Online Pornography's Effects, and a New Way to Fight Them
HOLLY FINN,online.wsj.com
There is a fix for the brain-altering effects of pornography
It was suspiciously warm, the reception given to a study published a week
ago in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. A survey of 4,600 young people in the
Netherlands, aged 15 to 25, found the behavioral impact of pornography—most
of it online now—to be surprisingly small. Reaction to the news? People
didn't whoop exactly. But you know they wanted to.
Pundits loved the contrarian view, parents loved being let off the hook. Of
course, to the study's author, who said "previous studies could have
overestimated the association between pornography and sexual behaviors,"
there is a better response: Sure, fella. The same way we overestimated the
association between alcohol and reckless driving. Let me take you for a
spin.
One estimate now puts the average age of first viewing at 11.
For a year I've been asking young folks about pornography's effect—and
they've been honest. When I asked one successful 29-year-old last week if
she feels porn influences her life, in bed or out, her answer was typical.
"A thousand percent," she said. This woman finds herself repeatedly in
porn-informed situations that are unpleasing, even unpleasant,
while—crucially—her partner feels nothing's amiss. This isn't about one
girl's luck or one guy's moves. It's about a generation of them. I've never
felt so lucky to be over 40.
Today 12% of websites are pornographic, and 40 million Americans are regular
visitors—including 70% of 18- to 34-year-olds, who look at porn at least
once a month, according to a recent survey by Cosmopolitan magazine (which,
let's face it, is the authority here). Fully 94% of therapists in another
survey reported seeing an increase in people addicted to porn. It has become
a whole generation's sex education and could be the same for the next—they
are fumbling around online, not in the back seat. One estimate now puts the
average age of first viewing at 11. Imagine seeing "Last Tango in Paris"
before your first kiss.
Countless studies connect porn with a new and negative attitude to intimate
relationships, and neurological imaging confirms it. Susan Fiske, professor
of psychology at Princeton University, used MRI scans in 2010 to analyze men
watching porn. Afterward, brain activity revealed, they looked at women more
as objects than as people. The new DSM-5 will add the diagnosis "Hypersexual
Disorder," which includes compulsive pornography use.
Repetitive viewing of pornography resets neural pathways, creating the need
for a type and level of stimulation not satiable in real life. The user is
thrilled, then doomed. But the evolutionary plasticity of our mind makes
this damage reversible. In "The Brain That Changes Itself," psychiatrist
Norman Doidge writes about patients who overused porn and were able to quit,
cold turkey, and change their brains back. They just had to stop watching
it. Completely.
None of the men were addictive types, or kooks, Dr. Doidge points out. But
"because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images
increased at the expense of what had previously attracted them"—including
girlfriends and wives. When the doctor explained what was happening to them,
they "stopped using their computers for a period to weaken their problematic
neuronal networks, and their appetite for porn withered away."
Such a no-shenanigans approach is becoming protocol. At Utah's Desert Solace
porn treatment center, there's education about "pornography as a brain
disease (not moral failure)," a 10:30 curfew and a ban on all laptops,
Nooks, Kindles, iPads and Wi-Fi-enabled devices. Among the young people I've
asked, only teetotalism worked. Otherwise, as one put it, "the creep creeps
back."
This rehabilitative mental process, it turns out, is a lot like the one we
use when we fall in love, getting over one person and meeting someone new.
First we "unlearn" old pathways, cutting and rewiring billions of
connections in our brain. Then we make fresh ones. So, in a way, love
actually conquers all—even porn. Please tell the nearest teen.