How PORN Creates Angry Men…

Plenty of research has come out about porn’s effects on men—erectile dysfunction, making your brain less attracted to your wife, distorting a man’s view of women overall, etc.  One I haven’t seen listed, though, is anger.

Men who regularly give in to porn often have a lot of anger toward their wives.

I’m not a therapist or a neuro-scientist. I’m writing from the perspective of one who does pastoral counseling. And in that context I have witnessed the effects of porn leading to anger with men and couples with whom I’ve met. Plenty of other researchers are far more qualified and perhaps more interested in writing about this, but I’ve gotten so many questions from the last blog post (where I mention porn’s connection to anger casually) that I thought I should follow up with this. I need to thank the men who have shared their struggles with me as well as those who have written in with specific insights for this particular post. I had thought of one or two reasons why porn might lead to anger, but the shared personal experiences of these men has opened my eyes to several more.

As a caveat, I am fully aware that a growing number of women use porn. I’m not mentioning women in this post because I haven’t personally worked with a single woman who has struggled with porn. I’m not sure if the neurological effect is the same, and I’m not qualified to say.

First, when a man acts with anger out of proportion to the situation at hand, it might simply be a fruit of the lack of self-control. Obedience and sin both shape us. Our choices ultimately shape our character, for good or for ill. If we demonstrate a lack of control in one area, it will manifest itself in all other areas. If we can’t control lustful desires, we won’t be able to control inappropriate expressions of anger.