The fight against the harmful effects of pornography on the family has just earned an unlikely ally: Actor and comedian Russell Brand.
Brand speaks up against pornography in a new video he released on his YouTube channel that was featured on the Fight The New Drug website earlier this week. FTND is an organization set up to spread awareness of just how damaging pornography can be to relationships, families, and a person's brain. The group uses scientific evidence to prove the harm, instead of approaching it from a religious or moral perspective which has often made awareness too niche in the past.
"We are the first generation in the history of the world to face the issue of pornography to this intensity and scale," the organization's website states. "We're also the first generation with a scientific, fact-based understanding of the harm pornography can do. With that knowledge, we feel the responsibility to share with others that porn harms the mind, damages relationships, and affects society. Our movement uses nothing but science, research, and personal accounts to bring this issue out into the open and get people talking about something that has previously been considered taboo."
Russell Brand is best known for his work as a stand-up comic, MTV and radio show host, and actor. His use of illegal drugs and alcohol has defined the British comedian since his debut, and he is notorious for stirring up trouble with most projects. He was fired from London's Indie Rock station Xfm for reading pornographic material on the air, which makes this most recent collaboration with FTND all the more interesting.
"Sex is something that we're all interested in because of biological programming, but our attitudes toward sex become warped and perverted and have deviated from its true function as an expression of love and a means to procreation," Brand said in the video, part of his year-old YouTube show called The Trews.
"I was obsessed with porn when I was a teenager," Brand admits. "We had to find magazines and steal things from under beds, so living in this culture now where there's just icebergs of filth floating through every house on wi-fi is inconceivable at what it must be like to be a young adolescent boy with this kind of access to porn."
Brand goes on in the video to quote several studies that point to the fact that we're just now really discovering the harmful effects of pornography on you people and their later relationship, and the full scope is yet to be realized.
"I feel like if I had total dominion over myself, I would never look at pornography again," Brand admits as he further explains that even softcore porn can act as a gateway to something much larger. In this example, Brand names the recently released Fifty Shades of Grey as something harmful to society and the increasing objectification of women that is perpetuated by pornography.
"This sort of cloud of pornographic information in even soft cultural smog, like Fifty Shades of Grey... is making it impossible for us to relate to our own sexuality and our own psychology and our own spirituality."
While Brand is almost ironically making his rant while shirtless and sitting in his bed, his message is powerful and accurate, and he even admits that he's still struggling with porn addiction himself. Be sure to check out the entire video below.
