We have nothing against playing video games; they have many good features and benefits. Our concern is that when they are played to excess, especially in social isolation, they can hinder a young man's ability and interest in developing his face-to-face social skills. Multiple problems, including obesity, violence, anxiety, lower school performance, social phobia and shyness, greater impulsivity, and depression, have all been associated with excessive gaming.5 The variety and intensity of video game action makes other parts of life, like school, seem comparatively boring, and that creates a problem with their academic performance, which in turn might require medication to deal with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which then leads to other problems down the road in a disastrous negative cycle, as we will see.
Porn adds to the confusion. Porn itself is not as great a problem for casual viewers, or for those with some personal sexual experience to juxtapose it against what they see. But for young men that have had no sex education or real-life sexual experiences, it can be very problematic. Many, we have learned, are developing their sense of sexuality around hard-core porn, not around real people. During our research, a lot of young men told us about how porn has given them a “twisted” or unrealistic view of what sex and intimacy are supposed to be, and how they then found it difficult to get aroused by a real-life partner. For many of them, a real-life sexual encounter can be a foreign and anxiety-provoking experience because communication skills are required, their body needs to be engaged, and they must interact with another flesh-and-blood person who has their own sexual and romantic needs. Other young men told us about how other areas of their life are affected, such as concentration and emotional well-being, by watching excessive amounts of porn because they noticed massive positive shifts in their personal lives and outlooks once they stopped masturbating to it. Other experts noticed this same phenomenon. Physiology teacher Gary Wilson, creator of www.YourBrainOnPorn.com and author of the book of the same name, has collected hundreds of self-reports from online forums where young men have been experimenting with giving up online porn. They recount how their social anxiety improved drastically—including increased confidence, eye contact, and comfort interacting with women. The young men also often reported more energy to get through their daily lives, concentration became easier, depression was alleviated, and erections and sexual responsiveness were stronger after voluntarily engaging in a “no fap” challenge (no masturbating to online porn).6
Like video games, we emphasize the overuse of porn as a problem. Overuse is difficult to define however. Though there are more and more studies being done on porn's physiological and psychological effects on adults, most studies do not control for personality or other extraneous factors, and there are no similar studies done on children below eighteen years old, only the occasional survey. It is also difficult to find a control group of young people that has not watched porn online. One University of Montreal study that initially sought to compare the behavior of men who used porn versus those who didn't could not even find a single twenty-something male participant who had not seen porn.7
Plus, most health and psychology communities do not officially recognize porn as something a person can get addicted to. In some circles it is thrown in with Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD), which has only recently been acknowledged as a legitimate problem.8 Despite this, many young people, mostly young men, are beginning to speak up about how porn is affecting their motivation, ability to focus, social and sexual abilities, and perceptions of the world,9 and their testimonies should not be ignored. Their symptoms are real, and shouldn't be brushed aside as merely a phase or “all in their heads.”
Again, we're not saying women don't play video games and watch porn—they do. But they don't do it nearly as much as men do. And the concept of watching porn is definitely a male thing. For their book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, researchers Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam sifted through over 400 million Internet searches and found that 55 million of them (about 13 percent) were for erotic content. Who is doing these searches? You guessed it: guys (mostly). Though more women seek out erotic stories than men, Ogas and Gaddam determined that men preferred viewing erotic images and movies more than women six times to one. Indeed, on popular pay sites like Brazzers and Bang Bros, the audience is about 75 percent male, but when it comes to actually paying for porn, only 2 percent of all the subscriptions are made on credit cards in women's names. Even CCBill, the popular billing service used by adult sites, flags female names as possible fraud.10
Why the differences? Certainly there are many female porn connoisseurs and men who enjoy erotic literature. Ogas and Gaddam explore this by delving into men's ability to be aroused by “or” and women's need to be aroused by “and.” They explain that men have single-cue arousability: nice breasts or a round butt or a hot MILF [mother-I'd-like-to-fuck] will do; whereas women need multiple cues: attractive and nice to children and self-confident. Though most women are actually physically turned on by just about any kind of porn, they become psychologically aroused only when the “and” threshold is met. The woman herself must also feel safe and irresistible and physically healthy. The “Power of Or” exists to help men exploit opportunities for sex. Women do not work the same way. In stressful environments, for example, a man's libido goes up while a woman's libido goes down. Male brains separate sex and romance, neural systems that are united in female brains, while female brains separate mental arousal from physical arousal, which are united in male brains.11 Men and women just pick up on different erotic cues, have different ways of processing those cues, and behave differently in response to those cues.
If you look at why young men are gaming and using porn you'll find that those factors are both symptoms and causes of their overall decline. There is reciprocal causality where a person may watch a lot of porn or play video games to excess and develop social, sexual, and motivational problems, and vice versa. This perpetuates a cycle of social isolation. We are concerned that the more provocative and lifelike video games and porn become, the more reality will mesh with virtual reality, and the more egocentric young men will become—living entirely in their own carefully-crafted digital worlds.
Overuse of either outlet can result in real-life problems, but it's the combination of excessive video game playing and porn use that creates a deadly duo, leading to ever more withdrawal from usual activities, social alienation, and inability to relate to anybody, especially girls and women.
Porn and video games have addictive qualities, but it's not the same as other addictions. With alcohol, drugs, or gambling you want more of the same, but with porn and video games you want the same . . . but different; you need novelty in order to achieve the same high. The enemy is habituation to a regularly experienced stimulus. We call this arousal addiction; in order to get the same amount of stimulation, you need new material: seeing the same images over and over again becomes uninteresting after a short time. The key is novelty of visual experience. Both these industries are poised to give users that endless variety, so it's up to each individual to find what the best balance is for engaging in these digital outlets along with other activities in their lives—especially with constructive and creative ones, not just consumer ones.
Diversion is a double-edged sword. We have more information at our fingertips than ever before, but we can lose ourselves in alternative worlds. These alternative worlds are not even necessarily more efficient, as many of them purport themselves to be. They are just more distracting. For example, a busy New York restaurant was perplexed as to why the number of customers they served hadn't changed in the last ten years, despite adding more staff and reducing the number of items on the menu. When they watched a surveillance tape from 2004 and compared it with a tape from the same time in 2014, they found out it was not such a mystery. Between customers taking pictures of the food, pictures of themselves, asking waiters to take photos of themselves and their friends, and then sending their food back to be reheated, customers were there twice
as long.12
One of our strengths and weaknesses as humans is our natural inclination to shift our attention from one thing to another. We do this so we can be aware of what's happening all around us in our environment. Having nearly everything available instantly at any time on the Internet exacerbates this impulse. “Clouds”—virtual storage spaces accessed through the web—act as a second brain where we can put our memories and tasks, allowing us to focus on the present instead of the past or future. They are an incredible technology that goes wherever we go, provided we have the means to access them. The flip side is that this makes us more focused on ourselves and less conscious of the world around us and other people, because we don't have to remember as many details about them, nor do they seem as relevant to fulfilling our immediate needs.
When neuropsychologist Ian Robertson took a poll of 3,000 people and found that while almost everyone over fifty years old could remember a relative's birthday off the top of their head, less than half of the “digital natives” (millennials) could do the same. The rest had to reach for their mobile phones to find out. Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired, says the reflexive gesture of reaching into one's pocket to find the answer epitomizes the problem. By offloading data onto computer memory, we're remembering fewer basic facts. Thinking about the future, Thompson wonders whether our growing dependence on machine memory will disrupt other ways of understanding the world, eventually causing people to be mentally impaired when they're not plugged in.13 Whether he's right or wrong, the externalization of our thoughts and memories to technology and the Internet is only going to become more pronounced, especially as younger and younger children access them regularly.
Writing and reading enlivens people's experiences of life and nature through thoughtful consideration, reflection, and imagination. Yet writing anything by hand is going extinct, and books and newspapers in their current form are becoming obsolete. Many newspapers and magazines have either gone out of business or now focus on the web as their main way to distribute content. It's great for the forests, which, paradoxically, don't get visited by many young people. Instead, the web has become our loyal companion and our preferred place to find, process, and share information. It's clear that companies pay a price if they don't have a presence on the Internet, losing readership, sales, and business from advertisers. American schools too have “lost” students' interest with static and understimulating lesson plans and outdated technologies.
In 2013 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published a report saying children now spend more time engrossed in media than they do in school: “it is the leading activity for children and teenagers other than sleeping.” The imbalances were even greater if an adolescent had a television in their bedroom, which the majority of teens do. Though the AAP believes that media can be pro-social and teach children ethnic tolerance and a variety of interpersonal skills, they recommend children have no more than one to two hours of screen time per day.14 But as they pointed out, many youths are spending five to ten times that amount of time in front of a screen, and their brains are becoming accustomed to it.
Sherry Turkle, cultural analyst and founder of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, says that all the tweets, texts, and “sips” of online communication don't add up to one big gulp of conversation because we learn how to have productive inner dialogue through our conversations with others. Thus, limiting in-person communication with others can limit one's own ability for self-reflection and deep thinking. Turkle observed that people were becoming so used to functioning with fewer real conversations that many almost felt they could get through life without having any direct conversations with other people.15
Our ability to engage in the deep thinking required to understand printed material and engage in lengthy conversations is slipping away as the physical makeup of our brains adapts to short spurts of information. The more we are required to shift our attention from moment to moment, the less able we are to experience the more profound forms of emotions, including empathy and compassion. Underdeveloped emotions combined with a lack of engagement with others can stunt future social and romantic relationships, which require going beyond superficial considerations.
Over the past decade, this pattern has escalated into adulthood, where many grown men function socially and interpersonally like boys, having difficulty relating to women as equals, friends, partners, intimates, or even as cherished wives. Some have come to prefer the company of men over that of women. Through our survey, we discovered that many young men aren't interested in maintaining long-term romantic relationships, marriage, fatherhood, and being the head of their own family—which is, in part, due to the high percentage of young men who are growing up with physically or emotionally absent fathers. Others, who are either sheltered by their parents or are banking on becoming “the next big thing” or simply becoming financially stable, are reluctant to move out of their parents' houses.
Today many of the young men who do manage to find a partner feel entitled to do nothing to add substance to that relationship beyond just showing up. New emasculating terms such as “man-child” and “moodle” (man-poodle) have emerged to describe men who haven't matured emotionally or are otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves. Hollywood has caught on, too, to this awkward bunch of males, who appear to be comically hopeless. Recent films such as Knocked Up, Failure to Launch, the Jackass series, the Hangover series, and Hall Pass present men as expendable commodities, living only for mindless fun, “bromances,” and intricate but never-realized plans to get laid. Their female co-stars, meanwhile, are often attractive, focused, and mature, with success-oriented agendas guiding their lives. The sense of being entitled to have things without having to work hard for them—attributed to one's male nature—runs counter to the Protestant work ethic, as well as to the US football coach Vince Lombardi's victory creed: “Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing.” Feeling entitled to have things done for you or to you, without having to work for it, just because you are a male, is a dead-end in any relationship with women, except those who are desperate to have any guy, even a loser, rather than being alone.
Through illuminating the symptoms and causes of these gloomy trends, we hope to shed more light on how we arrived at this state of affairs as well as provide context for the solutions we will present to you in Part III.
PART I
Symptoms
ONE
Disenchantment with Education
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that the information age is liberating because it allows us to offload mundane mental chores to “cognitive servants.”1 At some point in the future Mr. Brooks may be right. But for now, as liberating as this ability to externalize is in many ways, it is making the world—as spoken-word artist Gary Turk succinctly put it—full of “smart phones and dumb people.”2 The problem with this notion, explains Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, is “the proponents of the outsourcing idea confuse working memory with long-term memory. When a person fails to consolidate a fact, an idea, or an experience in long-term memory, he's not ‘freeing up’ space in his brain for other functions.”3 Carr argues that storing long-term memories does not bog down our mental powers; rather it increases our level of intelligence because it makes it easier to learn new ideas and skills in the future. In other words, we think we're smarter than we actually are.
As a culture, we are losing our ability for sustained attention. The more we “outsource” the less we retain, and in turn, the less we know. While 76 percent of Americans said they watched, read, or heard the news on a daily basis, less than half said they went beyond the headlines.4 So there's this potential illusion of knowing. It is the danger of having a superficial level of knowledge, yet believing you know everything. A retired English professor mentioned to us that toward the end of his career he noticed that although his students thought they understood something, when they were asked to describe the topic they stumbled over their words. One student even dropped the
class after refusing to do revisions on his work. This example is a microcosm of the “giving up before you try” attitude that has permeated the minds of young men en masse.
Some people think it's been a case of boys not doing well in school and giving their teachers hell since the beginning of recorded history. A recent large-scale meta analysis of over 300 studies that reflected the grades of more than 500,000 boys and nearly 600,000 girls revealed that, for many decades, girls all over the world have been making higher grades than boys in all subjects.5 The authors suggested that this data undermines the “boy crisis,” but we have to disagree. Good grades have become crucial to earning a living wage—and it is all the more reason for society to show boys the importance of doing well in school. Boys also used to have far more motivation to compete and succeed in every other aspect of life—moving out of their parents' house, getting a girlfriend or wife, setting long-term goals, and embarking on a career—which they are sorely lacking now.
For the first time in US history, boys are having less education than their fathers.6 Moreover, academics are now more of a female pursuit. Girls are outperforming boys at every level, from primary school through university. In the US, by thirteen or fourteen years old, not even a quarter of boys are proficient in either writing or reading, versus 41 percent of girls who are proficient in writing and 34 percent who are proficient in reading.7 Boys also account for 70 percent of all the lowest grades given out at school.8 Similar achievement gaps between the genders have been documented worldwide. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that boys are more likely to repeat school years than girls, had poorer grades, and got lower pass rates on school leaving examinations. In some countries, such as Sweden, Italy, New Zealand, and Poland, the girls scored so much higher than the boys on reading in the PISA Assessment (a global measure of skills and knowledge) that they were essentially a year to a year and a half ahead in school.9 Internationally, in just over half of the countries that participated in the 2009 PISA Assessment, boys outperformed girls only in mathematics, but the mathematics gap was only one-third the size of the reading gap.10
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