Is pornography driving men crazy?
Editor's Note: Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. For more by Wolf, check out Project Syndicate and visit it on Facebook and Twitter.
By Naomi Wolf
It is hard to ignore how many highly visible men in recent years (indeed, months) have behaved in sexually self-destructive ways. Some powerful men have long been sexually voracious; unlike today, though, they were far more discreet and generally used much better judgment in order to cover their tracks.
Of course, the heightened technological ability nowadays to expose private behavior is part of the reason for this change. But that is precisely the point: so many of the men caught up in sex-tinged scandals of late have exposed themselves – sometimes literally – through their own willing embrace of text messages, Twitter, and other indiscreet media.
What is driving this weirdly disinhibited decision-making? Could the widespread availability and consumption of pornography in recent years actually be rewiring the male brain, affecting men’s judgment about sex and causing them to have more difficulty controlling their impulses?
There is an increasing body of scientific evidence to support this idea. Six years ago, I wrote an essay called “The Porn Myth,” which pointed out that therapists and sexual counselors were anecdotally connecting the rise in pornography consumption among young men with an increase in impotence and premature ejaculation among the same population. These were healthy young men who had no organic or psychological pathology that would disrupt normal sexual function.
The hypothesis among the experts was that pornography was progressively desensitizing these men sexually. Indeed, hardcore pornography’s effectiveness in achieving rapid desensitization in subjects has led to its frequent use in training doctors and military teams to deal with very shocking or sensitive situations.
Given the desensitization effect on most male subjects, researchers found that they quickly required higher levels of stimulation to achieve the same level of arousal. The experts I interviewed at the time were speculating that porn use was desensitizing healthy young men to the erotic appeal of their own partners.
Since then, a great deal of data on the brain’s reward system has accumulated to explain this rewiring more concretely. We now know that porn delivers rewards to the male brain in the form of a short-term dopamine boost, which, for an hour or two afterwards, lifts men’s mood and makes them feel good in general. The neural circuitry is identical to that for other addictive triggers, such as gambling or cocaine.
The addictive potential is also identical: just as gamblers and cocaine users can become compulsive, needing to gamble or snort more and more to get the same dopamine boost, so can men consuming pornography become hooked. As with these other reward triggers, after the dopamine burst wears off, the consumer feels a letdown – irritable, anxious, and longing for the next fix. (There is some new evidence, uncovered by Jim Pfaus at Concordia University in Canada, that desensitization may be affecting women consumers of pornography as well.)
This dopamine effect explains why pornography tends to become more and more extreme over time: ordinary sexual images eventually lose their power, leading consumers to need images that break other taboos in other kinds of ways, in order to feel as good. Moreover, some men (and women) have a “dopamine hole” – their brains’ reward systems are less efficient – making them more likely to become addicted to more extreme porn more easily.
As with any addiction, it is very difficult, for neurochemical reasons, for an addict to stop doing things – even very self-destructive things – that enable him to get that next hit of dopamine. Could this be why men who in the past could take time-delayed steps to conduct affairs behind closed doors now can’t resist the impulse to send a self-incriminating text message? If so, such men might not be demons or moral ciphers, but rather addicts who are no longer entirely in control of themselves.
This is not to say that they are not responsible for their behavior. But I would argue that it is a different kind of responsibility: the responsibility to understand the powerfully addictive potential of pornography use, and to seek counseling and medication if the addiction starts to affect one’s spouse, family, professional life, or judgment.
By now, there is an effective and detailed model for weaning porn-addicted men and restoring them to a more balanced mental state, one less at the mercy of their compulsions. Understanding how pornography affects the brain and wreaks havoc on male virility permits people to make better-informed choices – rather than engage in pointless self-loathing or reactive collective judgments – in a world that has become more and more addictively hardcore.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011. www.project-syndicate.org. You can read more by Naomi Wolf at Project Syndicate.
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Comments
it's nice to see that she
it's nice to see that she appears to understand the process of addiction, but i'm not really sure i buy that there's a positive correlation between porn addiction and 'sexting' or internet-based sexual harassment of any kind.
the whole method of her argument just seems ridiculous to me. she's basically saying that in the past, 'powerful men' were going around being 'sexually voracious.' but they just happened to be good at covering their tracks, so that this way, we would never know it. and that's why we don't have any evidence for it now, but it's true, just 'cause. she's essentially claiming 'nothing new under the sun,' but citing porn as something which is just bringing problematic behavior out into the open.
i'd argue that by and large, porn is causing men to ignore actual women. this is why multiple studies show a negative correlation between the prevalence of porn and the commonness of rape in a given society. sexual harrassment, in whatever form, seems to require a certain sort of arrogance that porn, if anything, drains from men (thus distorting the mechanics of the sexual marketplace overall). the idiocy of people communicating via the internet is just because this is brand new technology, and its development has probably sped ahead of people's ability to understand its weight or consequences.
What you say
makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, heavy porn use definitely interferes with some people's inner compass...which is, of course, their reward circuitry. So if someone is low on dopamine (or receptors) and they need a hit, then doing something dicey will look like a better idea than normal.
Who knows?
that's also a good point
another point in her favor would be that on porn sites, the most common ads seem to be for like 'sexy' dating sites or whatever. of course i doubt that any actual women are on those things (or how they even work), but the feeling of realism could be the reason as to why those sorts of ads are continuing to result in profits (probably).
we'll probably never know who's an addict and who isn't when it comes to publicized scandals, because we're looking at a very small sampling size of politicians and famous athletes, and although my instincts tell me that men in power don't need porn nearly as much as unpowerful men of lower income status (i'm basically attributing this to desireability in the sexual marketplace), it's just hard to generalize about career politicians and celebrities, because anyone who wants that much media exposure is probably more eccentric in the first place, and therefore harder to peg down psychologically.
Agreed
I think Gary thought of the article more as "food for thought," than as "proof" of any phenomenon.
I put it up because I think she may have
been reading some of our stuff. She never mentioned dopamine in her previous articles, and some of the languaging seems like ours. That said, it's not her best work. She gives no references, which has all the commenters ripping her. I can find no evidence for the one study she mentioned authored by J Pfaus. I don't think porn has much to do with men fooling around.
Along those lines
Also without reference is "an effective and detailed model for weaning porn-addicted men and restoring them to a more balanced mental state." I wonder what that's about.
Yeah,
we did, too. Sounds kinda like what goes on here, eh?
How are you getting along, by the way? How's the music?
Thought you might get a chuckle out of this exchange.
This is what one of the academics had to say about Wolf's piece. They were quick to find the mindhack rebuttal, which we spent most of the morning replying to (our comments are "awaiting moderation"...hmmmmm).
First what one academic said on the listserve:
My reply (Comment 1 is Gary's, Comment 2 is mine):
Kim, I, too, was puzzled by Wolf's claim that porn is used to desensitize doctors, although years ago I read a claim that soldiers headed for the Falklands were shown porn to make them more aggressive. I could find no reliable documentation for that claim. Not sure where the premature ejaculation point come from, but psychiatrist Norman Doidge mentioned that his porn-using clients first found porn shortened their arousal time and later made satisfaction more difficult. http://yourbrainonporn.com/doidge-on-pornography-and-neuroplasticity
Here are some responses to the Mindhack article (http://mindhacks.com/2011/07/04/naomi-wolf-porn-and-the-misuse-of-dopamine/), which critiqued Wolf's piece (http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/30/is-pornography-drivin...).
Comment 1
I’m not sure who is more guilty of misusing addiction research, Naomi Wolf or vaughanbell.
The impression one might get from the vaughanbell post is that dopamine is not involved in addiction, that desensitization is the same as habituation, that the reward circuitry is not involved in all addictions, and behavioral addictions involve different mechanisms from drug addictions. These would be false impressions.
First the author states that habituation and desensitization are synonymous. This is incorrect, yet much of his post relies on this false premise. Desensitization refers to chronic changes present in addiction process that involve a decline in dopamine signaling. One very important, and often measured, aspect of desensitization is a decline in D2 receptors.
"Volkow May Have Uncovered Answer to Addiction Riddle"
http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/39/11/32.full
"PET Imaging Confirms Link Between Receptor Levels And Cocaine Abuse" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060716224517.htm
He is correct in describing a declining dopamine response to stimuli as habituation. This is a normal response, for example with hunger. When one is hungry, dopamine rises in anticipation of taking that first bite of a burger. As lunch continues, dopamine declines and we become habituated (satiety). This normal process, which measures the salience or value of stimuli is quite different from the pathological change characterized by addiction researchers. Habituation happens thousands of times a day, desensitization occurs after chronic, usually long-term exposure.
QUOTE:’It’s important to point out that this densensitisation research is almost always on the repetition of exactly the same images. We would clearly be in trouble if any sexual experience caused us to densensitise to sex as we’d likely lose all interest by our early twenties’.
In the above quote he makes 2 points that militate against his thesis. First, he acknowledges that viewing the same images causes a loss of interest (decline in dopamine). I seriously doubt that a porn user would watch the same image throughout one session, let alone day after day. What makes Internet porn so appealing is the ability to move from one image or video to another, one genre to the next. Each new scene provides another possible spike of dopamine. Unlike drugs or food, there are no satiation mechanisms to inhibit porn viewing except orgasm, and many users forego it for hours, either because they want the dopamine buzz, or because they are having trouble climaxing due to brain changes from excess.
" Contextual Novelty Changes Reward Representations In The Striatum"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2838369/?tool=pubmed
Second, the example of a young man becoming desensitized on sex is irrelevant (although most monogamous couples see a decline over time in sexual activity). Internet porn is not sex. As mentioned, the endless novelty that Internet porn provides allow one to seek (dopamine spike) a more exciting scene (dopamine spike), as soon as one becomes bored with the current scene (no dopamine spikes). Porn is somewhat analogous to gambling as vaughanbell described, except with the added incentive of sexual stimuli, and without the loss of money. It’s telling that the brains of pathological gamblers manifest alterations similar to those of drug addicts. Accordingly, psychiatrists are re-categorizing pathological gambling from 'disorder' to 'addiction' in the upcoming DSM-5.
"The neurobiology of pathological gambling and drug addiction: an overview and new findings"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2607329/?tool=pubmed
QUOTE: “With regard to dopamine, it is indeed involved in sexual response, but this is not identical to the systems involved with gambling or cocaine as different rewards rely on different circuits in the brain – although doesn’t it sound great to lump those vices together?”
I believe Wolf was suggesting that all addictions involve the mesolimbic dopamine pathway. Are you, vaughnbell, saying this is not the case? Perhaps cocaine and gambling are differentiated by activation of unique subsets of neurons, yet the “reward circuitry is without a doubt involved in both the salient and hedonic aspects of all addictions. Just for the record, the theory of separate circuits within the dopamine pathways coding for separate stimuli is not a settled matter. This recent study suggests there may be considerable overlap in neurons that code for reward value:
"How do dopamine neurons represent positive and negative motivational events?"
Masayuki Matsumoto1 and Okihide Hikosaka1
Nature. 2009 June 11; 459(7248): 837–841.
“It has generally been assumed that midbrain dopamine neurons form a unified functional group, all representing reward-related signals in a similar manner1. Our results are roughly consistent with this idea as far as the reward-related signals are concerned. However, clear heterogeneity was revealed when we examined their responses to aversive events.
QUOTE: “Furthermore, Wolf relies on a cartoon character version of the reward system where dopamine squirts are represented as the brain’s pleasurable pats on the back. But the reward is not the dopamine. Dopamine is a neurochemical used for various types of signalling, none of which match the over-simplified version described in the article, that allow us to predict and detect rewards better in the future”
It’s true that dopamine fires for potentially aversive and rewarding stimuli. In other words, for what is potentially salient or valuable. Dopamine is ‘wanting,’ whereas other neurochemicals, such as opioids are ‘liking.’ This is a straw man argument, however, as Wolf’s article was written for a lay audience, and vaughnbell’s point does not negate that dopamine dysregulation is involved with all addictions. Addictions are pathological wanting.
"'Wanting' - Incentive Salience"
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/research/affective...
Comment 2
I was eager to read Vaughanbell’s critique in hopes of finding solid addiction neuroscience based the latest findings. However, the tone of his post caused me to check out some of his other writing. His bias on the subject of behavioral addictions is evident, and it appears to be clouding his assessment of Wolf’s hypothesis that heavy porn use may be altering users’ brains in detrimental ways. Vaughanbell has said,
“Despite the scientific implausibility of the same disease—addiction—underlying both damaging heroin use and overenthusiasm for World of Warcraft, the concept has run wild in the popular imagination. Our enthusiasm for labeling new forms of addictions seems to have arisen from a perfect storm of pop medicine, pseudo-neuroscience, and misplaced sympathy for the miserable.”
In fact, research shows that overstimulation via Internet use can result in the same addiction processes (brain changes) that NIDA head, Volkow MD, points out underlie all addictions: desensitization to pleasure, sensitization to cues and hypofrontality. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201000042/abstract)
Internet addiction brain studies:
Desensitization: “Reduced Striatal Dopamine D2 Receptors in People With Internet Addiction”
Sensitization: “Changes in Cue Induced Prefrontal Cortex Activity with Video Game Play”
Hypofrontality: “Microstructure Abnormalities in Adolescents with Internet Addiction Disorder.”
Vaughanbell uses a very misleading argument when it comes to dismissing behavioral addictions. He correctly states that the idea that “dopamine = addiction” is wrong. But this is not what behavioral addiction experts are saying. Based on brain research on overeaters, pathological gamblers and, now, fervent video gamers, these experts (and Wolf) are saying that “dopamine dysregulation (i.e., brain changes over time in response to overstimulation) = addiction.” That conclusion is, in fact, well supported by years of brain research.
If extensive overstimulation via Internet addiction can cause dopamine dysregulation in some users then it’s difficult to see how extensive overstimulation via Internet porn addiction cannot pose a similar risk. At the very least, Wolf’s hypothesis merits investigation, not derision. As an addiction-science matter, it’s most unlikely that there’s a separate brain mechanism for porn use, which magically prevents it from dysregulating dopamine in the same way as Internet addiction does, as Vaughanbell implies.
Vaughanbell correctly instructs us that dopamine does not equal pleasure. Yet he fails to make it clear to his readers that dopamine still lies at the heart of all addictions, via the mesolimbic dopamine pathway. Watching a sunset, petting a cat, and cheering on a favorite team release dopamine, but they are not the same as more intense stimulation in terms of corresponding dopamine released in the brain. For normal pleasures, we get little spikes of dopamine. Then the brain returns to homeostasis.
In contrast, via Internet stimulation users can keep substantial spikes of dopamine going indefinitely. Dopamine soars in response to "hunting," novelty, exceeding expectations, shock and anxiety. The Internet furnishes an endless stream of stimulation with these characteristics, which can lead to tolerance (escalation). Said one young guy who had been worried about his sexual orientation due to his use of transexual porn:
“Porn binges for 4-6 hours the last couple days. On the plus side, it did become more obvious that the transexual porn is unrelated to my sexuality. After spending 30+ hours over the past 5 days watching porn, transexual porn started to become boring! I began searching for other more disgusting and shocking stuff.”
The fact that sex is good for us doesn’t prove that too much extreme sexual stimulation cannot dysregulate dopamine, or that we, as a culture, shouldn’t look more closely at the possible unintended effects of today’s Internet erotica on the brains of heavy users. “Different strokes for different folks” is a fine philosophy, but it shouldn’t extend to escalation that alters brains in fundamental ways with important implications for eroding the brain’s executive function and wellbeing of the user.
Speaking of wellbeing, Wolf also raises the possibility that today’s porn is adversely affecting male virility. Vaughanbell’s readers may want to have a look at this article about a 28,000-person survey in Italy, sponsored by an association of urologists who are seeing more and more youthful erectile dysfunction. The president of the association, Carlo Foresta, who is also a professor at the University of Padua, reports that the effects of Internet porn use on those affected are gradual, but devastating. “There is a general drop in libido and in the end it becomes impossible to get an erection." http://www.ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/english/2011/02/24/visualizza_ne...
Men on many English-speaking forums (for example, bodybuilder sites, medhelp sites and pick-up-artist sites. Example: http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=136116941) are reporting these same problems and are sometimes desperate for solutions. The phenomenon appears to be reversible, but it takes months of avoiding overstimulation. The progression of the desensitization and recovery in youthful ED sufferers is consistent with the hypothesis that today’s porn desensitizes some brains, and that it takes time to restore them to normal dopamine responsiveness.
It would be good to know exactly what goes on in the brains of heavy porn users, and who might be vulnerable to overstimulation. We humans may be more susceptible than we think when it comes to extreme versions of natural rewards. After all, since our diet has shifted in the direction of cheap junk food crafted for maximum appeal to our dopamine-driven reward circuitry, we’ve gained a lot of weight as a society. 79% of Americans are overweight, and half of those obese (with only 10% of those for metabolic reasons according to neuroscientist and “Compass of Pleasure” author, David Linden). Frankly, we can’t even yet be confident that problematic Internet porn use would be confined to impulsives and novelty seekers, when pathological eating is not.
Vaughnbell is certainly entitled to his opinions, but they don’t appear to be consistent with the latest research on Internet addiction. That said, I’m grateful to him for continuing the debate.