Porn Then and Now: Welcome to Brain Training

Submitted by Gary Wilson and... on Tue, 08/30/2011 - 15:54
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"Are we the first generation to masturbate left-handed?"

A Reddit poster Wanker's cramprecently asked, "Are we the first generation to masturbate left-handed because our right hands are browsing porn?" Yes, an entire generation is becoming "ambi-wackstrous" as one wag put it.

Once upon a time, masturbation called for a lot of imagination. It was rehearsal for the real thing: "First I'm gonna do this...and then...." No longer.

"I'm part of the last generation to start masturbating before they had the Internet. I can't fathom having access to visual representations of every possible sexual taste before feeling the biological urge to whack it. When I was a kid, we were all desperate to look at boobs, but the opportunity only came by one or two glorious times a year [via catalog]. I honestly wonder how tits-on-tap affect later generations."

What does this shift mean? Internet porn use more closely parallels videogaming than real sex. It combines your genes' No. 1 priority—and biggest natural reward (sex)—with the constantly changing, ever-novel-and-surprising delivery of "World of Warcraft." Your left hand is applying more pressure and speed than intercourse. Your right hand is clicking away in "search mode," as your eyes dart from one screen to the next and moaning fills your ears. No imaginary orchestration needed.

Porn, and the way it is delivered to our brains, has changed. Alas, our brains haven't yet adapted, and this can create unexpected problems:

"I've used porn for years. I just like watching people have sex. My problem escalated about 18 months ago when I got high-speed Internet. All of a sudden, I went from just viewing pictures online, to viewing videos and movies online instantaneously. I never really gave it much thought, but after almost daily viewing—sometimes even binging for hours on end watching porn videos—I really began to notice a change in my personal sex life with my wife. I had never really had any ED problems at all. But now, whenever my wife and I start to have sex, I cannot get an erection. Sometimes I get one, but then it quickly starts getting soft. Sex has been almost non-existent for us."

Another guy:

"There's a difference between today's online porn and that of just a couple decades ago. Now, you can go to a variety of websites and find more free porn than you could watch if you quit your job and dedicated your life to it—all in living color. You can even pick your favorite fetish, whatever you find the most intense, and just watch video after video of it. If the intensity wanes for a few seconds, or you get bored with watching the same bodies for two minutes straight, you can jump to a new set doing new things. It has the potential to be far more destructive to your appreciation for the real thing than ever before."

Exactly. Internet porn exploits more than just sexual desire. It drives users beyond their natural libido: Users can watch porn in multiple windows, search endlessly, view constant novelty, fast-forward to the bits they find hottest, switch to live sex chat, fire up their mirror neurons with video action or cam-2-cam, or escalate to extreme genres and anxiety-producing material. It's all free, easy to access, available within seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and can be viewed on phones at any age. Before long, it will be enhanced with sex toys that simulate physical contact.

Zoom into the brain

What drives this unnatural "mating" frenzy? Dopamine. It's the primary neurochemical behind reward-seeking behavior. Dopamine levels are the barometer by which we decide (and remember) the value of any experience. Not surprisingly, sexual stimuli raise dopamine far more than other natural rewards.

Most people think of dopamine as the "buzz," the "sugar high," or the drive towards orgasm. Actually, it spikes in response to stimuli associated with survival needs. It's motivation. It tells us what to approach or avoid and where to put our attention. Further, it tells us what to remember, by helping to rewire our brains.

Internet porn just happens to elicit spikes of dopamine for all of the "salient" stimuli for which we evolved to be on the lookout:

Erotic words, pictures and videos have been around a long time. So has the neurochemical rush from novel mates. Yet the novelty of a once-a-month Playboy evaporates as soon as you turn the pages. Would anyone call Playboy or softcore videos "shocking" or "anxiety-producing?" Would either violate the expectations of a computer-literate boy over the age of 12? Neither compares with the "searching and seeking" of a multiple-tab Google prowl (see this reddit thread: I spend more time looking for the right porn video then I actually spend fapping).

Porn Then And Now Chart

The phrase "Variety is the spice of life" comes from a William Cowper poem (1785) about a guy who courted a different girl every week. But the Internet makes possible a never-ending stream of Tabasco sauce in the form of dopamine spikes. My Google search for "porn" just retrieved about 1.3 billion pages (with "Porn for the Blind" in my top ten). Constant stimulation can interfere with the way we think, even without erotic imagery. In fact, recent studies have shown that compulsive Internet use (videogaming) causes addiction-related brain changes.

"It was getting pretty bad. I would take a chick home and sometimes not even be able to get my d*ck up because porn had rewired my brain and conditioned it to have 5-6 girls at a time. One girl, even though she was there in person, was not doing the trick."

Why is constant dopamine stimulation so addictive? As neuroscientist David Linden explains, smoking hooks a far greater percentage of users than heroin, even though heroin furnishes a bigger neurochemical blast. Why? It's a question of brain training. Every puff of each of those 20 cigarettes per pack is training the smoker that cigarettes are rewarding. In contrast, how often can someone shoot up? At base addiction is "pathological learning."

In the case of Internet porn, think of the constant novelty, the shocking or anxiety-producing visuals, and the clicks in search of the perfect shot as puffs, and orgasm as something stronger. Both train the brain. However, we hear from guys all the time with porn-induced ED, who will give up masturbation to try to heal rather than give up Internet porn. They instinctively know where the dopamine drip is:

"I tend to think it's the porn that is the hyper-stimulus resulting in erectile dysfunction, not the masturbation. The odd thing I am finding about my personal experiment is that without online porn, I don't really feel like masturbating. Even when I try, am not aroused enough to masturbate. My mind doesn't fantasize anymore, like it used to when I was a kid in the pre-Internet days."

Today's porn use is more about dopamine hits than climax

Dopamine drives all arousal, but a steady stream of ever changing erotic stimulation is a far more powerful mind-training experience than occasional masturbation to orgasm. This is why online erotica can create powerful addictions in some brains.

Sadly, abundance of dopamine doesn't equal satisfaction. Its message is always, "Satisfaction lies just around the corner, so keep going!" Behavioral addiction research on food, gambling and Internet videogaming shows that too much dopamine numbs the pleasure response of the brain. This indicates addiction processes are creeping in. A numbed brain lead to cravings for more; even the perfect shot will not satisfy. Today's porn doesn't just meet your needs; it distorts them.

Watching a sunset, petting a cat, and watching your favorite team are not the same as more intense pleasures. With normal pleasures, you get dopamine signals and then your brain returns to homeostasis. In contrast, some activities have the potential to dysregulate dopamine long-term.

Indeed the medical doctors of the American Society of Addiction Medicine recently issued a statement citing sex, food and gambling as potentially addictive activities. They leave no doubt that all addictions—whether to alcohol, heroin or sex—are fundamentally the same. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo, too, has pointed to the dangers of "arousal addiction." (TED talk The Demise of Guys?)

Even young men are warning each other about Internet porn. Bodybuilding thread: "Ask a recovering porn addict anything. (SRS)." Reddit thread: "Ask a guy who quit porn for 2 months now anything." They are also figuring out that porn causes escalation and creates bogus sexual tastes:

"Porn binges for 4-6 hours the last couple days. On the plus side, it did become obvious that  transexual porn is unrelated to my sexuality. After watching for 30+ hours over the past 5 days , transexual porn started to become boring! I began searching for other, more disgusting and shocking stuff."

The qualities of Internet porn affect the brain in unique ways. In addition to constant stimulation, there's no inherent limit to consumption—unlike eating or drugs. Escalation is always possible because the brain's natural satiation mechanisms don't kick in unless one climaxes—which may not be for hours. Even then, users can click to something more shocking to become aroused again. Nor will Internet porn eventually activate the brain's natural aversion system ("I can't tolerate another bite/drink/snort!"). Who can't bear to look at another erotic image? Reproduction is our genes' top priority after all.

Become aware of the symptoms of excess

The belief that "porn use can cause no harm" arose in the era of monthly Playboy. Like it or not, Internet porn is as different from past erotica as "Super Mario" is from tic-tac-toe. Self-reports make this evident. Instead of being "just porn," Internet porn is a new phenomenon, for which evolution has not prepared many brains. 

Your ancestors had no Internet or memory banks of porn-based fantasy. If they masturbated,  normal libido and their own imagination got the job done. If your sexual responsiveness is decreasing, or you need porn to climax, then you are, in effect, overriding your brain's natural appetite mechanisms, and risking addiction. Wait until your brain returns to normal sensitivity. Withdrawal may be difficult, but tips and support are available.

Your brain didn't evolve to handle today's erotica-at-a-click. It doesn't just see videos; it perceives endless fertilization opportunities, and it will use its dopamine "whip" to make sure you fertilize as many as possible—whatever the cost to you. Instead of getting off and getting on with life, today's viewers often continue for as long as they can stay awake—unaware that they may be at risk for addiction or performance problems. As Eliezer Yudkowsky once wrote, 

"If people have the right to be tempted—and that's what free will is all about—the market is going to respond by supplying as much temptation as can be sold. Market incentive continues well beyond the point where a superstimulus begins wreaking collateral damage on the consumer."

Learn the signals that indicate excessive porn use. (Read others' self-reports.) You can't go by what your friends are doing, or even by the advice of sexologists or doctors. Go by what you notice.

"Back in the day of dial-up, I was only able to download the occasional picture (very soft-porn) due to bad/slow Internet and not knowing where to find all the smuttery. But now with high-speed, even to mobile phones, it has made me continuously watch more and more and at higher resolution. It sometimes becomes a whole day affair looking for the perfect one to finish on. It never, ever satisfies. "Need more" the brain always says...such a lie."

Comments

Submitted by Marnia Robinson on Thu, 10/20/2011 - 12:19.

How to let go of you harem? Just take your computer, and look at the screen from one side. What do you see? A side of a screen.. there is nothing there, nothing behind it. That is as close as you'll get to those women on the screen.. when you realize this, and I mean really understand what I mean, you will pop out of that longing for your harem.

Submitted by Marnia Robinson on Sun, 10/30/2011 - 22:20.

It probably is indeed the masturbation in combination with the internet pornography that triggers this addiction to be so powerful. Some people refer to it as visual cocaine, myself I actually call it visual meth :p because I still found that somewhat of an understatement. I believe this IP addiction is top of the class. Sometimes the pull can just be so amazingly strong, and your limbic can just dominate you. I've experienced this first hand many times.

Submitted by Gary Wilson on Tue, 11/01/2011 - 15:22.

Taken from this thread on ED and Internet Porn.

http://www.medhelp.org/posts/Mens-Health/Too-much-porn-masturbation-caus...

Ok, so I have had problems getting an erection or staying erect going back to early 2004. I am 37 years old now. Prior to 2004 I would get erect for sex with no problem, having an erection and being ready to go was never a issue. These days, I watch porn and masturbate to it or to pictures on profiles on swinger websites) maybe 4-5 days a week. But I sit there for an hour at a time, 2-3 hours at a time, in between taking breaks, but then going back to it. The invention of Porn Tube Channels has not helped at all.

But here is the thing, prior to 2004 when I started having this problem, I was 30, and had been masturbating all the time for 15 years without an issue of erection( I started having sex at 20)......... But here is what I realised. AND GENTLEMAN PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO THIS...... In early 2004 I installed boradband internet at my house. Within weeks I was in front of the monitor trying to find as much porn as I could and masturbating to it, finding pictures online, and masturbating to them. That was a new form of masturbating for me. Prior to that, my masturbating was regulated to watching a hot girl on television, or a steamy scene on a cable movie and masturbating. Running to the bathroom and masturbating. Or right here in the living room, a quick 2 minute pleasure............ But Broadband Internet introduced me to a new form of masturbation....Long drawn out episodes of masturbation. Clicking from one video to the next until one finally turned me on to the point of ejaculation..... At times 4-5 times a day, 4-5 days a week. Going through swinger websites, going through pictures on profiles, until it made me ejaculate........ Guys, the past 7 years of this type of masturbation has RUINED my sex life.........

I am an attractive guy, good body, work out all the time.......I can not count the number of great looking women I have met the past 7 years that I have not been able to perform with. The latest being last Wednesday (10/26/11)....I met this great Asian girl, she came over. I stayed hard for a little bit, but it was gone within 5 minutes. And as I usually do when this happens, I jerk myself to get hard, but that takes a few minutes, and then when I entered her again, it didnt last 2 minutes. Needles to say, she was nice about it. But I have been texting her since that day, and I get very short non-personal replies.........She was obviously disappointed.....

As of late I have been confiding in friends about masturbation, and they all do it, and some say they do it all the time. But they have no problem getting erections when it comes to sex. It has obvisosly occurred to me that masturbating in front of the monitor to porn, pictures, is what is effecting my sex life and inability to get erections.........

I'm sure masturbating normally, maybe once a day, maybe twice a day, for a minute or two over time would have not affected my sex life and erections at all. But masturbating to internet porn and pictures really does cause you great harm.........

I remember last June. I was going to Dallas for a company outing. I knew a sales girl from a different branch. We exchanged sultry emails and text messages. So I did not masturbate for 3 days. I did Wednesday afternoon, then didn’t do anything until I would see her. Saturday night I went to her hotel. We were naked within 20 minutes, and heres the things. She blew me and got kind of hard, but I jerked myself to get hard. And when I entered her, I could just feel this incredible feeling I had not felt in years guys, years. I was staying hard and maneuvering her all over the place. It was freaking incredible. The only thing I could not control was as soon as she got on top of me I came almost instantly...But that’s when I realised how internet masturbating to porn really ***** you up big time.

Needles to say, to this day I’m still masturbating to porn, I did it last night for almost 2 hours. I’m looking into getting professional help. But guys, you will read different things that masturbating is not directly linked to erectile dysfunction, and that might not be true. But it does not specify the different types of masturbating habits people have. That is something that is not studied.

I'm 37 years old and have been addicted to masturbating to internet porn since 2004 when I first got Broadband internet, and that’s when my erectile dysfunction started. And I don't believe the dysfunction come from a psychological block; My brain telling my penis that it can never be as good as the porn when I’m in bed with a girl so there is no point in getting hard. My problem and the problem of a lot of others is the excessive pulling and strain on the penis pretty much just wears your functions out..............

Submitted by admin on Sun, 12/11/2011 - 08:56.

From another forum:

I am 37 years old. I started to masturbate at age 14 in 1988. I masturbated a lot through my teens, late 20's. I kept a regular sex life. Not a ladies man where I was bedding women all the time. A couple of gf's, a couple of one night stands a couple of escorts.

I NEVER had a problem, getting an erection. On occasion I would rent porn movies at an adult book store, masturbate to them. Never had a problem getting an erection. In 2004 I installed broadband internet in my home (was 30 at the time). I soon was masturbating to all types of porn. Swinger websites with pictures of swinging couples. These would often be 45minute-1hr-2hr, 3-4 hr sessions. Taking breaks, and then going back to it. Ever since I have had broadband internet in my home and the quick access to porn.

MY SEX LIFE HAS BEEN A COMPLETE DISASTER. It's very very rare that I have a fulfilling sexual encounter. I did not realize that masturbating to porn was the problem this until a gentleman I e-mailed through a swingers website gave me some advice.

Submitted by Marnia Robinson on Tue, 12/13/2011 - 14:35.

I remember halfheartedly attempting to give up porn several times in the past before finding this site, and finding myself right back on the path towards it thanks to the temptation in every media outlet known to man. To think that as a youngster I used to have to make a conscious effort to find pictures of scantily clad women... now it's difficult NOT to find them.

Submitted by admin on Wed, 12/14/2011 - 16:21.

I guess I have the same story as hundreds of you people. Began reading porn mags with my friends at age 12-13, then started buying videos a couple of months later. Had a TV on my room and used to stay up at night watching porn on cable. My parents knew nothing. At the same time my fantasies about girls started drifting away from romantic to sexual encounters. When I was 15-16 the Internet explosion happened and we all know what that meant. First we just had the dial-up and my parents monitored my use since it was expensive. Still managed to download hundreds of pictures that I kept on floppy discs. And there we go, broadband, P2P, Torrents, streaming etc etc

Submitted by admin on Fri, 12/23/2011 - 15:13.

From This Thread

Drama Wrote:

I have enough self-control to not let it become a problem. I'm still trying to figure out where this shit came from. 2 years ago nobody bitched about having jerk off issues, and now guys all try to relate it to running their life.

RockNRollPUA answered:

Its mostly due to Internet porn. A whole generation just grew up on Internet porn and are now finding out that they have a distorted view of sex and chronic masturbation habits. With all the free tube sites you can pretty much see any kind of porn imaginable in an unlimited quantity. It is highly addictive and totally easy access. There is even an epidemic of straight men that are addicted to gay and tranny porn. Luckily I never got into that stuff, but from what I have heard from my friend who sells sex toys and porn online, its allot more common than you think it is. Yourbrainonporn.com also had an article about it which I read out of curiosity. It is unbelievable how mess up allot of the guys in this article are, its fucking horrifying.

http://yourbrainonporn.com/ask-us-iam-attracted-to-gay-transsexual

Porn can definitely fuck your brain up if you watch it all the time, which a whole generation of people that just reached adult hood are now realizing.

Submitted by Gary Wilson on Fri, 01/06/2012 - 21:07.

I wanted to mention that my own experience with online porn confirms your theories 100%.

I first got really hooked on internet porn just about a year ago through a new form of porn called "hypno" videos. These videos are the most powerful of the powerful sex stimuli. They are clips of literally hundreds of the most intense scenes from porn videos, put to a soundtrack of pulsing techno music, sex sounds (moaning ect.), dirty talk, and printed words (usually shocking words - guilt or shame inducing words) flashed onto the screen.

These sex scenes, shock-words, sex sounds and dirty talk are constantly changing, often at a really high rate of up to 2-3 images a SECOND! You can imagine the dopamine hits that come from this kind of novelty! It's like 300 vaginas in a minute!

When I first viewed this particularly pernicious form of porn I was so hooked that I spent the entire weekend masturbating, until I was completelt exhausted. Imagine that rat pressing the bar -- that was me! No food, no personal hygene, little sleep....pathetic!

This frightened me quite a bit, and upon finding YBOP I realized exactly why these hypno videos are so powerful -- they are designed to take full advantage of brain chemistry/wiring/behavior. Thay are truly the crack cocaine of porn.

Submitted by Marnia Robinson on Fri, 02/17/2012 - 15:30.

I has been a porn addict of increasing severity for at least 15 years now, probably more like 20. The ill effects of it are horrible. First it was softcore porn magazines, then was hardcore ones as well as hardcore video tapes. Paralleling that was years downloading both soft and hardcore images off the internet. With the advent of P2P apps, I was able to get hardcore videos off the internet. First was smaller p2p apps, then Bittorrent. After that, direct download sites and blogs/sites that link to them. I once paid for a month of premium access on one DDL site and binged on porn like I never had before.

Two things made my porn addiction much worse in 2008. For the first time I got a laptop, and I discovered porn tube sites. First it was [Site 1], then [Site 2], then [Site 3], [Site 4], [Site 5], [Site 6] and finally [Site 7] and [Site 8]. There are probably a few others I've forgotten. Porn tube sites, especially the big ones like [Site 8] are the crack cocaine of internet pornography. There is so much of it, and so much new content every day, every hour, every 10 minutes that I was able to find constant new stimulation.

The laptop made things worse because it sits right next to my bed. It's always there. No longer do I have to go downstairs or avoid housemates. I couldn't sleep? Fire up some porn; fap. Wake up with a headache? Same. Wake up without a headache? Why not fap to porn anyway

Submitted by admin on Sat, 04/07/2012 - 18:41.

YankieWankie has commented on: "The Sky Is Not Falling"

Subject: Escalation and desensitization

For the purposes of this comment, I'll take issue with just one of Dr. Ley's theses: "If someone watches porn showing something they find distasteful, it has no impact on their behavior or desires". I feel fairly confident in positing that most men who have viewed porn over the course of years or decades have seen their tastes (desires) escalate from ordinary to repulsive as they have become habituated to successively higher levels of stimuli. I myself went from looking at centerfolds in the early nineties, to hardcore magazines, to hardcore VHS, and then came the internet and I went back to still images for awhile, then downloadable video, then highspeed streaming video. As I progressed from still images to video, still images just didn't "work" on my libido anymore. To some extent, having given up porn entirely, still images are still somewhat ineffective at arousing me--and I believe that's regrettable. I want some of the "innocence" back that I gave up in order to look at shocking material.

In terms of the content of what I watched, there came a time when I found myself looking at extreme group sex (50 men, one woman), a subject that at the start of my experience with porn would have repulsed me. Yet at the end, I had to feel that revulsion in order to become aroused. I believe it only would have gotten worse if I hadn't curtailed my use of porn entirely.

Submitted by admin on Sat, 04/07/2012 - 20:06.

The interesting thing is that I open several windows in my browser, each one with many, many tabs. The main thing that arouses me is novelty. New faces, new bodies, new "choices". I very rarely even watch a whole porn scene, and can't remember when I saw entire movie. It's too boring. I always want NEW stuff.

Submitted by admin on Fri, 04/27/2012 - 09:32.

LINK

Our minds have been evolving for thousands of years. The advent of Internet based porn is a technology that our minds did not evolve to handle. Men evolved to be attracted to youth, beauty, and subtle signs of fertility. Before large cities emerged in recent times and the creation of mass media; television, billboards, magazines, the Internet, people would only see a limited amount of other people. A man may only see a few 7-8/10s in his day to day life.

The brain is not evolved to process 30 tabs of beautiful women with perfect breasts who attempt to look healthy and youthful who are naked and posing for you, or getting fucked. Brain evolved to find average women sexually arousing. Porn takes everything your brain already finds arousing, amplifies it by 100%, then you go and open 30 tabs of it without realising that doing this has serious consequences.

So yeah, finding Playboy attractive should come pretty naturally. And the only conspiracy at play here is that our brains are not evolved to deal with porn. Its too much stimulus.

Finding average women attractive: Good.

30 tabs of incredibly hot women getting banged: Bad.

Markets supplying to the demand: Expected.

Submitted by admin on Fri, 05/04/2012 - 15:04.

Porn addiction is not all about the release of sexual energy, for me at least. It was about the hunt. And of course the repressed society adds guilt and this adds more of a "high", for the lack of a better term, to a porn addict. There were times in my life where I would spend 4 hours stroking my dick, looking for a perfect image starting with artsy stuff like x-art or met-art pics to end up with bestiality or shemale video, then cum, take a nap and repeat the process.

You may not understand it, and it's great that you have a good relationship with porn but don't presume that everyone is like you. Just like we shouldn't presume to understand people who become so obese that they become grafted to their couches. Porn is my poison, moderation hasn't worked out for me yet so it's abstinence for me for a few months, then I'll try to masturbate without porn just to disassociate the two, then maybe moderation might be the way to go.