San Francisco, Calif., Mar 26, 2017 / 04:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In 2013, Beyonce Knowles topped GQ’s list of “The 100 Hottest Women of the 21st Century.”
That same year, the “definitive men’s magazine” that promises “sexy women” along with style advice, entertainment news and more ran a shorter listicle: “10 Reasons Why You Should Quit Watching Porn.”
The list included reasons such as decreased sexual impotence in men that regularly viewed pornography, and a reported lack of control of sexual desires. It was inspired by an interview with NoFap, an online community of people dedicated to holding each other accountable in abstaining from pornography and masturbation.The site clearly states that it is decidedly non-religious.
Matt Fradd, on the other hand, is a Catholic. Fradd has spent much of his adult life urging people to quit pornography, and developing websites and resources to help pornography addicts.
But even though he’s Catholic, Fradd’s new anti-porn book, “The Porn Myth,” won’t quote the saints or the Bible or recommend a regimen of rosaries.
“I wanted to write a non-religious response to pro-pornography arguments,” Fradd said.
That’s not because he’s abandoned his beliefs, or thinks that faith has nothing to say about pornography.
“Whenever I get up to speak, people expect that I’m just going to use a bunch of moral arguments (against porn). And I have them, and I’m happy to use them, and I think ultimately that’s what we need to get to. But I think using science…is always the best way to introduce this issue to people.”
“In an increasingly secular culture, we need arguments based on scientific research, of which there’s been much,” he said. It’s why he cites numerous studies on each page of his book, and why he’s included 50 pages of additional appendixes citing additional research.
Fradd is careful to clarify in his book that it is not a book against sex or sexuality. What he does want to do is challenge the way many people have come to think about pornography, and question whether it leads to human flourishing.
“This book rests on one fundamental presupposition: if you want something to flourish, you need to use it in accordance with its nature,” Fradd wrote. “Don’t plant tomatoes in a dark closet and water them with soda and expect to have vibrant tomato plants. To do so would be to act contrary to the nature of tomatoes. Similarly, don’t rip sex out of its obvious relational context, turn it into a commodity, and then expect individuals, families and society to flourish.”
But why dedicate a whole book to the scientific effects of pornography?
Fradd said that the sheer volume of pornography consumption makes this an especially urgent book – and it’s at least two decades too late. According to one survey, about 63 percent of men and 21 percent of women ages 18-30 have reported that they view pornography several times a week – not to mention those viewing it slightly less often.
“If we have an iPhone we have a portable X-rated movie theater. And some studies suggest children as young as 8 are being exposed to it, so if I meet someone who’s 14, I know that they have looked at porn or are looking at it regularly,” Fradd said.
Fradd recalls in his book a study done by Melissa Farley, director of Prostitution Research and Education. When Farley’s team set out to do a study about men who buy sex, they had a difficult time finding men who don’t do so.
“The use of pornography, phone sex, lapdances, and other services has become so widespread that Farley’s team had to loosen their definition of a non-sex buyer in order to assemble a hundred-person control group for their research,” Fradd wrote.
Throughout the book, Fradd uses scientific research to debunk numerous and prevailing “myths” or arguments about pornography, including the ideas that pornography empowers women, that it isn’t addictive, and that it’s a healthy part of sexuality and relationships.
One of the most commonly believed myths is that pornography doesn’t hurt anyone, Fradd said. But he has found that pornography harms people personally, relationally, and societally.
On the personal level, a 2014 study from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin found that frequent pornography use in men was associated with decreased brain matter in certain areas of the brain.
The abstract explained that the association may not be causation, but correlation, “which means that if porn isn’t shrinking your brain, it would mean that people with small brains like porn more,” Fradd said.
“It’s not a feather in your cap, either way.”
As for whether or not pornography empowers women, Fradd said that while he agrees that a woman who consents to producing pornography is in some sense “better” than a woman who is forced or coerced, but not by much, because pornography is still being used by the consumer to treat another person as a means to an end.
“No matter the level of consent, it is a manly thing to treat a woman who has forgotten her dignity with dignity nonetheless,” Fradd wrote.
Fradd also quotes Rebecca Whisnant, a feminist theory professor, who once refuted the myth of porn as female empowerment in a talk:
“Feminism is about ending the subordination of women. Expanding women’s freedom of choice on a variety of fronts is an important part of that, but it is not the whole story. In fact, any meaningful liberation movement involves not only claiming the right to make choices, but also holding oneself accountable for the effects of those choices on oneself and on others,” she said in a 2007 talk.
These women are also perpetuating a system that robs women, as a group, of empowerment, Fradd said, such as women who are sex trafficked while participating in the porn industry. By some estimates, two million women and girls are held in sexual slavery at any given time.
It’s part of the reason why Fradd is donating all of the proceeds of “The Porn Myth” to Children of the Immaculate Heart, a non-profit corporation operating in San Diego, Calif, whose mission is to serve survivors of human trafficking.
Porn also disempowers the women whose relationships are destroyed by men caught up in pornography addictions, Fradd noted.
“Ask the millions of women whose husbands habitually turn to porn. Do these women feel empowered by pornography?” Fradd asked.
Pornography use in marriage is one way that porn harms relationships. According to Fradd’s research, a survey of 350 divorce lawyers reported in 2003 that pornography was at least part of the problem in half of all divorce cases they saw.
Another commonly believed myth is that marriage will solve a porn addiction, which shows a misunderstanding of the psychology of addiction in the first place, Fradd explains.
But pornography can also damage the relationships of a single person looking for love.
A 2011 TED talk by psychologist Philip Zimbardo said that studies showed a “widespread fear of intimacy and social awkwardness among men,” and an inability to engage in face-to-face conversations with women, Fradd wrote.
“Why? Zimbardo says this is caused by disproportionate Internet use in general and excessive new access to pornography in particular. ‘Boys’ brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way, for change, novelty, excitement.’”
And Zimbardo is not alone in his observations. As Fradd notes, neuroscientist William Struthers wrote in 2009 that “With repeated sexual acting out in the absence of a partner, a man will be bound and attached to the image and not a person.”
In other words, men can start preferring pixels to people. According to NoFap’s statistics in 2013, about half of their users had never had sex with a real person, meaning their only experience of sexual intimacy has been digital.
That reason alone has been why many people, men especially, have sought to kick their porn habits, Fradd said.
“I know agnostics or atheists who quit porn literally because they couldn’t have sex with people they were hooking up with. That’s why they quit porn. And these guys are fit, good-looking young men, who couldn’t get an erection around a young woman. But they realized if the woman left and they opened up their laptop they’d get an immediate erection.”
Studies have also shown that pornography addiction is driven by the increase in amounts, and varieties, of material readily available to anyone with access to the internet.
“People find themselves viewing more and more disturbing pornography, and the reason for this is because of a decrease in dopamine in the brain, which happens because of the addiction one has, and they end up seeking out more graphic, violent forms of pornogrpahy just to boost the dopamine enough to feel normal,” Fradd said.
“People don’t wake up when they’re 30 and decide to look at child porn or feces porn or something disgusting like that. These are big things that people spiral into, and the industry has to keep pushing the envelope because it’s addictive,” he added.
While the statistics of pornography can be disturbing and depressing, Fradd stressed that there was still hope. He devotes several chapters in the book to protecting children from pornography, dealing with pornograpy in marriage, and getting help for those addicted to pornography.
Fradd himself has spent years in ministry to those with pornography addictions, and helps run the site Integrity Restored, which offers numerous resources to help those struggling with addictions and those in ministry to them.
The most effective steps for someone to follow for someone addicted to porn?
“They should find a spiritual director, they should go to therapy, and they should find a 12 step group (like Sexaholics Anonymous),” Fradd said. “With those three things together, we’ve seen the most success.”
Often well-meaning Christians will relegate pornography addictions to the spiritual realm, telling people that they simply need to pray more, Fradd said. And while prayer isn’t a bad thing, it doesn’t address the psychological aspect of addiction.
“When people do things like put a picture of Mary on their laptop or pray more, it doesn’t actually usually work. It’s not a solely spiritual problem, so what we don’t need is a solely spiritual answer,” he said.
Just as you should encourage a clinically depressed person to seek counseling and therapy, you should also encourage someone experiencing addiction to seek professional help, he added.
Fradd said he’s also been encouraged by the number of celebrities who have recently spoken out against pornography, such as Pamela Anderson, British comedian Russell Brand, actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Rashida Jones, and former NFL player and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” actor Terry Crews, to name a few.
Slowly, he said, society is catching up to the science that shows how harmful pornography can be.
“We’ve reached a tipping point in our culture such that everyone either struggles with porn and/or knows someone who does, and we all see the negative effects,” he said.
“So the porn industry’s cronies can tell us that pornography is healthy for well-rounded adults, but they now sound like the tobacco apologists sounded like in the 80s. In light of the evidence, their assertions seem increasingly ridiculous.”
Fradd’s book is available at: https://www.thepornmyth.com/
[…]
In California, it might behoove the pro-life movement to limit the discussion to minority LGBTQ babies.
Who are registered Democrats.
(Sigh.)
Archbishop Cordileone should punish the students who walked out by denying them communion.
Aside from that, the students should be punished by requiring them to read and write about Archbishop Cordileone’s recent pastoral letter on abortion.
It sounds like Archbishop Cordileone should be more concerned about his own flock rather than a USCCB letter that will never see the light of day and which Bergoglio has effectively rendered meaningless.
Multiple generations of pseudo-Catholicism. Why should we expect the children of the latest generation to not be, well, charitably speaking, airheads?
That is it in a nutshell with the San Francisco location as the topper.
You had to guess it happened in California. Lemming behavior is all they have. A private Catholic school is not a place for this sort of behavior….it was rude, childish and unchristian for the students to walk out on a speaker. Since most left, it has the feel of a planned political action. One would suspect the ring -leaders among the newly admitted girls. Students do not run the school or make the decisions on speakers. In a catholic school one would think that learning aspects of catholic morality would be part of the expectation. The students who walked out should be disciplined with several weeks of detention and a long essay assignment about why their behavior was inappropriate, and their parents should be informed. Those who decline to cooperate should be expelled. .
Their parents are pro-abortion “catholics” who vote Democrat, so this cannot be a surprise. The Catholic Church in America is mission territory, and the USCCB is merely a self-promoting welfare agency of the Federal Government. This is why I now support the SSPX without reservation.
Accepting that their parents are politically Democrats, there is also the propaganda the students are exposed to due to the ubiquitous presence of their cell phones. The world of the woke and progressives is always at the tips of their fingers.
Further evidence of the extraordinary catechetics in place for the last fifty-five years. The new evangelization has so many success stories. Given the locale one can only imagine the other moral issues held in mid-air by the next generation of katholics. Maybe they should be at the synod on synods…
But we don’t want to make them too rigid.
Ah, but these are difficult times they say.
One is left to wonder how less difficult they might be if we had not sold out to the world, the flesh and the devil while we were opening all the windows…
A couple of points. First of all, I graduated from the school in question in 1971. Secondly, the Society of Mary has not been at the school for a number of years. Frankly, I don’t know if they have any role in administering the school. Thirdly, I was disturbed at the idea of the girl who stayed for the assembly, but did not want to be quoted by name. I wrote to the CHRONICLE reporter to point that out. She replied that the girl did not want to be quoted because she wasn’t sure how her parents would feel about her talking to a reporter and that the reporter had witnessed an open discussion among that girl and classmates who felt differently about the issue.
Did Nancy lead the walkout?
Whomever is the spiritual leader of the Catholic kids in the school need to have a serious conversation with them. I, for one, will not be attending their graduation ceremonies.
California. San Francisco.
“We ask that all students listen respectfully to the speaker, who is nationally recognized for her work on this subject.”
Before we even get into the topic of abortion the issue to be addressed is the protester’s lack of respect for and unwillingness to hear an opposing viewpoint. Who empowered them to take such an action? They come across as a bunch of spoiled ignorant lemmings who think that the world revolves around them and their precious opinion, all other viewpoints be damned. There should be profound attention-getting consequences for their action and if they don’t like it then “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” Clearly Catholic doctrine is lost on them.
Returning to the topic of abortion, ultimately what a sad statement they make of the condition of their soul. So young to be so poisoned.
Of course, I don’t know what has been going on in the school prior to this incident, but it appears there is not much about the school that is Catholic. How Catholic can these young people be or how Catholic do they perceive they are supposed to be, and then betray a fundamental teaching of the church.
I don’t have a problem making efforts to help them better understand why the church teachers what She teachers, but if there is continued resistance they need to be expelled. If the entire school is infected with compromise, then it might be time to close the school until A proper foundation is established allowing it to reopen as an authentic Catholic institution.
I think your comment could apply to a number of Catholic high schools, and even more so to a great number of the Catholic colleges and universities in this country.
So very sad. Very sad. These students at a CATHOLIC SCHOOL not only did not want to hear about the value of life and why we, as CATHOLICS, believe every life is sacred, they did not want to value the educational ideal of listening to what amounts to a “philosopher” speaking. Like walking out on Plato, for example, because he espoused a Republic. Closing their minds, let alone their spirits, to ideas they don’t want to hear about, so young, so sad. Better to keep an open mind and spirit to the wisdom of others, throughout life.
And their ability to protest a pro-life speaker was guaranteed by a mother who respect their right to life from conception.
And they wonder why people homeschoool…
…And don’t save several thousand dollars a year as well.
It’s very difficult to be a principal or president of a Catholic high school these days. That said, I believe the interim president of this school made two mistakes in this matter. First, he should not have, in effect, apologized to parents for programming authentic Catholic teaching on the protection of life from conception to natural death. The teaching is only “polarizing” in the sense that radical dissenters and apostates do not accept it, and it is relativistic to acknowledge any legitimacy in their positions. Second, the event should not have been a mandatory assembly, but rather an optional lecture during school hours. The walk-out, which was foreseeable, has caused scandal. Yes, it is sad that many people think they can claim to be Catholic and also pro-“choice”, but offering them opportunities like this to cause scandal only wounds the Church. My opinions on this matter are informed by the comparatively successful approaches taken by leaders of Catholic high schools where I have worked or sent my children.
This is happening in a lot of Catholic schools where parents send their children primarily for academic and less of religious studies of learning the Catholic faith. These are children of parents who failed to lay a good solid moral foundation prior to their children getting indoctrinated by the secular society. “… do not weep for me, but for yourselves and for your children.” Lk 23:28
If only Catholic schools weren’t concerned with filling seats in order to stay in business…
As mass population centers continue to lose Catholics more schools will close.
The church has not “led” on this issue, even In the beginning. They left it to grass routes as a way of messaging truth. But too many changes accompanied the decades and for myriad reasons, we lost the young. Morality must be organic for it to be lived. Mixed messages from a video of the Pope and the President lockedin a seemingly harmonious handclaps all but adds a final period to the efficacy of the Church’s teaching authority.
We have been warned about being in the last battle against family and marriage ;
one has to wonder if Christianity is beeing seen by many any more just as a ‘nice , nice ‘ wimpy and effeminate , impractical faith and the related contempt against same .
The Way of the marvelous spiritual warfare in a bloodless manner that we have been blessed with – more focus on same could be one means . There is the occasion of Elisha, the mocking ‘kids’ and and the bears – invoking The Lord to bind and command away the spiritual bears in the lives of the mockers and to heal their wounds can be one good exercise in warfare for all involved –
https://answersingenesis.org/bible-questions/elisha-little-children-and-the-bears/
Similarly , St.Joseph , from the Line of David who tore up lions and bears , to be invoked to help protect the ‘sheep ‘ – the inner thought life and purity of the hearts – being there to tear up all seductive spirits , to restore blessed thoughts and prayers as the saintly children in Fatima , to live in holy and good relatioships .
The Holy Father reminding us to focus on The Cross where in all evils get burned up in the Flames of Love , to bless us with New Life – as the Most Powerful in the warfare – thank God that families too have easy access to these truths and occasions in the Holy Mass and Sacraments .
May The Spirit help to burn away all lukewarmness in many hearts to keep us too from walking away from Life Giving Blessings and protection in The Precious Blood !
The pro- life lecture should not have been mandatory. The school administrators could have turned it into a “pro-choice” moment in which students are told they’ll have a choice, either attend the pro-life presentation or go downtown and work at the soup kitchen feeding the homeless and washing dishes.
Wouldn’t expelling all the walkouts be a life lesson to be remembered for the rest of their lives?
The chaplain of the school needs to be replaced. He seemingly wants woke friends instead of religious Catholics.
As a Catholic high school theology teacher, I would not be too hard on the students or the leadership. Most of the students who walked out were probably just ignorant. The leadership did well to bring in this speaker.
I’d suggest a way forward is to schedule a debate between two competent speakers on each side of the issue.
Kudos to the school for teaching the pro-life stance.
Shame on the students who walked out thus demonstrating they—the woke—cannot tolerate differing opinions. God save us from them. They, terrifyingly, are the future.
Sad commentary on the state of Catholic schools, but great comments except for the suggestions of “choice of activity” and debate. A wise spiritual director once amended my thinking, as he asserted there is no argument for abortion—there is no “pro” position that withstands the objective truth that induced abortion is always murder. How to help women in crisis pregnancies or what society can do to turn around faulty rationale are open to dialogue and debate. As for providing students the option of a corporeal work of mercy is rather than listen to this speaker still misses the larger objective: education. This is obviously sorely needed, as these students—by their demonstration—expressed their lack of a yi comprehensive understanding of abortion—not just as evil—but all of the realities of the procedures and aftermath—lifelong consequences. Yet, an option might have been individual library research that demonstrated a better grasp of those risks, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Finally, that this walk out caused scandal—for whom? Jesus Christ experienced numerous walk always but still affirmed truth. At least we know who needs our prayers.
Why all this “tolerance” of people protesting on Church property, in support of murder. Please, stop this acceptance of things divisive, destructive, and evil. This is the Church we are talking about! Defend Her, Protect Her, Boldly make our Biblical stand. Expel these students. Closet smokers don’t get as much tolerance.
Abortion is certainly one of the great spiritual battles of our time, and the devil seems to be winning many to his side.
In Ephesians 6:12,St. Paul writes: “For we are not contending with flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places.”
In John 8:42-47 Jesus said this to a group who opposed Him: 42 “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me. 43 Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. 44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! 46 Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me? 47 Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.”
And in St. Faustina’s Dairy (#1276) there is this:
“At eight o’clock, I was seized with such violent pains that I had to go to bed at once. I was convulsed with pain for three hours; that is, until eleven o’clock at night. At times, the pains that caused me to lose consciousness.
“Jesus had me realize that in this way, I took part in His Agony in the garden, and that He Himself allowed these sufferings in order to offer reparation to God for the souls murdered in the wombs of mothers.”
“If only I could save even one soul from murder by means of these sufferings!”