While adult obesity rates have doubled over the past thirty years, adolescent obesity rates have tripled.7 It is also evident from much research that obesity is a killer—shortening lifespans by triggering a range of autoimmune diseases, like “adult” type II diabetes. Young children have a one-in-three chance of developing type II diabetes—with a 50 percent chance if they are Hispanic—as well as a greater likelihood of developing heart disease, hypertension, and certain kinds of cancer.8 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) noted that the trend was especially pronounced in boys, where the heaviest are getting progressively heavier.9
In America, this is creating a national emergency. The Army Times reported that military-age youth are “increasingly unfit to serve—mostly because they're in such lousy shape.”10 Recent statistics from the Pentagon showed that over a third of Americans aged seventeen to twenty-four would not qualify for military service just because of medical or physical problems. Curt Gilroy, the Pentagon's director of accessions, said that obesity was the main culprit: “There's no question about it . . . Kids are just not able to do push-ups . . . they can't do pull-ups. And they can't run.”11
Obesity is just one side of it, however. When men gain weight—the bad kind, as opposed to bulking up muscles—a metabolic change happens that drops the hormone levels in the body, making them surprisingly less effective socially and sexually. The more dominant a man becomes, the more testosterone he produces, which in turn increases his libido.12 Researchers from the University of Buffalo recently determined that obese men have lower levels of testosterone, and when that male hormone drops, one of the biggest victims, aside from male fertility, is his bedroom performance. The study shows that 40 percent of obese men have abnormally low levels of testosterone.13 Obesity can also trigger type II diabetes, one effect of which is restricted blood flow to veins, especially the small blood vessels in the penis and testicles. That surge of blood is essential for male erections. A curious corollary of this combination of obesity and testosterone decline in males is the unhealthy rise in their bodies of the female hormone estrogen, which is naturally present in small amounts, but excessive levels of which can in turn lead to erectile dysfunction and infertility.14 Talk about a double punch below the belt!
Over the last few decades, physical activity among youth has decreased while screen time has increased. Sedentary behavior fills time that children could be spending on physical activities or even sleeping, contributing to excessive snacking and eating meals in front of the television or computer screen. Young men and boys who spend their evenings gaming instead of getting a good night's rest are putting themselves at a much greater risk of becoming overweight.15
Childhood habits tend to stick with people for the rest of their lives, and an obese child often becomes an obese adult, the likelihood becoming stronger the older the child.16 Thus kids who watch television and play video games instead of being active are setting themselves up for a sedentary future.17 Not surprisingly, several studies have found a positive association between screen time and prevalence of excess weight in children.18 In sum, a sedentary lifestyle is not only unhealthy for males; but it can also lead to other wide-ranging problems and shorten their life-spans.
SIX
Excessive Porn Use
Orgasms on Demand
I have the same problem third-world refugees who relocate to suburban America report after visiting their first supermarket. They are paralyzed by the overwhelming options, unable to choose from so many nearly identical but clearly different brands of pasta sauce. They are stuck in a permanent, unpleasant state of browsing, fearful of making the wrong choice. Now imagine how much more difficult that decision would be if pasta sauce gave you an erection.
—Joel Stein, contributor for Playboy1
Back in 1996, a young man named Peter Morley-Souter drew a comic scene that depicted his initial shock at seeing a couple of his favorite cartoon characters, Calvin and Hobbes, having sex with Calvin's mother. He figured if there was porn of Calvin and Hobbes, everything could be made into porn, which resulted in the caption “Internet Rule #34: there is porn of it.”2 It is safe to say online porn is the marketplace of virtual pleasures. Although the top 5 percent of descriptive tags are associated with 90 percent of the videos, the popular site XNXX has compiled over 70,000 different tags to help users find the specific and less common content they're looking for.3 The notion that somewhere on the web anything you can imagine exists as porn has become difficult to disprove as the Internet becomes more saturated with X-rated images and videos. In fact, we are sure that there are porn categories that are beyond what most people could ever have imagined existed.
In 1997, just six years after the World Wide Web went live, there were approximately 900 online porn sites.4 Later, in 2005, approximately 13,500 full-length commercially available pornographic films were released, compared with the 600 or so films released in Hollywood.5 Today millions of companies and outlets are generating porn clips directly online in quantities impossible to calculate accurately. In 2013 alone, PornHub had nearly 15 billion views, or 1.68 million visits every hour for the entire year.6 Just type “porn” into Google and you'll get hundreds of millions of results, with the entire first page of hits offering free instant streaming videos.
By offering unlimited visual stimuli in a wide variety of categories and compilations, which can be paused or fast-forwarded at any time, tube sites like PornHub, Youporn, and Redtube are catering to the male sexual brain. Using a tool called PornIQ, PornHub will even generate a playlist for the user based on their specific desires.7
One in three boys are now considered a “heavy” porn user, watching more times than they can count.8 In the UK, PornHub was the thirty-fifth most visited website for children aged six to fourteen in 2013.9 A survey found that the average boy over there watches nearly two hours of porn every week. One in three of the young men categorized as “light” users spent less than an hour a week viewing porn, while four out of five who were categorized as heavy users (only a small percentage of those surveyed) watched more than ten hours a week.10 Surveys have shown similar findings in the US.11 Keep in mind that the majority of PornHub users are millenials, and their average session lasts 9 minutes, so even one hour a week could translate into one session per day.12 Though the popular time to use porn is between 11 p.m. and midnight,13 a third of the light users said they had missed an important deadline or appointment because they could not break away from their pornographic adventures.14
A new term has emerged—procrasturbation—which means procrastinating through porn. Add to the mix older guys, married men, and businessmen watching adult videos online, at work, at home, and in hotels across the country and around the world. Through their adult television or “late night” channels, hotels typically offer porn specials of unlimited viewing around the clock—before and after meals and appointments.
Can these guys make up for the lost time? That depends on how susceptible an individual is to media effects and how much porn they watch. A recent Belgian study of adolescent boys found that frequent use of online porn lowered academic performance. The researchers found that boys who went through puberty earlier and boys who scored high in sensation-seeking watched more porn than other boys their age. It was not just the time devoted to porn that displaced engagement with other activities; there was a cognitive absorption effect where the complete involvement in a highly pleasurable activity—porn—excited cognitive, sensory, and imaginative curiosity to the point where a boy lost track of time and other attentional demands became inferior. Using the excitation transfer model and sexual behavior sequence of psychologists Dolf Zillmann and Donn Byrne, respectively, the researchers also suggested that the high states of arousal achieved in porn stimulated impulsive and “restless” behavior that may impair actions that require long periods of constant focus. More research is needed to explore this intriguing theory.15
Another consequence of teenage boys watching many hours
of online porn is they are beginning to treat their girlfriends like sex objects. The common sentiment among young women is: “Boys just want us to do all the stuff that they see porn stars do.”16 As a result, says Cindy Gallop, a dynamic TED speaker and author of Make Love Not Porn, young men don't know the difference between making love and reenacting porn.17 In an online survey conducted by the University of East London, one out of five young men between sixteen and twenty years old said they “relied on porn as a stimulant for real life sex.”18 Porn users report altered sexual tastes,19 less satisfaction in their relationships,20 and real-life intimacy and attachment problems.21
This spillage of porn culture into romantic encounters has been dubbed the “dating apocalypse.”22 Dates are becoming extinct as young people in their late teens and early twenties now use hookup apps like Tinder like they use porn. Users look at other local app users' photos, swiping left (not interested) until someone looks attractive enough, and then they swipe right (interested). If the person they're interested in swipes right on their profile too they will exchange a few texts, meet up, and have sex. Of course, unless someone better comes along as they continue to swipe, and, as one guy said, “there's always something better.” Another compared it to ordering online food, “but you're ordering a person.”23 To them, women have turned into options, rather than priorities.24
Of the 500 teens polled in a recent survey by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), two out of three boys and three out of four girls say they believe that porn causes unrealistic attitudes about sex. Two-thirds of boys and girls believe porn can become addictive, and 62 percent of boys and 78 percent of girls believe that porn may have a negative impact on young people's views of sex and relationships. Perhaps most revealingly, 77 percent of boys and 83 percent of girls believe “it's too easy for young people to accidentally see pornography online” and for teens who thought accessing porn was seen as typical for their peer group, approximately two-thirds said viewing porn became common by age fifteen.25
We think the negative effects of excessive, socially isolated porn use are worse for young people who have never had real-life sexual encounters. Why? They see sex as only physical performance, mechanical arrangements of body parts, without romance, emotion, intimacy, communication, negotiating, sharing, or even touching and kissing. Sex becomes an impersonal “thing,” and for men, a desirable sex partner becomes an object that they have no connection to after they “finish” on her or inside her. The average age young people have sex for the first time is seventeen years old.26 If the average guy has watched two hours of porn every week since he was fifteen, he's already had nearly 1,400 porn sessions before he's ever had real-life sex. What is he going to think is normal? Whereas adults may understand that the idea of porn is to turn real life into fantasy, some young people view what they see in porn as the opposite, or even something to strive for. As one teen told us, “the idea of porn is to make fantasies into real life.”
Then there are the other dimensions of unreality and inevitable negative social comparisons: the actors are generally good-looking, in great shape, with endless stamina to continue all-out sexual acts for long periods before orgasm. The effects of viewing film after film with male stars showing off huge penises that are instantly erect and stay that way even after the big O are not positive for young men, as we will discuss later.
Finally, it becomes the norm to have unprotected sex, from oral to anal, and to promote every possible arrangement of penises, vaginas, breasts, and mouths. Porn is a world of fantasy, not education. But without a decent real-world sex education, the high risks of certain sexual behaviors that are performed so casually in porn go unchecked. A recent study on sexuality by the Burnet Institute's Centre for Population Health in Australia found that weekly use of porn was significantly associated with early sexual behavior, inconsistent condom use, sexting, and anal sex.27 In the US, just 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they'd tried anal sex in 1992. Today, at least one in five women aged eighteen to nineteen, and two in five women aged twenty to twenty-four have tried it.28 Many times young people don't think they need to use protection during anal sex because pregnancy is far less likely to occur.29 What they are unaware of is how much easier it is to acquire a sexually transmitted infection through anal sex. Not incidentally, half of young people in the fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old age group will get a sexually transmitted infection by twenty-five years old.30
SEVEN
High on Life or High on Anything
Over-Reliance on Medications and Illegal Drugs
MIT professor John Gabrieli and his research team found that medication for ADHD improves the focus and academic performance of normal kids by the same degree that it improves the focus and performance of kids with ADHD.1 So when someone responds well to the medication—better behavior, focus, and grades—it doesn't necessarily mean they have ADHD, yet many parents and doctors are using these improvements to confirm the disorder exists.
What's the harm if the medications help the kid do better in class? While kids generally do perform better and become more manageable, being on these medications for even just a year can lead to changes in personality. Friendly, outgoing, adventurous boys become lazy and irritable. Children also learn that taking a pill can make their problems go away.
Professor William Carlezon and colleagues at Harvard University Medical School recently reported that giving stimulant medications—such as those used to treat boys with ADHD—to juvenile laboratory animals resulted in those animals displaying loss of drive when they grew up. These animals looked normal but were lazy. They didn't want to work hard, not even to escape a bad situation. The researchers suggested that similar effects could be seen in children. Children might look fine during and after taking these medications, but when they become adults they won't have as much motivation or drive as they would have had if they had not been reliant on those medications. So the apathy we noted in Chapter 2 may continue to worsen as these heavily medicated new generations get older.
The psychologist and family physician Leonard Sax wrote in Boys Adrift that stimulant medications appear to harm the brain by damaging an area called the nucleus accumbens, where inner motivation is turned into behavioral action. If a boy's nucleus accumbens is damaged, he may still be hungry or sexually aroused, but will lack the drive to do anything about it. Independent groups of researchers at universities in the US and Europe have found that even when young laboratory animals were exposed to low dosages of these medications for short periods of time, permanent damage to the nucleus accumbens can happen. Sax writes:
One particularly disturbing study—conducted jointly by researchers at Tufts, UCLA, and Brown University—documented a nearly linear correlation between the nucleus accumbens and individual motivation. The smaller the nucleus accumbens, the more likely that person was to be apathetic, lacking in drive. These investigators emphasized that apathy was quite independent of depression. A young man can be completely unmotivated—and still be perfectly happy and content.2
He just won't do much or want to do much, but be a smiling couch potato. This is especially relevant to young men in the US, since nearly 85 percent of all stimulant medications are prescribed to them.3
One of the side effects of taking stimulants is nervousness and anxiety. What's a great way to reduce these side effects? Smoking a joint and getting high. Marijuana has grown in popularity across the US over the last decade,4 and many young men, both those taking and not taking medication, smoke marijuana. But marijuana is not the same drug it used to be. The average potency of weed has risen steadily for the last three decades. The average THC content (the psychoactive constituent of marijuana) in 1983 was less than 4 percent, but in 2008 the THC content was more than 10 percent, and it is expected to rise to 15 percent or 16 percent within the next ten years.5 In Colorado, where recreational marijuana use is legal, the average THC content is 18.7 percent, but some are as high as 30 percent.6
&
nbsp; In 2011 the Dutch government announced that high-potency weed (with a THC content of 15 percent or more) would now be classified in the hard drugs category along with cocaine and ecstasy.7 One reason for the reclassification may be that high-potency weed significantly impairs executive function and motor control,8 processes that are involved in planning, memory, attention, problem-solving, verbal reasoning, and resisting temptation. From one generation to the next, marijuana has become an entirely different drug that can potentially do more harm than good.
Perhaps a more serious concern should be young people's use of synthetic marijuana—chemicals that are sprayed onto shredded plant material to mimic the effects of THC when smoked. These drugs, known as K2 or “Spice,” can be extremely potent and unpredictable, yet are inexpensive, easy to acquire at convenience stores or online and cannot be as easily detected on standard drug tests. More and more high schoolers are recognizing the dangerous side effects (which can be as severe as acute psychosis and heart attacks), yet one out of sixteen has still tried it. They are marketed as a “natural” and “safe” alternative to other drugs, but they are not.9
Let's revisit exposure to temptation. Life is filled with temptations that are dangerous pleasures. “Lead us not into temptation,” is a common prayer for Christians. What makes people less able to resist temptation drives them to be more present-hedonistic than future-oriented. My (Phil's) research on the psychology of time perspective reveals that being present-hedonistic is being vulnerable to all addictive substances and behaviors.10 This is because being dominated by present-hedonism means you are constantly seeking out novelty and intense sensations.†
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