How Porn Kills Your Sex Drive (we were interviewed for this Mens Health article)

This letter I wrote to an addiction expert gives some of the background:

Here's a bit of background so you know why my husband and I are even writing about this delicate topic. We have been lurking on an academic listserve for sexologists. It's run by Northwestern professor Michael Bailey, who was in the news last year for hosting a live demonstration of a woman using an extreme sex toy for the benefit of his students. (I like the guy, by the way.)

This group of academics utterly reject the possibility of sex or porn addiction. Sadly, they are the ones to whom journalists typically turn when writing those jolly articles about the health benefits of sex, which make Internet porn sound like a health aid. Here's the latest from a popular listserve member, Marty Klein, if you'd like a sample: http://sexualintelligence.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/fourteen-ways-to-obse...

This kind of naive advice grates a bit because my husband Gary Wilson and I have been listening to the woes of recovering porn users for 5 years, through a fluke. We happened to write a book about sexual relationships, which discusses the effects of sex on the brain and refers to a lot of neuroscience. Google put "sex" and "addiction" together and they landed on our site. My husband later created a site just for them: www.yourbrainonporn.com.

Here's a page with some of the descriptions of the symptoms these guys experience: http://yourbrainonporn.com/what-are-the-symptoms-of-excessive-porn-use It's not unusual for their tolerance to increase to the point that they can no longer climax to porn related to their sexual orientation, which causes some of the younger ones especially severe angst. See 0.TOLERANCE.pdf They also struggle with nasty withdrawal symptoms: 0.WITHDRAWAL.pdf. More important, they report striking benefits as they manage to stay off of Internet porn: 0.BENEFITS.pdf

We've also been amazed to see a rash of young men with porn-related sexual dysfunction. We're confident of the cause because it slowly reverses itself when they stop using. For more: "Porn-Induced Sexual Dysfunction Is a Growing Problem." As far as we know, no researchers are even asking young men whether porn is causing these problems, perhaps because the aforementioned sexology professors are designing the questionnaires.

Incidentally, among our visitors are several medical students, who are recovering along with many others. My husband's site tends to attract science types struggling with porn addiction because it is science and evolution based. He has taught anatomy and physiology for years and, as a former addict, has long had a passion for the neuroscience of addiction.

When I brought to the sexology listserve's attention the August ASAM statement, they referred to it disdainfully as the "dopamine hypothesis" and dismissed it. They counsel (and refer) their clients for any pathology but addiction, regardless of glaring evidence that addiction is likely.

Sad to say, most physicians are no better. All of our visitors who have sought help for ED have received the same trial pack of sexual enhancement drugs and diagnosis of "performance anxiety," possibly with a referral to a sexologist. No thought is given to the possibility of dopamine dysregulation and desensitization. If the patients ask about masturbation as a possible cause, their healthcare providers say it absolutely cannot be the cause. (That was probably once true, but with the hyperstimulation of Internet porn, things have radically changed.) Some of these young men are distraught and desperate. And the more porn they use (because it's often the only way they can still get any kind of any erection), the worse their problem gets. Some fear to stop because they think they will lose it if they don't use it, or get prostate cancer if they don't masturbate very frequently. (I'm not making this up.)

The resistance of the sexologists to the addiction science baffled me, as they frequently hold themselves out as the world's only true objective scientists. I used to think they feared that if they admitted that brains are plastic and that excess can lead to addiction-related brain changes - they are condoning "reparative therapy." I understand their fears, but they hardly justify actively suppressing humanity's understanding of its sexuality, especially now that gay lib is well underway.

A growing percentage of today's youth are engaging in sufficient sexual excess to numb their pleasure response (profoundly altering their brains). Straight or gay, many can't perform normally or sustain erections enough to use condoms safely. They need more and more sexual stimulation (via anal sex, threesomes, risky sex, ever-kinkier porn, etc) to climax. In short, overstimulation that morphs our plastic brains doesn't discriminate based on sexual orientation.

To us, it seems evident that the message that sex can cause unwanted plastic brain changes that are often reversible addiction-related changes, needs to get to the masses as quickly as possible, as adolescents are particularly at risk for heavy porn use today. It's time to update the science of addiction to include sex so healthcare providers can assess and treat clients/patients correctly.

The young guys on our site tell us this problem is huge. Those who can talk to their friends about porn use say all their friends are heavy users too, and many have no idea how to quit. It's adversely affecting their concentration, their academic and job performance, their optimism, their social and sexual lives, their sexual identity, their perception of potential sex partners, and their erections. They're hurting. (Did you watch "The Demise of Guys?" - a short TED talk by a psychologist? http://bit.ly/slDIHF)

My thought is that it will take a big shake-up to jolt the mainstream journalists, sexologists, psychologists and physicians into shifting gears to align with ASAM's statement. This doctor, for example, advised his young patient to cure his copulatory ED by watching (more) porn during sex with his girlfriend: http://recoveryfrompandm.blogspot.com/2011/09/day-1-of-blogging-3-days-w... Maybe if someone from your profession is willing to speak up, these kind of well-intentioned errors can be averted.