Like an abusive relationship, porn is a closed system. A great deal is left out. Knowledge is repressed. Break out of this mental prison, writes David Mura, there are better ways to seek fulfillment. From “A Male Grief:
Notes on Pornography and Addiction”, from Men Confront Pornography (1990, p.131-141)…
In imposing abuse, the abuser attempts to keep the victim from any knowledge of how to resist the abuse. In this way, abuse represents a closed system, any information which implies the abuse is wrong or which even implies the existence of a world beyond the system must be repressed…
To link sexuality and intimacy is to link sexuality with knowledge, with an opening up of possibility rather than a closing down. In the choice between addictive sexuality and intimate sexuality, one trades a finite set of possibilities against an infinite set of possibilities. Addictive sexuality wishes to deny itself knowledge of the lover, of the lover’s emotions, history, human fallible self and the possibilities of that self. Such sexuality views the other only in one dimension, for that is all it believes sexuality can contain. In contrast, intimate sexuality believes that sexuality can contain not only the other, but also one’s own emotions, history, fallibilities and possibilities…
[I]n the need for more and more images, all drained of emotional depth or a sense of personal history, the endless consumption of pornographic images derives from the mistaken assumption that one can feed a spiritual hunger through a desire for control, distance, and eventual destruction. Such a desire is not a desire of the flesh. As so many have pointed out, pornography is not primarily a sensual experience. Instead, the consumption of pornography is, in its profoundest sense, an intellectual and emotional perception which is based on repression and false premises. Since one’s spiritual hunger can never be satisfied by such means, the addict can either keep consuming pornography in greater amounts, hoping that somehow quantity will change its quality, or else he can give up pornography and seek a different sustenance…
The idea of what is “natural” has been debunked so often, one tires of going after it again (see, for instance, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies). Except when the term enters debates among Marxists, “natural” is invariably used to preclude any investigation of whether or not people in other societies or in other times may have behaved differently. In addition, it discourages any examination of whether or not certain behavior is learned. In such instances “natural” is not a step-by-step reasoned argument, it is an ideology. It is used to justify whatever is customary in a given society, to blind critical discourse.
In this particular case, the argument that pornography is “natural” ignores the fact that there are men who have given up their obsession with pornography and who have not died.