PORNOGRAPHY !! . . . .IS EVIL . . !!!!

I ओंस walked around in an Internet café where I work and found a boy who seemed to be in his early teens browsing different pornography sites. I was surprised because in a society like ours, one wouldn’t expect that of him, but little did I know that one can become a pornography addict the way it is with alcohol and smoking.

According to Mr Patrick Mwase, a psychologist at Makerere University, pornography addiction is the excessive use of pictures or images with sexual acts that ends up interfering with your daily life and becomes part of you.

“Pornography is something that many people look at as sexual pleasure and it’s an overt depiction of pictures and persons in nude images with the aim of eliciting sexual arousal on the part of the consumer,” he says.

Although some adults watch pornography material, it’s mostly the youth who enjoy watching such videos and because of the improved technology like the Internet, pornography is no longer a magazine thing.

“However, when one continues watching porn material, it can easily become an addiction that an individual gets involved in like smoking and taking drugs,” says the psychologist. He also adds that porn addiction is caused by different reasons like prolonged exposure to pornography material. This stimulates the need to watch it over and over again so such an act becomes habitual.

The desire to see more of it can also lead to an addiction so with time, the person develops the tolerance for porn and this tolerance pushes them to see worse images. The need to see their fantasies acted out also turns one into a porn addict.
But porn addiction is not instant; it’s a process with different stages.

“The first stage is early exposure, in this case, an individual who gets early exposure to pornography is likely to take it as something normal and part of their life so it becomes hard for them to quit,” he says.

They will find it hard to do without it and will tend to search for more pornography. The second stage is the escalation stage; the psychologist says that under this stage, the individual starts looking for more graphic porn material and has the urge to look at advanced porn since material that once excited them no longer seems interesting.

Desensitisation is the other stage. “Under this stage, the individual becomes numb and porn becomes something normal that even when they watch the most erotic pornographic material, they do not get sexually aroused, so this pushes them to look for more erotic material,” explains Mr Mwase.

The final stage is when the individual starts acting out sexually. “Since the individual is not satisfied with the most erotic porn material, they move away from watching the images and start getting involved in different sexual acts like masturbation and violent sexual relationships as a way of depicting what they watch.”

At such an advanced stage of pornography addiction, the psychologist says that the individual is most likely to suffer from different problems like lack of intimacy in their relationships since they always get satisfaction from watching porn material.

“The individual will turn out to be sexually violent in cases where they want their partners to do what they see and when they fail to comply, the porn addict will think that their partner is not updated, so they should update them by force.”

At times, such an individual spends long hours in isolated places so that he can watch porn material, so this comes with a trait of secrecy where the individual is not open since he does not want other people to know what they are doing.

It also leads to inefficiency at work in cases where the individual spends long hours looking for porn material instead of doing his work. This person is also likely to develop obscene language since it’s what is used in porn movies.

Mr Mwase says that there is no standard criterion to diagnose porn addiction, but individuals need to look out for the stages to avoid getting addicted to pornography because it has serious side effects.