The pleasure center of the brain was discovered in a famous 1950s lab experiment utilizing rats. Two researches attached wires directly to certain regions of the rodent’s brain. The rats would then receive a current whenever they pressed down on a paddle in front of them. At the peak, some rats were pressing the paddle as much as seven-hundred times per hour. They ignored their food and sexual partners, eventually dying of exhaustion. These were the first instances of arousal addiction.
We are undergoing an interesting experiment ourselves. Since the late ’90s, every young male with internet access has been able to venture into the boundless world of online pornography (often before they’ve even begun to develop sexually.) Without a comparative control group - i.e. boys who don’t have internet access, it’s hard to know what changes this magnified convenience has had on the collective sexual psyche. Masturbation has always been a healthy and necessary part of sexual development, but humans have never had access to a limitless resource like the internet before. Just like the lab Rat’s paddle, our unending pleasure is just a few mouse-clicks away.
We’ve learned from the rats, and general human behavior, that any activity which rewards the pleasure center does so by releasing the chemical Dopamine. This makes us want to repeat the behavior more frequently, and with greater potency. It’s why we eat ourselves into obesity, play video games for hours, measure our self worth in facebook likes and chain drink our coffee. When online pornography first rose to prominence, some worried it would lead to an increase in male aggression. They saw a danger in the unending novelty of internet porn, allowing more nudity to be seen than any of our ancestors could have fathomed. But in place of barbaric Hunters, docile Gatherers have thrived; voyeuristically enjoying a harem of fantasies collected through electronic windows.
Real courtship requires facing our anxieties, interacting in person, the rush of hormones, attraction, conversation, seduction, humor and confidence. If people begin to find that comparatively daunting to pressing a few buttons, we will probably continue to see rises in diagnosed depression, erectile dysfunction and social anxiety. A similarly modern social shift can be found in the online dating debate. Those in favor, advocate access to larger pools of partners, offering pairings that otherwise might never have occurred. The other side fears online dating has changed people’s perception of monogamy, turning meaningful courtships into a form of algorithmed virtual shopping.
So is there an inherent harm in enjoying online pornography? The brain has always been elastic, and we change the circuitry with almost any repeated action. We avoid the dangers of fast moving cars, reward our work ethic with a sense of accomplishment and cultivate hobbies that give us joy. We are constantly learning, so why is our curiosity with virtual sex so different? It seems even for those among us who enjoyed open and honest discussions about sex growing up, online pornography still carries a stigma of shame. It’s been two decades…surely everyone is doing it by now, right? Watching online porn is a normalized activity, and yet we still seem uncomfortable discussing it for some reason.
Let’s picture the average adolescent. Whatever they view online, generally tends to be divorced from the concepts of sex that teachers and parents explain to them. There is simply too much explicit vulgarity, uninhibited experimentation and shock value exhibitionism to be found online. What does a latex clad slave being whipped by an array of men in furry animal suits have to do with real intimacy or the creation of a family? As morbid curiosity sets in, more and more unseen novelties must be discovered. As a result, this isolated young mind creates a wall of shame between his online ventures and the reality of the world around. This has become a routine facet of modern sexual development.
Millennials were exposed to this circus of erotic imagery at a young age, long before we ever began having sex. How would real intercourse compare with the deviant imagery embedded in our young neural pathways? Life doesn’t have a fast forward button to skip to favorite parts. It doesn’t offer a diversity of partners, costumes and toys with every sexual encounter (outside of Las Vegas.) Would all those long stored, hard wired fantasies rooted in our adolescent minds be a hindrance or a help? The answer is, of course, that no porn will ever compare to real sex. It is a fast and cheap imitation, of something passionately tactile and engagingly layered.
In the end, the habit of watching online porn seems less about nudity, sex, power or even lust, and more about ease of access. You don’t do it because you’re sexual drive is surging or you’re particularly horny, you do it because you’re bored and it’s available. Porn isn’t a drug, it’s junk food! We consume it even though we aren’t really hungry, and it might ruin our appetite. Just like junk food, it is comprised of the vulgar fundamentals of real food: sugar, salt and fat. We’d be terribly mistaken to confuse its easy comfort with nutritional value. Pornography itself has been around since our earliest civilizations, in every form of art and expression. But it’s undergone the same evolution as food, arriving at its most base manifestation. It is yet another temptation in which we should seek moderation, despite our drooling brain’s compulsive desire, lest we go the way of the exhausted rats.
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