What are you watching? If you told me even what channels you watch I bet I could get a small grasp on who you are as a person. It seems a bit like judging a book by the cover, but I am confident enough in my statement to risk it. We have so many choices of what we can watch, at any time, that we end up coming back to the channels that play what we want to see. Be it cartoons, crime shows, JerseyShoredramas, even nudie-boobie channels. Do you watch a lot of MTV? I’m probably not going to ask you for advice with my relationships. How about the cooking channel? Let’s get married. When we watch T.V., movies or internet videos, we are simulating ourselves being a part of the scenes we are watching. We can feel and be a part of something, without having to leave our house or even our room. Want to be in love? Here, just watch The Notebook. Want to be in a fight? Watch Green Street Hooligans. Wanna have butt sex? Here…
The N.Y. Times did a study on the show Spongebob and the effect it has on kids. The study found that kids who watched Spongebob did worse on tests of attention and problem solving than kids who watched slower educational shows, or just hung out and drew. Spongebob Squarepants jumps back forth extremely quickly and the audience got used to the pace. When it came time to do some real world work, the kids couldn’t concentrate on it. We might think, “Nah I’m an adult, this study was done on undeveloped brains, therefore, this point is invalid.” But think about it. Are we really that different? Are you going to tell me that after you saw Fight Club, you did not want to go start a fight? Maybe even host your own version of those basement brawls? Shoot, I immediately wanted duke it out in hand-to-hand combat. Not because I was pissed off, but because the movie made it look so cool. We can see that what we watch affects us. So how do we turn around and say that watching porn won’t affect our sex lives? Maybe you haven’t flat out said it, but if you are looking at porn and masturbating, but dream of some day having a healthy romantic relationship, it’s just as good. If we keep coming back to porn when we’re bored, when were lonely, what does that say about what we think about sex? I could tell you pretty easily. Watching people have sex, while working on an orgasm is training your brain how to react to sex. How, if you have repeatedly told your brain that sex is rubbing one out in your room in front of a screen, are you going to transition into healthy sex with your husband or wife? It doesn’t work. When it comes time to take the test I believe that the results will be much like the kids who watched Spongebob. I don’t think you will fail outright, but your results will pale in comparison to those who stayed away from porn.
See, we all know that pornography is not good. And if you are on the fence with the issue, let me help you out, it’s bad for you. It’s like soda, it seems pretty alright, and it’s absolutely everywhere and so easy to get. But it rots your insides. It’s scientifically proven; ask your doctor and your dentist. That’s porn. So now that we’re on the same page, I want to go a little bit deeper than pornography. It seems like porn is the end result of something doesn’t it? I noticed that we almost always “end up” looking at porn. For whatever reason, at some ill-defined point we decide “Yeah… I’m just gonna go ahead and do it”, even after we told ourselves a thousand times, “I’m done with porn. That was the last time, I’m not going to look at it anymore.” I think this has something to do with the other things we are watching. Now I know that humans are by nature, sexual beings. Even the first thing God said to Adam and Eve when he made them was, “Be fruitful and multiply”. So of course not all of our sexual desires come from watching the wrong show or movie. What I am getting at is that when we do watch those shows and movies, it plants a little idea of how sex is, into our heads. If these idea-seeds are watered and fed with more ideas, then our views on sex and our sexual urges can become completely different from what they were intended to be.
Why do we watch shows with blatant, over-the-top sexual content, then wonder why it’s so hard for us to stay away from porn? Really? We’re ingesting these little bits of sex throughout the whole day and it starts to add up. I imagine it like the arcade game, where you put a quarter in the machine and it lands on a little shelf that moves forward and back. If you land the quarter in the right place, at the right time, then it dumps pockets and pockets worth of coins into a hole, which then turn into tickets whose conversion rate is about three tickets to every 8 dollars in quarters. If you think of the whole machine as your brain, and the little sexual tidbits we take in throughout the day as the quarters, then we see that as they add up, they end up spilling over into some kind of sexual action. Whether it be masturbation, or actually going out and having sex. Then when it’s all said and done, we have earned absolutely nothing of real value.
I realize that in the culture we are a part of it is extremely hard to stay away from media that is not “healthy” for us. We can’t listen to music, watch movies or T.V. without being bombarded by sex and violence. I’m going to go ahead and assume that none of those reading this are television executives, orHollywooddirectors. If I am correct then we are not in a position to control the content of television or movies. So the only thing that we can control is what we choose to watch, and how often we choose to watch it. Do you see it coming? Am I going to go the extreme route and order that you cut out television and movies all together? I’d like to, but I doubt many of you would take me seriously. In fact the very suggestion might even discredit this entire blog. It may cause you to move along to another region of the internets when you happen to see my name and picture in the blog header. So I won’t even try to tell you that cutting T.V. and movies out of your daily lives might be beneficial. I won’t try to say that if we completely stop taking in this sort of “media”, that maybe we will start to see real life how it really is, that after an amount of time away from these screens, we might happen to get a peek at one of our old favorite shows, but not remember why we were so attracted to it in the first place. Maybe even get a little grossed out by how often shows throw in random sex because it gets attention and ratings. They might even seem cheap. But I won’t say it because that wouldn’t make sense and this isn’t a fairy tale. All I can actually say is that less is better. After all, how will the quarters overflow if we stop putting them in the machine?
Love,
Bryan