What is it about November? Movember encourages people to keep their beards and mustaches alive. November is also the host of National Novel Writing Month, and No Shave November. So the month is packed with plenty of causes to keep people busy.
But a new campaign aims to eliminate pornography from people’s lives. The campaign #NoPornovember is the newest anti-porn movement — and it has already garnered somewhat of a following.
What is Nopornovember?
#NoPornovember aims “to change the conversation on the topic of porn around the world,” according to Fight the New Drug, an anti-pornography group.
“Decades of studies from respected institutions have demonstrated significant impacts of porn consumption on individuals, relationships, and society. #NoPornovember is all about giving visibility to these facts and inspiring our world to be porn-free,” Fight the New Drug said on its website.
For the event, Fight the New Drug has created the new #NoPornovember Challenge, which calls on people to avoid pornography for the entire month in hopes to keeping people away from addictions and other harmful side effects tied to pornography.
Simply, the challenge asks for you to spend 30 days without watching pornography.
Pornography and social media
The challenges arrives as three pornography websites ranked among the top 10 most popular websites in the United States, only falling behind major websites such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo, per Relevant magazine.
“It’s a staggering report with very concerning implications: The three major porn video sites now get more traffic than eBay, Twitter, Wikipedia, Instagram, Reddit and even Netflix,” according to Relevant magazine.
But the campaign has already made waves across social media as about 3,000 Instagram posts use the #NoPornovember hashtag. Many of the posts share the dangers of pornography and how it can negatively impact your life.
“Pornography is a plague that traps people in addiction, alters the brain, poisons relationships, and destroys the world by fueling sex trafficking, rape, sexual assault and more. Why? Because it REMOVES 👉🏽LOVE👈🏽 from the picture and replaces it with lust, lies, abuse, violence, and false realities. I am so thankful pornography has no place in my relationship. All we need and want is each other,” one user wrote on Instagram.
Another Instagram user explained that pornography became a drug for her. She struggled to identify it as an addiction. But she eventually came to her own conclusion about pornography and has vowed to keep fighting it, especially in November.
“Like many I never believed I would have ever admitted to having a porn addiction, and even more so never believed I could be free from it,” she wrote. “It takes a lot of hard work, and many times failing and picking yourself back up again but here I am, free.”
Pornography addiction and hope for the future
Jill Manning, a licensed marriage and family therapist, said in a Church News interview that pornography addiction can be hard to combat, often due to lack of education about sexuality and marital intimacy, as well as mental health issues.
Research has shown that those with mental health issues such as ADHD, depression and anxiety, bipolar disorder, chemical dependency, impulse control disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder or attachment disorders often have an addiction to pornography. Finding treatment for those issues can help treat pornography addiction.
“The takeaway is to treat those things, to intervene as early on as possible to make sure that people are getting the adequate skills, and sometimes medical treatments, necessary to be as strong and healthy and resilient as possible,” she said.