A sensational read this closing year was a Nation
exposé claiming pornography is a $10 billion (Sh900 billion) a year
industry with over 10 million man-hours spent watching porn.
The
revelation should be of great concern to men, who, research shows, are
greater addicts of porn in magazines, videos, TV and the Internet.
Libertines
will be swift to aver that what is deemed to be ‘abnormal’ — including
same-sex sexual exploits — is purely subjective. In the spirit of live
and let live especially in this festive season, this article will focus
on pornography, which could be inflicting greater damage to marital
relations.
In a book, The Sexual Man, which is billed
as a landmark study of men and sex in the 90s, the author, Archibald
Hart, describes porn addiction as having serious effects on its victims,
who could sink into sadomasochism.
Published in 1994,
a case study in the book is of a married man, who “found himself drawn
to kiddie porn”, before he realised the depths to which he had sunk.
Pornography, he realised, knows no boundaries. “It is a bottomless pit.
It never becomes satisfying.”
Nairobi Clinical
psychologist Gladys Mwiti linked older men’s addiction to pornography to
morality. In a recent telephone interview, she said: “The values you
grew up with end up being the values that you age with.”
The
interview turned out to be an indictment of modern Kenyan men’s
obsession with wealth creation at the expense of nurturing relations
with their spouses. Be it money, leisure, or pleasure you invested in,
that is what you end up withdrawing.
FAILED HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS
As
some people grow older, Dr Mwiti said, “they forget to invest in
healthy relationships and in principled living.” They end up lonely and
watch porn to make up for failed healthy human relations with their
wives and their children.
Young men are giving their
all to amassing wealth. They have become virtual prisoners of what is
destroying their intimacy with their spouses.
“If you
have been focusing more on property and money and less on relationship,
you are likely to grow up lonely, alone, and with very few meaningful
relationships around you.”
Dr Mwiti says that if you
don’t invest in values to distinguish right from wrong, as you grow
older, you start looking for young girls.” Nothing informs your
engagement in the leisure enterprise.
Could watching
porn be a factor in recent cases of undressing women? Most likely, given
Hart’s suggestion that women’s images in porn suggest women are sex
objects.
The hard-core stuff also presented many
sexual fantasies as being violent and forceful. The message? Pain and
sex go together. The more pain the better the sex.”
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