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Many of my male students, whether Jewish Israelis at the University of Tel Aviv or Catholic Americans at the University of Notre Dame, have confided in me that they struggle to abstain from pornography and that it has wrought significant damage on their lives. But over the years, I have noticed a pattern: Men of an older generation find it difficult to understand the extent of this distress and ruin. The vast chasm between the casual dismissal of older men and the profound misery of younger ones demands an explanation.
Among older educators, the view that pornography is merely a “not so nice” habit of young men is unfortunately still prevalent. According to this perspective, the sexual “vice” of pornography is problematic mostly because it objectifies women, or because it creates “unhealthy expectations” for marital life. These things are true, but these adults fail to see that their students’ pornography habit is not a sexual vice, but a disease.
A more substantial iteration of this position argues that porn reflects an egocentric philosophy that places one’s own pleasure ahead of other people’s interests. On this view, the problem with the porn user is that he views women as objects from which he can derive one-sided pleasure.
Along these lines, conservatives often view auto-eroticism as the core of the problem with porn. But this misses the heart of the matter: The real problem with pornography consumption is not that it is a sexual vice, but that it is an addiction. Porn consumers are not choosing their own interests over those of others. Rather, they are actively harming themselves—and therefore decidedly choosing against their own interests.
This misunderstanding stems from the fact that pornography itself has undergone a radical transformation in recent decades. The idea that pornography is just a “dirty little secret,” an unpleasant part of male sexuality that can be swept under the rug, was born of a time when the term “pornography” referred to something else entirely. In the 1950s and 1960s, pornography was a stack of Playboy magazines in a shoebox under your uncle’s bed. When teenage boys found this nasty little stash, they received a jolt of excitement, leafed through the pages, and that was that. Pornography was a small blemish on one’s life that rarely went beyond a brief rite of passage into manhood and a set of disapproving looks from one’s wife. It was a “dirty little secret.”
The children of the 21st century have been subjected to what the great anti-porn crusader Gary Wilson called “the great porn experiment.” With the advent of the internet, a new technology that stimulated the brain in a novel way entered the bedrooms of every child in the nation. To understand the ubiquity of the phenomenon, consider Wilson’s claims that he couldn’t organize control groups for his experiments because he could not find young men who hadn't already been extensively exposed to internet porn.
The American Psychological Association believes the average age of first exposure to pornography is thirteen, with some children being exposed as young as five. Lacy Bentley, on the other hand, found that the average age of first exposure to pornography is just under ten.
Thus, an entire generation was drenched with experimental stimulation for years, without consideration of possible side effects. Three decades later, the jury is in. Internet pornography is nothing like the naughty magazines of our grandfathers. The stimulant involved in the addiction—the internet—is inescapable. It follows boys everywhere they go, allowing them not a moment of respite. Images produced for the purpose of hooking a young boy are pumped into his brain via an unavoidable set of screens. Erectile dysfunction, hypofrontality, depression, anxiety, brain fog, and attention disorders can now be found anywhere one chooses to look. Online forums such as NoFap document the harm done to countless men.
The potency of modern pornography stems from what Wilson called the “Coolidge effect.” A brain function we share with other mammals, the Coolidge effect refers to the way our brains release greater quantities of dopamine in response to novel stimuli. For example, a ram’s rate of intercourse with a single ewe decreases over time. After being exposed to the stimulus of the ewe, the ram is naturally less inclined to pursue her. The very same ram keeps up the intercourse at a constant rate when exposed to multiple ewes. That is, he does not tire because of the novelty of additional ewes.
Similarly, human sexual desire naturally decreases after sex to allow for other pursuits and pleasures. But internet tube sites bypass this natural tendency of healthy sexuality. An infinite supply of new women are presented in an endless sea of new and shocking genres. Internet pornography, then, is nothing like Playboy magazines because it can drown the brain in a riptide of variety and perpetual stimulation.
The porn trap is also a “supernormal stimulus.” As psychologist Niko Tinbergen theorized, some kinds of artificial stimuli can affect the brain more powerfully than the stimuli our brains are accustomed to handling—often resulting in pathological behavior. Pornography addicts subject themselves to graphic, bizarre images that produce more of a stimulus than a real-life woman could. The sex-seeking circuits of the brain are then fried, as the addict’s brain is subjected to a drug-like effect.
The point of all this neurobiology is this: Pornography is a kind of drug. And like all addictions, stress and boredom continue to trigger porn cravings long after a man’s sex drive has been decimated by the porn trap. As the porn addict sinks deeper into the porn trap, his sensations of self-loathing, repulsion, horror, and fear increase. He asks himself, “Am I an evil person?” “Am I broken in some way?” “Is there something wrong with me?” These intense negative emotions only serve as further novel stimuli that reinforce the addiction.
When well-intentioned adults tell young men to abstain from porn because it is “not nice” to women, or because it is “self-centered,” they miss the point. These moral teachings are true, but they often fail to help younger males because they fail to understand a fundamental truth about the porn con: Porn is not a pleasant vice, but a physio-psychological disease akin to bulimia. Like the bulimic who feels only pain and revulsion every time she purges but returns to the addiction time and again because her brain is disordered, the porn addict returns to porn even though the images cause him emotional distress and make him impotent.
We should be telling children: “Young man, you shouldn't watch porn because it is terrible for you—and it isn’t even pleasurable. It is a form of self-torture. Porn will turn your brain to mush and destroy your body—and cause you pain as it does so.”
It is heartbreaking to think of the millions of young men reaching out to the world through pornography. Rather than finding companionship and validation, they feel only loneliness and shame. In their search for the respite of union, they find only the restlessness of addiction. In their search for self-respect in the recognition of another, they find only self-contempt for their own weakness.
There is at least one type of sex that involves what the Israelites called gilui erva, or the uncovering of vulnerability. As man and woman disrobe, they display their deepest fears and most intimate weaknesses. Every blemish is up for criticism. Every desire subject to judgment. In this form of sex, a man willingly exposes his entire self, his very being, to a woman’s evaluation. On this view, sex is one of the holiest, highest expressions of a man’s being.
This holy of holies of the human soul is not to be tortured, twisted, and tarnished in a cycle of addiction and hyper-stimulation. This precious gift is not to be squandered and commodified so that faceless corporations can profit from the suffering of children.
H. A. Hazony is a PhD student in political theory at the University of Notre Dame.
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