IT HAS been blamed for brain shrinkage, impotence, divorce and paedophilia – and in April this year, Utah declared it a .
Warnings about pornography come not just from religious or conservative groups – former Playboy model and actor Pamela Anderson also against its “corrosive effects”.
Yet survey after survey shows porn use is common among men and not exactly rare in women, so can it really be so dangerous? Or could it even have benefits?
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While there is research into the effects of porn, a great deal of it is contradictory. Even the same studies are interpreted differently by those on opposite sides of the debate. Some feel it is a menace to society, while others think that attitude belongs with 1980s hysteria over video nasties.
Anti-porn campaigners chiefly argue that it is addictive and hijacks the brain’s normal reward pathways. Like heroin addicts who crave more of their drug to get the same high, users find they are no longer aroused by real sex and resort to increasingly harder-core material, or so the theory goes.
Of course, there are other concerns over pornography, such as its depictions of violence, exploitation and sexual consent. But male addiction is an increasing focus of anti-porn campaigns.
Campaigners say that an excess of porn prompts users to spurn their partners and seek out images of bestiality, rape scenes, and child abuse. Some schools in Scotland now warn that viewing adult images leads to impotence, coercion and abuse. “This kind of escalation is described over and over again,” says Gary Wilson, a retired biology lecturer and author of website and book .
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So is pornography addiction real? Wilson cites studies showing brain activity differences between people who use a lot of porn and those who don’t, often in the same regions that also seem to work differently in drug addicts.
But while some of these studies show porn users have higher responses to sexual cues (PLoS One, ), others suggest they have lower responses (Biological Psychology, ). Either way, that doesn’t prove porn changes your brain. Perhaps people who are drawn to it have different brains in the first place. They might have a higher sex drive, which could stem from a biological difference.
Instead of resorting to brain scans, we should find out how often porn users report problems like impotence and escalation, or act like drug addicts.
Wilson co-authored a recent review concluding that rates of impotence among young men are higher now than they have ever been – as much as 33 per cent in some studies, compared with 5 per cent before the rise of free internet pornography (Behavioral Sciences, ).
But at the University of Glasgow, UK, warns that comparing impotence studies can be misleading as they may use different definitions.
Not an epidemic
It is normal, she says, for young men to experience the occasional “let-down”, usually due to nerves or alcohol, so it’s crucial to define what severity you are asking about. “It would be possible to cherry pick studies,” she says.
Mitchell helps run Natsal, one of the largest regular studies of human sexuality, which takes place in the UK every decade. The last one, in 2011, found that the most common sexual problem for 16 to 21 year-old males was premature ejaculation. Only 3.3 per cent reported a “distressing” level of impotence (Journal of Adolescent Health, ).
The two previous surveys didn’t break down answers to this question by age, so we don’t know if the figure has increased, but this is clearly a minor problem. “I don’t think anyone could argue that 3.3 per cent constitutes an epidemic,” says Mitchell.
When it comes to escalation, however, a survey of 434 men, mainly French or Belgian, found that nearly half had seen images they assessed as “previously not interesting, and even disgusting” (Computers in Human Behavior, ).
“Maybe their brains have undergone addiction-related changes,” says Wilson. But the question is vague – men who answered yes could have viewed something by accident, or just tried it a few times. We don’t know if they now prefer such material.
How about addiction? A common definition is that the behaviour starts to negatively affect the rest of the person’s life – their job or relationships – and that they would like to stop or cut down, but struggle. Websites like Your Brain On Porn are filled with testimonies from men whose behaviour met these criteria.
Another porn recovery website, called , claims to have about a million users a month (see “Make educated decisions about using your genitals“).
“Between 6% and 28% of male porn users describe their habit as “problematic””
But to really know how common this phenomenon is, we need to look at random samples of porn users, rather than those who seek out such sites. Earlier surveys have estimated rates of self-identified “problematic” use (out of all male users) at between 6 and 13 per cent. The French/Belgian study found 28 per cent, an outlier, although this could reflect a recent increase.
addiction clinic called New Mexico Solutions, says usually porn isn’t the problem, but people’s guilt about using it is. “Study after study shows that self-identified porn addicts are not watching more porn than other people, but have moral values that conflict with their use.”
Either way, at least some people are unhappy about their level of use. But does that mean we should heed calls to restrict it?
Many people, perhaps the majority, get more benefits than harms from porn, according to a Danish study of about 700 straight men and women. Both sexes thought that overall, it had a positive effect on their sex life, knowledge about sex and life in general (Archives of Sexual Behavior, ).
“It’s good for us to do things that make us happy,” says Dan Miller at James Cook University in Australia, who found similar results in a survey of 470 men that isn’t yet published. For example, it can help some gay men feel that they aren’t alone, he says.
Miller also found that straight boys are starting to regularly use porn at an increasingly earlier age, 15 for the youngest in his survey, so he thinks it is vital we educate teens. “But not in a preachy way that vilifies watching porn,” he says – rather, explaining that pornography may not accurately depict sex and relationships.
In other words, we may wish to critique how porn represents and affects society, as we would any other media, but we don’t need to blow it up into a health crisis.
“I don’t want to discount the experiences of any guys who feel porn is having this deleterious influence on their life, but I haven’t seen much good evidence to support claims of a coming porn-apocalypse,” says Miller. “I think everyone should calm down a little.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “The truth about porn”
