by Sara Pascoe
Prolactin is not the addictive element of sex and orgasms, although it affects the pleasant satiation feeling we get afterwards. Addiction is always related to dopamine – the neurotransmitter we discussed earlier. We already know how it helps us achieve goals that aid survival, so of course it’s integral to sex. The moment a person looks at an erotic image, the reward system in their brain switches on. This circuit includes the ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex, both of which help elicit the good feelings you get when you do something rewarding. People’s brains learn, over time, that porn is a reliable way to seek good feelings. But while someone will get a satisfying hit of dopamine when watching porn for the first time, they will need something novel, newer, harder, stranger to get the same effect again. Like a drug addict seeking a bigger and bigger hit. The porn watcher might not realise that they’re bored with the kind of porn they’ve seen before because it’s no longer stimulating the reward circuitry in their brain.
People don’t tend to watch the same porn over and over again for this reason. It wouldn’t get you off in the same way. With some people this pushes them to watch all kinds of things they wouldn’t normally – things they wouldn’t identify as their sexual preference. It could be amputees or very young or old people, or, you know, horrific violence and aggression. I worry, along with the penis size thing, about what this is doing to the inner life of men. Do they feel shame if they cannot share what they watch with their loved ones? They can’t announce to the family WhatsApp group that they’ve started wanking to bestiality.
*Mum has left the conversation*
And the really interesting thing, or if not interesting, very relevant, is that the worse someone feels about porn, the more they do it. The trouble with behaviours that stimulate dopamine response is that when someone tries to cut down, tells themselves they shouldn’t, they become more obsessed, fixate upon it, end up doing it more. This is why Jesus’s advice about not thinking lusty thoughts was so unhelpful.
This is also the problem we have with educating young people about the effects of porn – if we simply pump them full of shame, they won’t be able to have a healthy relationship with masturbation and they might be even more isolated within their habits.
I’ve been interviewing people about their relationship with pornography to help me understand it, and my friend Matt told me the best story. When he was thirteen he knew his dad kept porn magazines in the boot of his car. One day when Matt had a friend over, they snuck into the garage and stole some. Matt loved the women and their bodies, and he decorated his bedroom with posters and centrefolds. Fully naked women, arching and curving and holding their vulvas open to be viewed. Matt felt adamant that when his parents came home, he’d defend his new wallpaper. This was how he wanted his room to look; he would insist on his right to enjoy these beautiful sexy women. He knew his mum would flip out, but when she got back she didn’t react. She looked at his room quietly for a bit, then told him, ‘I’m so glad you’ve done this.’ She said, ‘Before you and your brother were born I used to have pictures of penises up everywhere, I really loved to look at them – but I was worried that it would make you guys uncomfortable. But now that you’ve put your pictures up, I can put my penis pictures up again.’ His mum went downstairs, and Matt hurriedly took the posters down because he didn’t want his friends coming over and seeing penises everywhere and thinking that his mum loved dicks.
This story made me so happy, I thought that was such incredible parenting. Matt’s mum didn’t make him feel bad that he enjoyed looking at women’s bodies, she used an empathy exercise to make him realise why the reverse would make him uncomfortable. She didn’t give him a guilt complex, she made him consider other people’s feelings.
I asked Matt if he and his mum had discussed this as adults. When he reminded her of it, she told him she had walked downstairs worrying, ‘Where the heck am I going to find loads of penis pictures?’
It makes me think a lot about how I handled the situation with Nicholas. When he told me that he got more excitement or more satisfaction from pornography, I didn’t know about dopamine in the brain, I didn’t know about reward centres and novelty. And actually I don’t know that it would’ve helped if I had, but he did promise to stop watching porn and then he failed and felt worse, and I did too. If porn is creating a problem in a person’s life or in their relationship and making them feel bad, what should we do?
Gary Wilson is one of the most famous anti-porn educators and his TED talks have had millions of views. He has a website, yourbrainonporn.com, if you would like to investigate his work. Wilson explores issues like male anxiety about penis size and body shape, but also how porn may desensitise sexual responses and lead to men becoming less aroused by their real-life partners.
Much has been made of the relationship between porn use and erectile dysfunction, and we must be sceptical of some of the science. I read on an anti-fap website that internet porn has caused a 3,000 per cent rise in impotence, which is hugely shocking, the kind of stat that makes the villagers want to storm the castle with burning crucifixes. But I read elsewhere that the huge rise can largely be attributed to a change in how they asked the question, the difference between ‘Do you have difficulty achieving an erection?’ and ‘Have you ever experienced difficulty getting an erection?’
Several studies have only found weak links between porn use and erectile dysfunction, but that doesn’t mean that watching a lot of porn has no effect on a man’s sexual responses. I am not denying that quitting porn like the NoFappers might have a wonderful array of side effects. For example, the dopamine circuitry ceases to be hijacked and perhaps men can live more in the moment. I interviewed two men who considered themselves to have been ‘sex addicts’, who said excessive porn use had been part of their ‘problem’. They were both evangelical about getting porn out of their lives and credited this with feeling more ‘present’ and having healthy (very sexy) relationships. Just as in other forms of addiction, some bodies, some personality types fall prey to certain stimuli more than others. How much porn is too much differs from man to man. One thing that really struck me about both of my interviewees was that watching hours of porn every day was isolating them from absolutely everybody in their life. They were alone.
While I worry about the damage to men’s relationships and their self-esteem, let us jump to Concern Five: Porn makes men sad about their penis size.
Penis Power
There’s a very wide representation of female bodies in mainstream porn, but all male porn stars have massive dicks. This is an important detail. It is non-negotiable, it is what the men are there for.
What do we read into this? Firstly, as we have already ascertained that across all cultures it is mainly men watching the porn – these big dicks are there for them. While most straight men might not consciously acknowledge it, might not admit aloud on a stag do, ‘I much prefer watching a large-phallused dude going at it,’ the videos they buy and click on confirm that preference.
The most famous male porn stars have always been the most generously endowed, like the previously celebrated mentioned Ron Jeremy (nine and three-quarter inches) and John Holmes (he never confirmed a measurement but was estimated at twelve or thirteen inches). The average penis in porn is between eleven and twelve inches long, which is considerably bigger than average – in fact it’s double. If everyone we saw on TV was ten feet tall, perhaps we would be discussing why we all have insecurity about our height … but the reason we don’t is because—
Humans aren’t ten feet tall.
Okay, seven feet tall then. Basketball players are much taller than the average person, because being tall is of benefit to them – it makes it easier to score baskets. It doesn’t make all men wish they were seven foot. With porn, being well hung is believed to make men better at sex. But while this might add to male insecurity, it is the result of our species’ obsession with penis size rather than the cause of it.
There are many olden references t
o the importance of a big peen, pre-dating internet porn by hundreds of years. Leonardo da Vinci claimed that ‘the woman likes the penis as large as possible, while the man desires the opposite of the woman’s womb. Neither gets their wish,’ and this brings us to another Conundrum of Heterosexuality™. Unlike Tiresias we cannot experience intercourse in a different body, so we guess. Men say that they enjoy a better sexual sensation from a tighter orifice, which makes sense physiologically: tightness can provide more stimulation.
There are also the important connotations of a small vagina: virginity, youth, sexual inexperience. As we have already explored, choosing sexual inexperience or virginity in a mate is a way to ensure paternity certainty. Doesn’t this explain the prevalence of ‘tight’-orientated dirty talk in porn? Alongside the ‘you’re so deep’ tropes relating back to sperm competition, it’s very common for women to offer ‘my pussy is so tight’ or a penetrating man to groan in appreciation about how ‘small and tight’ a woman feels. This has to do with sperm competition too.
The opposite, a large, non-tight vagina, is mostly a myth. The vagina is an elastic organ, it stretches then resumes its original shape. A woman may give birth to a baby and then, a few months later, find it as tricky as ever to insert her tampon. But despite this, an insult for women is to be called ‘baggy’ or ‘loose’, with the mistaken idea that this physical state is synonymous with experience.
Let’s think about Donald Trump’s penis again. In 2018 Stormy Daniels described the president’s dick as a little mushroom. She said it looked like the toadstool character from Mario Kart (not pictured, can’t afford it). People who dislike Trump rejoiced. The immature rejoiced. The most powerful man in the world emasculated by a porn star. Because I am a boring old fart, I did not enjoy this. This humiliation of a human based not on his (misogynist, racist) politics but on his private parts. PRIVATE. Not tell-the-news-about-them. What do things like this teach young men? It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you achieve, just don’t have a risotto ingredient for a penis. I don’t worry about President Trump’s feelings per se, but I do worry about men’s anxiety about their own genitals.
And what about the backlash? It was insinuated by political sources and explicitly by Trump supporters that the problem was not the presidential phallus but the gaping, flapping-in-the-wind vagina of Ms Daniels.
There is a stigma around women who have enjoyed many partners, as we’ve explored when thinking about cuckolding. The men who sleep with them have no paternity certainty, and while this should not concern us in the modern ‘contraceptives are available’ world, if there are evolutionary reasons for some men to be attracted to newly pubescent partners (hebephilia), then those same men may be subconsciously turned off by sexual experience.
Maybe these things are related. Maybe a tight orifice offers enjoyable sensations and reinforces the idea of being the first or only sexual partner. But a mistake that men make about their female counterparts is that we seek to be ‘filled’. That there are parts of our internal organs only a big cock can reach. That we are unsatisfied by small willies. I’m not saying this to be nice, it’s not true. I have a vagina, I have been having sex for over twenty years with many* different-shaped and -sized penises, and my enjoyment of the sex was never, ever about their girth or length. With a bigger penis I have to be very aroused to accommodate it or I cannot be penetrated without pain. Pain turns me off – it’s horrible. Some positions are impossible with a bigger penis for the same reasons.
But I don’t think men want to hear this. I do not think they believe it. Which results in bad sex and an unnecessary preoccupation with their own erection. Penis size anxiety is less about satisfying sexual partners and is much more about impressing other men.†
An internet survey of over fifty thousand people found that while 85 per cent of women were satisfied by their partner’s penis size, only 55 per cent of men were satisfied with their own and 45 per cent wished to be larger. There’s a gap, isn’t there, between the happy partners and the men who don’t care if she’s satisfied, they wish it was larger anyway.
Men who go for penis enlargement surgery or complain of low confidence on message boards often cite wanting to satisfy sexual partners as the reason for wanting to be larger. With the huge irony, LISTEN TO ME PLEASE I KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT, that turning a woman on more is what will make sex more enjoyable for her. More engorgement of vulva and vagina, more lubrication of the genitals results in increased sensation. Being very aroused makes the act of penetration far more exciting. Being only slightly aroused means that having a penis in you, no matter what size, is quite blah. You can pump and pump away and it all goes a bit numb.
This is all part of the Conundrum of Heterosexuality™. Why all these spam emails about penis enlargement to make your lover scream? Those emails should all be about fingering and licking – free stuff you can do more of, for longer, and which will drastically improve any female partner’s pleasure. Teasing: why don’t men understand the great sexual delight of making someone desire something they can’t have rather than shoving their dick in as soon as it will be accommodated?
My theory is that that stuff is not physically enjoyable for the man, so it’s of less interest. It’s easier to blame your dick than spend an extra ten minutes going down. We have seen the gender discrepancy in porn consumption, and a contributory factor must be that the majority of the sex depicted is not necessarily the sort of sex a female body would best respond to. Nothing wrong with a good hard shag, of course, but as you’ll remember, all the same nerve endings that a penis has are condensed in our little clitoris. Imagine if all porn ignored the penis? That is what non-clitoral heterosexual sex looks like to us. It’s male fantasy, it’s impractical and please improve. Thank you.
Men are conscious of penis size, and they blame it on wanting to impress women because it’s embarrassing to admit they care about other men. In our society men are nude at the gym, they wee in front of each other and are quite aware of how they rank among their friends. The study mentioned above found that men who believed they were bigger than average (22 per cent of respondents) also rated their looks more favourably, which suggests that feeling confident about their penis creates confidence about other aspects of their appearance.
Perhaps this applies to self-worth in general? In the book Manhood: The Bare Reality Laura Dodsworth interviews men about their genitals. One of them admits, ‘Whenever I’m somewhere where men are naked I’m always looking at other dicks,’ which is exactly the same as how I feel in changing rooms, surreptitiously looking at other women’s bodies and feeling inadequate. The anonymous man continues, ‘I put myself in a pecking order of men and their dicks and I believe that there is an importance to the size of my dick and that if it’s not big enough then … I don’t know, I think it probably comes straight back to, will I be loved?’
That makes sense, doesn’t it? We understand the illogical way that self-confidence works. How we feel about ourselves dictates how we think we look to others. It’s worth noting too that it is not the actual penis size that matters, but the perception. Surveys of clinics show the men who go for consultations about enlargement are well within the average. Like with women who have dysmorphia about their weight or attractiveness, the same irrationality is undermining men. Here is the pity of having a culture that equates a large penis with masculinity – it affects male self-esteem. Their sense of self and worth is connected to what’s in their pants. This is what incidents like the one with Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump reinforce: bad men have small dicks, small-dicked men are insufficient, a small-dicked man has less worth.
Where does this penis concern originate from, if it’s not women complaining, ‘I can’t feel it, is it in?’ There is a theory that because boys growing up see their father’s penis and are aware of its larger, post-pubescent size, they associate this with strength, authority and adulthood, which is Freudian, but logical for once.
I wondered earlier why the human m
ale’s large penis evolved, as we know it does not physically aid the chances of conception. But it would be relevant if a large penis enabled its owner to better dominate other men and/or impress possible mates. Is a large penis a reliable signifier of high testosterone? Short answer is no. The hormone rises and triggers penis development during adolescence but does not reflect a higher T level in adulthood; the size is determined by genes rather than hormones. Taking steroids, which are androgens, will in fact shrivel your D and Bs.
Okay, what about this: could the larger penis have been selected for by female partners’ preferences? There is a study which seems to confirm this. Researchers at the University of California and University of New Mexico offered seventy-five women a range of synthetic phalluses and asked them to choose one for their ‘ideal’ partner. Interestingly, they found that women chose a slightly bigger example than average, 6.4 inches, for a one-off partner, and 6.3 inches for a relationship. I mean, this falls inside our range of average, although maybe slightly higher than the six inches we bandy around as bang in the middle. But, can you hear me, this is an idealworld preference. Picked only for length and girth, and puny compared to what you’ve been watching in porn.
An interesting fact of evolution is that penises may have been prevented from growing proportionally even larger by the vaginas of our female ancestors. Males with too-large penises would have had them bitten off been selected against, as sex would have been more painful, more likely to cause injury. When the hyperbole of porn is taken away, there are many men who will tell you that being too big has created problems in their love life. The world’s reportedly largest penis (over thirteen inches when erect) belongs to Jonah Falcon, and he describes light-headedness when he manages an erection due to the amount of blood needed to fill it. He is not able to fully insert it in anyone because of the pain it causes them and has not had a lasting, long-term romantic relationship. While this hypersexual signalling gains much interest from people, it does not lead to a more satisfying sex life, more a kind of freakhood.