Porn affects people at every level in society, even those with fame and fortune who have far greater sexual access than most people. Elsewhere on this blog, I’ve featured content from Fight the New Drug, an organization committed to raising awareness about the dangers of pornography and reducing consumption.
In this article, I’ve transcribed a compilation of 5 celebrities–Terry Crews, Rashida Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Candace Cameron Bure, and Russell Brand–talking about porn. Their takes are as insightful as they are thought-provoking; and they all feed the same conclusion: pornography is bad for individuals, bad for relationships, and bad for society. Much respect to these individuals for using their platform to make a difference, especially Terry Crews (see his complete testimony) and Russell Brand, who opened up about their own pornography consumption.
For more, see the complete archive of articles on integrity.
[Edit: Video removed from YouTube, but transcript available below.]
Transcript:
Crews: It’s one of those things where the pornography addiction turns into something else. You can’t have something like that in your life without it growing into something else. . .
For years, years, years, my dirty little secret was that I was addicted to pornography. This thing has become a problem. I think it’s a worldwide problem. But pornography–it really, really messed up my life in a lot of ways. It was my secret. Nobody knew, and it got bad. And when I say bad–some people deny. They say you can’t really be addicted to pornography–there’s no way. But I’m going to tell you something. If day turns into night and you’re still watching, you probably got a problem, and that was me. . .
Being on the internet allows you to keep it a secret. Before you had to go search it out, go look for it, go to a strip club where somebody would see me. But this is a secret–they don’t have to see you at all. You can be all alone, and it will be just yours. But I’m trying to tell you that makes it all the more insidious and all the more we have to root it out and call it what it is. .
My issue was and is with pornography is that it changes the way you think about people. People become objects. People become body parts. They become things to be used rather than people to be loved. . .
Pornography is an intimacy killer. It kills all intimacy. Every time I watched it, I was walled-off. As like another brick that came between me and my wife. . .
I didn’t want to be this way. I didn’t want to continue to do the things that hurt my wife and hurt my family. . .
I want to help people. That is what I’m about. Guys, it’s my mission. It’s my life. It’s what I do. I love yall.
Jones: The average age now where somebody watches their first porn is 11. Porn can be anything from really soft-core and mellow to like hardcore, violent, torture porn. For somebody to learn about sex from porn, I think is really dangerous. And I think that happens a lot. I had a bit of a tipping point from pop culture. I saw so much imagery in one week, fully inspired by porn and stripper culture. And it just felt like something we were forced to accept and we never got the chance to have a conversation about it. That message, that really homogenized myopic message that your sex is the thing that makes you valuable. That is your currency. That limits women’s choices. It’s across the board now with Instagram, social media, pop stars, actresses. It feels like you have to be sexy to be noticed. I think it’s dangerous because we’re ignoring whatever other costs there may be.
Gordon-Levitt: Different media that we consume give us unrealistic expectations of what life is supposed to be, and certainly what love or sex is supposed to be. You know I’ve worked in TV and movies most of my life, and I’ve experienced this where people say to me, “Why can’t I have it like that? Why can’t I find a guy who’s like that character in the movie?” The truth is real life isn’t like those simplistic fantasies that you see or are in a pornography clip or in a commercial for Carls Jr. Real life is better than that. Real life is so much more complicated and detailed and nuanced, but you’ll miss all that good stuff if you’re too busy comparing your real life to these simplistic fantasies.
Bure: I have a quote here from the co-director of the sexual trauma and psychopathology program that says “Pornography addicts have a more difficult time recovering from their addiction that cocaine addicts since coke users can get the drug out of their system, but pornographic images stay in the brain forever.” I can remember the first time I was exposed to pornography when I was probably about 12 years old. I can see it in my head right now. It’s something that won’t go out of my brain, and it hurts me to know that. . . I can vividly see the photographs that I was exposed to. And because of the internet, pornography is available and accessible to kids, even younger. And it is such a perversion of what sex is supposed to be. To have these kids so exposed to it–I think this is fantastic.
Brand: Sex is something we’re all interested in because of biological programming, but our attitudes toward sex have become warped and perverted. Pornography reduces the spectacle of sex to a kind of extracted physical act. There’s a lot of statistics here that we’ve got about pornography. The Journal of Adolescent Health talks about the effects of prolonged exposure to porn. I was obsessed with porn when I was a teenager. And it’s nostalgic mad stuff that makes me sound old now. We had to find magazine places and steal things form under beds.
So living in this culture now where there’s just iceberg of filth floating through every house on WiFi. It’s inconceivable of what it must be like to be a young adolescent now with this kind of access to porn. I know that pornography is wrong, that I shouldn’t be looking at it. There is a general feeling, isn’t there, and you can recall if you look at pornography that this isn’t what’s the best thing for me to do, this isn’t the best use of my time now. I don’t put that laptop down and think “There, what a productive piece of time spent, connecting with the world.” I feel like if I had total dominion over myself I would never look at myself. One day at a time–I’d kick it out of my life. Pornography is not something that I like. It’s something that I haven’t been able to make a long-term commitment to not looking at. And it’s affecting my ability to relate to women, to relate to myself, to my own sexuality.
The direction we should be going in is how can we understand our sexuality? How can we express it lovingly? This cloud of pornographic information and even soft cultural smog is making it impossible for us to relate to our own sexuality, our own psychology. So if you’re constantly bombarded with great waves of filth, it’s really difficult to remain connected to truth. Try to have an idea of what you want from loving relationships, and what you want from sexuality.
