Nowadays

By Daniel Gaffney 

Both in the medical community and the media, very little attention has been given to porn addiction. Porn addiction is a pandemic that has only reared its head as the first fast-internet generation moves into adulthood. In a recent survey, 33% of men in the UK felt they had been addicted to porn, while a further 19% said that they were unsure. With over 50% of men feeling at least insecure about their relationship with pornography, porn addiction is a national problem akin to drug or alcohol abuse.

What do alcoholics, drug addicts and porn addicts all have in common? They are all addicted to short term pleasure. In a rapidly developing world, it is easy to forget that we are warm-blooded mammals. Our brains function in the same primitive patterns as they did two millennia ago, while internet access and thus access to adult content has increased exponentially over mere decades. 

I refer to the primitive state of the human brain, because fast-internet access offers us easy access to short term, instant primitive pleasure through masturbation.  In the 1950’s, psychologists James Olds and Peter Milner modified B.F Skinner’s operant conditioning chamber (more commonly known as the ‘Skinner Box’), so that a lever press would deliver direct brain stimulation through deep implanted electrodes in the brain. What resulted was perhaps the most dramatic experiment in the history of behavioural neuroscience: Rats would press the lever as many as 7,000 times per hour to stimulate their brains. This was a pleasure centre, a reward circuit, the activation of which was much more powerful than any natural stimulus. 

In 2019, the UK government postponed and then cancelled plans for a nation-wide porn block online, intending to force people to buy porn passes in order to access adult content. True to the nature of the British public, this government action split the nation down the middle. However, the porn block is a step in the right direction, because it stops children from viewing and watching adult content. 

In the aforementioned study, 55% of young men felt that viewing pornography was their real sex education. This is an extremely dangerous statistic, and for me, the main underlying cause for pornography addiction in modern men. The adolescent brain is incredibly malleable, it doesn’t fully develop until the age of 25. Porn addiction is most common in young men, because the frequent watching of porn conditions the brain to use pornography and masturbation in the same way that Olds and Milner’s rats were addicted to pressing the lever for stimulation. By subconsciously creating neurological connotations between porn, pleasure and sex; young men are damaging their own mental and sexual health without even realising it. 

The effects of porn addiction are only just starting to be recognised by the medical community. An increasing number of men have admitted to experiencing erectile disfunction, premature ejaculation and male orgasmic disorder (the inability to orgasm with a partner) as a result of an over reliance on pornography. However, porn addiction is such a modern addiction, that GP’s and other medical professionals don’t actually know how to treat it yet. Alcoholics and drug addicts have various forms of rehabilitation, smokers can put a patch on or switch to E-cigarettes, but the current advice for porn addicts is to just stop. 

Considering that rats pushed the lever 7000 times a day, just stopping requires someone to completely recondition their brain, that is an incredible amount of willpower and mental strength that only a handful of people have. 

Porn addiction is dangerous because it is completely psychological, while the physical results of a porn addiction can also lead to further mental health issues and insecurities- particularly in men. Repeated poor sexual performance, can lead to men worrying about their future, worrying about losing their partner or just avoiding sex altogether. At a time when men are finally starting to open up about their mental health, porn addiction must be met with a serious and effective response. 

The millennial generation is often regarded as the ‘snowflake’ generation, but we are also the first generation to grow up with the internet. The internet is arguably one of the greatest achievements of the human race to date- but it is also incredibly dangerous. This writer appreciates that older generations worked hard, grew up in harsher circumstances than today and may have gone to war; but they also got to grow up without the pressures and temptations of social media and the internet. We need to spend more time teaching young people about the negative effects that the internet can have on personal development. We need to talk about porn.