It’s one of the most debated topics when it comes to pornography: Is watching porn cheating?
Let’s start by pointing a few things out.
If you think about it, the majority of men and women aren’t proud of viewing porn. Regardless of whether or not they’ll admit it, most feel varying amounts of guilt, shame, or awkwardness about it.
Think about it: people don’t lock the door or check their surroundings when they are about to flip open the pages of a Nordstrom catalog to order their significant other a birthday present. They don’t clear their online browsing history because they spent too much time scouring the web for a deal on plane tickets to take a vacation with their partner. People aren’t watching skateboarding videos or looking at pictures of cool street art with their door locked and their browsers set on private, right?
This is one of the main reasons that porn is cheating. Because of all the damaging secrecy and hiding that goes into it. There are few things that will tear apart a relationship as much as snooping around and keeping secrets. And when that secret is that a partner is watching other people have sex instead of wanting to be intimate with their own partner, how could the other person in the relationship not feel cheated on by that?
Pornography is taking something extremely awesome and intimate and exaggerating and exploiting it as cheap entertainment. When partners view porn, they aren’t sharing intimate moments with their partner, but instead having them alone with a computer screen.
Perhaps we’ve heard or made the excuses: “Nobody gets hurt. It only has to do with me.” But that is a wishful ideal that is just simply not true. How about all the women in the porn industry that are being abused, threatened, and coerced into being there? What about those caught in the sex trafficking industry and have had porn made of them unwillingly or even unknowingly?
What about the excuse, “It’s a healthy, natural release for me!” Not true either. Pornography is shown to actually rewire your brain and has been proven to be as addictive and harmful as hard drugs. The ideal that porn is a healthy sexual behavior is perhaps one of the most twisted rationalizations of our day, one that science is consistently proving otherwise.
There is actual scientific proof that watching porn is cheating. When someone is viewing porn, a pleasure chemical called oxytocin is released into the brain. Oxytocin is known to increase feelings of attachment, connection, and trust. Studies show that couples in a healthy and well-adjusted relationship exhibit much higher levels of oxytocin than those in a distressed relationship. Because the hormone is naturally released during sex, watching porn triggers the release of oxytocin as well, effectively bonding the person to that experience. Over time, the bond becomes stronger and stronger until it seems unbreakable. Meaning, a porn user is literally bonding themselves to a sexual experience coming from a computer screen, not from their partner.
We don’t know your definition of cheating, but when a person is sexually bonding to something other than their own partner, we would most definitely call that cheating.
Honestly, two people in a committed relationship is sexy. One person alone in front of their computer screen?
Not so much.
Bottom line: cheating doesn’t have to be a physical act. It can be emotional as well. And when it comes to porn, it very easily leads to both physical and emotional cheating. Not cool.
Love, sex, and intimacy is something that should be shared with no one (and nothing) else but your partner.
This post was taken from: http://fightthenewdrug.org/is-watching-porn-cheating-on-your-partner/#sthash.Y2irnBMA.dpbs
Let’s start by pointing a few things out.
If you think about it, the majority of men and women aren’t proud of viewing porn. Regardless of whether or not they’ll admit it, most feel varying amounts of guilt, shame, or awkwardness about it.
Think about it: people don’t lock the door or check their surroundings when they are about to flip open the pages of a Nordstrom catalog to order their significant other a birthday present. They don’t clear their online browsing history because they spent too much time scouring the web for a deal on plane tickets to take a vacation with their partner. People aren’t watching skateboarding videos or looking at pictures of cool street art with their door locked and their browsers set on private, right?
This is one of the main reasons that porn is cheating. Because of all the damaging secrecy and hiding that goes into it. There are few things that will tear apart a relationship as much as snooping around and keeping secrets. And when that secret is that a partner is watching other people have sex instead of wanting to be intimate with their own partner, how could the other person in the relationship not feel cheated on by that?
Pornography is taking something extremely awesome and intimate and exaggerating and exploiting it as cheap entertainment. When partners view porn, they aren’t sharing intimate moments with their partner, but instead having them alone with a computer screen.
Perhaps we’ve heard or made the excuses: “Nobody gets hurt. It only has to do with me.” But that is a wishful ideal that is just simply not true. How about all the women in the porn industry that are being abused, threatened, and coerced into being there? What about those caught in the sex trafficking industry and have had porn made of them unwillingly or even unknowingly?
What about the excuse, “It’s a healthy, natural release for me!” Not true either. Pornography is shown to actually rewire your brain and has been proven to be as addictive and harmful as hard drugs. The ideal that porn is a healthy sexual behavior is perhaps one of the most twisted rationalizations of our day, one that science is consistently proving otherwise.
There is actual scientific proof that watching porn is cheating. When someone is viewing porn, a pleasure chemical called oxytocin is released into the brain. Oxytocin is known to increase feelings of attachment, connection, and trust. Studies show that couples in a healthy and well-adjusted relationship exhibit much higher levels of oxytocin than those in a distressed relationship. Because the hormone is naturally released during sex, watching porn triggers the release of oxytocin as well, effectively bonding the person to that experience. Over time, the bond becomes stronger and stronger until it seems unbreakable. Meaning, a porn user is literally bonding themselves to a sexual experience coming from a computer screen, not from their partner.
We don’t know your definition of cheating, but when a person is sexually bonding to something other than their own partner, we would most definitely call that cheating.
Honestly, two people in a committed relationship is sexy. One person alone in front of their computer screen?
Not so much.
Bottom line: cheating doesn’t have to be a physical act. It can be emotional as well. And when it comes to porn, it very easily leads to both physical and emotional cheating. Not cool.
Love, sex, and intimacy is something that should be shared with no one (and nothing) else but your partner.
This post was taken from: http://fightthenewdrug.org/is-watching-porn-cheating-on-your-partner/#sthash.Y2irnBMA.dpbs
