There’s been a lot of a talk about porn addiction on TRP, PUA forums and in manosphere in general. Is this really dangerous for us men? Some guys say that they don’t have any problems with this, but so many others claim that it destroyed their sexual life. The rise of a No Fap community made us to ask ourselves, should we start the no fap challenge?
Porn Traffic
First, let’s see how much of internet traffic is porn?
Two Ph.D. researchers published their findings in A Billion Wicked Thoughts by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. According to them, from July 2009 to July 2010, about 13% of Web searches were for erotic content. Also, Extreme Tech released an article in 2012: Just how big are porn sites?.
The average length of visit for most websites is 4-6 minutes.
Depending on how internet traffic is measured, claims vary that from 4% to 30% of internet traffic is connected with porn. For some researchers, LiveJasmin is the most popular porn site.
The Real Danger
There has been a tremendous change among men on this planet. Pornography is changing our society “under the radar” for quite a while. Completely new generation of men appeared that all the way from early childhood had access to porn, and by the time they finished primary school they knew all the variations and fetishes that you can see on porn sites. They knew most of the porn stars. Their brain is now modeled in a different way.
For some reason, psychologists only started recently to research porn addiction, and the results of such studies were frightening.
Famous psychologist Philip Zimbardo made a great TED talk about the danger of pornography. It’s called The Demise of Guys, where he discussed shocking data about our new generation. He said that most guys have a problem to start a communication with a girl that they like. They have a big fear of rejection and a lack of motivation to meet women. Reason? Internet pornography.
Daily porn made guys suffer from ED, death grip, depression, social anxiety, etc. It also leads to disinterest for a real woman and low testosterone. Why would a guy go out in a club if he can stay home playing League of Legends and later watch his favorite porn actress? It’s almost like he had sex, right?
If you are still skeptic that porn is bad for you, let’s try with science.
What was confirmed in a recent study of a German scientist in Berlin? They scanned brains of 64 men with MRI and then studied their porn habits. It turns out that men that watch the most porn had gray matter volume of the right caudate of the striatum smaller. Striatum helps coordinate motivation with body movement. It is in charge of motivation with both higher-level and lower-level functions such as inhibiting one’s behavior in a complex social interaction.
In other words, porn consumption is turning men into passive and depressive beings that are guided by small brain impulses.
Addiction
Porn addiction symptoms are oftentimes mistaken for other conditions, such as social anxiety, depression, ADHD, performance anxiety, OCD, etc. It’s assumed that these conditions are primarily the cause of addiction – but never the result of it. As a consequence, they drug these guys.
By some statistics, guys watch 50 porn videos a week. But addiction from porn is specific, says Zimbardo. If we look, for example, at drug addiction, we can see that a junkie wants more of the same thing. In porn, the addict wants different things. A porn addict quickly becomes bored with regular sex stuff, so he jumps from fetishes to fetishes in order to get that strong orgasm.
So, what makes porn so addictive? According to some Australian study, it’s not simple sexual drive and nudity.
Subjects watched 22 porn videos. That spike represents how they reacted to new porn videos that they haven’t seen before. Sexual novelty is the keyword. Guys who watch porn regularly can’t get the same orgasm with the same video clip over some time, they need to find something else. Something new and different.
This picture tells us how mother nature is encouraging our reproduction. Different female equals better and faster orgasm.
Conclusion
There is a huge gap in generations. Our grandfathers through their whole life couldn’t get to fuck so many different women as their grandson can in just 5 minutes of clicking on the computer.
Until recently, the voice against pornography could be heard only from church and religion circles. Most young people don’t take them seriously because they mostly focus on archaic subjects and talk about sexual morality. But now, more and more people are realizing the consequences of porn from so-called self-improvement movements because of the reasons that I mentioned.
On Reddit, there is this community called Nofap. It gathers men around the world that have read all this stuff and realized what happened to their brain, so they decided to give up on porn. They exchange their experiences, talk about their abstinence crisis and help each other to bring back healthy interactions and sexual life with real women. The time that the brain needs to get back in a natural state is 2 to 5 months. But you will see first results in just 2 weeks.
I hope that this text will help people recognize addiction if they have one. On the internet, you can find tons of material that can help you with this.