Those subjects who read the religious “primer” viewed and described their violation more negatively, and identified that it had had a more negative impact on their partner at the time. Essentially, they had subjects read a religious essay, and then describe a time in their own past, where they violated their own sexual values. Tongeren, Newbound and Johnson demonstrate experimentally that “ priming” a person to think of religion and religious values, increases the degree to which they negatively perceive the effects of sexual values violations.The authors suggest that therapists can be more effective by helping these patients to learn to manage their anger, explore the dissonance between their porn use and their moral disapproval of it, and hint that assisting these patients in managing their anxiety through mindfulness techniques may be effective clinical interventions, so long as these are provided through a nonjudgmental therapeutic relationship. When religious people use more porn, their anger towards God, and their general irritability, both increase. They found that religious people with lower self-esteem are more likely to experience difficulties with porn use, and to have these struggles contribute to greater feelings of anger in general, and anger towards God. take these concepts further, demonstrating that it is an individual’s level of moral disapproval of porn use which contributes most to a person’s feelings of addiction and distress when they do in fact use porn. Rather than addressing porn use, therapists may assist patients to examine their religious values, their moral values over porn, their sense of addiction and their feelings of shame. Their model is useful and valuable for clinical intervention, as it explicates a more sophisticated understanding of how religious pornography users experience shame and difficulties, AND how and where clinicians may intervene to assist these individuals. They experimentally explore a model depicting the progression from childhood religiosity to personal religiosity to moral disapproval of pornography to a sense of perceived addiction to pornography to a sense of sexual shame over pornography use.
Volk, et al., support the theory that religious experiences in childhood are indirectly related to the experience of sexual shame in later life.If this data proves anything, it's that repression seems to be breeding curiosity - not suppressing it. As much as the states or countries try to clamp down on sexuality the porn-viewing numbers prove their efforts to be backfiring. The common trend between the conservative South and the highly censored Muslim world raises the question of whether forbidden fruit really does taste sweeter. According to a 2014 Pornhub study, "every single state in the South watches porn at a higher percentage than the average of states where gay marriage is legal." The top contenders: Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia. Interestingly, Americans' porn-watching habits reveal a similar irony: The most conservative states - those in the South - watch more gay porn than any other region of the U.S., BuzzFeed reports. While pornography has long been forbidden in much of the Islamic world - Egypt, for example, banned online porn in 2012 - people are ignoring government prohibitions. Should we be surprised? While the kinkiness of these searches might be surprising, perhaps what's more shocking is the fact that the most conservative and religious countries are the ones indulging the most.