It can take an uncomfortable month or two to restore normal perception after habitual overstimulation. But as ravenous feelings ease, it’s easier to find satisfaction in every aspect of life.4
This escalation of the need for stimulation to achieve the same level of arousal is why trends in porn are for images that are more and more extreme. The relatively soft lighting and nonviolent pacing of the Emanuelle-branded adult films of the 1980s have given way to porn sites that render mainstream desires for quite violent sex, or sex with apparently very young girls, or incestuous situations, which used to be considered quite marginal or fetishistic. Some of this change in content may be because our culture is more sexually open overall, and less invested in moral judgments about individuals’ sex lives than it once was; but some of this escalation of extreme images is also, according to the science, the result of porn users’ overall desensitization. The OCD nature of chronic masturbation to porn means that the next time a porn user sees that image that last turned him on, it is not going to turn him on as much. This is why pornography trends tend to become more and more extreme over time—to migrate, say, from missionary position consensual sex to violent anal rape, or to images that arouse the SNS through breaking such taboos as incest taboos or taboos against sexualizing minors.
Even strip club ads have evolved rapidly in the direction of more extreme imagery. In Manhattan, the Private Eyes Gentlemen’s Club advertises with signs on top of taxicabs. A few years ago, the women’s faces in such ads simply looked fetching and seductive. About a year ago, the women began to gaze into the camera with an expression that was slightly frightened or angry, as if they were confronting some kind of violation. Recently, I noticed, faintly but unmistakably, on a sign for the Private Eyes strip club on a yellow taxicab on a city street—that is, not on a fetish website or buried in a grimy publication—that on the upper cheekbone of a lovely model advertising the club, there was now a single drop. Was it a tear?
It is common to condemn heterosexual men for their interest in looking at women who are not their partners. But, according to Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn, men have to contend with the “Coolidge effect,” a biological phenomenon in which men may respond sexually to a new partner with greater arousal. (Females have a similar spike in arousal with a new partner.) The Coolidge effect has been demonstrated in male rats; nothing perks a male rat up more readily than the introduction into his cage of an unfamiliar female. In humans, as Dr. Helen Fisher has demonstrated also in The Anatomy of Love, erotic excitement shoots up when a man or woman has sex with a new partner, but that excitement subsides over time.5 (Fewer people know that while, all things being equal, male rats choose novelty, if they are primed to associate scent with postorgasmic good feeling, they will choose their familiar scented partner—who is associated with that good feeling—over a more novel or younger “wife.”6)
The problem for contemporary men is that the novelty effect of new partners did not evolve in an environment in which hundreds or thousands of naked or copulating women emerged at a signal to make themselves visually available to men until men were done masturbating to orgasm at the sight of them. Rather, the male brain evolved in a context in which the sight of a naked or copulating woman was extremely rare, and typically arrived at arduously—thus making it very, very exciting. This arousal and dopamine response was keyed to having actual sex with an actual woman after a specific courtship hunt, raising dopamine levels.
YourBrainOnPorn.com, which tracks the science of porn use and addiction, presents findings that make the case that porn has a similar effect on the brain that junk food has on the body, as does the book Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow by Marnia Robinson, who manages the site with Gary Wilson.7 Gary Wilson also presented a summary of the research on porn and male sex problems in a TED talk: “The Great Porn Experiment.” The science shows that with dopamine activation and opioid release, men who use porn are bonding with the porn.
Robinson writes, “As psychiatrist Norman Doidge recounts in The Brain That Changes Itself, adults have no sense of the extent to which pornography reshapes their brains. His patients report increasing difficulty in being turned on by their actual sexual partners, girlfriends and spouses, though they still consider them objectively attractive. They try to persuade their lovers to act like porn stars, and they are increasingly interested in ‘fucking’ as opposed to ‘making love.’ Humanity is running a massive, uncontrolled experiment, and we don’t yet know the results. However, there’s increasing evidence that there’s no free lunch.”8
Porn sites, by offering abundant “free samples,” intentionally seek to engage this addictive response, to use it to boost profits. The tactic is successful: the porn industry is now larger than conventional film, records, books, and video combined (and Viagra sales constitute a multimillion-dollar-per-year industry in the United States alone). The mass-produced, fast-forward, pornographic vagina is to the real vagina what highly processed or GMO food is to slow-grown or to organic food, and it has parallel negative effects on the consumer.
We should deal with the dilemma of modern men—urged by massive industries into an addictive relationship to porn—with empathy rather than hostility. Almost no one has warned men adequately about the problems they may have with their virility—let alone their free will—once they introduce this free, compelling image stream into their neurological environment. The men who wrote to me about their porn addiction and potency problems were not monsters; they were suffering men who were loving husbands and boyfriends, who hated the pain they were causing their partners, and who were ashamed of what they now felt to be their sexual inadequacy.
After I wrote a new article on the subject of porn’s addictive effect on the male brain in 2011, I received a number of e-mails from concerned high school counselors and counselors at boarding schools, asking me for more information about dehabituation programs, as they were seeing younger and younger male teens who were suffering from porn addictions so severe that, by sixteen or seventeen, these addictions were interfering with other aspects of the teenagers’ lives, such as school, sports, and friendships.9 At one college in Virginia where I spoke in 2012, an undergraduate woman asserted that most of the young men she knew were, in her view, addicted to pornography by the time they had graduated from high school and that there was strong pressure on young women to accept this situation as “the new normal.”
On Reuniting.info, a website that offers concerned porn users science and information for dehabituation, Marnia Robinson and Gary Wilson report, confirming Robert Sapolsky’s analysis, that their community members describe “gradual” and “subtle” shifts in their perception after weaning themselves from pornography addiction. They note that similar shifts in perception can arise with recovering from erectile dysfunction, which they call “a very tangible symptom that more and more heavy porn users report since free Internet videos became widely available some five years ago.”10 The authors sought to compare users’ self-reporting after several months of scaling down or ending their porn use completely, with self-reports of men who were using pornography intensively, to see what if any differences arose.
After several months of following steps to dehabituate themselves to pornography use, many of the men found looking at the same porn videos, which had so aroused them in the past, curiously dissatisfying or even unpleasant.
One man turned off his browser and noted his own emotional reaction: “I now realize that much of the pornography I’ve been watching is either not really exciting or is basically exploitation. My attitude is changing. In the past, I have typically fast-forwarded past any vaginal sex or emotionally positive interactions to the anal bits. Also, in the past, I have often felt strong resentment toward my wife for her unwillingness to emulate porn. But today I feel remorse at how I have treated her, and gratitude that she still seems to unconditionally love me. Well, not unconditionally, but rather unselfishly.”
Another porn addict who is dehabituating f
rom masturbation to pornography reports on the site:
Until recently, I believed that I could never get enough sex, and that I was unlucky because I married a woman who prefers sex not more than once every other day and does not accommodate indiscriminate penetration of every orifice. But then I successfully got through 31 days without watching pornography, masturbating only minimally, genuinely trying to appreciate my wife for her sexuality on its own terms, and actively suppressing the fantasy/obsessive urges that have progressively insinuated themselves on my personality over the last decade.
Following this experimental reduction of my “sexual expression,” it has become evident that the emphasis our culture places on . . . sexual activity that I was “free” to develop as a member of our culture, has been detrimental to my emotional development, to my marriage, to my fundamental attitude toward women as a category, and has restricted my breadth of experience.
I have not yet calculated the amount of time I devoted to masturbating, pornography, fantasy, projecting sexual dissatisfaction as dissatisfaction with life, etc., but I have probably lost years. I’m not yet free from sexual compulsion, but I truly feel, for the first time in probably 16 years, that my life still has the potential to offer deep, meaningful experience without also including a hyperactive sexual component. This vision of freedom from compulsion is completely novel.
The fantasies and the basic dissatisfaction with my sex life have not returned with any of their usual force. My perception of my wife is changing, too. She looks increasingly attractive. That can only be a positive development!11
Add to all this yet another complication: the centers for aggression and sexual desire are close to each other in the brain. Many of the women who have written to me or confided in me about their boyfriends’ or husbands’ porn use were upset less by the nakedness of the women involved than by their degradation; they could not believe that their kind, caring male partners got off on watching men urinating on women, or degrading them in other ways. When men see, over time, images that connect sex to violence or degradation, they may become more and more aroused by the connection of sex to violence or degradation. This may be true for women as well. The vulnerability to this kind of limbic deregulation is not an existential moral flaw in men, as feminist writers Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin posited. It is not because most men like, as a rule, to be violent to or to degrade women in real life. Many men who are on “dehabituation community” websites, trying to deescalate their porn addiction with the support of other sympathetic men, do not even like that aspect of their masturbatory lives. The potential link between sexual desire and aggression is an aspect of the male brain that a new technology is cynically manipulating, for profit, at men’s expense.
Heterosexual women are adapting—at some sacrifice to their own sexual richness—to the onslaught of male-paced pornography in the environment. We saw how masturbation to porn can desensitize men to the vagina. But does it also desensitize women to their own vaginas? Recent studies indicate that it does. Female masturbation to porn can desensitize women themselves to their own vaginas. Women who contacted me also reported their own desensitization after masturbation to porn. As a result, they no longer respond sexually to the more simple versions of erotic imagery. They, too, need to “fast-forward” to get to hard-core fucking, or to more violence, to become as aroused as women used to become, in studies of a generation earlier, by scenes showing female nakedness, kissing, stroking, genital caressing, and so on. Female sexual response is adapting to male-porn’s pacing—with consequent problems for women in libido and arousal under less intense sexual triggers, and to the detriment of both genders’ sexuality and sense of connection.
Marnia Robinson sent me a comment that a female reader posted under her last Psychology Today post on erectile dysfunction:
I have this exact problem except I don’t have a penis.
When I read this it made me realize this is what I have been suffering. I did not know porn was my problem. I have been looking at porn, and addicted to it since I was very, very young. I am only 24 and my love life is a struggle at best. My husband understands somewhat but I have never really been able to tell him what it was from. I didn’t tell him about my addiction. Mine started normal, where my sensitivity to touch decreased exponentially, since I started looking at porn. Also as the paper said, the porn I viewed also increased in “harshness.” I used to get turned on over nakedness and now [am] at a stage where I am concerned about my mental sanity.
I have a hard time achieving any type of orgasm without clitoral stimulation and some hard thought processing on my part. I miss being able to have sex and have it feel good without much effort.
I have not looked at porn for a long time, and have just started again, and the time away did not increase my libido but might explain why I had no libido. I used to have a very extreme libido and could barely control it, now I don’t even like being touched.
I think in my case, giving up porn and visual aids would be difficult and a long journey. I have a feeling it might be years before my sensitivity would come back, if that. Here is for hoping! Thank you for writing this and bringing it not only to my attention but many others’!
I hope the authors understand that women, along with men, use porn to masturbate too. In secret I bet women are pretty close to the amount and severity that men use and maybe that’s why many women need some type of stimulation to achieve anything. Vibrators are the devil and I will be getting rid of mine, that’s for sure.”12
This may not be a rare situation: according to a study published in the Journal of Adolescent Research, while nine out of ten young men say they use pornography, so do a third of young women.13
I checked with Pfaus about the reports I was getting from women that porn use and vibrators seemed to correlate to desensitization in them as well; he noted that vibrators desensitize women over time because of a natural habituation phenomenon—the spinal circuit itself habituates to the same repeated stimuli. So truly, for women, porn and vibrator technologies offer no long-term neurobiological substitutes for an attentive, inventive lover or inventive, attentive, imaginative self-care. Technology is creating its own problems.
There are more negative ways in which porn intervenes in and distorts women’s sense of their own vaginas. Labiaplasty—the surgical reconstruction of a woman’s labia—is a major new industry in cosmetic surgery. Natural variation in the folds and arrangement, and even the symmetry, of the outer and inner lips of the vagina is quite extensive among women. It is very common for a woman’s labia to not look remotely like the standardized versions of labia that appear in porn magazines and on websites; consequently, many women who are completely normal think that there is something very unusual, or even deformed, about their “too” long, “too” complicated, or “too” asymmetrical labia.14
Dr. Basil Kocur, of Lenox Hill Hospital, a highly principled and accomplished specialist in pelvic floor problems who does “real” licensed, credentialed, medically justified vaginoplasties and pelvic floor repair to help women recover from pelvic floor collapse (the loosening of vaginal walls after childbirth and with middle age, which can involve the collapse of other organs), explained in an interview that pelvic floor surgery is the wave of the future in surgery: the population of women is aging, and more and more women want to reclaim the positive sexual feelings of their youth, and have better pelvic floor function, which can be returned to them with a corrective tightening of the vaginal walls and support of the pelvic floor. (He also warned that there were uncredentialed “butchers” out there, exploiting women’s desires for this kind of reconstruction.) But he also noted that in the last few years, sometimes a patient who is scheduled for a pelvic floor surgery or a vaginoplasty will hand him a page from Penthouse or Playboy and ask for a labiaplasty as well, so she can “look like that”—when there is absolutely nothing wrong with her labia. He believes that pornography has given many women an unrealistic idea of what their vulvas s
hould look like, because the neat, symmetrical labia of porn models have often been reconstructed surgically themselves.15
PORN AND VAGINAL ILLITERACY
In lectures I give that elucidate the distinction between addictive male-centered pornography as opposed to erotica and Eastern discourse that tease out “the Goddess Array,” young women and young men talk very frankly about how the wave of porn around them has short-circuited their sexual and emotional lives. It seems clear from what I now understand about the importance of the female ANS that porn can short-circuit female orgasmic response as well.
Young women are also direct, in these talks, about how the portrayal of female sexuality in porn—and the portrayal of the vagina itself in pornography—has had, in their opinion, a sharply negative effect on their young men’s understanding of vaginas, and on what young men should ideally be doing to women sexually. Porn is leading men to become poorer lovers to women, and, more specifically, training young men to mishandle or ignore the vagina.
A group of young women who spoke to me at what I will call, to protect identities, a community center on the West Coast, were even more concrete: “I get so angry,” said Lisa, a lovely, slight young woman in biker boots and skinny jeans. We were sitting with cups of coffee around a folding table, and as she spoke she whacked increasingly savagely at a coffee spill on the table.
“I had a lover,” she said, “whom I really liked in every other way. But he always wanted to make love with a video on, and he always fast-forwarded the video right to the climax of the intercourse. And I just wanted to take the remote from him and make him watch it all the way through—that is, including the foreplay—or even just slow it down.” I was surprised that she did not apparently mind that the video had to be on in the first place. The other young women at the table did not react with any surprise at all to what Lisa was saying. I, of course, being two generations older, was astonished that Lisa seemed to feel the video and its timing mediated what was going to or what could happen to her sexually, rather than her sexuality being inflamed or distracted by the video. But from comments I have heard from many young women (and young men) now, it is indeed the porn video—its timing, its options for activities, its positions—that is the dominant “script” for what is expected between contemporary young Western lovers. Now, for young people, a struggle over porn and even over the remote control often actually is a struggle over sexual behavior and pacing.