15 reasons impotence isn't the worst side effect of porn:

1. Porn perverts parent-child relationships. Men who watch porn report worrying about the way they see girls their daughters’ age. And even how they see their OWN daughters. Porn, like incest, threatens marriage and family.

2. Porn disconnects sex from its purpose. Everyone involved becomes an object of mere pleasure and profit. The actors, the vendors, the consumers.

3. Today’s high-definition, realistic streaming images are unprecedented. Porn in the modern sense began with the invention of the camera. Unlike in painting or sculpture, in porn there is no reworking of the body by an artist.

4. Unlike real women, porn isn’t discerning. It doesn’t call forth the hero. It’s an aid to sexual failure.

5. Porn traps boys as Peter Pans too scared to start a life with Wendy. Wankers at the window. Lost boys who'll never make it as men.

6. Porn makes real women less attractive. Elizabethan women used to put a peeled apple slice in their armpits to absorb their sweat. Their lovers prized these tokens. But now even enhanced porn stars claim they can’t compete with computer-generated models.

7. Porn users become less attractive to women. Porn and the pill are sexual solvents. They dissolve the bond between men and women.

8. Porn is a leading contributor to the disintegration of the family. It increases men’s desire for sex without emotional involvement. Men become frogs forever lacking the kiss that will turn them into princes. And without that kiss, they’re stuck in the swamp.

9. C. S. Lewis’s warning about masturbation also applies to porn: It ‘sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.' 'And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman.’

10. Porn poisons loyalty. Dr. F. W. Foerster warned at the outset of modernity that ‘the old idea of loyalty with its immense educational power, one of the pillars of all higher culture and civilisation, has become a thing of mockery.’

11. Porn reduces the desire for children. Especially female children. This rots society at the root: the fertility rate.

12. 'Sexual obesity' is now a psychiatric term. The virtuous man eats to live; the glutton lives to eat. Sex is for creating life; sexual obesity means living for sex.

13. Porn consumers risk impotence, habituation and desensitisation. The psychiatrist Norman Doidge notes that his patients ‘craved pornography but didn’t like it.’ At the centre of Dante’s Inferno is ICE, not fire. The heart of hell is not lust but indifference.

14. There is no society in the abstract. It is only the sum of individuals. So as porn rewires individual brains, it also rewires society.

15. Sir Roger Scruton called porn ‘one of the great social diseases’. It harms not just the individual but the family and the whole of society. - Divorce - Poverty - Mental illness - Crime - Drug use - Depression - Suicide knowlandknows.substack.com/p/porn-and-the…