Rémy Verlyck is the managing director of the
think tank Familles Durables
, founded at the heart of the health crisis in 2021, whose goal is to think about the daily challenges of the 19 million families in France to better support them.
What could save love?
Singer Billie Eilish has recently been the subject of numerous articles after claiming to have developed a porn addiction from the age of 11.
“
I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated to have been exposed to so much porn
".
Now 20, she claims to have suffered nightmares related to the violence of the videos she watched.
According to the OpinionWay barometer for Sustainable Families, 73% of French people believe that minors are poorly protected against emotional problems linked to porn addiction, and 75% believe that minors are not protected against exposure to pornographic images.
An analysis of the effects of pornography that is reasonable, holistic, devoid of moralism and inclusive of people's lived reality is needed.
Digital technology now emits 4% of the world's greenhouse gases, and its energy consumption is increasing by 9% per year, reveals The Shift Project, which published the Lean ICT report in October 2018, For digital sobriety.
Pornographic videos alone generated around 80 million tons of CO2 in 2018. According to Global Carbon Atlas, that's as much as all the CO2 emitted in a country like Romania in a year and almost twice as much as Sweden. .
“
In ten years, humanity has watched the equivalent of 1.2 million years of porn
commented director Ovidie in Pornocratie, her documentary released in 2017. Every second, 372 people search for so-called adult content on search engines, 28,258 Internet users view it and 3,075 dollars are spent on it.
This industry would represent today a world market of 100 billion dollars whereas it was estimated at 60 billion dollars in 2015.
Read alsoChildren facing an alarming “pornopandemic”
Since it is a question of carbon footprint, it is necessary to mention an ancestor of pornography by Internet, the free radio Carbone 14, founded in 1981. A friend confided to me: "
It was pornography by radio , on which we fell without paying attention while browsing the FM band.
The parallel is striking.
The editorial line of the radio not sticking to the requirements of the High Authority for Audiovisual Communication, its authorization to broadcast was withdrawn.
Despite this, the station continued to broadcast until the authorities seized the equipment in 1983.
That 11-year-olds like little Billie Eilish seek to “feel like a guy” by consuming content intended to create lucrative adult addictions makes us wonder about the world in which they live.
Remy Verlyck
That 11-year-olds like little Billie Eilish are looking to, say, "
feel like a guy
by consuming content intended to create lucrative addictions in adults questions us about the world in which they live.
According to the French government, 1 in 2 young people claim to have come across pornography by chance, and more than half believe that they saw their first pornographic images too young.
Nearly a quarter of young people say that pornography has had a negative impact on their sexuality by giving them complexes and 44% of young people who have sex say they reproduce practices they have seen in videos.
At the same time, only 7% of parents believe that their children watch pornography at least once a week.
However, the situation seems alarming:
an article published in the columns of Le Figaro recently gave the floor to a school nurse reporting the increase in rapes between children and adolescents under the influence of pornography.
A 2017 UNAF report explains that there is a correlation between viewing pornography and reduced sensitivity to the suffering of others, anxiety, increased relational aggression, attesting to a transformation of behavior, objectification and increased sexual dissatisfaction.
Read alsoChildren, adolescents: when screens intoxicate them
An English study published in 2012 sheds light on the development of harassment of 12-year-old girls by smartphone and blackmail with naked photos.
Verdict, an almost daily pressure accompanied by an appropriation of their bodies by many young boys who share the collections of "nudes" accumulated, opportunities for blackmail.
Another French survey demonstrates the permanence of teasing, threats, insults and sexual assaults within schools.
86% of French women have at least once in their life been victims of some form of assault or sexual assault in the street, reported the Jean-Jaurès Foundation in 2018. In the USA, 70% of women have received “ unsolicited dick pics.
Our society is therefore becoming more dangerous for women and increasingly harmful to the development, well-being, physical and mental health of both sexes.
We can no longer ignore a link between growing insecurity and harassment in public spaces and the omnipresence of unregulated pornography.
Viewing pornographic content generates addiction just like drugs by activating the same areas of the brain.
Remy Verlyck
Viewing pornographic content generates addiction just like drugs by activating the same areas of the brain.
The increased exposure to pornography seems to impact the sexual attitudes of individuals and more specifically adolescents who adopt more risky behaviors such as the absence of means of protection against sexually transmitted diseases.
Specialized in this subject, the Canadian doctoral student Rachel Anne Barr is unequivocal.
Based among other things on the large study dubbed “
The Brain on Porn
” published in
JAMA Psychiatry
in 2014 and on a study published in
Behavioral Sciences
in 2016, she confirms that while the scientific world is just beginning to understand the neurological implications of pornography consumption, it is clear that its effects on mental and physical health are catastrophic, with serious consequences: “
Pornography seems to transform our neural wiring
she says, explaining that consumers are prone to more severe depressive and anxiety symptoms.
Remember that 25% of people suffer from depression each year in Europe, according to the WHO, which estimates the social cost of this phenomenon at 170 billion per year.
A parallel seems interesting here.
Published in the journal Brain in August 2021, an article reports an explosion in the number of adolescents suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder due to the success of profiles publicizing Gilles de La Tourette syndrome on the TikTok platform.
The magnitude of this new phenomenon has prompted researchers to propose the new term "
mass sociogenic disease induced by social media ".
to describe the spread of trouble through viewing.
The study of mirror neurons, democratized in our latitudes by the neuropsychiatrist and psychologist Jean-Michel Oughourlian, confirms it: what we observe would have an indisputable effect on the continual evolution of our brain, and affects mimetic desire.
In addition to the access facilitated by technologies, these drifts seem favored by Western advertising culture, describes Eva Illouz, sociologist and Franco-Israeli academic specializing in the sociology of feelings and culture, sometimes referred to as one of the most intellectual influential in the world.
The author of “
Why Love Hurts: The Experience of Love in Modernity
” and “
The End of Love: An Investigation into Contemporary Disarray
” states that “
sexual freedom has been co-opted by capitalist industries.
The sexualization of the female body has been co-opted by the industries of pornography, film, advertising… to sell even more merchandise
.”
Read also“Pornography is so powerful that it has engulfed eroticism”
Never have we had so much mental availability in the past.
8 times more than at the beginning of the 19th century, says Gérald Bronner in “Cognitive Apocalypse”.
A godsend for the totally deregulated communication market.
Every day, our screens are flooded with millions of messages aimed at guiding our choices and thoughts.
Omnipresent, they shape our vision of the world.
This is the factory of consent analyzed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.
Edward Bernays, assumed father of modern political propaganda and nephew of Sigmund Freud understood that if humans think they are governed by their reason, they are in fact unwittingly governed by a subconscious highly and easily influenced by the image.
The power cocktail
image and naturally addictive content make us totally helpless?
Would it diminish our capacity for rational and free analysis in the face of the omnipresence of pornography?
Loneliness has never been so important: in France, it is one in five French people and this situation is suffered for a majority of them.
Remy Verlyck
Paradoxically, despite the prevalence of dating applications and the disappearance of the moral injunctions of yesteryear, the younger generations are having less and less sexual intercourse.
This phenomenon called "Sex recession" was introduced by Kate Julian in
Atlantic
in 2019. Loneliness has never been so important: in France, it is one in five French people and this situation is suffered for a majority of them.
Pornography seems to transform our neural wiring and therefore, by domino effect, our societal wiring.
Billie Eilish is right to think her brain has been damaged by pornography;
she is not the only victim.
The male gaze on female bodies,
body shaming
that she denounces are the expression of a pornocratic culture.
If pornography has existed since the beginnings of humanity, its availability has never had such an effect on what makes our humanity, our ability to live together and to love.
Touching the most intimate to generate reifying addictions, it makes society more violent, pathological and is a source of social disintegration.
The prospect that the world of tomorrow will be made up of a majority of people affected by these addictions should worry us.
Can the land of courtly love be content to give up in the face of the power of the culture of sexual violence?
Let us be careful, like the sorcerer's apprentice, not to be overwhelmed victims of the world we create.
Protection against pornographic enslavement [...] must be an inalienable and sacred right.
Freeing oneself from the grip of the image through a respectful and positive education of corporeality, affectivity and sexuality seems to be a humanist imperative of justice, gender equality and fulfilment.
Remy Verlyck
"
People are more easily enslaved with pornography than with watchtowers
", said Solzhenitsyn.
Let us recall the first article of the preamble to our Constitution: "
Following the victory won by free peoples over the regimes which have attempted to enslave and degrade the human person, the French people once again proclaim that every human being, without distinction of race, religion or creed, has inalienable and sacred rights.
The protection against the pornographic enslavement of children, lovers or parents of tomorrow, must be an inalienable and sacred right.
Freeing oneself from the grip of the image through a respectful and positive education of corporeality, affectivity and sexuality seems to be a humanist imperative of justice, gender equality and fulfilment.
The priority for families, nurseries to humans, is to train themselves to educate their children before pornography imposes itself on them, with dramatic consequences, but this does not exempt public authorities from working on educational, health and , safe and anthropological which will only increase.
To Chrétien de Troyes, cantor of courtly love, the final word: "
No one, if he is not courteous and wise, can learn nothing from love
”.