Now let’s talk about a topic that many people probably think about when they ponder the effects of porn on society: addiction. Is porn addictive? And if so, how does the addiction play out – what are the symptoms?
It turns out that yes, porn can be very addictive. At least according to a TED talk which I’ll put at the bottom of the post in case you’re interested (upon which I’m basing a lot of this post). I know it’s bad form to post something based on one talk, but A) I’m lazy, B) everything in the talk made sense to me, there wasn’t anything that seemed wrong (to my unscientific ears), and, C) white people have a huge hard-on for TED talks.
One of the main reasons porn is addictive – applicable to men more than to women – is the Coolidge Effect, where males are more sexually aroused by new partners than they are by partners they’ve already “had.” I can vouch for this, by the way: give me a choice between my wife in some novel new sexual position or sexy outfit or something, and plain old sex in the missionary position with a stranger, and I’ll choose the new woman every time, even if she’s only average looking. My wife is pretty damned hot (if I say so myself), but normally I’d still be more turned on by an average looking woman I’ve never had than my sexy wife. We’re turned on by variety. And what is porn but endless variety?
They have studied this a bit, looking at the levels of dopamine that are produced when viewing porn, and seen that the dopamine tends to surge when the subject comes across new girls or new scenes. Porn gives us constant novelty. Scroll through your Smutty feed and it’s a feast for the eyes: girl after girl after girl, scene after scene after scene, fetish after fetish after fetish. It never stops, if you have the time and energy. (Drink lots of water.) As I was writing this I went to Smutty’s “hot” feed, and saw the following:
You probably can’t see that very well, I made it really small to fit in more images, but right on the main screen, without even having to scroll too far, I saw:
- Girl #1 (brunette) letting us peek down her top and admire her cleavage
- Girl #2 (blonde) doing the same
- Girl #3 (brunette) in some kind of Lara Croft-like cosplay outfit
- Girl #4 (blonde) in some kind of pink lingerie
- Girl #5 (brunette) in a sports bra showing off her 6-pack abs
- Girl #6 (brunette) sucking cock and playing with her breasts
- Girls #7 and 8 (both brunette) in some very sexy stockings and garters – we even have variety in the colours, since one outfit’s black and the other is red
- “Girl” #9 (black hair) is a tranny showing off her cock
- Girl #10 (redhead) is showing off her bra & panty set (and some nice tattoos)
- Girl #11 (redhead) is showing us her breasts and pussy
- Girl #12 (blonde) is having interracial sex; one photo has shots of both fucking and sucking
- Girl #13 (blonde) is showing off a very nice ass, in a yellow thong
- Girl #14 (brunette) is bending over to show us her pussy and getting it nice and wet for us
- Girl #15 (blonde) looks kind of young for me, but she’s pulling aside her panties to show us her pussy, even though her boobs are covered
- Girl #16 (don’t even know what colour her hair is; maybe I should just call her “Body #16) is letting us peek inside her shorts at her pussy.
Our brains – at least the male ones – are built to crave this variety because it’s not something that has occurred naturally until recent times. Sure, there were always beautiful girls around, but how many of them would a guy meet in a day? In a month? In his lifetime? Think about that: you will see more variety of girls on Smutty or other porn sites in one sitting than someone 100 years ago would have seen in his entire life.
And with 7 billion or so people to choose from, meaning 3.5 billion or so females, porn can afford to be choosy and pick the very best looking, the very sexiest women to showcase to us perverts. Obviously there aren’t 3.5 billion women applying for every single porn shoot (which is too bad because there are some women I’d love to see on the screen), but there are enough applying, from around the country and even the world, that only the really beautiful, really sexy ones will get chosen. And that’s what I see on my screen any time I go looking for porn. 100 years ago, when dudes were pretty much confined to the cities or villages (or farms) where they lived, they only saw the women who were geographically close; how many of those women were smoking hot, vs. beautiful, vs. good looking, vs. average looking, vs. … well, less than average looking?
So now we’re giving our brains what they crave at such a rate it’s shocking that every guy isn’t addicted. And it’s a type of addiction which is different from the type of chemical addiction you get from things like alcohol or drugs; this is an addiction to something that’s occurring naturally in the brain, which makes its hold on us all that much more strong.
So what effects are produced by this addiction? First of all, like any other type of addiction, we get acclimatized to it after a while, and need something stronger. I’ve written before about how our boredom can build, causing us to go in search of something new, but technology is outpacing our ability to keep up.
If I were addicted to porn ten years ago I might have gone through the stages of moving on to newer and more … er... lurid forms of porn in the stages I mentioned in my addiction post: looking at naked girls, then watching girls get fucked, then watching girls getting peed on or watching them pee, or whatever. Actually, none of this “if I were addicted to porn” bullshit, ten years ago I was addicted to porn! And there is a difference between how it was in 2003 and how it is in 2013: it gets easier and easier to find porn, of any type, and when I find it, it gets delivered to me exponentially faster than it used to. Back then, if I was tired of looking at pretty naked girls in photos and wanted to move on to watching them get fucked in videos I had to look a bit harder – it’s always easier to find “naked posing girl” porn than other types – and when I found something and wanted to download it I would have to wait a long, long time for it. (Again, I’ve written about this before.) It’s true that there was a “thrill of the hunt” aspect to it that I no longer get when porn is almost literally force fed to me, but it would also take someone longer back then to get bored of a particular fetish and move on to something else.
But now, not only is it easier to find porn of any type, it’s also exponentially quicker. If I was a twelve-year-old kid going out in search of porn, I could go to a site like Smutty and find pretty much anything I wanted and get it instantly. All I have to do is pick the right hashtags and I can get almost any type of porn, and since internet speeds are way faster now than they were then I can get it without any noticeable delay. There’s no perception of “lag” anymore; if I see a video in Smutty or Fantasti and click Play it just starts playing. Very rarely is there any type of pause, and if there is it’s only for a second. When I was on Usenet I’d have to choose ahead of time to download videos overnight, and hope that when I watched them the next day they’d be hot; now I can start watching a dozen videos, one after the other, until I find one I like. I feed not only my own addiction, I’m actually speeding the process of getting bored!
For me this is new but for kids who are just coming of age this is how they started experiencing porn. This means that kids are becoming addicted at much younger ages, getting bored quicker because they can move from fetish to fetish with such rapidity, and then ending up with nowhere to go. Worse yet, teenage brains are at very important formative stage, and the way those brains are trained will get hardwired very deeply; when a teenager trains his brain to like porn, he’s training in in a very fundamental way that, while not impossible, will be very difficult to undo later in life.
So what happens when you get bored of every type of porn and can’t find a new and novel fetish? Well first off they find that guys who are addicted to porn have issues like ADHD and social anxiety. But they also end up getting numbed pleasure responses to everything.
Porn is candy for the brain; what else could possibly compete with that? 200 years ago gay poets wrote long, boring poems about the beauty of flowers; do you think any fourteen-year-old kid gives a fuck about the beauty of a flower? He just came out of his bedroom where he spent an hour watching the sexiest women alive pleasuring each other; if that flower isn’t covered in semen, it doesn’t stand a chance of capturing his attention. (Did I just start a new fetish? Nah, I bet there are already pictures out there of flowers covered in cum...)
A guy who’s addicted to porn ends up getting less pleasure out of almost everything else; a good meal, a beautiful sunset, hearing a great song on the radio, his pleasure at these things is no longer as strong because they simply can’t compete with the way porn targets his brain’s pleasure centre like an arrow hitting a bullseye. (Hmm... I wonder if that’s why music is so shitty these days?)
In fact, not even sex produces as much pleasure as it used to! This might be counterintuitive, since porn is supposedly an approximation of sex, but it turns out that men who are addicted to porn sometimes suffer from erectile dysfunction. But it’s a mental issue, not a physical issue: they can get it up just fine when they’re yankin it to porn, just not with, you know, a real girl when having real sex. So often they’ll go to the doctor to get one of those little blue pills and it won’t help because the little blue pills only help with physical problems, not mental ones. Nobody, including the doctor, puts two and two together to realize that it’s because the guy is addicted to porn, such that real sex with real women isn’t stimulating enough anymore.
But all is not lost when it comes to studying the phenomenon. The dude in the video (below) makes the point that we are now finding a new control group when it comes to studying the effects of porn: some porn addicts are giving up their porn, and we’re then able to see how the lack of porn impacts them (or stops impacting them, depending how you want to look at it). Of course, one of the main reasons they’re probably giving up porn, ironically, is the erectile dysfunction. Guys are really traumatized by ED.
One interesting thing about what they’re finding – again, counterintuitive – is that older men are getting over their ED quicker than younger guys. Why? Remember, it was never a physical problem in the first place, it was a mental one. The guys who became addicted to porn in the high-speed internet age have hard-wired their brains in a much deeper way than the guys who only got high-speed internet later in life, so it’s easier for the older guys to retrain their brains than it is for the younger guys.
So here’s the video. It’s only fifteen minutes or so, not too long, so even our Twitter-addled attention spans can cope with it:
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