On porn, desire and the root of suffering

Buddhists teach that the greatest obstacle to freedom and happiness is selfish desire. Porn is the quintessential selfish desire. The most powerful new years' resolution men can make is to quit porn.

The ancient Indian Upanishads say that your desires are so essential to you, they comprise you. “You are what your deep, driving desire is,” says the text. “As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.”

Sexuality, when free of aggression and fear, expresses our deepest desires. Not just our personal interests and needs – sex is not a need like water, food, and shelter. We can live without it as individuals. What we cannot do is persist collectively; sexuality has more to do with humanity and our collective evolution than personal survival or superficial wants. Your sexual longings – who and what you are drawn and attracted to – are expressions of who you want to become, what you want for the world and how you wish to contribute, the life you want to create.

That is why there is no more powerful way to render a person controllable than to capture their sexuality, with which comes the entirety of their desire, longing, imagination, capacity to love and to give, and in short, their humanity.

Pornographers do this to young boys. The average age boys first view porn is eleven. Before they are old enough to have grappled with the nature of sex for themselves, pornographers are poised to claim that part of a boy’s life, through clickbait at online game sites and other avenues. The accessibility of porn, and its rewards of dopamine and orgasm then make it addictive, at incalculable cost. In a world where around seventy percent of men report looking at porn at least once a month, and only six percent claim they’ve never looked at it, porn does not only capture the sexuality and humanity of individuals. It captures the trajectory of human advancement.

15-19 year old boys have become the most rampant sexual offenders, and most sexual assault survivors are now under eighteen. Research shows a clear difference between adolescent sex offenders and their non-offending peers: early exposure to porn. Girls and young women are increasingly going to sexual health service providers with internal damage caused during anal sex, genital injuries and other harms inflicted by boys and men re-enacting porn on them.

Even those who use porn and minimise its effects “don’t put that laptop lid down and think, There! What a productive piece of time spent, connecting with the world!” as actor and social commentator Russell Brand pointed out in 2015. He spoke about porn following the 2015 filmic release of Fifty Shades of Grey. “What does softcore porn do to us?” he asked. “What does porn in general do to both and women in the way we relate to each other, or the way that all adults relate to each other?”

He cited studies showing softcore porn (the type we are surrounded by) has five main effects: voyeurism; objectification (seeing women like candy bars); the need to validate masculinity; trophyism (seeing beautiful women as collectibles to affirm masculinity), and fear of true intimacy. Brand could relate with all five. Objectification “is something that I work on,” he said, “but once that biological drive to procreate is connected with a culture of objectification, that’s a very hard equation to break.” And that is why porn is one of the world’s biggest global industries.

Brand admitted he was “obsessed” with porn as a teen, when viewing it involved stealing magazines from corner stores and typical hiding places, like under beds. “It’s inconceivable what it must be like to be a young adolescent boy, now, with this kind of access to porn.” In 2019, uploads to PornHub came to 12,500 gigabytes per minute — enough content to fill the memory of every single cell phone on the planet. “It must be dizzying and exciting but corrupting in a way that we can’t even think about.”

At the time of recording, Brand said porn was “the hub of my feelings of inner conflict and doubt,” concluding, “if I had total dominion over myself, I would never look at pornography again.” Porn has compromised that sense of self-possession, thus “affecting my ability to relate to women, to relate to myself, my own sexuality, my own spirituality.” Since making those statements, Brand has been accused of rape and sexual harassment by four different women, alleging assaults between 2006 and 2013. Brand’s own personal testimony suggests we should believe them.

In a 2021 interview with Howard Stern, popstar Billie Eilish offered her testimony of how today’s pornified youth culture affects her. Nineteen at the time of the interview, she confided she started watching porn at eleven years old. “I thought that’s how you learned how to have sex,” she said. Kids at the cusp of adolescence to want to know about the adult world. Eilish’s discoveries led to an addiction that “destroyed my brain,” gave her sleep paralysis, nightmares and night terrors.

She is not alone. Pornography is today’s primary sex education medium, despite 88 percent of scenes depicting explicitly aggressive acts like gagging, choking, spanking and slapping. That is not to mention the verbal abuse, incest, paedophilia, and racism.

Why is the industry so brutal? Porn functions like any other addiction. The user gets hooked on the ‘hit’, meaning the dopamine and, in this case, sexual reward. Over time, users become habituated and need a higher or more potent dose to get the same kick. With porn, increased potency means more degradation and brutality. That demand is supplied by pornographers who carry out horrific acts on women’s bodies. If users could once ejaculate while watching anal penetration, they now need to see ‘rosebudding’, when a woman is anally raped until she suffers rectal prolapse. That is the trajectory of a porn addiction, and the industry at large.

Eilish was watching BDSM porn by age fourteen. She had never had sex, but wanted the approval of her male peers. “I thought I was ‘one of the guys’,” she said, reflecting the experience of many teen girls. “And I would … think I was really cool for not having a problem with it and not seeing why it was bad.” She continued:

It’s how so many people think they’re supposed to learn. It’s how so many men think that they’re supposed to be. And because in porn there’s no consent … if you’re not interested in being slapped, and being choked, people are like: You’re vanilla, you’re soft … you’re boring in bed … [So] women are like: Oh, I have to like being hurt to be thought of as ‘good in bed’.

During her first sexual experiences, Eilish “was not saying ‘No’ to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to. And I am so angry that porn is so loved.”

Eilish is right to be angry. The porn industry – worth over $90 billion annually – is comprised of countless records of rape broadcast as entertainment. It perpetuates and encourages more of what it depicts. Out of these pornified sexual interactions, hearts are broken, sexual relations devastated, and children are born. The next generation is made. Human desire, expressed through sexuality, creates our collective future. Porn hijacks that future.

The issue is not just hardcore online porn, but the normalised softcore varieties we are surrounded by. We are told these images of semi-naked women are used to market everything from cars to make-up and toothpaste, for the benign reason that ‘sex sells’. In her 2013 TEDx talk The Sexy Lie, Caroline Heldman questioned this marketing adage. Sex, by definition, is mutual. But 96% of objectifying media depicts women. “If sex sold, why wouldn’t we see half naked men everywhere in advertising?” Heldman asked. The answer is that it’s not sex being sold, but power. “To men, they’re being sold this idea constantly that they are sexual subjects. They are in the driver’s seat.”

That power is illusory, as my ex-boyfriend once explained to me by describing the effects of softcore porn on himself and other men. He compared images of semi-naked women around the city we lived in to those of McDonald's burgers with cheese and sauce oozing over the patties, and Moro bars bitten to expose gooey caramel. Such pictures target a viewer’s appetite, so they will buy the fast food or confectionary.

If I submit to temptation and get that chocolate bar with the goo inside, there is often little subtlety to the experience. It is as if the craving itself carries out the actions — buys the chocolate, unwraps it, consumes. I do not reflect: this food is made from beans agricultural workers harvested from cacao trees that had to grow in sun, soil, and rain before their fruits were plucked, processed in a factory, mixed with other ingredients to make confectionary that had to be wrapped in plastic and transported in trucks and container ships across oceans to a convenience store for me to purchase for a few dollars. I do not question whether my momentary urge was worth such expense. I barely feel gratitude. A chocolate bar is a product awaiting a consumer; I consumed.

When women are surrounded by images of sexualised women, , as Eilish testified, it triggers inadequacy and the desire for products or qualities that help us become more attractive. When men are surrounded by the same images, it triggers desire for sex like a fat or sugar craving. Obviously there are significant differences between burgers and women, sugar and sex. Men are led to forget those differences.

Consider too that sex is the more powerful craving. Renowned translator of the Buddha’s teachings, Eknath Easwaran, tells us that in the sixth century BC, after Siddharta Gautama sat down under the bodhi tree to attain enlightenment and become Buddha, he subsequently made a little-known report. Mara the Tempter used every lure possible to distract Siddharta from his goal as he sat in meditation. Mara was unsuccessful, but the Buddha reported afterward, “if he had had to contend with another desire as strong as that of sex … he would not have been able to achieve his goal.”

There is a Tibetan word for the sensation powerful cravings and aversions generate: shenpa. Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön translates it as “getting hooked,” a state recognisable by the desperate, clutching, urgent energy that comes with the thought you ‘must have’ something. There may be strong or subtle physical clenching or tension in your chest or skin. “There’s a seductive quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. We feel restless, agitated, ill at ease.” Shenpa is insistent and does not like to be thwarted. Chödrön says it is the root of aggression.

This craving and satiation is also the essence of what a ‘real man’ is in a patriarchal society, as author Robert Jensen writes. A man someone who “looks at the world, sees what he wants, and takes it. Those men who don’t measure up are suspect—they are wimps, sissies, fags, girls.”

The Buddha is among the most famous examples of such noncompliant ‘wimps’. Born prince Siddharta Gautama in the sixth century BCE, Siddharta’s life was idyllic. By age 29, he had a beautiful wife and son and promising future. Yet he was restless and dissatisfied with the comforts and entertainments of life on his father’s estate, and became plagued with the question of whether there was nothing more to life, and nothing to the future but decline and death. He finally left his father’s palace to study yoga and meditation under the best teachers he could find. He then surpassed them and moved on to practice more advanced austerities with other adepts in the forest — austerities that brought him close to death.*

(It seems that going beyond the model of a ‘real man’ who ‘sees what he wants, and takes it’, is not really a path for sissies. At least it was no mean feat for Siddharta).

One day after about six years of training, a farm girl called Sujata saw Siddharta looking weak. She offered him a bowl of milk. Soon after he drank it, he sat down under a now-legendary bodhi tree, and said: “Come what may, let my body rot, let my bones be reduced to ashes – I will not get up from here until I have found the way beyond decay and death.” Siddharta resisted the temptations of Mara until dawn, when he reached his goal. He found nirvana, and became Buddha, “he who is awake.” Nirvana means ‘extinguishment’ and refers to the elimination of afflictions (kleshas) associated with selfish desire (trishna).

The Buddha taught widely, educating audiences on the Four Noble Truths. The first is the fact of suffering, duhkha:

All desire happiness, sukha: what is good, pleasant, right, permanent, joyful, harmonious, satisfying, at ease. Yet all find that life brings duhkha, just the opposite: frustration, dissatisfaction, incompleteness, suffering, sorrow. Life is change, and change can never satisfy desire. Therefore everything that changes brings suffering.

The Second Truth is that the cause of suffering is selfish desire: trishna, also known as grasping or craving. The Third Truth is that suffering with a cause can have an end; any ailment that can be understood can be cured. The Fourth is that the cure for selfish desire is to follow the Buddha’s Eightfold Path.

Let’s examine the second truth, that the cause of suffering is trishna. Trishna is not desire itself, as is often assumed. It is selfish desire, superficial desire, manufactured desire. It is the need for instant gratification, the urge to consume provoked by advertisers, the ability to take without consideration, appreciation or mutuality. Our deep, true desires have a different quality – like the desire for freedom that prompted Siddharta to give up the privileges of his father’s palace. Such desires are calm, generous, social, and often cost us something, like comfort and convenience. It is that quality of desire that trishna overrides.

Rape is the most brutal and quintessential expression of trishna and shenpa. The word itself comes from the Latin rapere, which means “to steal, seize or carry away.” Second wave feminist Andrea Dworkin explained that this definition reflects early legal codes in which women were deemed men’s property, and “rape was a crime against the man who owned the woman.” Another interpretation is that seizing is like taking – acting on selfish desire. If to love is to give and to be energised in the giving, to rape is to take what exists to be given. To rape is to bypass relational intimacy, bulldoze a woman’s desires and ability to express them, consume, and be gratified.

In the words of contemporary spiritual teacher Sadhguru: “It needs to be understood that though there may be a sexual stimulus to rape, it is not about sexuality alone. It is about the power to possess.”

To have what you want when you want it can feel like freedom. It can feel like power, like being in the driver’s seat, as Heldman said. But the Buddha warned us that trishna, selfish desire, enslaves, and that enslavement is the root of suffering. Freedom lies in rediscovering the expansive, compassionate consciousness that exists within us beyond trishna.

Today, we are seeing a massive upsurge of interest in spiritual topics and pursuits, Buddhist teachings, mindfulness programs, yoga retreats, and other forms of personal development, life coaching and self-help. The influence of porn is not generally emphasised, but it could be. Everything we seek through teachings, retreats, prayer, meditation — including freedom, joy, love, even true wealth and wellbeing — lies beyond men’s collective enslavement to porn, beyond men possessing women. Love and freedom means a world without rape and a world without porn. If love and freedom are what we want most, for ourselves and others, now is a great time for us to decide what we’re willing to do, and what we’re willing to forego, to get there.

* Passages on the Buddha’s life were cross-referenced and compiled from three sources: Eknath Easwaran’s Dhammapada (1987), Stephen Cope’s Yoga and the Quest for the True Self (2018) and Ajan Thiradhammo’s Treasures of the Buddha’s Teaching (2013).