Here’s Gary Wilson’s back & forth with a young author about oxytocin and porn use. He repeated the claim in his book that oxytocin “bonds the user to porn.”
FIRST COMMENT BY GARY
Finally, I guess it doesn’t matter, but even though I have the greatest respect for ______ , I was sorry to see her repeat the meme that people bond with porn due to oxytocin released at orgasm. I know of not one shred of science that supports this theory, even though I have heard it from several well-intentioned MDs and PhDs.
Oxytocin is about bonding with a person or group, and it is not just released at orgasm: mothers love their kids, and people love their animals – all without orgasms. And many people have casual sex without “bonding” to their partner. Except in the rare case where a porn viewer gets a crush on a specific actor, oxytocin is not what makes him use porn or stare at screens. Addiction or sexual conditioning is the reason. Both sexual conditioning and addiction share the same key brain change, called ‘sensitization’, which has nothing to do with the release of oxytocin. Sensitization occurs when the brain wires together the sights, sounds, smells, sensations, emotions, and memories associated with a big reward, such as masturbating to porn – creating a pathway that can blast our reward center in the future. When activated by cues or triggers, this pathway creates powerful, hard to ignore, cravings – which manifests as the inability to control use.
Compulsive porn use is all about novelty, which is the neurological opposite of falling in love with one person or your offspring.
Cravings to use are not “bonds.” They stem from reduced sensitivity to normal every day pleasure combined with hypersensitivity to cues that promise pleasure/oblivion/whatever (sensitization). If oxytocin at orgasm were necessary to bond with screens, no one who used other digital media (but not porn) would get hooked. There is some evidence that oxytocin – far from hooking people on their screens via “bonds” – is protective against addiction, including this new finding that a drug that mimics it seems to curb addiction in rats: https://www.thefix.com/could-
Anyway, it’s up to you what you do about this, if anything. It’s one of those things that “sounds good” until you think about it in more depth.
Sincerely,
Gary Wilson
COMMENT BY AUTHOR
Hey Gary,
Thank you so much for your thoughts and suggestions. It means a lot. We’re changing those small glitches. It may be late for me to adjust the bonding content because a large change like that may break the design, but I see your concern and will adjust that in an updated version, or another manuscript if I do one.
I think the research in _____________ was pretty big on the bonding playing into addiction and I was influenced by that, but I should’ve scrutinized a bit more, especially as they’re commercial.
Anecdotally I do think there’s an emotional attachment to the porn, but from reliable stimulation temporarily combating short term pleasure receptivity rather than oxytocin to an actor. Maybe there was oxytocin bonding to the device though? Time may tell. I agree it doesn’t make sense for oxytocin to be involved with porn for most, because of how novelty based it is. It’s true that bonding doesn’t always happen during casual sex, but sometimes it can come out of that, and maybe that can happen with porn with specific actresses? So maybe just a theory here that some people can develop emotional attachment, if not to the porn at least to the device, which is giving the sexual stimulation so often? Something not causing addiction, but challenging withdrawal? Or something unrelated to bonding through porn that challenges bonding otherwise, maybe from all the emotionless objectification (without any oxytocin at all)? Not sure.
Feel free to use that on your blog!
Thank you so much for offering to review. I hope you have an amazing weekend and enjoy the conference next week. Thanks for this and all your work, so meaningful! I love recommending your book to friends.
Best…..
SECOND COMMENT BY GARY
I still feel the need to talk about the myth of oxytocin.
A little background. When I and my wife started writing about porn’s effects in 2008 or so (YBOP was created 3 years later), it seems as though everyone was copying the “porn model” put forth by Candeo, which was that porn releases powerful chemicals. An actual quote – pornographic psychopharmacological flood yields epinephrine, testosterone, endorphins (endogenous morphine), oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin.
Several problems with this model:
First problem – People pondered this and asked, if this is true, then how does porn use differ from normal vanilla sex or masturbation without porn? Since it doesn’t differ “neurochemically”, there was no comeback for this. Then people asked, if these same chemicals are released during sex/orgasm, then what makes internet porn any different than sex? Again, no answer was provided. The real answer is that internet provides endless novelty, a voyeur’s perspective, escalation to novel genres while masturbating, violation of expectations, constantly searching & seeking, anticipation of next image, etc. All these properties activate the VTA-NAC dopamine system – as do addictive drugs. Porn use can lead to conditioning sexual arousal to everything associated with one’s porn use (which doesn’t match real sex) and/or to porn addiction. Oxytocin is not really a player in either.
Second problem – The claims made about the “neurochemical cocktails” have several holes, or are simply incorrect (I won’t get into it all). I know this because what got us into all this porn stuff was years of studying and writing about the neurobiology of sex, bonding and orgasm. We had written books and many articles, and I had studied the science related to neurobiology of sex, bonding and orgasm for 10 straight years – before creating YBOP. A lot of material about oxytocin, prolactin, testosterone that you may have seen on the web (especially before 2010) was taken from our early articles. I was very clear about the differences between sexual arousal, bonding and orgasm and the possible effects of streaming internet porn.
But back to oxytocin. It has only been measured in the blood of humans during sexual arousal, and only in a few studies. It hasn’t been assessed in the brain. The brain and blood sources of oxytocin are anatomically separate, and the oxytocin circulating in the blood doesn’t cross back into the brain (due to the blood-brain-barrier). Some studies show that there is little or no change in circulating oxytocin at orgasm, in some people.
Oxytocin may be involved with bonding, but many experiments show that administering oxytocin via nasal spray causes the person to be on guard, or even aggressive toward others. So oxytocin’s effects are strongly influenced by the context of the social situation and the state of mind.
As for bonding to an internet accessing device, that simply does not occur. This claim is saying that the porn user is now in love with his laptop or Smartphone. This is absurd. If any young man was asked – “do you want me to replace your old tired laptop with the latest, fastest, best laptop on the market, all for free” – he would immediately say yes, and not pine for his old laptop. While a person may be triggered by environmental cues (such as turning on the laptop or seeing the laptop) and experience cravings, this is not bonding– it’s cue-reactivity, which is caused by the primary addiction-caused brain change – sensitization.
The orgasm = oxytocin = bonding to porn, or to a device, is without support and illogical. Porn addicts do not bond to computers or to monitors – or they would never buy a new one, and would have no need to turn it on because they are in love with the laptop, not the content it supplies. Nor do they bond to porn – or they would watch the same video over and over and never seek new material. This is real simple: novelty seeking is the neurological opposite of bonding. Once pair-bonded, exposure to that one individual induces the release of dopamine & endogenous opioids. We call it love. Pair-bonded animals, such as voles, will often attack voles of the opposite sex. They don’t want novelty. Oxytocin is necessary for pair-bonding.
With internet porn the user quickly habituates to the same image or the same old video (all studies show this too). Neurologically, habituation is caused by a decline or absence of dopamine. When exposed to a new image, or a new video, or new porn star, this registers as novel – causing a sharp spike in reward system dopamine. Receiving a blast of dopamine (and likely norepinephrine) for a screen-based novel sexual partner is the direct neurological opposite of pair-bonding.
Why am I so adamant about all this? Because the naysayers could use this particular claim “that oxytocin bonds the user to porn” as a prime example of pseudoscience. They could point to this single claim as a way to dismiss the person making the claim as a crackpot. I’ve seen these claims happen a lot. Sorry for the rant, but I’ve been ranting about this for 10 years now.
Best,
Gary
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