The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It (7 page)

Sex is an undercurrent of society, but we don’t look at it holistically. We promote love but deny lust, banning it from mainstream media. Lust is hardly out of sight; rather, it’s in plain sight, on thousands of online sites. The Internet is the great collective unconscious that provides insight into our needs, desires and fantasies. And while porn may initially help people become more excited about sex, over time it appears to have the opposite effect. A recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that “regular porn users are more likely to report depression and poor physical health than nonusers are. … The reason is that porn may start a cycle of isolation. … Porn may become a substitute for healthy face-to-face interactions, social or sexual.”
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Porn is an attempt to make up for the underrepresentation of lust in our culture; it’s represented very, very well online. According to the Web traffic-reporting site
Alexa.com
, 24 out of the top 500 most-viewed general websites worldwide are dedicated to porn — that’s nearly 5 percent. To put this in context, nearly 47 of the top 500 sites are different countries’ Google homepages; the most popular porn sites, LiveJasmin and XVideos, had more traffic than 36 of them, including Google Canada, Mexico, Australia and Germany (
Alexa.com
, July 8, 2011). LiveJasmin and XVideos are also visited more than CNN, AOL, Myspace and even Netflix (Netflix alone has 26.3 million subscribers
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). However, unlike many of the other popular sites, which have a general audience, the porn websites’ audience is primarily males under 24 years old, most of whom are viewing from home.

All of the 24 most popular porn sites offer free content and also offer more-exclusive features, such as higher-quality high-definition (HD) videos or live webcam viewing for a small fee. You can pretty much find anything you want free of charge, and you can access these videos nearly anytime, anywhere in the world that Internet exists. A buffet of arousal awaits. One of the major sites, PornHub, has 56 categories listed conveniently in alphabetical order; the average category hosts 5,832 separate videos. The most-viewed videos among these categories average 22.3 million views and are about 20 minutes long.

On assignment for this book, Nikita watched PornHub videos for three days straight to record in detail what they were all about. In the most-viewed videos, she found it is an average of 33 percent of the way through the video before there is vaginal or anal penetration. In only a quarter of the videos is there a discernable female orgasm, whereas in 81 percent of the videos there is a discernable male orgasm — the male orgasm typically is the highlight of the final scene.

Not once in any of the most-viewed videos is there a discussion of safer sex practices, or of physical or emotional expectations or boundaries. Condoms are used in only one of the most-viewed videos — one in which lesbians are using strap-ons. And many times a man will receive oral sex from a woman and then penetrate her vagina — and then her anus and then move back to her mouth or vagina (known as ATM, for ass to mouth), a practice which puts the woman at much higher risk for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and bacterial infections such as urinary tract infections (UTIs). Very seldom is there a close-up on the man’s face, yet there are many close-ups on the woman’s. A commonly used camera angle focuses the lens directly on the genitals while the woman’s breasts and/or face are visible in the background. Often the woman is positioned so her facial expressions can be filmed. The man often ejaculates on the woman’s breasts or face, or in her mouth, rather than inside her (with the exception of “creampie” videos). Porn videos usually end shortly after the man has ejaculated, suggesting male ejaculation is the only pinnacle of sex. The old “fade to black” that ended movies has become “face to black,” as porn ends with the woman’s face covered with cum.

These videos insinuate that sexual fantasies never involve conversation. There is very little emotional intimacy, and verbal exchanges, if present, are awkwardly scripted. Surprisingly, for all the bad rap porn gets, there are very few instances in which derogatory language about women (such as slut, cunt, bitch) is directed at the woman — at least that is the case in the most-viewed videos. Such language occurs more in gang-bang and rough-sex videos. There is also very little physical intimacy, because if partners were actually close to each other, the camera would not be able to capture such graphic close-ups.

Our overall conclusion is that porn is not about sex or making love, it’s about “fucking” in a visually appealing way for the male viewer. That’s not to say that women don’t enjoy watching people have sex; many do, and there are a good number who watch porn. Simply put, most women just don’t enjoy shot after shot of graphic close-ups of body parts bashing together without any context. Porn is not about romance, sexual foreplay or gradual building up to ever-greater intimacy. It is about on-demand performance of oral, initially, then vaginal or anal sex, then variations in positions or partner arrangements. On a positive level, porn can be an outlet for exploring fantasy or substitute for a lack of sexual partners in real life, but it could set off a progression into further seclusion. It could also cause other, unwanted, undesirable changes.

The most powerful sex organ is the brain, and for men, that’s where an erection starts. So what happens to your brain when you watch porn? Gary and Marnia Wilson, creators of the website Your Brain On Porn (
yourbrainonporn.com
), compared Internet porn to excessive gambling, video game playing, and food addiction — all of which can cause brain changes that mimic drug addiction. Conveniently, the same part of your brain where arousal occurs is the same place where addiction takes place: the limbic system. That’s where your reward circuitry is and where you experience the desire to eat, have sex, take risks and fall in love, as well as pleasure and libido. It’s here that you get turned on — or off — or addicted to something.

Gary Wilson explains that because dopamine is the primary neurotransmitter that turns on the reward circuit, the more aroused you are sexually, the higher your dopamine level. The higher your dopamine, the more you crave something. Dopamine is also the basis for the motivation to achieve your desires, and in the context of sex, it’s central to sexual desire and erections. An erection won’t happen if there is not enough dopamine to signal the reward circuitry. Dopamine skyrockets with novelty, so with every new sexual partner or sex scene, you are getting another surge of dopamine. If your dopamine starts to decline — that is, your erection starts to dwindle — you just click on something else to boost yourself back up. And with Internet porn, there is always something new, exciting or ever-more shocking only a click away.

However, watch enough porn and your reward circuitry will essentially get burned out because it has been overstimulated by your dopamine system and thus becomes less responsive. At this point you become dependent on new porn, because you need more and more stimulation to become aroused and get that penis saluting again. Eventually, the porn pathway in your brain becomes so strong that you are no longer sensitive to normal or usual stimuli, such as sex with a real person.

“Internet porn is now a powerful memory that calls to you at a subconscious level — because it’s the most reliable source of dopamine, erections and relief from your cravings. … This is what happens with all addictions. The more you overstimulate the reward circuitry by jacking up your dopamine, … the less it responds. Think of a flashlight with fading batteries. In simple terms, your reward circuitry isn’t providing enough electricity to power your erections,” says Wilson. He notes that porn-induced erectile dysfunction “is not psychological — it has a physiological cause. It’s a symptom of an addictive process that has altered the brain.” These changes associated with continued heavy porn use can cause numerous consequences:
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• Lack of spontaneous erections.
  
• Lack of arousal by static porn or previously viewed porn. Often guys need to escalate to more extreme material just to get aroused — a sign of addiction.
  
• Decreased penile sensitivity — indicating the brain has become numbed to pleasure.
  
• Delayed ejaculation or the inability to orgasm during sex with a real partner.
  
• Copulatory impotence — the inability to maintain an erection with a real partner.
  
• Erectile dysfunction drugs lose their effect — in other words, the problem is in the brain, not the penis.
  
• Eventual inability to get any erection, even viewing the extreme types of porn.
  
• Sexual enhancement drugs like Viagra and Cialis won’t help these problems, because they only dilate the blood vessels to sustain an erection, not create one. The brain needs to be aroused first; without arousal, nothing can happen. And that’s what porn does over time — it kills the male’s arousal response.
  

The high availability of Internet porn combined with a lack of sex education means many young guys don’t know what they’re getting into. They’re going to have challenges later with women because they don’t realize how it’s impacting or shaping their sexuality. For them, sex becomes an objectified experience. I have talked with guys that have to fantasize about being with their partner when they’re actually with their partner because they’re disconnected from the sensation of their own body connecting with another body.
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— Celeste Hirschman, sex and relationship therapist and author
of
Cockfidence: The Extraordinary Lover’s Guide to Being the Man You Want to Be and Driving Women Wild

Sex education is to porn as reality is to fantasy. There’s a lot of fantasy material freely available, but very few informative resources out there for young people regarding sex. We don’t want to say porn is bad, but when young guys are on a regular diet of it — watching it
before
they’ve actually started having sex — one has to wonder how it affects their views on normal, or reality-based, sexual behavior.

A recent article stated young males were suffering from “sexual anorexia” after Internet porn use. A large-scale survey of 28,000 young men in Italy found that many of them started an “excessive consumption” of porn sites as early as age 14 and later on, in their mid-20s, became inured to “even the most violent images.”
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The problem worsens when guys’ sexuality develops independently from real-life relationships. As they develop lower reactions to the porn sites, their libido drops, and then it becomes impossible to get an erection. A lot of guys in our survey said that porn distorted their idea of a healthy sexual relationship and that “the script” of porn was always playing in the back of their mind when they were with a real girl.

Surely those views would be tempered by better sex education and conversations about what to expect from real-life sexual relationships. Here’s how one high school guy from our survey responded:

The average age at which kids first view porn is 11 years old.
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Sexual education in American public schools tends to begin around the same time, and it is taught mainly in two forms abstinence-only and comprehensive. The abstinence-only approach promotes the abstinence from sex before marriage. Comprehensive sex education promotes abstinence but also informs students of the benefits of contraception and how to avoid STDs and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Neither the comprehensive nor the abstinence-only approach discusses porn. According to a 2010 report from the CDC, almost all teens in America have received a formal sex education by age 18, but only about two-thirds have been taught about birth control methods.
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Currently, there is no cohesive national law governing what is taught in sex education classes; some state laws allow curriculum decisions to be determined by individual school districts.

Neither the comprehensive nor the abstinence-only approach is very effective in its stated objectives. People are marrying later than they ever have; the average age is 28 for men and 26 for women.
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Eighty-eight percent of teens who pledge abstinence and 90 percent of Americans overall will have sex before marriage, yet most are ill-equipped to navigate the physical and emotional landscape of sex.
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“Kids who learn abstinence only have just as much sex — only they use condoms less often. Limiting the availability of contraception doesn’t reduce sexual activity — it just increases unwanted pregnancy,” says Marty Klein, author of
America’s War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust, and Liberty
. He writes, “Abstinence programs don’t shape adolescents’ sexual
behavior
much, they … shape the
emotional context
of their sexual behavior. So these young people … understand less about how sex actually works, feel worse about themselves, and talk less about their sexual feelings or experiences with their parents.”
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In 2009, 15- to- 24-year-olds made up about 25 percent of the sexually active population, yet they acquired nearly half of all new STDs.
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The same year, 410,000 15- to 19-year-old girls gave birth — a higher teen birth rate than in almost every other developed country. “Each year,” says the CDC, “teen childbearing alone costs the United States approximately $6 billion in lost tax revenue and nearly $3 billion in public expenditures.”
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Yet the grand total for funding all abstinence education, pregnancy/STD/HIV prevention and education programs, and family planning services annually is $874 million.
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If it’s not already obvious, these numbers on their own clearly indicate that it is worth it to make these programs more effective.

Students want better programs, too, but unfortunately they have little influence on what information schools give them. With few public resources and no help from parents, the Internet has become the main go-to resource for unanswered questions and curiosities. Porn, being as accessible as it is, is now serving as both sexual educator and safe haven for emerging sexual needs.

Young people are going to learn about sex one way or another, and technology is here to stay, which begs the question to parents: Would you like to educate your children about sex — or would you rather let the industries, like porn and other popular media, which exploit your failure to do so, be their primary source of education? “Don’t do it,” or “Be safe,” isn’t an education. Although condoms tend to break less than vows of abstinence, kids need more grown-ups they can talk with and readily accessible resources they can go to for issues and questions.