Behavioural addictions—when people get addicted to activities, not substances—are everywhere. They’re in how often we check our social media, how many hours we play video games, how often we shop online, how much money we spend on gambling, how much we eat, how much time we spend exercising. Any of these in moderation are relatively harmless, but when the behaviour becomes compulsive, it can become an addiction.
Recently, I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts and it was talking about porn addictions. Porn is a taboo topic (despite its huge number of users), but it should be discussed, because when it starts to cause problems in sexual attitudes and performances it becomes a problem for society. The things that shocked me the most were that people are losing the ability to orgasm during intercourse due to overstimulation from internet porn, and that sometimes heavy porn users find themselves less attracted to their partner.
One of the largest consequences from over-exposure to porn is how people are interacting with it. If someone is only orgasming from internet porn, they could be rewiring themselves to only be able to orgasm that way, especially when they do not have many real-life experiences (this is called an “idiosyncratic masturbatory style,” for anyone interested in big words). A disjoint can be made between what intercourse actually is and what heavy porn users may end up believing it should be.
Being able to search for different types of interactions, sexualities, body types, ethnic backgrounds, and countless other categories on porn sites allows watchers to choose exactly what they want to see and change it as often as they want. This is not how real relationships work.
This impacts not only individuals who have a porn problem, but also their current and/or future sexual partners. Since this is the case, shouldn’t we at least be educated about it? Doing research for this article led me to many dead ends. There are countless myths surrounding the impacts of porn, a few case studies, and very few hard statistics. Even the frequency of porn-site use and bandwidth was inconsistent across searches.
Millennials and Gen Z-ers are growing up in an age where sexual content of all sorts can be found with only a few clicks. If porn use is becoming more and more mainstream, shouldn’t education around it follow suit?