One question that is not being asked: What is porn doing to us and are we OK with that? There is a growing body of research that says watching porn may lead to some not so desirable individual and social outcomes both in the short and long-term.
Some people can watch porn occasionally and not suffer significant side effects; however, plenty of people out there, including teens and pre-teens with highly plastic brains, find they are compulsively using high-speed Internet porn with their porn tastes becoming out of sync with their real-life sexuality.
Just visit the sites YourBrainOnPorn and Reddit’s No Fap (no masturbating to online porn) forum to see stories from thousands of young people struggling to overcome what they feel is an escalating addiction.
In the first-ever brain study on Internet porn users, which was conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, researchers found that the hours and years of porn use were correlated with decreased grey matter in regions of the brain associated with reward sensitivity, as well as reduced responsiveness to erotic still photos.
Less grey matter means less dopamine and fewer dopamine receptors. The lead researcher, Simone Kühn, hypothesized that “regular consumption of pornography more or less wears out your reward system.
This is one of the reasons why Playboy, the magazine that introduced most of us to the naked female form, will no longer feature nude playmates after early 2016. As Pamela Anderson, who is featured on the cover of the final nude issue, said, “It’s hard to compete with the Internet.
A separate German study showed users’ problems correlated most closely with the numbers of tabs open and degree of arousal. This helps explain why some users become dependent on new, surprising, or more extreme, porn. They need more and more stimulation to become aroused, get an erection and attain a sexual climax.
A recent study led by researchers at the University of Cambridge found that men who demonstrate compulsive sexual behavior require more and novel sexual images than their peers because they habituate to what they are seeing faster than their peers do.
Another recent study from the University of Cambridge found that those who have compulsive sexual behavior exhibit a behavioral addiction that is comparable to drug addiction in the limbic brain circuitry after watching porn. There is dissociation between their sexual desires and their response to porn—users may mistakenly believe that the porn that makes them the most aroused is representative of their true sexuality.
It may be no coincidence then that porn users report altered sexual tastes, less satisfaction in their relationships and real-life intimacy and attachment problems.
A lot of young men especially talk about how porn has given them a “twisted” or unrealistic view of what sex and intimacy are supposed to be, and how they then find it difficult to get interested in and aroused by a real-life partner.
