Raised on P*rn | Documentary Film

One of the powers of innocence is the ability to have a world that is safe to be able to play and experiment in without the threat of danger.

what happens with pornography or when sexuality intrudes through any form of violation, is you all of a sudden realize there's a parallel world next to yours.

And that if you walk through this door, nothing will ever be the same.

I remember being a kid and looking at a rosebud and thinking how pretty it was.

And I remember thinking, oh, well, I want it to open up like a rose, you know, so I'll just pull back all the petals and it'll open up and it'll be beautiful like a rose.

Now I realize you can't force that.

That happens when that flower is ready to open and when it's being fed and nurtured and it opens.

And it's very similar to a child's or adolescent's sexuality.

If you try to open those petals too early, I mean, they will grow and they will open, but they're going to be damaged.

They're not going to be the same person that they would have been.

Growing up, my dad planted a church in a small rural town where everyone knows everyone.

We would always hang out on the streets, you know, playing football with the neighbors and stuff like that.

We're in this playground, and a friend of mine was like, hey, Richie, I want to show you a picture.

He shows me this picture of this topless girl.

These sensations go through my body.

I'm not even aware of the language or even what to recognize or call them.

And I never forgot that.

It was imprinted in my heart.

The next week or so, I'm riding my bike, and out of nowhere, this paper blows on my yard.

I went over there and picked it up, and it was a full page, like someone ripped it out of a Playboy magazine.

And I was like, this is it.

This is like my chance of actually getting pornography for myself.

So I actually folded it, put it in my pocket, and hid it in my room.

Every time it was time for bed, I would literally just take it out, lock the door, and just start looking at it.

And I remember doing that for hours, even as a child.

From there, porn created this whole mental script

on how to relate to the opposite sex.

And so I remember I wanted to pursue girls and I had no idea how to approach them.

I had no idea how to start the conversation.

All I knew was, you know, we go to the room and have sex.

So it was like, how do you start a conversation?

So I'm like, well,

I'll just be the shy type, but it's all manipulation.

And so that's how I learned it, was be a manipulator.

So when I first had a relationship, I remember just thinking, I hope she's going to be okay with me putting my hands on her breasts.

And I hope that I can put my hands down her pants.

In my mind, I'm hoping this happens.

I'm not going to push it.

I just want to be one of the shy guys and just kind of just sneak it in that way so that way I can gain her trust.

And then I can go ahead and just do what I want, what I saw in the pictures.

There's pretty good documentation that the earlier someone is exposed to really explicit pornography and sexual imagery, the more likely it is that they're going to have compulsive and addictive problems around their sexuality as an adult.

because that nine-year-old does not have the emotional and biological development to be able to really understand what the meaning is.

He knows it's incredibly arousing and amazing and distracting and fun and it feels good to look at, but their brains are really not ready to handle it.

Our sexuality is wired into us.

The most sexual organ is between our ears, not between our legs.

So when you are developing your brain sexually, what happens is that pornography begins building that script.

This is the way we're supposed to think about it.

And so when a young person views pornographic material, they're neurologically now starting to put bricks in this wall of kind of building the structure of what sex means.

Adolescent brain is not an adult brain with less experience.

It is in a unique place.

It is anatomically, physiologically, and biologically different.

And what occurs during adolescence is several brain changes that have a purpose.

And the purpose is to become very excited about sensation seeking, about rewards, about sex.

And it's to become wired up, actually changing the structure of the brain to wire up to the environment.

And it has been shown to occur with nerve connections.

The way nerves connect and intertwine is really the basis for all learning and all memory.

So what occurs is around age 11, the adolescent brain prunes down these connections until you're set with the connections that will perhaps last a lifetime.

Pornography is a teacher and modeler of sexual templates, particularly when they're modeled early, because it's a powerful neuroplasticity device.

Neuroplasticity means that our brain changes, and we change when we want and when we learn.

And we have seen it in pornography now.

People who are watching pornography compulsively, their brains look different from those that are not.

A leading researcher said recently to me, we're in the midst of the single largest unregulated social experiment in human history.

And what he was talking about was the inundation of the brains of young children with content that they're not prepared to deal with.

And what it is doing is normalizing behavior that is going to affect, particularly young boys, is going to affect their view of women, their view of relationships, their view of the world.

A few years ago, when I was 16, I dated this guy and we were both virgins.

Maybe a month into our relationship, we ended up having sex.

The next morning, he was like, hey, I want to show you something.

We watched porn and I had never seen it.

I didn't even know it was a thing until then.

But then that was when I realized he watches this all the time.

And he told me, he's like, I watch it all the time.

It's not a big deal.

Over the course of our relationship, the different sexual things that he wanted to do became more and more vile and abusive and disgusting.

scary for me.

I just remember he would talk about wanting to do like certain things that he would see in porn.

And he said,

that one of his favorite things about porn is how at the end of some of the more hardcore ones, the guy will

um they'll punch a girl in the nose and finish on her face and it looks like a cherry sundae and i was like do not do that to me you can't do that to me and he was like i'm not gonna tell you like when i'm gonna do it it'll just be a surprise like you won't even have to think about it before and i just

I was just scared.

I just, I was really scared.

I didn't want that to happen to me.

And that was when I broke up with him.

It really just felt like I was an object for his pleasure and like I owed him anything he wanted.

The whole point is that he was a good guy who started watching porn and somehow it escalated to him thinking it's okay to punch his girlfriend in the nose and finish on her face.

Where did that become okay?

At some point in it, he stopped seeing women as people because porn messed up his mind and just distorted his whole thinking.

There's this very dangerous thing that's going on in our culture right now where we're not having a strong enough or more vibrant conversation with young boys about their sexual lives.

In the absence of adults having meaningful, ongoing, open and honest conversations with young people about sexual behavior, their bodies, intimacy, respecting themselves,

The lack of that conversation enables a very one-sided and dangerously one-sided presentation of sexual behavior, which is the one that they have access to, which in very often case is pornography.

We know now that boys are accessing pornography at age 11 and that there's an increasing consumption of pornography from girls.

And so if you think about it this way, pornography is the biggest sex educator.

It is the most significant influential sex educator that young people have today.

So we have to look at what they're learning from this.

When the average 12-year-old boy puts porn into Google, he's directed immediately to the porn tube sites such as YouPorn and PornHub.

And the most accessible is actually called gonzo porn.

That's the shorthand term for the violent porn that has no storyline.

If you want more softcore, less violent porn, you're gonna have to spend a good 10 to 15 minutes looking for it.

And don't tell me that the average 12, 13 year old boy is gonna start looking for that for 10, 15 minutes.

He is gonna go to that which is the most accessible.

The most popular pornography, it's always around how men get satisfied.

It's very, very rarely about women's pleasure.

Women are there as instruments.

They're simply there as tools, literally, for male pleasure.

The images they're seeing are about sexuality fused to domination, an aggressive sexuality, a sexuality that objectifies women, treats them as nothing more than objects for male pleasure.

It's not about equality or egalitarian lovemaking.

It's all about doing something to her, not sharing something with her.

Second to one, right?

Right?

Most porn ends up with women being not only presented as the victims of violence, but often presented as the victims of violence who love it.

I want you to do anything you want.

So girls are learning to be compliant and they're learning that what's most important is to be desirable to the boys.

Not that their own sexual agency or their own sexual pleasure is important at all.

Whatever you want to do to her, however debasing, however vile, she says yes.

So in a way, what you're doing is you're socializing men into thinking that women will consent to anything.

It teaches a very one-sided, dangerous, emotionless, almost human-less sexual experience that so many young men are now seeing as being normal.

This is how it happens.

14-year-old high school freshman, Daisy Coleman, says Matthew Barnett sexually assaulted her while she was unconscious.

Barnett would later claim the encounter was consensual.

22-year-old Madison Smith says the encounter started off with consensual sex, but things turned violent when he started to strangle her and force her to perform a sex act.

Two high school football stars sexually assaulted a visibly intoxicated 16-year-old girl.

During the crime, many did not step up to help, but nearly all got out their cell phones and started snapping pictures and tweeting.

Within five days, Children's Mercy saw 444 kids for sexual assault.

Almost half of our perpetrators were minors.

Gagging, strangling, when a child's acting out with that extreme violence, you have to contribute some of that to pornography because it directly correlates with the genres that kids are being exposed to.

I've seen numbers of these cases that I actually worked where kids who were sexualized early actually act out on that because they don't have the inhibitions or the knowledge of what the actual sexual acts are, what they mean.

Now, maybe they'll have the self-control to get off that.

The more time they spend reinforcing that arousal pattern, especially if they're looking at violent porn, my God, that's the worst possible thing they can look at.

Because what it will do, it will trip the wires in their brain, it will make them feel really good about this stuff, and it will overwhelm reason in their brain.

And they could go down this road and find that they don't have the willpower to stop themselves from doing it.

And it could surprise them how quickly that can happen.

In previous eras, to get sexually explicit material, you had to go to a pornographic movie theater.

You had to go to a bookstore.

Now, you can access pornography sitting at home at no cost over the internet.

The internet has made porn not only accessible, it's really made it inescapable.

Because now, of course, everybody has access to porn on their smartphone, including children.

Once the online world came about, it was the game changer.

I mean, I went from being a private practice clinician with one assistant to running a clinic with eight therapists and 150 clients a week.

I mean, the internet just swamped us.

So many people started having so many problems so quickly in relationship to online porn.

And it was really just the very beginning.

because I'm now seeing 25-year-old men who've been looking at hardcore porn since they were 15, and they've never had a date, and they've never had sex with a person.

And online porn really feeds that in a way that pre-digital porn didn't.

There are actually studies that show that the internet has the ability to cause addiction-related brain changes, the same brain changes that occur in a drug addiction.

So that tells us that the internet is different.

What's different is the ability to control arousal.

So you're sitting there with your mouse and you're clicking on a Facebook picture.

And I don't want to look at that.

I want to look at that.

I want to look at it.

I want to see what George is doing.

I'm bored with that.

I want to see what this person is doing.

Oh, what about this message?

I want to read this.

And you can go on and go on.

And what you're doing is you're controlling your arousal.

You're controlling your dopamine.

Dopamine is the motivation chemical to drive us towards natural rewards such as eating and achievement and falling in love and sexual desire.

When you're in the presence of something as arousing as images or a drama of sexuality, your brain is going to produce two to four times the normal amount of dopamine.

Well, we get the word dope.

which is what our brains secrete as what we call our pleasure drug.

And it gives us a sense of motivation and joy for living our lives.

Well, food is about 150% spike of dopamine.

And sex is 200, which is equivalent to morphine.

Sexual orgasm is equivalent to a morphine rush.

That's a pretty powerful reward.

There's also, though, the frontal areas over our forehead, and these are important in judgment and in weighing the pleasure that we want.

And so you have these competing areas.

You have this dopaminergic drive that says, do it, with this frontal break of the brain that says, think about it, weigh it.

And in a way, they're competing.

In young people, those frontal areas aren't fully developed.

And so that break isn't there.

Our frontal judgment volitional areas aren't developed until we're in our mid to late 20s.

And so you have an eight-year-old with this undeveloped brain who doesn't really have the ability to weigh or to judge what they're seeing, whether it's harmful, not harmful.

What will the result be if they participate in this activity?

They don't even know what it is.

And so when we flood the child's brain with these powerful sexual images which provide this physical, emotional overload, the child is powerless.

It's absolutely impossible for them to resist this kind of stimulus.

Now we combine that with a young male who has high hormones and is driven by interest, and then you combine it with the novelty of the internet.

So all these qualities are put together and they're matched with our highest natural reward and your genes' number one job, and that's reproduction.

And that's what makes today's high-speed internet porn so enticing.

Growing up, I was very antisocial.

Never really had any friends.

I never had a girlfriend until just a couple years ago.

So I felt like I was missing out on something.

I was very frustrated.

I felt like I wasn't like everybody else.

Then when I was about 11, 12 years old, I found some porn magazines.

Given our household, we never really talked much about sexuality at all.

So to see something like that was just an adrenaline rush.

It felt like what I thought would feel like if I had a girlfriend or had a real relationship.

And of course, my progression goes along with technology.

As the internet came and we got our first computer, I would sneak in there when nobody was looking and keep on looking at porn.

After a while, the stuff that worked before didn't work as well.

You build up a tolerance.

So it would get more edgier and edgier stuff, stuff that I wouldn't imagine ever looking at.

Then I found a file sharing program, which I was using to download music and stuff like that.

And there, by some accident, I found illegal pornography, child porn.

And it was so easy to get, it was almost as, it was as easy as getting the record stuff.

I guess my curiosity got to me, so I couldn't believe that it could be this easy, so.

I downloaded it, and I saw it, and I got the rush.

It worked.

It worked like nothing else did anymore.

As much as I tried to get away from it from time to time, I would always find myself going back to it because I was looking for that fix.

Looking back, it was a very dark journey.

I didn't even come to terms to it until I got caught.

I was a firefighter, and I was going back home from work about a year ago.

And all of a sudden, I had blue lights going by me, pulled me out of my truck, handcuffed me, and put me in the back of a car.

Pathologically speaking, were you a pedophile?

No.

How would you explain reaching that point of wanting to see a child in a sexual act?

It was the dangerousness of it.

It was dangerous.

It was wrong.

And that part was appealing, too.

Just how wrong it was, but it's what worked.

It was like the heroine of pornography.

For each individual, it's unclear what the outcome of viewing pornography will be.

It's not uncommon, the more you look at porn, the more you're gonna stumble into things.

And so you may stumble into a genre of pornography that's inherently violent, like rape porn.

where you may stumble into an area of pornography like child porn or something like that.

Most people don't start out saying, I want to go into this particular type of porn.

This is what I'm into.

It's that process by which you are now caught up in this wave of sexual arousal and excitement.

And so what happens then is you now, as you're exposed to more things, you run the risk of now being bound to more and more of these dangerous, really dishonoring forms of pornography or illegal forms of pornography too.

Sex addiction is often about escalation.

So someone could start looking at more violent images or more abusive images or things that they really never even thought would turn them on.

Even though it might feel shameful or uncomfortable, it's still intense and it makes their heart beat faster and faster and faster.

And that's very much what the non-substance addictions are about.

They're about adrenaline, they're about endorphins, they're about dopamine, they're about feeling high and excited and totally into what you're doing for the sake of emotional escape.

The thing I'm most concerned with is that escalator effect, the fact that today's images are not going to satisfy you tomorrow, and tomorrow's images are not going to satisfy you the next day, and there is a continuing quest for something new, for something different.

And at some point, because of the basic inclination of the person, there's at least going to be a temptation to experience it in real life.

My junior and senior year of high school, I was getting more popular with not just girls, but just with the whole school being homecoming king.

I started getting a little bit away from the porn a little bit.

It was just like an afterthought unless something triggered it.

And so I graduated from high school and I fell in love with this girl who's now my wife.

We moved from this town into actually where our family's at and everything, both sides of our family.

It was during that time where I was passing by a street here in town and there was like this adult store.

And I remember I'm like, I don't want to go there.

I don't want to go there because if I go there, that's it.

I'm going to go right back to the bottom.

Sure enough, I found myself opening the door and walking right in.

This was before smartphones.

This was like in 04, 05.

And so I would just go to the adult store as often as I could.

From there, the relationship I had with pornography was definitely progressive.

So, you know, first it was just a girl.

And then it became two girls.

And it was an orgy.

Then it was, ooh, all this behavior with certain body parts, these fetishes.

And I'm like, I really like this.

It came to a point where it's like, I need to experience what I'm seeing because this is just like amazing what I'm seeing.

Oh, but it's just paper.

Oh, but it's just the page.

Oh, but it's on my phone.

My wife won't do any of this stuff.

No way.

She's gonna say, where are you getting these ideas from?

So I'm like,

a stranger paying for it.

Duh.

I pay for it, and they do what I tell them, because I'm paying for it.

That was it.

One night, my wife was going to some function at church.

My kids were with my parents, and I had my own laptop.

So I go on Craigslist and I'm like, what's this personal stuff?

I can contact someone here?

Oh, I am free right now to do whatever I want and no one knows anything.

And I said, I'm gonna call.

So I'm like, hi.

Yeah, we give massages and I'm like, oh, that's cool.

All right, nude massages.

I'm like, oh, that's great, that's fine.

So when can I come?

And she's like, you can come right now if you want.

And I said, right now?

That's what I needed to hear right now.

I go there and I'm naked and she's naked.

I can literally feel my heart pumping out of my chest and my mouth dry and my fingers shaking.

And I'm like, what's going on?

What's going on?

What's going on?

What am I doing?

What am I doing?

I'm thinking this.

But because of all those unspoken secrets, they all just started taking over me and saying, this is your chance.

This is your chance to be like a porn star, where you can say and ask the person to do whatever you want, and because you're paying for it, they will do it.

When your wife was like, I don't wanna do that, this lady here, she will.

And I said, in my mind, that is so right, that's so true.

And so that was the lowest I have ever been.

And it was a porn dream that I had as a child.

After we were finished, she looked at my ring.

And she's like, how are you and your wife?

And I said something so twisted.

I said, you know, I love my wife.

And she was like, you do?

And I said, I do.

I need to go.

I gave her my money.

And I left.

And I went in my car.

And I wept.

I said, I can't believe I did this.

Oh, my gosh.

This trust.

Am I going to tell anyone this?

It was scary.

Take us back to that moment that you found out.

What did he say to you?

We were lying in bed, and he asked me to not get mad at him.

He was going to tell me something.

He's like, you promise you won't get mad?

And I was like, I promise.

He's like, you promise you won't get mad?

And I was like, yeah, just tell me.

And so he tells me, and it just felt like I got punched in the heart.

And he just started crying and I just held him.

I just held him because I've messed up really bad, you know?

And people would hold me.

And, um...

Yeah, so that was hard.

Because I was, you know, expressing love to him, and then I felt like I didn't want to be by him anymore.

And she's like, Richie, I can't even see you right now.

You need to sleep in the boys' room.

So I'd be in the boys' room, and my boys would be like, why are you here, Daddy?

I remember crying, I hurt Mama.

I hurt Mommy, and

I'm here right now.

I was so broken.

I just remember saying, I hurt mama.

And hearing myself saying that to my own son, my two little boys, something in my heart was like, I remember when I was their age.

I don't want this to repeat in my kids.

This can't happen anymore.

Thank you.

... ... ... ...

Thank you.