Young guys are giving up porn.
I know this because I’m watching TED talks, recently, and ran into one entitled The Great Porn Experiment. Rest assured, dear Readers, this elderly and respectable blogger has never EVER consumed a speck of smut, excepting those times when I pass Mr. Fernández at the computer.
It seems, however, that I am an exception, if the speaker, Gary Wilson is right. In fact, anyone studying the effect of porn on the brain has a little problem—there are virtually no guys out there who don’t watch it. So that’s a problem, where’s the control group.
It’s basic brain anatomy—a guy seeing a picture of a lusty babe, if that’s his persuasion, get a little jolt of dopamine. Now if the lusty babe is being her sultry self in dad’s Playboy magazine (found in the sock drawer or under the bed)—that little shot of dopamine goes away, after a bit. But what happens when that busty babe is on a computer screen?
Well, several things. In the first place, you can click faster than you can turn pages, and more important, if you put all the smut that’s on the Internet in a magazine under dad’s bed, well, he’d need either a ladder or more likely a helicopter to go to sleep every night.
So Wilson outlines the problem: a slight jolt of dopamine is a reward, it gives us a good feeling, and it makes us want to explore the world, one part of which is sex. But if you sit for hours at a time, as some guys do, and do nothing but consume one erotic image after another, what’s happening in your brain? You’re getting a positive feedback cycle of dopamine—the brain is craving more and more stimulation, trying to get back to the feeling of that first hit of dopamine. It can’t, of course—that’s the trap of addiction.
You enter something called arousal addiction, but other things are happening as well. You’re isolating yourself, you’re losing interest in other things, you start to feel depressed and anxious, and critically, you start losing interest in actual sex.
Two bad things happen—when you are with a real partner, you can’t get it up. And guess what? You’re 22.
So young guys have been getting erectile dysfunction, as well as getting medicated for depression, anxiety, and a host of other conditions. And unlike the erectile dysfunction in elderly guys, it’s not a plumbing problem, it’s an electrical problem—the brain is sending a weaker signal to the brain.
Then something really weird happens—you’re a straight guy, so why are you watching gay porn? ‘Jesus, what’s wrong with me,’ you think, ‘am I gay?’
Relax, you’ve burned through your sexual preference, as it were, and now you’re searching farther and farther afield for stimulation.
So what are guys doing? They’re giving up porn, and waiting out the two to six months that it will take to rewire the brain. And as one guy said, that gives him time to study French, play the piano, exercise, etc. A porn addiction takes a LOT of time.
I live in Puerto Rico, which has a serious problem socially with arousal addiction. Car stereos are blaring, people are shouting, the landscape is littered with signs that seem to rush at you, screaming to be noticed. And everyone everywhere is beset with six things they have to do or want to do or are in fact just doing. I report this as absolute fact—I visit Manhattan and feel relaxed. Ah, a quieter, gentler time!
“Let me tell you about a place that is so dark the sky at night is ablaze with stars,” I would tell my students.
“Let me tell you about a place that is so silent, you turn off the refrigerator at night—it’s too loud,” I’d say.
“Let me tell you about sleeping alone in the forest, and hearing the rustle of something moving through the underbrush outside, and not knowing what it is,” I’d begin.
They looked at me blankly. Of all of the pleasures of the world, the one imaginable one for them was a moment free of…
…stimulation.
