One in particular, voyeurism, caught and held my attention. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe it was those ads in the back of
Boys’ Life magazine for X-ray glasses that captivated my imagination as a child growing up. The thought of being able to see through women’s clothes and see them naked, just like the ad depicted, was exciting to me back then. I guess it was still exciting to me as an adult because voyeur Web sites had a special attraction for me. I’d spend hours pouring through site after site, Web page after Web page, looking at hidden camera images of unsuspecting women who were photographed while they were undressing, or taking a shower, or standing naked in the bathroom while putting on makeup, or using a tanning bed. The fact that most of these pictures, if they weren’t staged, were a criminal violation of a person’s right to privacy never seemed to matter much to me at the time. All that mattered was that it gave me a higher high.
My “connection” with this particular genre of porn somehow created a higher level of sexual stimulation for me. Over the years I had unconsciously created a hierarchy of needs based on sexual stimulation that had a direct impact on how much pleasure I would experience when looking at porn. For instance, it was more stimulating for me to see hidden camera shots of an unsuspecting woman getting undressed than it was to look at group sex pictures, which was more arousing than heterosexual sex, which was more exciting than pictures of a naked woman posing alone. But whenever I used these edgier images, my sexual arousal and the resulting climax was more intense.
Once I figured out that I could get a higher high and zone out even more by using hard-core porn as my drug of choice, I started spending more time exploring darker genres of images. The more disturbing the image, the more I found I had to separate my relational emotions and values from what I was looking at and view the women as objects instead of people. That was the only way I could reconcile what I was doing with these images in my mind. Even though they were only images, I still found I had to separate or dissociate my emotions from how I was “using” these people for my own gratification. Otherwise, I couldn’t cope with my own repulsive thoughts about myself and what I was actually fantasizing about doing. The more I went there, the more I started hating myself for who I was as a person.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that this would somehow transfer over to the way I treated real people in relationships in the real world, especially women. My objectification and sexualization of women in porn became objectification and sexualization of the women I had relationships with in my life—including Patty. In time, I started caring less about others and more about what I was getting out of the transaction, a characteristic of objectification. This led to my spending less and less time with Patty and the boys and even friends and family since my interactions with them were increasingly at the cost of my time spent with porn.
Real women like Patty were no match for what I was getting from porn. Porn didn’t ask questions, never complained, and had no needs for me to meet. It was always there, waiting on me hand and foot, ready to meet my sexual needs on demand, whether that meant blonde or brunette, big or small, one-on-one or with a group. Whatever I wanted, whatever I demanded, in the back of my mind I knew I could always count on the Great Escape to deliver.
— Need help with pornography?
Adapted from
Porn Nation.
Copyright © 2008 Michael Leahy. All rights reserved. Used with Permission. Published by Northfield Publishing.
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