The Catholic Letter

Why Do So Many Men Have Problems With Pornography Addiction?

Most women have a hard time understanding why a man would look at pornography at all... let alone become so addicted to it that it creates such huge problems with job performance, family life, and even finances.  And when women are told why this happens, they often don't believe it or they think that it only applies to a few select men.

Let's start with the fact that women are beautiful.  God made them this way, and meant for us to have a certain amount of awe for this beauty.  But the beauty (for men anyway) is much different than the beauty of a blue sky or a nice car.  The beauty is different because the mere sight of it excites a man sexually.

There are men out there who claim that they can behold the beauty of a woman (meaning from head to toe-not just their faces) without becoming excited.  The majority of those men are fooling themselves.  And those who aren't fooling themselves are suffering from a defect.  By design, men are excited by the body of a woman.  This wasn't an accident-it's the way God meant for it to be (at least, that's what He meant to happen after Adam discovered sin).  Men can see women, think about women, read about women, or hear about women and always have the same response.  The response might be to various degrees, but it's always the same thing-sexual excitement.

To this aspect of men, you add the fact that sex has such power over the human mind.  This isn't particular to men-women suffer from it as well.  Yes, there are people (more women than men) who completely lack sexual desire.  But even those people aren't impartial to sex.  Many of them are repulsed by it, emotionally or mentally.  St. Thomas Aquinas called this frigidity.  It is the opposite of lust.  Sex is polarizing, and most people lean toward one or the other (lust and frigidity).  Very few people are between.

Until recently, men had to go through a bit of an obstacle to get a hold of pornography.  They had to go to a ‘special store' or had to rent from a video store that kept records.  A man could hardly look at pornography in total secret-in order to obtain it, someone would have to know about it.  Not only that, but if he were a God-fearing man, even one prone to a lot of temptation in this area, he had time to think about his actions as he prepared to look at it.  Even standing in the checkout line at the store gave him enough time to realize he really didn't want to offend God this way.

Now, with the internet to available, a man can look at it without anyone knowing about it.  And he can get to it in a matter of seconds-just by typing a word or two in a search engine.  In fact, even if he doesn't want to see pornography, he eventually will by accident.  He might click on the wrong link, search for the wrong words, or even get spam from a pornography website.  If he does anything online daily, he will eventually see pornography.  It's just one of those things.

When you add all this up, you have a good recipe for spiritual disaster.  And that's exactly what has happened to thousands of good, Catholic men.  Men who, ten years ago, would never even have considered looking at an indecent picture.  Suddenly they're trapped in a fantasy world they can't seem to get out of-not alone anyway.

What's the solution for this problem?  Prayer.  The sacraments.  Fasting.  These men need all of that.  Eventually, they'll realize how bad it's gotten and try to get help.  Until then, you can only pray for them.