Porn’s Impact on the [Teenaged] Brain

Remember when I wrote about porn being addictive? And not just addictive, but addictive in a way that alters the fundamental makeup of our brains? And remember when I said that the effects are worse on younger folks because it catches their brains at a crucial formative point in their development?

Stash?

Do people bother with stashes of porn anymore? Is there any point?

When I was a kid porn was a lot harder to come by, and you can understand why: stone tablets are hard to transport, and even harder to mass produce! Also, it’s difficult to do good circles with a hammer and chisel, so boobs always tended to come out looking kind of boxy. To this day, just seeing a couple of circles side by side is enough to make me blush; put a dot in the middle of each one and I’ll cum in my pants.

Opposite of Porn Addiction in Action

I don’t normally get headaches, but I do get sometimes get a caffeine headache if I skip my morning coffee. (Or if I just have 1 instead of 2 or 3.) It’s a normal aspect of life for most coffee-addicted North Americans, including myself.

Porn Addiction In Action

Wednesday Evening, 8:00 PM
I’m sitting in front of the TV. Watching… I don’t know, something stupid, probably. I’m just killing time, really. My wife and I agreed to have sex later, and I’m hoping it will be soon so that I can go to bed early.

How Porn Impacts Us, Part 6: The “So What”

I work in an industry where I tend to do a lot of writing reports and giving presentations, and I’m often asked to distil complex topics down to simple concepts. When I’m preparing such reports or presentations a phrase I often hear is that I need to “get to the ‘so what’.” In other words, it’s all well and good to explain complex concepts in simple ways and educate my readers, but the main thing they’ll care about is, “So what? How does this impact me?”

Porn and Remembrance

Author’s Note: Why would I name this post with a pun based on a book so few people have read? Sure, it works thematically, but nobody will get the joke but me...

In a previous post from the “My History With Porn” series I mentioned my early history with pornographic magazines, and the fact that my mom found them at one point and made me get rid of them. After that I got “smart,” and going forward any time I came across new magazines I did a better job of hiding them: I’d rip out the “good parts,” and then insert them into the middle of a Mad Magazine. I had a billion issues of Mad, so it was easy to just slip this particular issue into the middle of the pile.

How Porn Impacts Us, Part 2: Addiction

In part 1 of this series I wrote a bunch of nebulous crap about control groups and pseudo-science, and wrote very little about actual porn. This despite the fact that I joked about three pornstars opening a “clinic” where they give away free sex, which would have been a great jumping-off point for a fantasy at the very least.

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?

Yes, Porn is Addictive

I’m terrible at coming up with names. If you want help naming a blog, or a band, or that novel you’re writing, I’m not the person to ask for help. So when I was toying around with potential names for this blog I floundered for a while before I came up with Impenitent Porn Lover (which I’m still not happy with, but too late now), and the URL pornzealot.blogspot.com (which I’m also not happy with, but... again, too late now). Most of the names I came up with had the word “addict” in them, and frankly the name I probably would have been happiest with would have been something like Porn Addict. Plain, simple, and to the point, just like me.

Porn I Like: Erotic Fiction

Most of the porn that I write about or link to or obsess over is of a visual nature. The vast majority of porn I consume is in the form of pictures, and the next biggest category is video. (I’ve talked before about the reasons for that ratio: being married and keeping my porn consumption “under the table” means that I don’t often get a chance to consume porn with audio.)

However being observant – not to mention highly intelligent and quite sexy – you will have noticed that I’m pretty fuckin wordy. I mean sure, I sprinkle the occasional smutty picture around the blog, but I also talk a helluva lot. So you won’t be surprised to learn that I also enjoy erotic literature.

Ancient Pornography

I come across the weirdest articles sometimes, but at least it makes me feel a bit more normal. “Been addicted to porn your whole adult life? Don’t feel bad! Folks have been groovin to porn since before the dawn of history, so you are not alone!” So it was just par for the course when I came across this article on Slate, about prehistoric porn.

My History With Porn: BitTorrent

For quite a number of years I was getting my porn from newsgroups, and then one day the unthinkable happened: my ISP discontinued their newsgroup service. A notification email that most of their customers probably didn’t understand (let alone care about) sent a chill down my spine. My primary source of porn was about to be taken away from me; I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.

My History With Porn: Marriage

It was during my “newsgroups over high-speed internet” phase that I got married and moved in with my wife, changing the nature of the situation dramatically. The amount of porn I was consuming dramatically decreased, not from of lack of desire but from lack of opportunity.

My History With Porn: High-Speed Internet

Throughout my college years, and for a few years into my working life, I connected to the internet through modems, eventually getting up to 28.8 kilobits per second – much faster than I’d been connecting, but still not very fast at all. As my career took off and money started coming in regularly I was able to trade up.

My History With Porn: College

At some point in my teenaged years I got religion. I became a born-again Christian, and eventually decided that all of this pornography (let alone the masturbation) probably wasn’t a good idea. So, remarkably, I stopped. Looking back on this it still amazes me. Later in life I tried numerous times to quit and wasn’t able to do it, but apparently I was able to stop in my teenaged years, when my hormones would have been far more... hormonal.

Of course, one doesn’t just shut off masturbation like a valve; there has to be a release. But that’s where wet dreams come in. When the pressure built too high the release valve would open, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night to find myself covered in semen. I may have quit, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I sort of looked forward to these dreams.

My History With Porn: It Begins

Like most guys, my fascination with porn and masturbation probably started around the age of 13, just as puberty was hitting. But this was back in the late 80’s, and kids my age couldn’t just go out and get porn. It was hard to come by. (No puns were intended in the previous sentence.) I have no idea where my first pornographic materials came from. I’m sure it was in the form of magazines, but that’s all I can remember.