Erectile dysfunction is experienced by 75% of British men aged 18 to 25 – the first generation to grow up with porn ‘on tap’
By Joe Madden, 30 September 2016
“Basically, porn broke my dick so that it didn’t work with real fannies.”
I’ve known Alec for more than a decade. He’s in his early 30s, London-based, and a successful writer. He’s funny, popular and charmingly gutter-brained. But for a while there, unbeknown to me, he was struggling with a uniquely 21st-century problem.
During an extended period of bachelordom, Alec fell into some bad habits in the crotch department. With little else to fill the quiet midweek nights, he’d fire up porn sites and tug himself insensible – again and again. And again. “I’d still have been wanking a lot if it wasn’t for porn,” he admits, “but the porn tipped me over into wanking like a subhuman.”
Time-consuming as they were, Alec’s chimp-like masturbation habits didn’t seem anything to fret about – until he finally got himself a girlfriend. And that’s where it gets complicated, because there, faced with a real living, breathing body, he failed to get an erection – again and again. “Thankfully, she was extremely patient and understanding,” he winces, “because it took a properly long time to fix.” (Spoiler alert: the two are now engaged.)
Alec’s story is by no means unusual. Porn-induced erectile dysfunction (PIED) amongst young men is the hot topic in sexual health right now. It’s highly likely you know a man with PIED, and you may even be in a relationship with one: if your man is often unable to ‘keep his end of the deal up’ during adult funtime, you may well be a porn widow. In fact, the unprecedented accessibility of X-rated material is creating thousands of new porn widows every day. According to the Sexual Advice Association, a staggering 75% of British men aged 18 to 25 – the first generation to grow up with porn ‘on tap’ – have experienced erectile dysfunction issues.
Alexander Rhodes, founder of NoFap.com (more on which later), is convinced of the link between porn’s rise and the decline of the boner: “Depending on which study you go by there’s been anywhere between a 600% to 3,000% increase in erectile dysfunction in men under 30 since the internet arrived. It’s a little alarming, right?”
CLICK’N’ERECT
With its sunlight-filled rooms and cheery décor, the practice of sex therapist Janet Eccles – nestled in an idyllic Greater Manchester village – doesn’t feel like a place where dark sexual turmoil is tearfully confessed. That is, of course, the point: disarmed by her upbeat scatter cushions and warm Mancunian frankness, Eccles’s clients reveal things they’ve never dared tell a soul.
Having greeted, seated and offered me coffee, Eccles turns to the subject at hand: the increasing numbers of young men coming through her doors whose malfunctioning genitals are a result of their porn use.
“Some men are growing very accustomed to clicking a button and getting quick ‘n’ easy sexual stimulation,” says Eccles. “They’re then finding that a real-life, flesh-and-blood woman doesn’t give them that same sexual hit, which leads to problems.
There’s been between a 600% to 3,000% increase in erectile dysfunction in men under 30 since the internet arrived
“Erectile dysfunction is the issue everyone talks about, because in young men it’s the most noticeable, and the one that’ll leave their partners thinking, ‘Oh, he doesn’t fancy me!’ But premature ejaculation can also occur, or even retrograde ejaculation, whereby the man can’t ejaculate.”
Absent boners aside, PIED can also manifest itself as a sustained and stealthy avoidance of sex. “The man may be making excuses; going to bed at different times from his partner; even becoming critical of their partner’s appearance,” says Eccles. This unwillingness to face the issue head-on stems from the two-pronged embarrassment of PIED: not only can he not perform sexually, he’s also probably lost control of his porn use.
But while not every PIED sufferer is also a habitual porn user there is, as you might imagine, a hefty overlap between the two groups. And it’s not merely a case of guys carelessly wanking their libidos away – something far more insidious and deep-rooted is at work.
“Porn works on the brain like any addictive substance,” says Manchester Metropolitan University’s Dr Nicola Ray, a neuroscientist specialising in behavioural addictions. “The thing you’re addicted to takes hold of your neural circuitry and hijacks the pathways related to more natural rewards so that they become unresponsive. So porn becomes the only thing the brain understands in relation to sexual stimulation; basically real sex becomes increasingly less exciting.”
Exacerbating this neurological reaction is the widespread practice of ‘edging’ – holding off climax for as long as possible, hopping from video to video in a zoned-out fog. Every porn user has done this to a certain degree, but some men are taking edging to the next-level: “There’s a big difference between logging on for 30 minutes, three times a week,” says Eccles, “and watching porn for five, six hours straight without orgasming.”
EASY ACCESS
During such sessions, the porn being viewed will inevitably escalate in strength: videos that seem gross and beyond-the-pale during hour one may be just the ticket by hour three.
“For long-term porn users the stimulation levels needed to achieve the same high increase and increase and increase,” says Eccles. “It’s like a long-term alcoholic who needs to down a bottle of whisky before they even feel a buzz. Before you know it you’re looking at some pretty extreme stuff.”
This downward spiral understandably plays havoc with the brain – which in turn plays havoc with the genitals. “Your brain releases less and less dopamine – the neurotransmitter that makes you feel pleasure – the more porn you watch,” explains Dr Ray. “You need increasingly intense and shocking material to keep the dopamine flowing, and eventually ‘boring’ real-life sex barely registers in the brain at all.” Yikes.
Women, of course, watch porn too – so why isn’t it decimating your sexual behaviour in a similar way? Well, not only do you consume porn less habitually – almost a third of men admit to viewing it every day, compared with just 3.8% of women – you also prefer different kinds of porn to us. As Eccles says, “most of the stuff on the big free sites is aimed only at men – and it’s just grim.”
My own wanking career – thanks for asking – began during the final days of the ‘analogue porn’ era, when softcore nudey mags – procured during red-faced trips to newsagents – were still the norm. Occasionally I’d come into possession of a VHS tape – a grainy copy of a copy of a copy – containing some excessively hairy ’70s porn that was usually more comical than arousing.
At the tail end of the 1990s internet porn arrived, but it was often more effort than it was worth. Dial-up speeds made the concept of edging a madman’s dream: video streaming was still years off, and I can’t tell you how many impatient boners I had wilt away waiting for a single jpeg to slooowwly materialise onscreen. (Too much information? I’ll stop now, I promise.) The struggle, as they say, was real.
THE ROAD TO REBOOTING
Back then I’d have killed for the constant access to porn that today’s teens and 20-somethings have. Viewed from the vantage point of my late 30s, however, that wanking paradise seems more like a prison, and I’m genuinely thankful to have missed out on it. It’s no coincidence that the first generation to journey adolescence in the age of the smartphone, wi-fi and Pornhub are also the first to suffer PIED on a dramatic scale. Got a 20-something boyfriend? He’s probably been looking at weapons-grade porn since his earliest pubes, and that’s not been great for his brain. “We’re all engaged in a huge global social experiment right now, because there’s never been a time before when everyone – including children – has had easy access to very hardcore pornography. We don’t yet fully know what the ramifications will be,” says Jon Brown, the NSPCC’s lead on tackling sexual abuse.
‘I was masturbating 14 times a day. I decided I needed to give it a rest for a few days, but I just couldn’t.’
Men who’ve viewed porn since childhood have a comparatively tougher time de-porning their brains – a process known as ‘rebooting’. GP and sexual function specialist Dr Anand Patel has dealt with countless PIED patients: “If they’re over 35 it’ll take them eight to 12 weeks to reboot,” he says. “But if they’re under 35, and so grew up with online porn, they’ll need six to 12 months.”
Daunting for younger PIED sufferers, maybe, but Dr Patel is keen to focus on the positive: “As ashamed as they may feel, these men need to know that they’re not ‘stuck’ that way,” he says. A full recovery is possible – if they work at it. Something worth passing on to the men in your life.
ABSOLUTELY FAP-ULUOUS
I’m Skyping with 26-year-old Pittsburgh resident Alexander Rhodes, founder of porn recovery community website NoFap.com, and the internet’s poster-boy for men wrestling back control of their sexuality in the internet age. (“Fap”, by the way, is onomatopoeic slang for male masturbation, from the fap-fap-fap noise a rapidly tugged penis makes. Yes, really). The wi-fi is down in the NoFap office, so Rhodes has hot-footed it to a nearby Starbucks for our video chat. I can see genteel frappuccino-sipping customers behind him looking increasingly perturbed.
“So, I’ll just jump right in and say it,” sighs Rhodes, bracing for the cringe. “At one point I was masturbating 14 times a day, and I decided I needed to give it a rest for a couple of days, and I found I just couldn’t. And I felt powerless.”
Rhodes became increasingly unnerved – and fascinated – at the control porn exerted over his life. It deadened his attraction to real-life women; he’d replay porn in his head during sex. So he set up the NoFap community on Reddit, which swiftly attracted thousands of fellow “Fapstronauts” from across the globe and eventually blossomed into NoFap.com.
“It’s a platform that provides tools and support for those who’ve decided to abstain from, uh… certain behaviours for a period of time,” Rhodes explains, self-censoring for the sake of his Starbucks eavesdroppers. NoFap is not, he emphasises, an anti-porn organisation. “We don’t want legislation against porn. We believe it’s a human right to do whatever you want to do, provided it’s not hurting anyone else. But if you’re in a relationship, chances are that heavy porn use will hurt your sex life, and if your sex life is affected, that spreads to every area of the relationship.”
When that happens, says Rhodes, a cold-turkey reboot is the only way forward. Dr Patel agrees. “You treat PIED the same as you would with any addiction, by stopping the stimulus. It’s difficult to withdraw from using porn, but you will get the return of normal sexual excitement and erectile function without resorting to medication.”
Nobody I spoke to for this piece was in favour of regulating porn or wiping it off the face of the web – but everyone agreed that something had to change to prevent further generations having their sex lives warped.
“Porn isn’t discussed in sex education,” says NoFap’s Rhodes, “and it’s often not even discussed in relationships. It shouldn’t be a taboo subject.”
Speaking as a man I do think we need to be far more honest and open about our porn use and the impact it’s having on both us and you, our wives and girlfriends. If the stats are to be believed, a third of men are consuming, on a daily basis, a highly potent stimulant that leaves a stark and lasting effect on our brains. We’re all cool with being warned of the potential pitfalls of drinking, smoking, gambling and so on, so it’s about time we accepted that cranking one off to Pornhub carries certain responsibilities too. And if we refuse? Well, you’d be fully within your rights to leave us – alone, hunched over a screen, pitifully lost in synthetic pleasure while the real thing walks out the door.
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