We’re honored to share our interview with author and therapist, Sam Jolman, who recently published his book for men: The Sex Talk You Never Got
Sam answers the question “why men watch porn”, addressing root causes and deep harms that porn use creates.
If you’re wondering if your pornography habit is really that big of a deal, this very kind and honest conversation is for you.
Or, if you’ve been deeply hurt by a loved one’s pornography use, we hope you’ll find clarity and understanding, too.
Table of Contents
- Is porn a healthy outlet for sexual desire?
- How porn cheats and curses you
- Why men watch porn: ongoing dissociation
- What if I watch porn because I’m bored?
- How shame and loneliness fuels porn use
- Ways porn promotes sexual shame and unhealthy childhood sexual formation in men
- Porn lies to you – creating a sense of false empowerment over women
- A secret to redeeming your true power as a man…
My name is Sam Jolman. I am a lover of my wife of 21 years, a father to three boys, a therapist who works with men in the realm of sexual trauma, sexual brokenness, compulsive sexual behavior.
I’m the author of the book, The Sex Talk You Never Got, a book for men on your sexual formation.
Is porn a healthy outlet for sexual desire?
It’s easy to think of porn use as an abundance of desire, like the lonely lover, a man who’s just full of desire and lonely.
It’s possible to even be deceived into believing that porn is a healthy outlet for that, right? That if you’re not in a relationship, or your partner is not in the mood, that porn is a healthy place to go to have an outlet for sexual desire.
How porn cheats and curses you
Yet, porn does not provide you any of the things that are inherent to love.
There’s no pursuit. There’s no knowing. There’s no actual connection happening.
There’s not even literal touch happening between you and the person that you love and who loves you.
Porn curses your inner lover
What I say is that “porn is the place the lover goes to die”, because it is nothing that you were wired for.
In many ways, you’re just cursed to watch
and be on the outside of something
you were meant to be on the inside of,
which is love itself.
While you’re acting out with porn, your heart is always there.
There’s always something that precedes that moment in your heart.
It’s never just a physical bad habit – because you’re not an animal, right? You’re more than an animal. You’re a human.
So what I would invite men to think about is this: what’s happening in your heart preceding that moment?
Why men watch porn: ongoing dissociation
At some level, pornography use is always a form of ongoing dissociation.
You are fleeing something in your body, something in your life, something in your relationships.
Though pornography may give you some sort of physical release, if you push yourself through the arousal cycle, you will get some physical release.
But you won’t get healing, and you won’t get the resolution of the dilemmas in your life. You’ll only get physical and temporary relief from something.
What are you trying to forget?
The question I would ask is – every man, every person that acts out with pornography, What is your ritual?
Everyone has a ritual: when they do it, where they do it, and what they look at, right?
And oftentimes that ritual is the thing it would seem you’re trying to forget. I’m trying to get that out of my head, and forget I did that, and get past it…
But I’m inviting you to pause at some point and at some level to be curious about your ritual.
A lot of times these rituals are actually traumatic reenactments of parts of our life that we ritualize and are acting out.
So start thinking of the themes that you bring to that moment.
What you look at – thinking of the time and the place – will help you discover that heart. Ask:
- What’s going on in my heart?
- What happened in my day?
- What happened the hour before I felt a pull to look?
- What’s going on in my body?
Those might not at first be easy questions to address, but those are the questions that will help you recognize:
This is more than just a bad habit.
I am ritualizing and reenacting
some form of harm
or something in my life that feels unresolved,
that I’m bringing to my porn use.
What if I watch porn because I'm bored?
Wow. At some level, I would like to note that there is a kind of false or pseudo-adventure in pornography use! There is this thrill of the unknown, and that next video, or that next image, that feels like it will bring some new rush of pleasure to me. My goodness, it can feel like, This is a great adventure of curiosity that fulfills my boredom.
In many ways research would say that sexuality is most like curiosity in the body.
And so it makes sense that when you are bored, your body naturally is drawn to be curious about something, to be moved by something, to be stirred by something.
So it can feel like porn is a great place to act on that curiosity , and yet…
Porn takes you on a false adventure.
What I’d invite you to think about is that porn is such a false adventure. It involves nothing of your full capacities.
You imagine the adventure of reading a book, which involves your imagination and your capacity to stay with characters. Or actually going out into the world to go on a physical adventure?
You were wired for real adventures and real connections.
What does it do to involve your whole body together, or even the adventure of a real relationship, which involves the unknown in the mystery of another person, and the pursuit, and the thrill of discovery with each other? That’s what you’re wired for!
And pornography mocks that. It presents this false adventure that really leaves you with essentially no new experience, other than what you’ve been brought through in pornography, the false version of that adventure.
You really aren’t ending with any more connection to anybody real or any real discovery of the world.
Porn’s chemical adventure
You will get relaxants, and you’ll also get something called oxytocin. If I’m understanding it right, as a neuropeptide, oxytocin is called the cuddle hormone.
Oxytocin is what is released in our body when we get touch from somebody who loves us, or are in contact, or in a conversation, or close to somebody that we love and care about, and who loves or cares about us.
And so if you think about it, right, you are biochemically hot wiring your body to give you the chemical that’s released when you’re close to somebody. So at some level, it does give you a felt sense of soothing and comfort, as if you were close to somebody. As well, let’s just honor the presence of other people in a video.
Porn can give you this false sense of connection, as you are watching human experience in a certain way. Yes, you can hotwire, through porn use, the chemical release you would get from a genuine relationship.
Except you aren’t getting a genuine relationship, and so you don’t have that ongoing and far more nourishing experience of relationships.
The invitation would be, yes, your body is leading you sort of intuitively towards the chemical release you would get from a relationship, except it’s without relationship, and that would be the harm inherent in it.
How shame and loneliness fuels porn use
The other thing I would add is, obviously, loneliness can provoke our shame with a sense of, Why am I alone?
It must be because something’s inadequate in me.
The idea of going to risk more in a relationship when you’re lonely can sometimes feel exposing and shame inducing.
A lot of times what’s actually leading us to porn use is not desire, but shame.
Porn is a place that we go to actually reenact shame, not just seek fulfillment for desire.
The truth is that if you’re going to overcome your pornography use, you must address your shame.
If you are using it to manage loneliness, I would invite you to think about the way that shame grips you, and what you’ve concluded in your own heart about your loneliness that:
- I must be inadequate.
- I must not be enough, or…
- I might be too much for a real person to love.
So, I’ll just take care of it myself — that is such an indicting curse on your life. It is not true!
I would invite you to turn the tables on that shame.
You are made for a real relationship, and you are not too much. And there is not something inherently wrong with you that’s keeping you from being lovable.
Shame is a liar.
The hard part about shame? When addressing shame, it feels true. It feels believable that, yeah, that this shame is my fault. It is my guilt.
So many men I walk with feel like everything in their sexual story is somehow their fault, that they are perverted or dirty, twisted, weird, or broken. Thereby, you know, addressing anything in their story is really just a Death March through everything that’s “my fault.”
Are you asking me to expose, you know, the worst parts of me?
What I want to invite you to consider is that shame is always lying to you.
Does it mean that nothing’s your fault? Well, no.
There are possibly parts of your journey that involve your guilt. Guilt is a far different experience than shame!
Ways porn promotes sexual shame and unhealthy childhood sexual formation in men
I know – even though I don’t know every man – I would say every man at some level has sexual shame. That is not his fault.
This is an area of our lives that we’ve received so little healthy formation, and so little presence in conversation with others in a good way.
Childhood exposure to porn and sexual abuse – a perpetration of undeserved harm
I have so many men who say, well, there’s some weird things that happened when I was a kid.
And nine times out of ten, what we come to understand is those are stories of harm – where somebody else perpetrated against you and left you feeling like you were the perverted one. You were the weird one.
Most men’s story of first exposure to pornography is also a story of harm, simply by the nature of – you don’t know what’s coming!
You can’t know what’s coming as somebody is inviting you to look at pornography. Or if somebody carelessly left porn in a place or gave you access to it in a way that did not protect you.
That is a reckless and careless act on the part of somebody else.
Turn the tables on shame.
Men, what I want to invite you to is this: turning the tables on shame. It is lying to you!
There is more to your story than simply your perversion.
Though it might feel scary to walk into the unknown, I can assure you, you will discover parts of you that you thought you had lost — or were convinced were not possible for you.
Examine your unhealthy sexual scripts.
It’s easy to think of porn use, again, as just a bad behavior, as a body function. That sexual release is just a body function.
I would want to make clear that all sex and all sexual activity lives in a story. it always has a script or a ritual to it.
It is so important that you reflect on and engage in curiosity about the scripts that you’ve infused into your sexuality!
These can be even more damaging the earlier you discovered porn, because it sets the tone for what is sex!
At the time when you’re coming of age and meant to be curious about sexual things, rather than it being a kind of innocent discovery, and curiosity and learning experience? Well…
Instead, when you’re experiencing pornography, it’s setting a script that often involves harm, objectification, and manipulation.
It doesn’t involve love and romance and sensuality in a healthy way.
So… it’s so vital that you come to understand the impact porn had on you with those behaviors. They can set a tone and a mood for sex.
Porn literally sets the story that becomes arousing to you.
Healing your sexual arousal script
Your arousal script can change. It can heal as well, but it can be wounded by what you look at. In other words, with porn you’re allowing the story to be written for you about what sex is.
So that’s another reason why, really at some level — get angry at the evil inherent in pornography that is now writing the script for you of what sex is!
You can recover, and your neurology can heal your sexual script.
Your sexual arousal script can change.
Porn lies to you - creating a sense of false empowerment over women
Again, I think it’s important that we understand that pornography use is a form of relief, an attempt at relief, but it’s also a form of revenge.
And that might be a harder category to think about.
Lust is not just, again, this behavioral attempt at relief. I think there is that threat, but it is also an activity of power.
Lust is even more so about power than it is about relief or release.
Lust and power – naming the implicit misogyny in porn
So it’s important that we recognize that pornography is so implicitly misogynistic. The orgasm gap within pornography, meaning like the frequency of orgasm for men versus women is something like 80 to 90%, where in real life it’s 40 to 50%.
So we need to understand that the scripts of pornography are inherently full of hatred of women. Often, even that’s a part of what’s happening, presented as arousing, is the degradation of women through names that are given to them. That shapes your heart.
It takes three months after porn use for a man’s misogynistic views to start to reduce.
So for three months after a moment of acting out with pornography, there is a spike in misogynistic activity, or views. It takes three months for that to pass out of him, after a moment of porn use.
I think Patrick Carnes said that once – that they could test that for three months after porn use, because there was a spike in misogynistic views. That is staggering to me, What the hell, I mean, literally hell, right?
I would say most men are not going to pornography hoping to become women haters! They aren’t going there actively hoping to get revenge on women.
It’s so important we recognize, again, porn is not a place that’s going to foster you to become a healthy and loving, good and safe man to women.
In a lot of ways, you know, sex and sexual acting out can become a false attempt at power and initiation as a man.
It can become this kind of cultural thing by “scoring and getting some.”
It can feel like – I have the power of access to women.
I feel virile!
And it is such a false power handed to men.
A secret to redeeming your true power as a man…
The most powerful part about you as a man is your love.
It is your heart.
If you want to move the people in your life in the deepest way, become a good lover.
Love well the people around you.
Stop letting porn rob you of love.
Pornography will only present to you this false power: that it’s the virile man who scores and gets some and mistreats women, who gets the power.
I would say porn is robbing you. It is like a thief picking your pocket, as you’re watching, the pocket being your heart.
There’s a writer, Peggy Orenstein, a journalist who did a lot of investigative, qualitative work with men and women around sex culture, young men and women.
Her conclusion after all of these 300 or so interviews with men and women was, that when it comes to sex, women need to reconnect with their bodies and men need to reconnect with their hearts.
That would be her summary statement about what she sees wrong in male culture.
So my invitation to you as a man is that it is so vital that you learn to recover your heart.
And understand porn is trying to pick your pocket. It’s trying to take love from you and replace it with a false sense of power.
You were meant to be a lover – but porn is where the lover goes to die.
14-Day Free Trial
Protection From Pornography
Change your habits, change your life: Start our 14-day free trial to help get rid of pornography for good.
