His Porn, Her Pain, Confronting America's PornPanic with Honest Talk about Sex

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His Porn, Her Pain, Confronting America's PornPanic with Honest Talk about Sex Page 19

by Marty Klein

There was also the issue that a lot of porn addiction is self-diagnosed or partner-diagnosed.8 This would never be considered appropriate for, say, bipolar disorder (much less for diabetes). Tellingly (though not surprisingly), those self-diagnosing as porn addicts are disproportionately men whose religious values conflict with their self-reported sexual behavior and desires.9

  SO WHAT IS REAL ADDICTION?

  When your body has changed its way of metabolizing a substance such that your decision-making is compromised, that’s addiction. Think alcohol. Heroin. Pain-killers like OxyContin.

  Nicotine is another example of real addiction: In the United States, less than 7 percent of people are able to quit smoking on any given attempt without medicines or other help. Even with medicine, only 25 percent of smokers can stay smoke-free for over six months. And that’s only six months.10 Similarly, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) found that 82 percent of smokers have unsuccessfully tried to quit at least once. Dr. Mike Knapton, Associate Medical Director for the BHF, says: “Every year more than 100,000 [British] smokers die because of their addiction.”11

  Unlike pornography, substances like crack cocaine and tobacco are actually addictive. No one leaves a great sex life for porn. But some people do leave a great life for heroin, alcohol, and truly addictive substances because they’re addicted.

  The simplistic argument that porn is like drugs and therefore works like drugs is just silly. An analogy is not evidence. Flour looks like cocaine, but they work differently. Jogging and talking to the police both make you sweat, but the activities are very different, and your body even experiences them differently.

  After taking up addictive substances like crack cocaine, users soon stop experiencing any pleasure from using—only normalcy when using, and relief from the distress of not using. Masturbating to porn is different from addictive substances in that it continues to be enjoyable over many years; anyone who doesn’t get pleasure from using porn almost always stops looking at it. If they don’t, that’s a sign of a recognizable and treatable psychological problem, such as OCD or PTSD.

  DOES USING PORN LEAD TO ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION?

  The newest entry in the porn-is-a-dangerous-product sweepstakes is the mythical disease of PIED—Porn Induced Erectile Dysfunction. Using a combination of misleading junk neuroscience, testimonials, and the old news that virtually all men occasionally don’t get erections when they want them, anti-porn forces have concluded that masturbating to high-speed porn (there’s that pesky masturbation behavior again), especially if you start young, actually affects your ability to get erect with a live partner.

  These alarmist activists conveniently overlook factors such as:

  Young people have unrealistic expectations about the conditions under which they’re likely to get (or not get) erect

  The medical definition of Erectile Dysfunction (ED), which requires a lack of alcohol, lack of performance anxiety, and recurring symptoms, not just the occasional disappointment

  Today’s decreasing level of live preparation for partner sexual interactions that young people get (leading to unrealistic expectations, having sex under sub-optimal conditions, and insufficient tools to deal with the results)

  The way 24-hour Internet connectivity can make every part of real life seem routine and boring

  Nevertheless, even television personality Dr. Oz (again, no training in sexuality) is concerned about supposed PIED. He bases his concern on three main things:

  A one-time Italian study that wasn’t peer-reviewed and has never been replicated.

  Testimonials of young (they’re always young) men who claim that they had ED, that porn caused it, and that abstaining from porn fixed it.

  The fact that his TV audience is almost entirely female, and that any show with the word “erection” in it gets a ratings spike. In fact, he did four shows on this in February 2013—“sweeps month” in industry jargon, when ratings are measured for advertisers.12

  The experts on these Dr. Oz episodes disagreed with each other, and with the newly minted orthodoxy of the PIED movement. Urologist Dr. Andrew Kramer said that men with PIED need four pornless weeks to “reboot,” while the PIED movement says six months or even a year is usually needed. On the other hand, sexologist Ian Kerner said that PIED might come from sexual boredom (in which case it wouldn’t be PIED), and that treating PIED is “not about cutting out the porn,” but perhaps using a different kind of porn. So PIED is a supposed problem whose believers can’t even agree on its contours, much less the contours of healthy sexuality.

  Where is the actual data showing an increase in young men’s erectile problems? It doesn’t exist. Although popular jokes suggest that only middle-aged and older men have erection problems, scientists have known for at least 60 years that at least 10 percent of men age 29 and younger have erectile dissatisfaction.13 While there was no Internet for young people to share their erection woes back then, that reality has been mentioned for dozens of centuries by writers including Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Aristophanes. People unfamiliar with world history or world literature think that erection problems, and sexual problems in general, are primarily a modern phenomenon (just like many young people in the 1960s thought they invented sexual ecstasy).

  I started practicing sex therapy 20 years before Internet porn became ubiquitous, and I haven’t seen any increase in erection problems in the 15 years since Internet porn came into every home. Neither have any of the urologists, psychologists, or sex therapists with whom I work.

  To support this professional experience, science offers studies thousands of miles apart. For example, North American neuroscientists Prause and Pfaus recently wrote of their research, in which pornography use was related to greater sexual desire for one’s partner, not to ED or lower desire.14 An ocean away, European researchers Landripet and Stulhofer found that neither frequency of porn viewing nor changes in the frequency of use were related to erectile problems.15 Both studies were published in a prestigious medical journal. Together, these two studies refute claims that watching porn desensitizes erectile function, which supposedly leads to decreased desire and arousal for partner sex.

  It is true that more young men are using erection drugs now than when they first came out.16 Blame a culture obsessed with intercourse, in which everyone wants the best erection they can get. Blame women who, more empowered than two decades ago, are voicing dissatisfaction in sexual situations where they didn’t used to complain. Blame porn that shows every man always erect (and, Mr. Porn Consumer, how do you suppose that happens?). Blame a young adult culture that sees Viagra as part of the “insurance” package they want before starting sexual encounters in which they feel anxious—and blame young men’s learned ability to fake the symptoms of ED in order to get Viagra.17

  If there is an increase in erection problems among Millennials, one likely explanation is that today’s drug of choice for young singles is alcohol, which undermines erections far more than marijuana did when it was young people’s favorite drug in the ’60s. People who have had a lot to drink are more likely to feel anxious (and therefore more likely to have erection problems) than people who have smoked a lot of marijuana.

  Possibly the most important issue here is the extent to which young people live on Internet-enabled devices: occupied with literally hundreds of texts per day, rapidly switching between screens, swiping between images, looking for facts or answers before trying to remember them, imagine them, or discuss them with a live companion. It isn’t that sex can’t compete with porn—sex can’t compete with the Internet. Sex can’t be as compelling, as varied, as unpredictable, as moment-to-moment rewarding as the Internet. Contrasted with this daily opulent online experience, young people tell me there simply isn’t enough going on during actual sex to absorb their attention. That’s what limits arousal and erection far more than the content of what they look at, whether it’s porn or anything else.

  All of which is different than saying there’s a neurological pathway through which po
rn use undermines erections.

  And do remember that there is no reliable data showing an increase in erection problems today over yesterday.

  Most men who swear off porn also cut out (or reduce) masturbation. Whatever improvements they notice in their erections are undoubtedly more because of not masturbating (or increased talking with their partners, or recommitting to sex in their relationship) than because of not watching porn. For many men, reduction of masturbation will increase sex drive, which over time can result in more morning erections and even nocturnal emissions. Most men would say that giving up masturbation is a pretty high price to pay for wet pajamas.

  Let’s remember that young people are not experts in sexuality, not even experts in young people’s sexuality. We do know that most 23-year-olds are trying to grow up and understand sexuality. Most do a poor job of it, and when older, disown much of their own 23-year-old’s behavior and beliefs. Choosing masturbation with porn instead of risking sex with a live woman is only the latest version of this. Ask a bunch of today’s 40-year-olds how they feel about their sexual decisions and beliefs back when they were 23—and most will roll their eyes and shudder, laugh, or both. If you’re 40, or when you become 40, this will presumably be true for you, too.

  WHAT ABOUT NEUROSCIENCE?

  “Non-experts really love explanations from neuroscience, even if they’re wrong,” says psychologist Carol Tavris. The fast-evolving technology in brain-imaging techniques has practically hypnotized laypeople—especially journalists—with images that are both stunning and incomprehensible. Still, Tavris says, “Many people regard evidence from brain images as being more ‘real’ than other types of psychological information.”18

  Other scientists have noted this effect as well. Three recent experiments tested the hypothesis that brain images have a particularly persuasive influence on the public perception of research on cognition. The results: “[P]resenting brain images with articles summarizing cognitive neuroscience research resulted in higher ratings of scientific reasoning for arguments made in those articles, as compared to articles accompanied by bar graphs, a topographical map of brain activation, or no image.

  “We argue that brain images are influential because they provide a physical basis for abstract cognitive processes, appealing to people’s affinity for reductionistic explanations of cognitive phenomena.” Or as Tavris puts it, brain images satisfy the public’s preference for “neat” biological explanations over “messy” psychological rationale.”19

  Having said that, what do those imaging studies say about the brains of people who watch porn? Do they look like the brains of people on crack cocaine? If so, doesn’t that prove that porn is destructive and even addictive?

  “Watching the NCAA playoffs is going to change your brain, eating chocolate—any time you have any kind of experience, it’s going to change your brain,” says Rory C. Reid, a research psychologist at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute who is also an expert in hypersexual behavior. He’s hardly pro-porn—“Philosophically, I’ve got all sorts of problems with porn”—but as a scientist, he says, “[T]his idea that consumption of pornography causes cortical atrophy that leads to negative consequences? We haven’t seen that.”20

  Similarly, Bruce Carpenter, a researcher at Brigham Young University—yes, that Brigham Young—is morally opposed to pornography. He suspects that “pornography has larger deleterious effects upon individuals, family, and society,” but adds: “Now to the evidence. THERE IS NONE … There is not a single study of pornography use showing brain damage or even brain changes.”21

  Dr. Barry Komisaruk, a Rutgers University psychologist who has done groundbreaking neuroscience research on the brain during orgasm, also says that there are no studies demonstrating that porn’s effect on the brain is anything resembling addiction.22

  And yet periodically one reads a headline and lead like the following, from 2013:

  “Pornography addiction leads to same brain activity as alcoholism or drug abuse, study shows.” Cambridge University scientists reveal changes in brain for compulsive porn users which don’t occur in those with no such habit.23

  Cambridge—that’s like the gold standard of universities, right? So doesn’t this seal the deal on the reality of porn addiction?

  Not at all—once we look at the actual science. According to neuroscientist James Pfaus, Professor at the Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology at Montreal’s Concordia University, “Assuming that it eventually passes peer review, all this study shows is that the nucleus accumbens (ventral striatum) is activated by preferred visual erotica. This happens with most preferred stimuli, including pictures of one’s favorite foods, preferred music, photos of your newborn baby, etc. And yes, it also happens in drug addicts with photos of preferred drugs or drug paraphernalia. You would not regard the chills I get listening to the final chorale from Bach’s ‘St. Matthew’s Passion’ (and that lights up my ventral striatum like Vegas) as an indication that I am suffering from ‘music addiction.’ ”

  Continues Pfaus, “Correlation is not evidence of causality, no matter what a newspaper headline says. The notion that so-called ‘porn addiction’ leads to brain activity is not at all what these data show. They show only that watching preferred visual erotica activates that region, whereas watching non-preferred visual erotica (in the matched controls) activates it less. Again, this is the case when many biologically relevant stimuli are preferred.”24

  To pick just one of many such examples, a recent study25 shows that even the smell of newborn babies triggers the same reward centers as drugs. That is, when women catch the scent of a newborn baby, their dopamine pathways in a region of the brain associated with reward learning light up. The same dopamine surge is also associated with satiating sexual and drug-addiction cravings. This mechanism influences us by triggering “the motivation to act in a certain way because of the pleasure associated with a given behavior.”

  What makes some substances addictive is that they always shift brain response to craving states rather than liking states. As neurobiologists Georgiadis and Kringelbach point out, “In no case has a shift away from liking to wanting or craving been demonstrated” with pornography … [N]o data have demonstrated that [porn] is different from any other ‘liked’ activity or object.”26

  After reviewing the literature of the neuroimaging studies of the human sexual response cycle, Georgiadis and Kringelbach further “normalized” sexual arousal with pornography, concluding “it is clear that the networks involved in human sexual behavior are remarkably similar to the networks involved in processing other rewards.”27

  To be fair, while the media and anti-porn activists are creating impressive headlines out of preliminary studies with low numbers and few if any controls, the scientists doing the studies rarely make the massive claims that non-experts do. Neuroscientists themselves generally say they don’t know what brain activation maps mean in terms of subjective experience, certainly not about decision-making. Beware non-neuroscientists’ claims about what neuroscience means.

  If the junk neuroscience of anti-porn activists was accurate, some 30–40 million American porn users would end up crippled (they obviously don’t), simultaneously losing interest in sex and wanting more intense sexual experiences (I know, it makes no sense). And all porn users, needing a bigger and bigger dose of their porn “drug,” would end up pursuing the ultimate in novel porn experiences—bestiality and kiddie porn. Of course, the overwhelmingly common outcome is that that doesn’t happen.

  Marnia Robinson (an attorney) and her husband Gary Wilson (a self-described neuroscience enthusiast) have made their name promoting the idea that neuroscience proves that masturbation to pornography actually induces erectile dysfunction, loss of desire for partner, and addiction. Until it was terminated in 2014, their Psychology Today blog continually argued that the brains of addicted men become desensitized to sexual stimulation and so they must continually seek novelty via porn that is more extreme, involves fetis
hes, or is even the “wrong” orientation. Other movements promoting this idea include No-Fap, YourBrainOnPorn, RebootNation, and XXXChurch. Interestingly, all these people are non-psychologists, non-therapists, and non-sexologists. These various websites and movements expose their ignorance of sexuality by saying things such as:

  Orgasm is the reward from watching porn [not always], and the greater the number of hours watched, the more orgasms a person has [not true]; and orgasm is “the most powerful natural dopaminergic reward in the nervous system.”28 [really not true]

  People should only watch porn that strictly reflects their own sexual orientation [1. Why? 2. This ignores the fact that most heterosexual men and women periodically enjoy same-gender fantasies]. Otherwise they’re vulnerable to a supposedly new syndrome, homosexual obsessive compulsive disorder (HOCD).

  People who have a single extramarital affair and thereby risk their marriage are sex addicts.29 [1. What? 2. Presumably, Dr. Hall feels the same way about people who watch porn despite inviting conflict and risk into their marriages.]

  Just in case you are not a neuroscientist, let me help you make sense of all this new brain research, junk and otherwise:

  The studies are on tiny populations.

  The studies can’t show causality, only correlation (legitimate scientists always say this; journalists and porn addictionologists rarely do).

  Studies don’t look at possible distinctions between people who look at a lot of porn without problems and people who look at a lot of porn either compulsively or with problematic outcomes.

  The argument is circular. Of course people who use a lot of porn are more excited when they look at porn, compared with people who don’t use a lot of porn. You could do the same study with people who do and don’t like vanilla milkshakes and get the identical result.

  There’s no explanation of people who watch a medium or large amount of porn for years without becoming addicted, compulsive, self-destructive, or sexually dysfunctional.

 

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