“Help! My son is using pornography.”
A: This is one of those situations where you have to dig deep below the surface, beyond the exterior behavior, and make a long-term commitment to the partnership approach in order for it to really work. But when it works, the change is truly transformative! Non-partnership, control-oriented solutions may work superficially but generally leave the root issues unresolved and prone to later emergence, often in a distorted way that further obscures the root cause.
Most likely, the root of your son’s behavior has little to do with sexuality. The main issue is power. To be clear, when I talk about power, I’m talking about Authentic Power, which is the innate, inner power that everyone naturally has in abundance, though most people in our society are disconnected from it in many ways. Authentic Power is often expressed as unconditional love, creativity, and “inner freedom,” which is the freedom to choose empowering thoughts, beliefs, perspectives, and responses.
Authentic Power is distinct from what I call “pseudo-power,” which is the illusion of power one obtains through control. Having pseudo-power over others never feels deeply satisfying because it undermines the delicious power of partnership and makes people feel more separate, more like opponents or competitors, even if they are ostensibly “partners.” And pseudo-power never lasts because you get it by taking control from others against their will. That pretty much guarantees that they will always be scheming to find a way to take back their autonomy. So you end up with a lot of control struggles and relatively little expression of Authentic Power.
Pleasure is a factor because it’s the way your body/mind/spirit let’s you know that you’re connecting with your Authentic Power. Gaining pseudo-power also generates pleasure, but only if the person gaining it is starting from a place of profound disempowerment. Once you start getting used to the deeper pleasure of Authentic Power, the fleeting pleasure of pseudo-power loses its appeal.
Physical/sexual pleasure is also an indicator of Authentic Power, on a primal level. Sexual arousal and orgasm are undeniably powerful feelings. But there’s a lot of confusion around sexuality and power because of our culture’s legacy of sexual repression, shame, and violence. This confusion creates the market for pornography that fetishizes control, domination, abuse, and violence. Men who are fully connected to their Authentic Power aren’t turned on by images of women being abused.
There are a thousand and one ways that children experience disempowerment, sometimes even before they are born. This happens even when they are lucky enough to have parents like you, who bend over backwards to give them some semblance of a healthy environment. It’s just not easy to grow up in a society that is so confused about power and pleasure when you belong to a species that is evolved for mutual empowerment and pleasure through genuine partnership. Since most children get very little exposure to coherent models of empowerment through partnership, every child develops their own unique strategies for reuniting with their Authentic Power.
Naturally, children follow the path of least resistance to an experience that feels empowering (even if it’s only “pseudo-empowering”). For example, our modern, isolating, social structures make it hard for children to meet their need for social stimulation the natural way: through self-initiated, child-led play with a variety of familiar children. With so few options for spontaneous socializing, TVs and iPads become the path of least resistance to experiences that feel like human interaction. But taking away the path of least resistance leaves only paths of more resistance, adding to the child’s sense of disempowerment. The partnership solution is figuring out how to clear pathways to healthy, desirable, authentically empowering experiences. (For the above example, a good solution is described in the book Playborhood, by Mike Lanza.) Ideally this approach leads to children choosing healthier paths so that parents feel less compelled to block what they see as unhealthy choices.
In a society where power is equated with control AND children are deprived of control over so many aspects of their lives, most children feel deeply disempowered. But they usually can’t make sense of that feeling; they just know they’re supposed to feel a lot better. Sexual stimulation is a natural way for children to close the gap between the painful reality of their chronic disempowerment and the pleasure of being connected to their Authentic Power. It isn’t the only way, but sexual pleasure is often the path of least resistance to feeling powerful — especially for boys entering puberty. And porn provides a path of least resistance to sexual stimulation. The addition of pseudo-power themes to porn “scenes” makes it even more compelling for boys who feel disconnected from their power and haven’t yet developed the awareness and skills for connecting with their Authentic Power through partnership.
Resisting, condemning, forbidding, and blocking porn only intensify the control dynamics and make porn seem even more powerful to the person being denied access to it. Trust me, your son can find a way to work around any restrictions if he wants to. The only real solution is to help him create paths of less resistance to his Authentic Power.
Most such paths are not going to have anything to do with sex, directly, but all will confer a kind of pleasure that is deeply satisfying. To the extent that this is new terrain for parents, they need to retrain their perceptions to identify the authentic pleasures of children, distinct from the shallow consumer titillation that most kids have been conditioned to seek out.
If there is a man your son respects and whom you would trust to be a positive/empowering influence around the issue of porn use, I think that bringing him into the conversation could be a lot more effective than if it’s just you trying to influence your son — especially with regard to the misogynistic ideations that are forming. If your son has begun devaluing women and saying men are better, then a respected, self-empowered man who sincerely appreciates women may be the best person to change his mind.
I hope the above gives you a sense of the scope and potential of deepening your partnership parenting practices. It’s a big-picture solution that takes time, but that’s okay because using quick-fix strategies is like the parenting equivalent of porn: it gives you a little superficial pleasure, but not the enduring satisfaction of a real partnership.
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