Sexual brain training matters—especially during adolescence
(Note: View numerous comments below this article)
It’s normal for kids to want to learn all about sex, especially during puberty and adolescence. This is when reproduction becomes the brain’s top priority. For this we can thank the specifics of teen-brain development.
Think of an adolescent jungle primate watching another band with such fascination that he (or she, in some species) leaves his companions, and endures the slings and arrows of being without allies at the bottom of another troop’s pecking order—all for a chance to get it on with exotic hotties in the future. The things our genes do to guarantee genetic diversity!
Now, fast-forward to a young guy discovering the mind-boggling novelty of Internet erotica:
I started looking at Internet porn when I was 11. I immediately became hooked, and spent hours daily viewing porn. Simply seeing a pair of exposed breasts was enough to get me off. But desensitization soon kicked in, and I began developing fetishes to get the same hit from porn. It started out with different ethnicities, then lesbians, then watersports, then scat/beastiality/BDSM/tranny. And then any combination of the above to create the sickest porn imaginable. I can remember sitting in school fantasizing about sick porn that I could search for that night.
What is it about the adolescent brain that makes this guy’s experience not unusual? Answer: During adolescence a temporary neurological imbalance develops. The “sex, drugs and rock & roll” part of the brain is in overdrive. The “let’s give this some thought” part is still under construction, and won’t reach maturity until adulthood.
This recipe for impulsive and risky behavior rearranges other adolescent-mammal brains too. It is evolution’s way of driving the brash independence many young mammals need as they seek mates and carve out territories. In the brain’s cost-benefit analysis, the scale is tipping heavily in the direction of possible rewards.
There’s a kicker though. The capacity of our teen to wire up new sexual associations mushrooms around 11 or 12. At this time billions of new neural connections (synapses) create endless possibilities. However, by adulthood his brain must prune his neural circuitry to leave him with a manageable assortment of choices. By his twenties, he may not exactly be stuck with the sexual proclivities he falls into during adolescence, but they can be like deep ruts in his brain—not easy to ignore or reconfigure.
Sexual-cue exposure matters more during adolescence than at any other time in life. Now, add to this incendiary reality the lighter fluid of today’s off-the-wall erotica available at the tap of a finger. Is it any surprise that some teens wire semi-permanently to constant cyber novelty instead of potential mates? Or wire their sexual responsiveness to things that are unrelated to their sexual orientation? Or manage to desensitize their brains—and spiral into porn addiction?
Incidentally, are you a guy remembering your own adolescence—and how you could never climax enough during those years? Perhaps you’re supposing that Internet porn would have been a splendid innovation. If so, read these two articles: Porn, Novelty and the Coolidge Effect and Porn Then and Now: Welcome to Brain Training. Porn, its content, the way it’s delivered, and its potential effects on the brain have changed radically. For today’s users, more orgasm can lead to less satisfaction.
Teen brains differ from adult brains
When we dug into the brain research on adolescents, we were astonished at how malleable teen brains are. Radical changes in the sexual environment hit them hardest. Here are four vulnerabilities unique to teen brains:
1. Much stronger “Go get it!” signals
The reward circuitry is the core of all drives (including libido), emotions, likes, dislikes, motivation…and addiction. In adolescence, sex hormones propel this ancient circuitry into a window of hyperactivity, which subsides by the early twenties. As journalist David Dobbs explains.
We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected. … This love of the thrill peaks at around age 15.
The brain’s sensitivity to dopamine, the “Gotta get it!” neurochemical crests, which spurs novelty-seeking, overrides executive control, and helps consolidate learning and habits.
In fact, teen brains respond to anything perceived as exciting with twice to four times the reward-circuitry activation of adults thanks to their extra dopamine sensitivity and bigger spikes of dopamine. Both novelty and searching/seeking spike dopamine in all human brains, but cyber erotica’s endless possibilities prove an irresistible lure for many teens.
The first time I looked at those hot pictures the feeling seemed to be out of this world, just ineffable. Suddenly I knew there was something worth living for, everything else was just boring, everyday life. I fled to this artificial drug: porn and masturbation. It was not unusual to watch porn for hours a day.
“Ineffable?” Yes. Teens are more likely to register sexual arousal, and other highs, as transcendental, memorable experiences. That is why you can still recall the shimmering details of that first centerfold. But there’s more evidence of hypersensitivity to thrills. (Click chart to enlarge.)
Alas, their heightened sensitivity to reward automatically renders teens more susceptible to addiction than if they encountered the same thrills later in life.
2. Decreased sensitivity to aversion
Having spent Friday night playing “World of Warcraft” until 4AM, while washing down eight slices of pizza and a bag of Dorritos with a six-pack of Mountain Dew, our hero is ready to do it all again come Saturday night. Research shows that teens are less deterred by symptoms of excess. Aversion is a reward-circuitry function, and teens can handle more wattage before their circuits overload
Ever wonder why Slasher + Teens (sex)2 = Summer Box-Office Hit? It all comes down to the marvels of the brain. No wonder porn images that adults find shocking, “eeeew,” or violent, register as abnormally exciting to teens. Also keep in mind that teens are less able to take other people’s feelings into account (even bad actors).
When I was 14/15 I encountered [transexual] porn while surfing the Internet. I still remember the graphic nature of the advert. Something just snapped in my pubescent brain. All the straight and lesbian porn I had watched for several years seemed ordinary. My heart started racing. My head was thumping, and the fear of getting caught…not just watching porn, but watching what some could consider not exactly 100% straight porn…made it all the more memorable. Today I remember crying after I finished. I didn’t know what came over me. I was so terrified I wanted to curl up into a ball in my bedroom. But I didn’t stop watching it. I was still attracted to girls, but with the [transexual] porn, I could orgasm quicker.
3. Weaker “Stop!” signals
The sex hormones that initiate teen sensitivity to thrills unfortunately do nothing to speed up development of their brain’s self-control center. A teen brain is like a new car with a Ferrari engine and Ford Pinto brakes.
At puberty, an extremely reactive “accelerator” comes online: the brain’s emotion-motivation mechanism, or reward circuitry, located below the rational cortex. It overpowers the “brakes,” the brain’s “CEO” or prefrontal cortex in the forehead, which won’t fully mature for a decade. The latter assesses risk, thinks ahead, chooses priorities, allocates attention and controls impulses.
Meanwhile, teens often base their choices on their emotional impulses as opposed to reasoning or planning. Later, as the prefrontal cortex matures, there will be fewer “I can’t believe he did that” moments. Teens make sounder judgments and modulate mood, plan and remember more effectively.
In the meantime, teens have trouble perceiving the consequences of “going for it.” Again, this is no accident. Daredevil tendencies during adolescence serve species that must take risks then to strike out on their own or find mates. In the case of adolescent humans, evolution has simply not had time to adapt to the hazards of recreational drugs, fast cars, or excessive consumption of junk food, online gaming or Internet porn. That’s why we have the Darwin Awards.
4. Extensive pruning throughout adolescence
Ideally, between the ages of 10 and 13, a critical developmental period, we humans are exposed to age-appropriate sexual behavior. We learn how to flirt and connect with potential partners. This is critical because during adolescence our brains hone themselves to make our familiar activities and thought patterns more efficient. To accomplish this, our brains actually eradicate unused neural connections, while strengthening others.
No wonder mood swings are a hallmark of adolescence! Together, genes and environment sculpt the clay of a teen’s frontal cortex. As use-it-or-lose-it proceeds, the brain reorganizes and fine-tunes itself:
The cortex prunes away little used circuits, while strengthening well worn neural pathways. Nerve cell axons in favored pathways become better insulated with myelin, increasing the speed of nerve impulses. Little branches that receive messages (called dendrites) grow like vines to better hear the incoming signal. The connections between axons and dendrite (synapses) multiply on strong circuits and vanish on weaker ones. In the end you have memories, skills, habits, preferences and ways of coping that stand the test of time. (ibid., Dobbs, emphasis added)
In less glowing terms, we restrict our options—without realizing how critical our choices were during our final, pubescent, neuronal growth spurt. According to researcher Jay Giedd, (See this talk – The Teenage Brain: Dr. Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health by Jay Giedd )
If a teen is doing music or sports or academics, those are the cells and connections that will be hardwired. If they’re lying on the couch or playing video games or MTV [or Internet porn], those are the cells and connections that are going to survive.
This is one reason why polls asking teens how Internet porn use is affecting them are unlikely to reveal the extent of porn’s effects. Kids who have never masturbated without porn have no idea how it is affecting them. (It’s like asking them, “How has being male affected you?”) They have nothing to compare with. Keep in mind that older porn users often do not connect their porn-related symptoms with heavy porn use—even when they develop porn-induced sexual dysfunction (PISD). Porn always seems like the “cure,” because even if they can’t get it up for sex, they can usually get it up if they watch enough extreme porn. Can we expect teens to figure it out?
Same problem with asking them about porn’s effects on mood. Users always “feel better” when using, even if the more they use, the worse they feel overall. So why would porn be seen as the problem? Moreover, when users try to quit, they sometimes face weeks of severe withdrawal symptoms, so controlling use can be mistaken for the problem instead of the solution.
Fact is, most heavy users who are going to hit a wall from excess, don’t do so until their twenties—just about the time their reward circuitry has curtailed its hypersensitivity. For example, by adulthood, dopamine receptors in the reward circuitry gradually decrease by a third or a half. Now, thrills aren’t as thrilling, and the consequences of excess are more disconcerting. Once nature’s foot is off the reward accelerator, it’s time for a hunter-gatherer to settle down and raise some youngins.
No birds or bees, just pixels please
Meanwhile, the adolescent brain is ripe for a perfect storm as the genetically driven hunt for novelty and the unexpected collides with the endless erotica of the Internet. Hypnotic Web-surfing—requiring no effort but scrolling and fapping—replaces leaving one’s tribe to search the savanna for fertile mates.
When I was 18, I had sex for the first time. When she said she was “down all the way”, I ran to the nearest store to pick up condoms like I had the Reaper chasing me. After the deed, my thoughts were, “Hmm…it didn’t feel that much different from masturbation, and it required a hell of a lot more work! Meh, I’ll stick to porn and not bother with a girlfriend.”
Another guy responded,
My thoughts EXACTLY. Just back pain, muscle strain, breathlessness, sweatiness and performance anxiety. MUCH less stress to just crack one off, plus you got your own ‘Iron Fist’ that gets you off better than that real vagina. Not only that, you always get a ‘good visual’ with a ‘porn girlfriend.’ You can see all those beautiful body contours in perfect lighting, breasts n’ butts n’ thighs look glorious, and *always* visible. In real life that’s rarely the case. The first time I did it, I didn’t truly enjoy it (even though we both came a lot). My first time should’ve felt like a TRIUMPH, given how ‘successful’ it was, but it felt artificial. It was then I KNEW there was perhaps something a tad wrong. The sex in my *mind* always seemed sexy and enjoyable. The *real* sex I had was primarily industrial and unexciting. Not good.
Today’s teens sometimes wire their arousal to Internet porn’s unnaturally intense, synthetic stimuli for as long as a decade before they try to connect with real partners. (See pages of self-reports of adolescent porn use.) The situation is even more precarious if a teen’s innocent pursuit of jollies has led to more fundamental brain changes, i.e., addiction. Again, teens are more susceptible to addiction than adults, due to their hyperactive reward circuitry and immature executive control.
Courting disaster
More important, while glued to his screen(s), a young guy is not learning courtship skills. Equally, he is not spending time around real potential mates—the very tasks for which mammalian adolescence evolved. His brain is not wiring his sexual pleasure to flirting, pheromones or three-dimensional partners of normal proportions providing ordinary simulation. In days gone by, nervous young men fumbled through one-on-one, vanilla sex for a bit before graduating to the kama sutra. Now, a 17-year old virgin envisions his first time with his first love as involving two of her friends, handcuffs, strap-on gear and a massive amount of lube.
Nor will our hero be able to explain to a future sweetheart his apparent lack of ardor, his fading erection and condom mishaps, or his frantic attempts to stay hard by fantasizing about watching someone have sex. He doesn’t have a clue why he isn’t responding, or how to go about repairing the damage. Nor do his peers.
I’m really afraid that since all my brain knows is watching porn (these are really the only two sexual encounters I’ve ever had, and they’re both complete failures) that I’ve messed up my brain soooooo much that I’ll never get better. I mean, all my sexual experiences from my youth are from porn. For the most formative years of my life, I’ve only ever orgasmed to porn. That’s all my brain knows. Will I ever be able to get it up with a normal woman? Will I ever be attracted to a normal woman the way I am to those pixels on the computer screen? I’m really afraid that I’ve messed up myself for good. Can I change?
Alas, many mates are too confused or hurt to hang around in such a disheartening situation. Resulting performance anxiety makes our hero’s situation worse. Could this explain why 36 percent of young Japanese guys and 20 percent of young Frenchmen have no interest in real partners? Or why abstinence rates in the States are increasing?
Today, a 13-year old’s sexual pathways are chiseled by hardcore porn, multiple windows, and constant clicking. In contrast, Dad’s matured to Sally next door and his fertile imagination. At first, we were astonished to see some older porn addicts recover from PISD (porn-induced sexual dysfunction) more quickly than young ones. Is it because thirty- and forty-somethings had well established brain pathways relating to connections with real partners from pre-Internet days? Please watch this September 2015 TEDx talk by a young man who need extra time and relearning/rewiring to overcome porn-induced ED and anorgasmia:
The good news is that brains retain some plasticity even after teen years. When a guy stops using synthetic sexual cues (or fantasizing to them) for 2-3 months, his brain’s recovering reward circuitry begins to ‘look around’ for the sexual cues it evolved to find. After all, its top priority is passing on genes, so it wants action. Gradually it wires the neuronal circuitry for natural cues more strongly to the brain’s pleasure center. The girl next door looks more interesting.
Said a 21-year old guy three months after giving up porn/masturbation:
I remember saying to my girlfriend, during my very worst days of porn use and porn-related erectile dysfunction, that it didn’t feel like I’d had sex yet. She didn’t really understand, and I couldn’t explain myself. But last night, OMG it felt so good. I could feel everything, and it was great. My penile sensitivity has increased loads. For the first time in my life, it feels like I’ve lost my virginity.
Another guy:
[Early twenties] Day 43 now, I am definitely seeing a girl as the source of my arousal now, rather than seeing her as an image that I can store up for later use. I see a hot girl now and think ‘That’s what I want’, and try to take steps to meet her. It’s been a gradual flipping of the switch. I’m probably about 90% there, but I can remember being 10%, 20% etc.
Today, average young Westerners are feverishly cultivating neuronal connections between all manner of Internet porn and their sexual response. No longer can we take for granted that teen arousal arises from some mysterious, individual, unchanging, core sexual identity. Thanks to the teen brain’s incessant quest for novelty to relieve its owner’s ever present boredom, some teens manage to wire in sexual tastes that cause them to doubt their fundamental sexual orientation.
A few caveats
Adolescence is a unique period of brain development. In the right environment, it’s highly functional and adaptive. No matter how keen hunter-gatherer teens were to seek thrills, they were also like bumper-car drivers. They had few opportunities to wire their sexual responsiveness to anything beyond the neighboring hotties.
The brains of today’s kids are equally eager, yet they’re titillated with abnormally stimulating erotica that pushes all their buttons: passion for novelty, delight in shocking things, potential for overriding normal satiety, and desire for sexual instruction with “adult” cachet.
Adults tend to assume that Internet porn use is harmless because “porn has been around a long time.” But how many males born, say, in 1960 started daily porn use circa 1973? Especially the hard-core, endlessly novel porn available now?
Today’s kids can’t necessarily stop themselves:
For years, like since I was 11-years old, I have been looking at porn and masturbating. I just can’t resist it and I do it too much now. I wanna stop it now. I’m 15 years old and wanna stop it because I think it’s affecting my social life, relationships, and school grades. How do I stop?
Adults also often assume kids will naturally leave impulsive behaviors behind at adulthood. Indeed, studies suggest that college-age kids do tend to outgrow binge drinking, pot use, etc. However, Internet porn habits may prove to be different. Did the young adults who outgrow substance abuse start their daily drinking/pot use at age 11?
[Age 35] When I was in my early teens and my mum would take us to the library, I’d sneak off to find an erotic novel. Just the talk/description of a woman would get me going. God, how I long for those days again LOL. Today, you can get ‘maxed out’ on porn. In the early stages it was a novelty and hard to get hold off. Over the last few years, porn is always on tap. Now it’s a necessity rather than a thrill/reward. How sad is that? I have no moral objection to porn. In fact quite the opposite, but when you get to my state, it’s no longer a positive, just a huge negative. A big, fat anchor around my neck.
Remember, learning to binge drink or get high isn’t the brains’ prime evolutionary imperative; reproduction is. Food habits may be a better analogy. Do 22-year olds suddenly change their habitual food choices? Now that junk foods are ubiquitous, 4 out of 5 adult Americans are overweight. Nearly half of those obese (i.e., hooked on food). Do they change their ingrained sexual tastes? Perhaps not unless they hit the wall of PISD.
Long-term effects
Obviously, watching Internet porn from an early age does not mean the user will end up a deviant. Or more sexually active, or more violent toward partners. Although some may believe it’s normal for sex partners to relish “facials” while having every orifice filled with objects. Tragically, however, a percentage of users will end up addicted. And that percentage may be higher than we think, given the rates of Internet addiction already affecting adolescents. The rates are 6-18%, depending upon whether Italy, China or Hungary did the research.
For many, the lingering effects of heavy Internet porn use are likely to be analogous to effects on online gamers. Overstimulation leaves the brain with a need for intense stimulation (unless it is consciously restored to normal sensitivity). Other activities seem boring in comparison. In this short TED talk, The Demise of Guys? famous psychologist Philip Zimbardo describes the ill effects of widespread “arousal addiction.”
Such effects impact relationships. Constant novelty is one of the prime reasons Internet porn is a superstimulus for the brain. Erotic training that relies on novelty as aphrodisiac can condition users such that familiar partners quickly lose their luster—confining users affected to shallow hook-ups. Also, the non-climax aspects of sex (skin-to-skin contact, kissing, comforting stroking, playful behavior, etc.) may be too unfamiliar and subtle to register as deliciously rewarding. Unfortunately, these are the very behaviors that soothe the brain and help couples strengthen their bonds.
First guy – Perhaps it is the easiness and comfort of just sitting in front of my computer jerking to images that I don’t have to please. I can go at my own pace and not have to worry about them. Having a real girl in my bed kind of distracts me.
Second guy – I don’t use porn, but going through my history of images, I realize that I sometimes look at thousands of images in an hour. I’m looking for that right girl or image that [gets me to climax]. Porn is not what’s desensitizing my sexual responsiveness; I think my huge Internet harem is.
Brain plasticity education
Maybe no one should be turned loose on the planet today without thorough education about the brain’s reward circuitry and its unique vulnerabilities during adolescence. That’s when it’s bombarded by junk food, drugs, video games, i-Phones and online erotica. Why not teach kids the simplified science behind the potential effects of extreme stimuli on the brain? (Watch Things You Didn’t Know About Porn, for possible concepts suitable for 10-13-year olds.)
Today, adolescents can (and do) wire up their brains to random erotic caricatures that their ancestors never imagined, let alone viewed intently for years before mating. Users may know that porn’s cartoonish 2-D stimuli are nearly as unreal as Santa. Yet those who inadvertently wire their ability to climax to gonzo porn themes are sometimes horrified. Many are afraid to ask for help because they think they are hopeless perverts. Some are even suicidal.
Advisers who don’t understand the difference between fundamental sexual orientation and randomly acquired, plastic tastes can increase an adolescent’s angst. Sadly, few experts yet know enough about brain plasticity to help kids rewire, which results in some sorry advice. (see – Young Porn Users Need Longer To Recover Their Mojo)
As pubescent brains are going to start wiring up sexual tastes anyway, give kids the facts and explicit information they are seeking—without the implausible scenarios porn makers must rely on to lure viewers whose brains have grown numb to subtler sexual pleasures. Teach kids the difference between sexual orientation and sexual tastes, and how the two can slip out of sync with habitual use of extreme stimulation. Also, teach them the behavioral-addiction signs to watch for, and how to reverse those changes.
[Age 17 arrived with weak erections, and was still showing limited signs of erectile health on Day 50 of no porn/masturbation] Day 76: Feeling great, way happier and more energetic and way more libido. My morning wood this morning was ridiculous—it literally wouldn’t go down for like 20 minutes even standing up! I’m gonna give it 90 days so I’ve done a full 3 months and then I should be completely back to normal and ready to try and find a partner. So relieved this actually works.
I’m 27 and I have a science and medical education, and I strongly believe that this brain-plasticity viewpoint about Internet porn needs to get out there. We’re losing the opportunity to educate young men who are suffering from physiological problems within their brains. Basically, I wish I had learned about this 15 years ago.
END OF ARTICLE
This post captures the essence of why Johnny shouldn’t use porn during adolescence
I finally lost my virginity, and during it I was watching porn in my head
I started jerking off at 15 and I started watching porn at 16.
I’ve been watching it and jerking off to it more or less consistently since then, for the past 7 years.
A few years ago I tried /r/nofap pretty obsessively, then I found /r/pornfree and realized that was the more important issue; after that, I became very anti-porn, while still not being able to shake the habit–despite a clean stretch of 6 months, I always, inevitably, ended up coming back.
For a long time, so far in my adult life actually, I identified as a /r/foreveralone, and almost an /r/incel, though not to those extremes. A combination of social anxiety, depression and severe self-image and self-esteem issues culminated in me being one very lonely, afraid, self-loathing, resentful, envious, and at times self-harming young adult.
That was my life, that was my identity, and that was what I would be until the day I died, presumably within the next five or so years when I would finally work up the courage to kill myself with the quick pull of a trigger, instead of the slow process of drinking and self-sabotaging and refusing to take care of myself.
Then three months ago, out of nowhere, this girl showed up in my life who changed everything.
I’m now in therapy twice a week, I’m learning to love and accept myself, I have a social life, and I’m pretty sure I’m in love with this woman. She’s 12 years older than I am but she doesn’t seem like she is. She act younger, she looks younger. And she’s told me I look and act older than most guys my age. We became friends instantly and pretty quickly became partners with a very deep emotional bond. We’ve both been through some shit and we’ve both learned to deal with it in different ways. She’s showed me that I’ve been doing life wrong and that living CAN be a profound experience full of excitement, wonder, confusion, joy, and occasional but inevitable pain and suffering. I no longer want to die. I want to live, and I want to experience life with her.
But that old identity that I constructed for myself over the years…it hasn’t gone away. It’s still there, and it’s eating away at me. I don’t need to explain to you guys how porn fucked up my brain, after being deprived of intimacy and physical contact for the first 23 years of my life, because you all know how it works. I knew, deep down, that it was messing with my perception, distorting it and twisting it all around into unrecognizable shapes, but it took finally losing my virginity, to this person I care deeply about and am attracted to not only physically, but emotionally, to fully realize how damaged my conscience is by years of internet porn.
My biggest worry about losing the v-card was that I’d finish too quickly. The opposite was true. I couldn’t finish, at all. I had to do it myself. She was totally cool with it, and understood, because she knew going solo was what I was used to, but she doesn’t know how deep it goes. I’m attracted to her normally, when she’s dressed, but once the clothes come off, something changes in my head. Suddenly I just realize she’s not any of those thousands of girls in porn with impossibly perfect bodies, she’s a real person. And I love her. I love her personality, I love her smile, and I love her soul. She cares so deeply about me and is always saying how in love with me she is, and I am too, except for the physical attraction part.
I literally could not stay aroused during sex. I stayed hard without much trouble, but I just wasn’t into it. And I didn’t feel anything. Not during intercourse, not during handjobs, not during oral, but during and ONLY during masturbation. It had to be ME, and MY hand, and what’s worse, MY imagination doing all the work. No matter what she did or said, no matter how much I looked at her and tried to reason with myself, I couldn’t feel anything. I was just going through the motions, with no feeling.
I did end up finishing, twice, and both times were from self-stimulation, and both times I wasn’t with her mentally, I was off somewhere else, switching between tabs opened from bookmarked memories, images and sequences and sounds from a terrifyingly large database of pixels burned into my brain. That’s how I got off. I had to watch porn in my head.
That’s fucked.
There’s this amazing woman who means more to me than anyone or anything else in this world, who saved my life by becoming a part of it, who I love on a profound, almost cosmic level, that’s how powerful it is. She’s my best friend and I love her and I miss her every second I’m not with her. But there’s this unsettlingly dominant part of my head that would rather fuck 100 other girls over her, girls younger and more attractive, girls who don’t care about me, girls I don’t care about. Maybe it’s because I haven’t gotten the chance yet to be with anyone else, or to experience any of that, but I crave it.
That’s the one thing that makes me uncertain about being with her, to dedicating myself to her and only her. I still feel like a horny teenager with raging hormones who salivates over every hot female he sees, and wants to do all this stuff to them, kinky and sometimes degrading stuff based on what I’ve seen–seen, not felt–in years and years of watching porn. It’s all visual. All these things that turn me on and get me going, these specific interests and triggers that get me hard and get me off, they’re all visual stimuli. There’s no feeling involved, no touch, no smell, no taste, no emotion. Just visuals and sounds, but mostly visuals. And that’s how my brain has wired itself now.
It’s not at all how I imagined it, when I’m actually in the moment, experiencing it for real, there’s no pleasure, there’s no arousal, no excitement, just…emptiness, emptiness where there should be something special. I feel disconnected and ashamed with myself now that I’m finally using my body to get what I’ve wanted for years, and the only way I can satisfy my desires, like I have been for the past 8 years, to do it to myself. And when I’m away from her and I start wanting it, I know where to go. All I have to do is open my laptop, the one lover who’s always been there for me.
Even when there’s no screen in front of me, the images are still there. I can summon them and conjure them at will and use them to make myself cum, while I’m looking my girlfriend in the eyes, while she’s just with me in that moment, and I’m off in some unknown hotel bedroom or kitchen or bathroom with another woman who I’ll never meet. It feels sickening to me. It literally feels like cheating. I watched porn just 30 minutes ago and jerked off and orgasmed and it felt amazing and emptying and emotionally draining in the way it always does, and my girlfriend is out of town for the next few days, and I swear to god, I feel like I’ve been unfaithful to her. I love her with all my heart, but my brain only has eyes for everyone else. I’m a piece of shit human being.
For more relevant information:
- (Study) “Pornographic exposure over the life course and the severity of sexual offenses: Imitation and cathartic effects” Adolescent exposure made offenders more violent and humiliating than adult exposure.
- Porning too much? by Robert Taibbi, L.C.S.W.
- Did porn warp me forever? (Salon.com)
- The Teenage Brain: Dr. Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health
- (Video) inside the adolescent brain – Talking Point with Dr Jay Giedd
- Insight Into the Teenage Brain: Adriana Galván at TEDxYouth@Caltech
- Teenage Brain: A work in progress (Fact Sheet) NIH
- FRONTLINE – One Reason Teens Respond Differently to the World: Immature Brain Circuitry
- FRONTLINE- INSIDE THE TEENAGE BRAIN (Documentary)
- The Brain: The Trouble With Teens
- Study: Anxiety increases sexual arousal (1983)
- Human Sexual Development is Subject to Critical Period Learning: Implications for Sexual Addiction, Sexual Therapy, and for Child Rearing
- Influence of unrestrained access to erotica on adolescents’ and young adults’ dispositions toward sexuality
- Brain study reveals how teens learn differently than adults (2016)
UPDATES:
YBOP presentation: Adolescent Brain Meets Highspeed Internet Porn (2013)
Study – Genital Cortex: Development of the Genital Homunculus (2019)
Unlike other body parts, the genitals of the “sensory homunculus” grows substantially during puberty.
We wonder if the molding of the genital representation by initial sexual interaction contributes to its huge mnemonic weight and its powerful effects on the perception of one’s own sexuality. …
Relevant lists of studies:
- Porn/sex addiction? This page lists 50 neuroscience-based studies (MRI, fMRI, EEG, neuropsychological, hormonal). All provide strong support for the addiction model as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies.
- The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 25 recent neuroscience-based literature reviews & commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.
- Signs of addiction and escalation to more extreme material? Over 50 studies reporting findings consistent with escalation of porn use (tolerance), habituation to porn, and even withdrawal symptoms (all signs and symptoms associated with addiction). Additional page with 10 studies reporting withdrawal symptoms in porn users.
- Porn and sexual problems? This list contains over 40 studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli. The first 7 studies in the list demonstrate causation, as participants eliminated porn use and healed chronic sexual dysfunctions.
- Porn’s effects on relationships? Over 75 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.
- Porn use affecting emotional and mental health? Over 80 studies link porn use to poorer mental-emotional health & poorer cognitive outcomes.
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UK Users must opt in for web porn
Comments from Reuniting: Puppy Love vs. PMO
Puppy Love vs. PMO
Porn’s Ability to Arrest Psychological Development
All right–
I’ve been reading all the articles and comments on this site for a while now. As with most websites, I don’t usually go through the effort to make an account just to send in my two cents’ worth. But because the authors and users of this website have done such a good job of pinning down the effects porn has on one’s sexual development, I felt I needed to demonstrate several points that the site dances around but doesn’t actually come out and say. Perhaps my own past illuminates these concepts more clearly to me than to other people.
Right around the time I turned 21, I met a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl at a college internship. For the first month, as my very first love blossomed, I hardly noticed what was taking place. Then, one day, as if struck by an arrow, being in her presence made me feel fleshy and hot, almost to the point of losing control of myself. The subsequent two years (after having been rejected by her) have been pure hell. The first year consisted of my inability to fall asleep and stay asleep. I suffered heart palpitations, insomnia, serious weight loss and weight gain, trembling, pallor, intrusive thoughts. It’s like I was stuck in a dream; the harder I fought to escape, the more strongly the dream consumed me. She had entered into a short-term relationship with another guy for about two months, and the images of midnight soirees filled my mind and imagination. I was plagued by thoughts of the sex I saw in pornography, and it disturbed me on a very deep level. As a virgin whose sex education stemmed only from internet porn, the idea that the love of your life spent night after night getting faced fucked by a guy she barely knew sent me over the edge.
This past year, I’ve been ruminating on what went wrong, and searching for answers to many perplexing questions. Why did I fall in love at 22 for the first time, when it seemed like my peers had been experiencing this since they were 16 years old? How come I had not liked anyone in real life up until that point? How come no one up until that point caught my eye, and why didn’t I like people in degrees, like others did? It was as if a switch had suddenly been turned on in my brain–an all-or-nothing response resulted.
There is a danger that comes with all this contemplation. For one, I’m moving into territory which cannot be measured or proven, or at least not measured in any reliable/valid way. No one knows where the brain stops and the mind begins, so for all the neuroscientific studies out there on porn addiction, the only real currency I have in this matter is absolute honesty and authenticity. I can’t prove the answers to these questions, but I can be as honest and truthful as possible. It’s all I’ve got.
Looking back, I know now that *part* of the reason I was different from the mainstream was that I was a legitimate late-bloomer, as my mom and uncle were. Until I turned 18 years old, I was only capable of getting sexually aroused by really hot girls. Impossibly hot girls–in PlayBoy, porn, etc. No one in real life measured up to this impossibly high standard. And on the rare occasion that they did, there was no impulse to *do* anything with them (i.e., kiss, cuddle, makeout, caress, hump). I was just sexually aroused by them. Now, I could look at pretty girls and objectively see that they were attractive. But there was no real difference in feeling than in intellectually recognizing a handsome man. They were the same to me.
Two months before my 18th birthday, however, things changed. Three girls in my senior class caught my eye, and I developed an almost imperceptible crush on them. I don’t even know if you would call it a crush. “Intrigued” might be a better word. But those fleeting moments evaporated, and I went to college 3000 mi away from home, to an Ivy League school no less.
The first year of college yielded no interest in girls. If my sex/love life were a closet, you would find nothing but crickets, cobwebs, silence, and darkness. My friends wondered whether I was gay…but mostly theorized I was asexual. I didn’t think much of it, considering I was focused very much on school and other matters. By at the age of 19, I had my first real crush, which even then I had not noticed. I attributed most of the feelings for the person’s rejection of me into depression and the cold winters of New York. Ergo, none of this even registered with me.
After that, nothing for another two years. I was officially headed to the margins of society.
Diversity is a concept in evolution and natural science studies that help promote a species’ ability to adapt and survive. In other words, we’re all meant to be different, because without our diversity we cannot grow and evolve. But underneath all of those differences, how would you know if there’s something that needs fixing? How does someone separate true malfunction from mere uniqueness?
After meeting the blonde girl, I set out on a quest to find answer to some of my questions about why I had had no real interest in girls until I was 22 years old. Helen Fisher was the first scientist I stumbled upon; her research on personality provided some insight into answers to my questions. For example, she noted that one of the four basic human psychological temperaments (the director/a result of testosterone) had no real interest in dating. Their tough minds were exact and to the point; nothing they do has no specific purpose. Everything is a competition with them. Their interests are very deep and narrow, as opposed to being very broad and shallow. They are very intense people, who easily become absorbed (sometimes obsessed) with something that interests them. The same goes with dating, she says. They are not very interested in casual dating, because it doesn’t make sense to them. But when they find someone they’re interested in, they don’t stop until they get what they want.
My temperament, based on her quizzes, is that of the Director.
So part of the reason I believe I didn’t engage in dating relationships until 22 was simply a matter of my personality. I’m just not a very light person. Add to that, being a late bloomer in the first place.
But there’s more to it. My being in love disturbed me in a way, because I couldn’t suddenly understand what I saw in porn. How could I do something that degrading to someone that, as Robin Williams would say, “was an Angel put on earth by God himself”? In the same way a kid witnesses murder scenarios in horror movies but doesn’t actually lose sleep over the experience because some part of him understands that he’s watching pixels not reality, I too didn’t think much of the porn I had seen. It didn’t really occur to me that this was something real people did in the real world. Everyone, mostly. And this realization forced me to come up with emotional/psychological solutions to very real hang-ups I have about sex. Here are the things I’ve noticed no one seems to outright say.
1. Real life sex partners don’t see each other as sacks of flesh. Kids raised on porn for their sex education don’t understand many things that adults assume are just “givens”. When a young man sees sex on tape for the first time, like I did, he doesn’t understand that people who have sex generally have feelings for each other. He doesn’t understand that what he “sees” is different from what the participants “see,” in the sense that they see an object of affection, while he sees a sex object and assumes the participants do, too. For someone who has never had a crush, but watches porn consistently, I came to believe that when you look at a woman you want to have sex with, you are supposed to see her LITERALLY as a piece of meat. I came to believe that people suddenly had animalistic urges to pound flesh, without acknowledging or realizing the other person’s humanity. This is a very hard idea to articulate to people, because when I say “piece of meat,” most people subconsciously assume I’m being at least a little metaphorical. But the truth is that I thought men and women who had sex became animals for thirty minutes of their day and had intense urges to put genitals in their mouths for its own sake. The act, I thought, had absolutely no deeper meaning; it was, in my eyes, on the level of defecation, urination, or eating potato chips. It was just something that you do. Inhibitions were the only reason I thought everyone was not sleeping with each other.
This puts a very sinister tint on everything sex related, especially for an idealistic young man like myself. There’s a website that outlines my newfound understanding of what most decent people are doing in the bedroom, called makelovenotporn.com. In regular porn, I never saw the kissing, holding, hugging, cuddling, and affection. I never saw the hours and hours of emotional turmoil involved after a breakup. Or the years of intimate secret sharing. Or the subtle things like being aroused passionately by the beauty of a woman’s hands, or her eyes, or her smile. Growing up on porn caused me to see sex as degrading and empty, not an act of love. No one can understand the kind of psychological damage that causes a young mind. Porn turns what is essentially a giant kiss into a violent beating.
2. Porn = sexual arousal; real life = passionate and intimate feelings of love. When you watch porn, the feeling you get is NOT the feeling you get with real sex. Porn somehow separates love from sex. Just as kids don’t understand that the participants in the act have deep feelings of respect and love for their partner (as mentioned above), they also make the assumption that the pure sexual arousal THEY feel while watching pornography is also the same feeling they will get during real sex. This further exacerbates the misunderstandings of sexual intimacy. It led me to believe I was supposed to feel the same thing to a person in real life as I did while watching porn, which is ultimately dehumanizing.
3. The arousal in porn is 400X more intense than the arousal in real life. Most of the arousal felt in porn is replaced in real life by the warmest feelings of love.
4. The things that actors do in porn, most people don’t do in real life. Most decent people have limits in real life. I’m making an assumption here, but I don’t believe that people in real life have the impulse to suck ejaculate from their partner’s rectum and make out with them (felching), move their tongue in someone’s rectum (rimming), face fuck someone, make out with their partner’s semen (snowballing), or solely have the male spray their face with semen (facials). To a young man who doesn’t understand the word “intimacy” these acts are in no way affectionate but humiliating and degrading.
5. If people in real life ARE doing the things a young man sees in porn, they are often doing them in vastly different ways. It’s not necessarily WHAT they’re doing here that matters as much as HOW they’re doing it. People in the real world might see oral sex as just an extension of their kissing their partner, everywhere. In porn, blowjobs are nasty and degrading and animal-like. Pile driving in porn in exciting and fun; in real life, it’s probably a bit uncomfortable and embarrassing.
6. Porn psychologically splits the viewer, zapping the vitality from his mind. He becomes two people, the watcher and the participator. In essence the alienation from himself deprives him of his ability to act on his romantic impulses.
There’s an underlying theme through all of these points about porn, which is that porn separates love from sex. In real life, even when two people who are not in love have sex with each other, they’re still doing what they would do if they were in love. People who say they fuck hot girls but make love to their girlfriends are essentially trying to say that the former is a kiss that isn’t affectionate, but the latter is loving smooch. A kiss is a kiss. There are very few ways I can think of to make it violent. The same goes for real life respectful, consensual sex. On one end of the spectrum, some “relationships” might be more sexual than romantic (i.e., “fuck buddies”), and on the other end they might be more romantic than sexual (i.e., “Romeo and Juliet”). But on either extreme, no real-life relationship is completely devoid of affection or lust. They’re all some combinations of both. Young people need to understand this, so their moral compasses don’t get knocked awry like mine did.
welcome and thanks for the insights
The points you bring up (1-6) are the primary arguments listed by many concerned professionals and “anti-porn” websites. One of the reasons we don’t delve into the psychological imprinting is that most other sites and professionals do. Our job is to write about what we know and educate the public on the neurobiology of addiction.
Secondly, a few studies (poorly designed) suggest that porn does not do what you describe. If we bring up your very valid points, opponents simply list a few peer-reviewed studies to refute these points.
Mind you, I think you are more than correct. It’s the poorly worded questionnaires that are not revealing the truth. Asking a teen how they think porn affects them is liking a fish what they think about water. The truth is best observed in those thousands of young men who recover from porn addiction, or simply porn use.
We are very concerned about the psychological imprinting. It’s huge. My site links to seemingly everywhere. I’ve read thousands of threads, some with thousands of posts, from about 30 different countries. I can verify everything you have said.
No Problem
After reading your reply, I googled “psychological imprinting porn” and starting reading all the research. I’m floored to find them saying the exact things I mentioned, sometimes even with the same language. I’m not sure how to separate the effects of porn from my own natural personality or hormones. I mean, everyone reacts differently. When I first started watching porn, it was very clear to me that what I was watching was staged. But as things progressed, the line between constructed and authentic sex on tape started to blur. Some videos featured people who were very clearly not actors, but were obviously aware of them being recorded by another person in the room.
Why porn affected me in such a different way than others remains a mystery. Could it have something to do with the fact that other guys starting falling for girls right around the same time they started viewing porn? This would counteract any misconceptions they have about real sex. Perhaps they have less intense personalities, or maybe don’t think as deeply. Why does porn hook other guys and not me? After my sophomore year of college, I sort of just stopped watching it without any problems. I never had to abstain with effort; I just grew out of it.
The irony is that if kids really want to know what they’re supposed to “feel” when they want to make love to someone, they’d be better off watching movies like “Titanic,” “Good Will Hunting,” or “Forrest Gump.” Porn hyperbolizes and somehow strips the affection that is inexorably tied with real-life sex, casual or not.
Another possible cause of all these problems with males viewing porn is that there is a period of time in a man’s life when sex is NOT about love, where the arousal he feels has no affection whatsoever. Not matter how much he thinks about “love” he cannot get aroused. He must imagine something specific and visceral to become aroused. This paradox between love and sex is not something that women face, I don’t think. This explains to me why guys don’t usually develop “crushes” as much as girl’s do. This also explains why guys are more capable of casual sex than women are, or why guys can get more easily aroused solely from visuals, while women need some kind of emotional paper trail to climax.
Comments from yourbrainrebalanced.com
Comment from reuniting blog
Submitted by Westminster93 on Thu, 2012-05-10 13:49
From this reuniting post – The blatant effect of online porn
Best memory? You’re likely to decide as a teen
Comments: We form stronger memories during our adolescence
July 20th, 2012 in Psychology & Psychiatry
“Best memory? You’re likely to decide as a teen.” July 20th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-memory-youre-teen.html
A conversation overheard on the bus made me feel bad for the you
“Sexting” again linked to risky sex among teens
“Sexting” again linked to risky sex among teens
By Genevra Pittman
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – One out of every seven Los Angeles high schoolers with a cell phone has sent a sexually-explicit text message or photo, according to results of a 2011 survey that also found “sexters” more likely to engage in risky sex behaviors.
In the new study, the LA teens who had sent racy texts were seven times more likely to be sexually active than those who said they’d never sexted.
“No one’s actually going to get a sexually transmitted disease because they’re sexting,” said Eric Rice, a social network researcher from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who led the new study.
“What we really wanted to know is, is there a link between sexting and taking risks with your body? And the answer is a pretty resounding ‘yes,'” he told Reuters Health.
A study of Houston, Texas, high schoolers out earlier this summer found one in four teens had sent a naked photo of themselves through text message or email, and those kids were also much more likely to be having risky sex. (See Reuters Health story of July 2, 2012).
Rice’s findings, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, are based on 1,839 students in Los Angeles high schools, most of whom were Latino. Three-quarters of them owned a cell phone that they used regularly.
On a survey sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just over 40 percent of teens with a cell phone said they’d had sex, and about two-thirds used a condom the last time they did.
Rice said the rate of teen sexting in Houston may have been slightly higher than in Los Angeles because of demographic differences – but that overall the two reports are consistent.
“Somewhere in the middle is probably a pretty good estimate of what’s going on nationally,” said Jeff Temple, a psychologist and women’s health researcher from The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston who worked on the Houston study.
His research found that girls in particular who’d sent naked photos were more likely to engage in risky sex, to have had multiple recent sex partners or to use alcohol and drugs before sex.
“Sexting appears to be a reflection or an indication of actual sexual behavior,” Temple told Reuters Health.
“What they’re doing in their offline lives is what they’re doing in their online lives.”
Rice agreed that was the most important finding to take away from both studies. “That may be a no-brainer to some parents, but it may be alarming to others,” he said.
“This is a behavior that a minority of adolescents are engaging in, but that minority is engaging in a group of risky sexual behaviors… not just sexting.”
With sexting, there’s also the concern that naked photos will end up on the Internet and teens will be bullied online, or that students who receive explicit texts could be charged with child pornography.
Researchers still have a lot of questions about sexting, including which students are most likely to sext and what other behaviors or personality traits may be more common among sexters. Temple and his colleagues are currently working on a study to see what typically comes first among teens – sexting or sex.
For now, Rice said parents and teachers may be able to use media coverage of the latest celebrity or politician sexting controversy as an in to talk to teens about sexting and actual sex – especially because the two are so closely linked.
“Sexting might be an easier conversation for teachers to start having with teens than a full-on conversation that starts, ‘Let’s talk about sex,'” he said.
SOURCE: bit.ly/jsoh2P Pediatrics, online September 17, 2012.
It’s all we know, since we
never even heard of the internet until my sophomore year
STUDY; The digital revolution and adolescent brain evolution.
The digital revolution and adolescent brain evolution.
Source
Brain Imaging Section, Child Psychiatry Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
Abstract
Remarkable advances in technologies that enable the distribution and use of information encoded as digital sequences of 1s or 0s have dramatically changed our way of life. Adolescents, old enough to master the technologies and young enough to welcome their novelty, are at the forefront of this “digital revolution.” Underlying the adolescent’s eager embracement of these sweeping changes is a neurobiology forged by the fires of evolution to be extremely adept at adaptation. The consequences of the brain’s adaptation to the demands and opportunities of the digital age have enormous implications for adolescent health professionals.
Published by Elsevier Inc.
A life forgotten by many
GUY 2)
GUY 3)
sexual scandal regarding 2nd graders molesting each other
Comment from 50 year old
Comment from 45 year old
No longer self conscious about penis size
Masturbating with vibrator at early age caused permanent ED
My parents gave me 0 supervision with computers
Gabe recalls conversation with 15 year old
Re: Gabe (age 25) and Gary discuss recovery from porn-induced ED
The following was written by Gabe from Reboot Nation. Gabe often talks to teens, and this is his recollection of a conversation with a 15 year old.
It’s an answer to this question:
-Yea, some of them are aware of what he is doing. He didn’t get into how they react, but he said the guy doesn’t care.
Here is part of our actual talk covering this:
Me: “So everyone at your school gets their own laptop right?”
Teen: “yea”
Me: “do they block facebook and twitter to keep y’all from being on there all day, posting about how boring school is, or how bad you wish you were home playing call of duty? (a video game)”
Teen: “haha they try too, but everyone knows how to get around the block, they say if we get caught (on facebook) you get sent to the office, but they never actually back that up. They said they will use someone’s account who is friends with a bunch of the students and see who all is online then bust them, but never do it.”
Me: “Ya that’s how it was for us too when Xanga and MySpace first got big. We figured out how to get around their blocks within 2 days. What about cell phones, I know everyone is on their phone all day and can get online on them right?”
Teen: “oh for sure haha, I mean some kids get their phone taken up, but most the times they just ask us to put them up. We say yes mam then 5 seconds later post a tweet about the close call haha”
Me: “well let me ask you this… how many of the guys at school watch porn on their iphones, or laptops?”
Teen: “oh man, tons. Not a whole lot on the laptops but just about everyone on their phones.”
Me: “yea that’s what I figured you would say, I bet you they do it right in the middle of class right?”
Teen: “all…the…time. No joke this one guy sits behind me and just stares at his phone in his lap the whole class lookin up videos. He doesn’t even care who sees him.”
Me: “wait, even if girls see him?”
Teen: “yea he could care less if a girl sees him, him and his friends think it’s funny.”
Me: “ it’s got to be tough for the class to pay attention if you know that’s going on right beside you.”
Teen: “For real! I’m like bro, you have cute girls sitting all around you, and you’re sitting there on your phone staring at a screen, doesn’t make sense.”
Me: “haha no it doesn’t, well how old were you when you first saw porn?”
Teen: “eh, it was the summer before 5th grade when I went to a friend’s house; he had a bunch of it on his Xbox.”
Me: “yea the average age is around 10 years old now for guys, it’s crazy. What was middle school like, because iphones have been around for awhile now.”
Teen: “Middle school was exactly the same, maybe even worse. There were a few times in 7th grade when guys would set their phone in the middle of the lunchroom table and everyone would crowd around it and watch it.”
We are in the middle of a epidemic that is destroying millions of lives, my goal is to make the neuroscience behind viewing porn common knowledge.
too young to have sex, but I discovered internet porn
It feels like I’ll never be satisfied until I try the things in
rehumanized my mind a bit, lessening the objectification of wome
After 6 years of sexually unfulfilling pornography,
Never really intended to share anything I wrote, but maybe this will help someone.
What’s normal anymore?
I’m A 27yo Who Was Forced To Watch Porn From 4-6yo
An apology letter
anxious after 20 days, but catching my brother in the act helpe
At age 10 I first started internet browsing, looking up words
Porn taught me that being a man was about orgasm.
before i started all this, i viewed famales purely as sexual ob
There is a distinct difference between watching a few vanilla sc
Porn addiction is real, trust me guys
Now I fap to EVERYTHING. Gore, snuff, hardcore anal, prolapses
2 Months Prostitute Free! For those of you thinking about using
P is not real.
I’ve been trying to quit porn
REALLY NEED HELP
Re: Did porn alter your personality?
Re: Did porn alter your personality?
This, this and this.
notfeelingit
Before Porn
I didn’t think I was addicted
but they all were addicted, and knew they needed to stop.
What I learnt from porn
What I learnt from porn
by drwoning21 days
By Krowg37 days
Don’t forget “the other” negative effect of porn.
Any preteen redditors starting nofap? You’re not alone
wasnt actually addicted, but it’s affected me in every other way
I am a 26 year old woman (comment on younger guys, porn and sex)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/reader-comments/p/comment/link/43647381
I am 15 years old & my sex drive has diminished
http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/1vlk0o/kids_access_to_porn/
Update. What porn does to our brain.
Age 16 – Porn Isn’t a Part of my Life Anymore
Tabs and downloads and torrents and etc etc and so forth and so
from r/nofap
Why I stopped (17 y.o.)
Why I stopped (17 y.o.)
This shit has really changed our brains and it all makes sense
Porn Sex entering Real Sex in the bedroom
Porn Sex entering Real Sex in the bedroom
After a while of abstaining, you’li see the damage Porn causes
The damage of P that I now see
40 days in, I think sex was ruined for me by PMO
40 days in, I think sex was ruined for me by PMO
Porn is normal today
… At no time was i ever told that porn was bad– it was / is socially acceptable, even EXPECTED, to PMO. constant jokes in the mainstream media strengthened the notion that it was all normal. and as someone who grew up in the first generation of internet porn users, i haven’t known anything different. porn is normal.
i think i subconsciously knew how destructive porn was for a long time. i would look at myself after hours of edging to increasingly weird porn, and feel an overwhelming sense of shame. i would find myself in bed with girls holding my limp dick in my hand, apologizing– always with an excuse (too much to drink, not enough sleep, empty stomach.) how did i end up here? where do i go from here? i had only questions without answers….
http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/2hpqo3/90_days/
People are so obsessed with porn!
People are so obsessed with porn!
16 year olds shouldn’t be having sex like people in porn.
The HARDEST thing I’ve ever typed. (It’ll motivate you)
Penis size used to be my biggest concern
Penis size used to be my biggest concern
I thought I was asexual.
I thought I was asexual.
Fifth grade porn addicts
Fifth grade porn addicts
PMO retards your social skills
PMO retards your social skills