Mainstream healthcare has long denied that pornography is anything but an innocuous pastime for the bored, lonely and frustrated. Research into the phenomena and its potential side-effects on a captivated male population has lagged real time technological advancement which has made internet porn accessible (through porn-tube sites, broadband internet and smartphones) to most adolescent and adult males across globe. It is also true that since most criticism of explicit sexual content online has emerged from religious and socially conservative groups; the modern mainstream chose to dismiss them without further investigation.
Framing the debate on pornography as a contest between the liberal left and conservative right is however a fundamental error, leading to immediate polarisation. Instead, an emerging body of evidence over the past decade reveals this to be an issue of public health; of how exposure to an endless amount of graphic stimuli is rewiring the brains of young and old men alike, causing widespread mental and physical health issues. While we are used to hearing about narcotics addiction, porn-addiction is spoken of, and indeed believed to exist less often (when was the last time you heard someone say, ‘I am 6 months sober from porn’?). The fact that its effects are usually more subtle and shielded from public purview compared to conventional addictions also allows it to fester unnoticed, even within the addicts themselves.
Yet, porn addiction affects approximately 5-8% of the adult population in the United States today. In 2018, a BBC survey of 18-25 year olds in the UK revealed that 31% had been addicted to porn. People who are addicted to cyber-porn spend at least 11-12 hours viewing porn online every week, though this amount can be much higher (Despite this, “Porn addiction” is not an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-V (DSM-5), another testament to the amazing inaction in this domain).
Addiction to porn, as well as even moderate or excessive use (that is not classified as ‘addicted’) has been reported to cause several disorders amongst men. This includes: porn-induced erectile dysfunction; Loss of libido (not attraction) with real-life partners; Personality disorders such as anxiety, loss of confidence and awkwardness; Breakdown in relationships and marriages; Withdrawal from social life in favour of viewing porn; Damage to attention span, concentration and creativity; Sexual offences and violence against women. These issues have not only been reported in anecdotal form from those suffering them, but also repeatedly reaffirmed through research by distinguished experts in the field of health, neuroscience and sexology.
This article will however remain narrow in its focus. Firstly it will consider how viewing sexually explicit content hijacks our brain and rewires our sexual conditioning. Secondly, it will focus on how this has caused an unprecedented rise in cases of erectile dysfunction amongst young males under the age of 40 in the past 15 years
To preface the discussion, it is appropriate to remind ourselves how ubiquitous internet pornography has become within popular culture. Porn sites receive more regular traffic than Netflix, Amazon, & Twitter combined each month. On a daily basis, Pornhub receives approximately 64 million visitors (one visitor can make multiple visits!!). Over the course of a year, its videos are watched an incredible 92 billion times. That works out at 12.5 videos for every person on the planet. According to the NSPCC, the average age that a child first sees porn in the US is 11 years old. In addition, 80% of American males between 18 and 30 admit to watching porn regularly, whilst in 2017 39% viewed it daily.
Porn, Neuroplasticity and Addiction:
Neuroplasticity is the concept by which our experiences alter the brain. It is closely linked with the appetite mechanisms of our brains, and by extension, addiction. If our brains are exposed to something frequently enough, they will grow to accept and eventually embrace it. If that thing relates to our primitive appetites such as sexual desire, and is powerful enough, this normalisation can morph into addiction. In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge explains:
“The men at their computers looking at porn ... had been seduced into pornographic training sessions that met all the conditions required for plastic change of brain maps. Since neurons that fire together wire together, these men got massive amounts of practice wiring these images into the pleasure centres of the brain, with the rapt attention necessary for plastic change. ... Each time they felt sexual excitement and had an orgasm when they masturbated, a ‘spritz of dopamine’, the reward neurotransmitter, consolidated the connections made in the brain during the sessions. Not only did the reward facilitate the behaviour; it provoked none of the embarrassment they felt purchasing Playboy at a store. Here was a behaviour with no ‘punishment’, only reward. The content of what they found exciting changed as the Web sites introduced themes and scripts that altered their brains without their awareness. Because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images increased at the expense of what had previously attracted them – the reason, I believe, they began to find their girlfriends less of a turn-on ...”
The reward circuitry (which is where we experience pleasure and become addicted) inside our brain produces a chemical called dopamine. All pleasurable acts, such as eating your favourite food or watching your favourite TV show, increase dopamine levels in the brain. What addictive substances do is flood our reward substances with excess dopamine. Drugs, such as cocaine and heroin hijack the brain’s reward circuitry which is used to natural rewards such as sex or eating. Since reproduction is our genes’ main priority, sexual stimulation produces higher dopamine levels than any other form of natural reward. Internet pornography therefore exploits our most fundamental appetite, by keeping the viewer engaged for hours through an endless array of content and novelty.
Thus, internet pornography can alter brain structures and cause addiction much in the same way as Class-A drugs. In doing so, it relies on our reward circuits’ pursuit of novelty. Pornography amounts to some 14% of the internet. This means a phenomenal amount of novelty, with content being uploaded every day, every hour, every ten minutes. This plays into something called the Coolidge effect, which works as follows: put a male and female rat in a cage together and you will initially see a frenzy of copulation. As the novelty wears off however, the male rat will become bored. However, replace the original female with a fresh one and you will find the male springing back into action, ready to fertilise his new mate. This process can literally be repeated until the male rat self-capitulates.
Interestingly, the Coolidge effect gets its name from US President Calvin Coolidge. The president once visited a farm with his wife where the farmer proudly boasted to Mrs. Coolidge of a rooster that could copulate with hens all day long, day after day. Mrs. Coolidge mischievously suggested that the farmer tell this to Mr. Coolidge, who was currently elsewhere. Upon hearing this, Mr. Coolidge simply asked “With the same Hen?” “No, sir” replied the farmer. “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge” smirked the president.
So why does the rooster or rat only display such virility with fresh mates? Well, because the brain produces less and less dopamine in respect to the current female, but a surge in dopamine occurs in the male’s brain when a new female is introduced. This mechanism helps promote genetic diversity and ensures no female goes unfertilized. Research shows that the same holds true for the human brain when consuming pornography. Dopamine levels spike when new pornographic material is introduced, which is endlessly available. With the Coolidge effect and excess dopamine, internet pornography becomes just as addictive as class A-drugs.
The following accounts from the Reddit forum “No-Fap” provide insight to how porn novelty enthrals and consumes:
‘I’d looked at pictures for years (well over a decade), and video clips from time to time. But when the tube sites became my daily fare, it was only shortly afterward that I developed ED problems. I think the tube sites, with their endless clips immediately accessible, threw my brain into overload.’
‘On a tube site you go straight from 0 to 140 kph. Arousal isn’t a slow, relaxed, teasing build-up of expectation. It is straight to full-on orgasmic action. Because tube clips are so short, you do a LOT more clicking to novel clips for various reasons: One is way too short to build up arousal; you don’t know what will be in the clip till you watch it; endless curiosity, etc.’
‘I can totally relate to ‘wanting to watch 10 videos all at once, streaming at the same time...’ It’s amazing to hear someone else say it. It’s like this sensory overload, or hoarding, or just overstuffing yourself with your favourite junk food.’
‘Tube sites, especially the big ones, are the crack cocaine of internet pornography. There is so much of it, and so much new content every day, every hour, every 10 minutes that I was always able to find constant new stimulation.’
‘Now with high-speed, even to smartphones, it has made me continuously watch more and more and at higher resolution. It sometimes becomes a whole day affair looking for the perfect one to finish on. It never, ever satisfies. ‘Need more’ the brain always says…such a lie.’
‘Before I discovered I had ED I had escalated to tube-site compilation videos, each consisting of the hottest few seconds of dozens of hardcore videos.’
Porn-induced ED
The fact that the rise of internet pornography coincided with historically sharp increases in male-reported ED under the age of 40 was largely ignored by the medical community. As far as early 2002, a meta-analysis of ED-studies amongst men under 40 reported a consistent rate of around 2%. This data preceded by some four years the rise of “porn tube sites” which enabled easy, no-download access to pornography. Following this, recent studies report unprecedented levels of ED amongst men below 40, which are for the first time greater than men over 40.
In 2002, ED rates amongst men between 40-80 were around 13% in Europe. By 2011, ED rates between 18-40-year-old males were around 14-28%. Furthermore, in 2012, an ED rate of 30% was found in a cross-section of Swiss men aged between 18-24. A 2013 Italian study reported one in four patients reporting ED were younger than 40, with instances of severe ED 10% higher than in men above 40. A 2014 study on Canadian adolescents reported that 53.5% of males aged 16–21 had symptoms indicative of a sexual problem. Erectile dysfunction was the most common (26%), followed by low sexual desire (24%), and problems with orgasm (11%). The results took the authors by surprise, “It is unclear why we found such high rates overall, but especially the high rates among both male and female participants rather than female participants alone, as is common in the adult literature”.
Despite these early warning signs, the story of research into the harmful side-effects of porn has been one of extreme inertia. So much so that when renowned sexology researchers Janssen and Bancroft stumbled across evidence that porn consumption caused erectile issues and that ‘high exposure to erotica seemed to have resulted in a lower responsivity to “vanilla sex” erotica and an increased need for novelty and variation’, they chose against investigating further.
Apart from obscure literature such as Pamela Paul’s “Pornified”, this brewing public health catastrophe went largely unnoticed. It wasn’t until 2014 that Harvard Urology professor Abraham Morgentaler shed light on a scourge terrifying the male population ‘it’s hard to know exactly how many young men are suffering from porn-induced ED. But it’s clear that this is a new phenomenon, and it’s not rare.’
In his book The New Naked, the neurologist Harry Fisch claims that ‘porn is killing sex’ by providing ‘ultra-easy access to something that is fine as an occasional treat but hell for your [sexual] health on a daily basis.’ In 2004, the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry published research demonstrating that porn use collates with decreased grey matter and decreased sexual responsiveness, even amongst occasional users. According to the lead author Simon Kuhn ‘That could mean that regular consumption of pornography more or less wears out your reward system.’
Later in the same year, a Cambridge university study on excessive porn users found ‘that as a result of excessive use of sexually explicit materials, they had ... experienced diminished libido or erectile function specifically in physical relationships with women (although not in relationship to the sexually explicit material)’.
Male self-action against Porn
Around the early 2010’s, the lack of investigation into the impact of pornography lead to a chain of self-action from men who believed that they suffered a range of physical and psychological health issues as a result of consuming excessive pornography. These men had little scientific evidence for a causal link between the issues they faced (erectile dysfunction, decreased libido etc) and their consumption of porn. Most of them believed that they were lone pariahs and kept their dirty little secrets to themselves. Slowly, they begin to anonymously share their experiences in emerging online communities. In 2012, a guy on an online forum known as Reddit/NoFap recounted the history of how men first figured out what they were dealing with (the onomatopoeic term ‘fap’ is slang for ‘masturbation to porn’):
“Around 2008/2009, people started surfacing on the internet who were freaked out that they had erectile dysfunction, but at the same time they could get a solid erection to varying degrees of extreme porn with the help of some good old deathgrip [masturbation]. The weird thing was, that in some cases, thousands of people responded to these forum posts, saying they had the same exact symptoms.
Now, taking those symptoms into account, people figured they’d desensitised themselves to real women by escalating to evermore extreme genres of porn and masturbating [such] that no woman’s vagina could match the stimulation. They hoped/guessed that if they’d stop watching porn and masturbating for a significant amount of time this desentisation might be reversed.
These people, who back then didn’t have YBOP [www. yourbrainonporn.com], NoFap and dozens of other forums on the subject, thought they were alone. The only weird-ass freaks on the planet who can’t get it up to a real woman, but find disgusting genres of porn a turn on. A lot of them were still virgins. Others were failing for years with real women, which devastated their confidence. They figured that they would never be able to have a normal fulfilling relationship with a woman, and considering they were freaks of nature, they secluded themselves from society and became hermits. ... [Quitting porn] helped reverse the porn-induced ED of these guys, and besides normal libido they started reporting other positive changes too: depression and social anxiety going away, increased confidence, the feeling of fulfilment and being on top of the world...
I’m one of those guys. I’d had several failures with women, starting in the middle of puberty. This had become the single most devastating thing to my psyche. In this modern world, where there’s hardly a commercial, a movie, a TV show, or a conversation without sexual innuendos, I was constantly reminded of my weirdness. I was a failure as a man on a very fundamental level and I seemed to be the only one.
A year before I [quit porn] I’d even gone to see psychiatrists and psychologists, who diagnosed me with severe social anxiety disorder and depression, and wanted to put me on antidepressants, which I never agreed to.
When I found out that the central problem of my life that was on my mind 24/7 could be reversed, the heaviest rock was lifted from my heart. When I went on my first NoFap streak (cca 80 days) I started noticing similar superpowers as reported by others. Is that really so weird? The central thing destroying my confidence and making me feel alone on the planet of 7 billion was being reversed, and it turned out to be very common.
Today, on my 109th day of a streak, I feel happy, confident, social, smart, capable of meeting any challenge, etc., etc.
Conclusion
Internet pornography is now being touted as the “new drug”. Even today, consumption surveys reveal a steady rise in viewership, which will only increase as more sophisticated forms of technology are deployed (VR-porn is predicted to be a billion dollar industry by 2025) by the industry. With its clandestine advantage over more traditional rivals such as cocaine and alcohol, this new drug is silently shaping a public health catastrophe that may only reveal itself to full public consciousness decades down the line. By this time, internet pornography will have destroyed multiple generations of men without any resistance whatsoever by society or government.