A Science-Based Case for Ending the Porn Epidemic, by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. Long excerpts from an even longer article, but this is important and — AFAIK — novel.
A scientific consensus is emerging that today’s porn is truly a public health menace: its new incarnation combines with some evolutionarily-designed features of our brain to make it uniquely addictive, on par with any drug you might name — and uniquely destructive. The evidence is in: porn is as addictive as smoking, or more, except that what smoking does to your lungs, porn does to your brain.
The damage is real, and it’s profound. The scientific evidence has mounted: certain evolutionarily-designed features of our neurobiology not only mean that today’s porn is profoundly addictive, but that this addiction — which, at this point, must include the majority of all males — has been rewiring our brains in ways that have had a profoundly damaging impact on our sexuality, our relationships, and our mental health. …
We are mammals hardwired to seek food and sex. But what happens when the circuitry gets confused or exploited?
Mammals, particularly males, are wired by evolution to seek out sexual stimulation. When we get it, a deep part of our brain called the reward center, which we share with most mammals and whose job it is to make us feel good when we do things we are evolutionarily designed to seek, releases the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Dopamine is sometimes called “the pleasure hormone,” but this is an oversimplification; it would be more accurate to call it “the desire hormone” or “the craving hormone”. … The reward center’s job is to make us crave those things which we are evolutionarily designed to crave — starting with sex and food. …
Male wiring rewards sex with new partners:
If you place a male rat in a box with several female rats in heat, the rat will immediately begin to mate with all the female rats, until it is utterly exhausted. The female rats, still wanting sexual congress, will nudge and lick the drained animal, but at some point he will simply stop responding — until you put a new female in the box, at which point the male will suddenly awaken and proceed to mate with the new female. … The evolutionary imperative is to spread genes as widely as possible ….
Neurochemically, this means that our brain produces more dopamine with novel partners. And — this is the crucial bit — on Tube sites, each new porn scene our brain interprets as a new partner. In a study, the same porn film was shown repeatedly to a group of men, and they found that arousal declined with each new viewing — until a new film was shown, at which point arousal shot right back up to the same level as when the men were shown the film the first time.
This is one of the critical ways in which today’s porn is fundamentally different from yesterday’s: unlike Playboy, online porn provides literally infinite novelty with no effort. With Tube sites and a broadband connection, you can have a new clip — what your brain interprets as a new partner — literally every minute, every second. And with laptops, smartphones and tablets, they can be accessed everywhere, 24/7, immediately. …
Drugs abuse the same sexual neuro-chemistry:
Evolution could not prepare our brains for the neurochemical rush of an always-on kaleidoscope of sexual novelty. This makes online porn uniquely addictive — just like a drug. Some scientists believe that the reason why chemical drugs can be so addictive is that they trigger our neurochemical reward mechanisms linked to sex; heroin addicts often claim that shooting up “feels like an orgasm.” A 2010 study on rats found that methamphetamine use activated the same reward systems and the same circuitry as sex. …
No one is born with a reward circuitry wired in their brain for alcohol, or cocaine — but everyone is born with a hardwired reward system for sexual stimulation. Addiction research has shown that not all people have a predisposition to addiction to chemical substances — only if you have a genetic predisposition can your brain’s reward system be tricked into mistaking a particular chemical for sex. This is why some people become alcoholics even after being exposed to moderate amounts of alcohol, while others (like me) can drink heavily without developing an addiction, or why some people can have just one cigarette at a party and then not worry about it while others (like me) must have their nicotine fix every day. By contrast, all of us have a predisposition to addiction to sexual stimulus. …
We are evolved to binge:
Another well-established evolutionary mechanism is something called the bingeing effect. We evolved under conditions of resource scarcity, which meant it was evolutionarily advantageous to have a reward system programmed to give us a very strong drive to binge whenever we hit a motherlode of something. But putting mammals wired for the bingeing effect in an environment of abundance can wreak havoc on their brains. (The bingeing effect has also been linked to obesity.)
If our reward system interprets each new porn clip as the same thing as a new sexual partner, this means an unprecedented sort of stimulus for our brain. Not comparable to Playboy, or even ’90s-era dial-up downloads. Even decadent Roman emperors, Turkish sultans, and 1970s rock stars never had 24/7, one-click-away-access to infinitely many, infinitely novel sexual partners.
How modern porn damages brains:
The combination of a pre-existing natural circuit for neurochemical reward linked to sexual stimulus and the possibility of immediate, infinite novelty — which, again, was not a feature of porn until 2006 — means that a user can now keep his dopamine levels much higher, and for much longer periods of time, than we can possibly hope our brains to handle without real and lasting damage. …
The evidence has been gradually piling up; at this point, we can say that the scientific evidence that online porn works on our brains just like cocaine or alcohol or tobacco, while recent, is very strong. …
Addiction researchers traditionally have been reluctant to use “addiction” as a label for behaviors that don’t involve chemical substances, … We all collectively rolled our eyes when prominent men felled by #MeToo piously blamed “sex addiction” and announced their intention to go to rehab, and we were right to. …
Slowly, the evidence has been piling up, and it looks, by now, overwhelming: porn does do the same things to our brains as addictive substances.
The effects:
Smoking and heroin will kill you, serious cannabis addiction will melt your brain, alcohol addiction will wreak havoc in your life — compared to that, how bad can porn addiction be? …
Let’s start with what we all know about addiction: you need more and more of your drug to get less and less of a kick; this is the cycle which makes addiction so destructive. The reason for this is that addiction simply rewires the circuitry of our brain.
When the reward center of our brain is activated, it releases chemicals that make us feel good. Mainly dopamine, as we’ve seen, and also a protein called DeltaFosB. Its function is to strengthen the neural pathways that dopamine travels, deepening the neural connection between the buzz we get and whatever we’re doing or experiencing when we get it. DeltaFosB is important for learning new skills: if you keep practicing that golf swing until you get it right, you feel a burst of joy — that’s dopamine — while the accompanying release of DeltaFosB helps your brain remember how to do it again. It’s a very clever system.
But DeltaFosB is also responsible for making addiction possible. Addictive drugs activate the same nerve cells activated during sexual arousal, which is why we derive pleasure from them. But we become addicted to them when DeltaFosB, essentially, has reprogrammed our brain’s reward system, originally written to make us seek out sex (and food), to make it seek out that chemical instead.
This is why addiction is so powerful: the addict’s urge is really our most powerful evolutionary urge, hijacked. …
Porn is a sexual stimulus, but it is not sex. Notoriously, heroin addicts eventually lose interest in sex: this is because their brains are rewired so that their sex reward system is reprogrammed to seek out heroin rather than sex. …
Which is why we are witnessing a phenomenon which, as best as anyone can tell, is totally unprecedented in all of human history: an epidemic of chronic erectile dysfunction (ED) among men under 40. The evidence is earth-shattering: since the Kinsey report in the 1940s, studies have found roughly the same, stable rates of chronic ED: less than 1 percent among men younger than 30, less than 3 percent in men aged 30-45. … We went from less than 1 percent of erectile dysfunction in young men to 14 to 37 percent ...
Online forums are full of anguished reports from young men about ED. An agonizing story is eerily common: a young man has his first sexual experience; his girlfriend is willing, he loves her or at least is attracted to her, but finds himself simply unable to sustain an erection (though he is perfectly able to maintain one when he watches porn). Many more report a milder version of the same problem: during sex with their girlfriend, they must visualize pornographic movies in their heads to sustain their erection. They are not fantasizing about something they like more: they want to be present, want to be aroused by a real woman’s scent and touch. They understand perfectly well how absurd it is to be more attracted by the substitute than by the real thing, and it distresses them. Some must put hardcore pornography on in the background in order to be able to have sex with their girlfriends (and, incredibly, the girlfriends agree to this). …
Imagine that we discovered that some bacteria were causing ED to jump from 1 percent to 14 to 37 percent — there would be a national panic, cable news networks would go wall-to-wall, Congress would be holding hearings every day, state and federal prosecutors would be on a hunt for perpetrators to make the Mueller and Starr investigations look like an Amazon customer satisfaction survey. …
Much less sex:
Last year, an article in The Atlantic went viral after it decried a “sex recession” among young people. Young people are simply having less and less sex. The author, Kate Julian, noted that the phenomenon is not exclusive to the United States but is prevalent across the West — Sweden’s health minister called its declining sex rates (even Sweden is having less sex!) “a political problem,” in part because it risks negatively impacting the country’s fertility. …
Perhaps young people aren’t having sex because the men can’t get it up. Or perhaps it’s because women don’t want to have sex with those men who can do it, but whose brains have been warped by porn.
Because porn does warp the brain. The basic mechanism of porn addiction, you’ll recall, is that when we watch porn, we get a jolt of dopamine, and when we do, we get a follow-up dose of DeltaFosB that rewires our brain to link sexual desire with porn — but not just to any porn. To the porn we watch. …
In the search for novelty, porn is fast becoming nastier. It’s a collective nightmare evolving on the web:
The syndrome doesn’t just make us crave more, it makes us crave novelty. And what kind of novelty, specifically? … Like water flowing downhill, we are drawn to porn that is increasingly taboo — specifically, more violent and degrading. …
Last year, Esquire reported that “incest is the fastest growing trend in porn.” (Tube sites ban videos that explicitly refer to incest, but it is still full of videos featuring “stepdads” and “stepmoms” and “half-brothers” that everyone understands to mean “dads,” “moms,” and “brothers.”) ….
Another rising popular genre has been so-called “interracial” porn, which nearly always means a specific type of interracial congress: black men and white women. The genre is inevitably based on the worst racial stereotypes and imagery. And interracial porn not only has been getting more popular, and more degrading to women, but more racist. … A newly popular genre is “cuckolding,” which involves a white man watching his wife or girlfriend have sex with a black man (or several).
It’s worth pausing to note the denial-driven disconnect between what we talk about and what we all know to be happening. Earlier this year, the country went into a moral panic when it was discovered the governor of Virginia had once worn blackface as part of a costume as a medical student; meanwhile, there is a massively popular and fast-growing genre of entertainment that makes minstrel shows look like a racial sensitivity seminar, and almost nobody talks about it. …
If we had a deep societal taboo against humping tables, table-humping porn suddenly would be exploding in popularity. Instead, we have deep societal taboos against incest, racism . . . and violence against women. …
The key phenomenon is that virtually all pornography, very much including the “vanilla stuff,” has grown more extreme, and specifically more violent, and specifically more misogynistic and degrading towards women. Oh, nonviolent pornography still exists, if you can find it. What used to be mainstream is now niche, and vice versa. …
Changing sexual identities … is novel:
Andrea Long Chu is the name of an American transgender writer, who writes with admirable honesty about her gender transition and experience. … In a paper at an academic conference at Columbia, Chu asked: “Did sissy porn make me trans?” Sissy porn is a genre — again, once extremely obscure and inexplicably, suddenly growing into the mainstream — where men dressed like women perform sex acts with men in stereotypically submissive, female roles. Sissy porn is closely related to the genre known as “forced feminization,” which is pretty much just what it sounds like. In a recent book, Chu essentially answers her own question: “Yes.”
It’s unclear — unknowable, perhaps — to what extent Chu’s experience matches up with the increasing rate of sexual transitions, but even if her example is purely anecdotal, it should serve to underscore the point: porn rewires our brain at a fundamental level and changes what we crave. And that should alarm us regardless of what we believe about transgender issues. ..
Relationship killer:
Another study of nationally representative data found that porn use was a strong predictor of “significantly lower levels of marital quality” … Porn use correlates with marital unhappiness not because spouses who become unhappy turn to porn, but rather that porn is the cause of the unhappiness.
Yet another study, using representative data from the General Social Survey, polling thousands of American couples every year from 2006 to 2014, found that “beginning pornography use between survey waves nearly doubled one’s likelihood of being divorced by the next survey period.” Most terrifying, the study found the group whose probability of divorce increased the most was couples who initially reported being “very happy” in their marriage and began using porn afterward. …
A majority of women in one study described the discovery that their man uses porn as “traumatic“; they not only felt less desirable, they reported feelings of lower self-worth. …
We can’t prove a direct causal link between porn addiction and the “sex recession,” but come on: even putting aside skyrocketing ED, given what porn addiction does to male sexuality, from the female perspective, sex with a male porn addict sounds like an experiment you don’t want to repeat — and at this point, it’s a fair bet that most young men are porn addicts. …
I can scarcely imagine what it must be like to be a teenage girl when close to 100 percent (as we might safely assume) of the potential relationship pool is porn-addicted. …
Not that pornography only affects sexual and romantic relationships. Porn causes loneliness. In part, this is because it is true of all addiction, which typically causes powerful feelings of shame that make us want to avoid or even push away other people. And addiction causes us to engage in antisocial behavior: though I wasn’t able to find a study, there are many online testimonies of people losing their job because they couldn’t stop themselves visiting porn sites at work. …
Brain damage:
Hypofrontality manifests in a decline in what psychologists call executive function. As the name executive function suggests, this is a pretty important feature of our minds. Executive function includes our decision-making faculties, our ability to control impulses, to evaluate risk, reward, and danger. …
I have found close to 150 brain studies that find evidence of hypofrontality in internet addicts — which, it’s safe to assume, is nearly synonymous with internet porn addicts, at least for males — and more than a dozen that have found signs of hypofrontality in sex addicts or porn users.
That’s right: porn addiction literally atrophies the most important part of our brain. …
Japan:
Japan also got broadband internet earlier than the rest of the world. Could it be that Japan is an example of what’s likely to happen to us if we don’t do something about porn addiction?
In Japan, this new generation of sexless men — and the Japanese sex recession is caused by men’s lack of interest, to the vocal dismay of young Japanese women, if media reports are to be trusted — are known as soushoku danshi, literally “grass-eating men” — in a word, herbivores. …
And what seems to define the herbivores is not just that they have no interest in sex, it’s that they don’t seem to be interested in much of anything at all. They tend to live with their parents. After all, it’s hard to find a place to live when you don’t have a steady job, which herbivores say they don’t look for, because they’re not interested in a professional career. … What herbivores do seem to be interested in is spending the vast majority of their time alone, on the internet.
Read it all. It’s like a biblical curse.
