaining his dis-empowerment. The emotionally abused and needy child’s painful unmet need to be valued and included in an emotionally intimate relationship (father/son; mother/son), starts a process that sets him up to become a porn addict.
Porn provides a facade of emotional intimacy that the addict projects onto the porn performer. The image of the 'emotionally safe' female is attractive to the wounded man because the persona he creates for her is taylor made to exclude all the emotional demands of a real relationship. The porn addict's mind feels safe with the emotional qualities that he credits to the porn performer. This special, imagined creation, this perfectly safe persona, excludes any threat of emotional rejection and abandonment. The persona makes no demands, she has no needs and she is perfectly safe. The porn addict creates an emotional relationship with the porn persona and then numbs himself with oxytocin and endorphins as he masturbates to the invented persona's image. He bonds to the emotional persona that he has attached to a porn performer's physical body. The persona however, does not exist anywhere but in the porn addict's mind. Many wounded men have stated that if they met the same porn performer in their home and she requested 'sex' they would have to make a decision whether to try to transfer 'pixel' sex to 'flesh to flesh' sex. In asking what factors might be important to consider in making that decision, men have a great need to ensure that the porn performer keeps the emotional persona that they as her customer, have attached to her. For example, if the porn performer called the porn customer 'you creep' or laughed at him, or called him ugly, or didn't offer him compliments sexual arousal would be drastically changed in his mind. Even if the woman was 'hitting' on them the way she did in the porn video or poster, the man would not be inspired or aroused to sexually connect with her. Why? Because the porn performer's words would shattered his imagined, fictious persona of being an 'emotionally safe' person. She might still be a 'hot babe' visually, but when she injured her porn addict (slave) emotionally, she became instantly repugnant to him and any sexual activity would not take place. One man responded, "Instant ED." (Erectile Dysfunction)
The process:
The child is emotionally needy but due to his parent’s failure/inability to meet his need for emotional validation and intimacy, the child realises that he must meet his own needs
He justifies dishonest behaviours in order to have his genuine need met.
The attitude of being enabled is created.
Feeling enabled is the justification for using dishonest methods to meet the genuine need.
The child begins performing illegal behaviour.
The disallowed or wrong behaviour must be performed secretly (ie. in a deceptive manner) because the child is not powerful enough to perform the disallowed behaviours openly or punishment and further abuse will be the unmanageable consequence from the parent or authority figure.
If questioned about their behaviour, the child denies performing the wrong action (lies) in order to escape the unloving punishment.
As the child realises that his/her needs can be met through secretly defying authority and their rules, he/she learns to justify their dishonesty, lying and betrayal.
The child learns a pattern of having a need, feeling entitled to have it met, justifying overriding another person’s opposing need, justifying dishonesty to have the need met, justifying the action to disempower the other person, and projecting guilt onto the other person by labelling them as being controlling/dominating/(selfish) for expressing an opinion that is not the same as their own. This pattern becomes a deeply ingrained habit and becomes normalised.
Wherever there is an emotional threat, the coping strategy (of projecting the source of the emotional stress onto the woman), is the first to be employed. The emotionally wounded man feels he must remove the threat of further emotional intimacy as that is where his pain from childhood rejection and abandonment are etched in his mind. The fear of abandonment and rejection causes him to be highly reactive and he wants to avoid receiving any pain from any future attempts by a woman emotional intimacy.
The child views porn for the first time. He already ‘knows’ that in some circumstances it is ‘justified’ to disempower another person to gain satisfaction of a need. He performs the behaviour in secret, he lies about doing it and he attempts to justify the wrong action by thinking he is entitled to have his sexual stress relieved and he feels empowered doing so by remaining undetected by the authority/wife.
Legitimate need met by legitimate means (child needs parental love)
Legitimate need met by legitimate means (man needs relationship - wife)
Illegitimate need met by illegitimate means (hypersexualised man needs inappropriate sexual activity - porn)
The pathway that justifies a man to use dishonesty, deceit and secrecy is abusive to the person (the partner) who is seen as the ‘problem’ - ie “she is controlling, she is dominating, she criticises me, she withholds my needs from me, she is using power over me” – therefore the man feels entitled and justified to use dishonesty, deceit, manipulation and secrecy to meet his need. The abused person (ie the wife, mother, girlfriend) is disempowered by the dishonesty, deceit and secrecy as she is robbed of her ability to choose to leave the relationship or to take any other action that would impose ‘negative’ consequences on the partner.
Value intimacy filter. When men women have no value on themselves and are dependent on outside input from others to express to them that they have value, they lose their dignity and self-respect.
The father should show/educate his son how to have an emotionally intimate relationship with a woman (ie his wife). He demonstrates how he cares for her, treats her with respect, helps her with physically demanding jobs, protects and values her, showers her with compliments. The mother should educate her son how to have an emotionally intimate but non-sexual relationship with a woman. How to speak appropriately to women and how to have non-sexual relationships with people of the opposite sex.
The high school boys from St. Kevin's Private Catholic School probably didn't understand that they were hypersexualised or realise that their behaviour was sexually abusive. The boys are a product of the pornification of society and are well indoctrinated into the cult of PIMP EMPIRE. While the girls are assaulted by having to endure listening to the vulgar lyrics of the 'song,' the offending boys' identities are protected by the camera blurring their faces. Our pornified society appears to accept sexual abuse of women but not as readily, the sexual abuse of men. For many decades, portrayal of men's genitalia has not been permitted on TV, but women's private organs were routinely displayed for public consumption.