If your partner says he's addicted to porn, is it truth or excuse?

The rise of readily available online pornography has sparked concerns that these sexually explicit images are addictive, damaging young minds and destroying sex lives. Emerging research a shows more complex picture. Wendy Zukerman investigates.

When Gabriel Deem was eight years old, he found a Playboy magazine. “That’s when it started,” he says.

Two years later, his family got cable television and Deem would stay up late watching softcore porn. Things escalated, he says, when high speed internet entered the home.

After school, Deem would watch internet porn for hours before his parents got home. “My taste in porn escalated to more shocking material,” he says.

This translated into his real life sexual relationships. “I would coerce some of my girlfriends through my teenage years to do what I saw in porn,” he says.

When Deem turned 23, a problem emerged. “I couldn’t get turned on by my partner anymore, despite the fact that I was extremely attracted to her,” he says. After searching online for answers, he realised that porn was the issue.

"It made sense," he says. "I became dependent on porn to get an erection. From that day on I gave it up, and the rest is history."

Deem now runs a website called Reboot Nation, an online recovery forum for people who he refers to as "porn addicts" and those with "porn induced sexual dysfunction".

While his story is compelling, the scientific evidence for pornography addiction and porn-induced sexual dysfunction is limited and controversial.

What is it about pornography that might cause these sexual difficulties, though?

According to Dr Russell Pratt, a forensic psychologist based in Melbourne, more than 65 per cent of pornography follows the same script: one or more men engage in sexual activity with one woman, and there is often multiple penetration involved - anal, oral and vaginal. This is followed by ejaculation on the women’s body "and the women portraying that they are enjoying anything and everything that is happening".

According to Pratt, repeated exposure to this "severe script" can change what arouses someone, potentially desensitising them to so-called "vanilla sex". Therefore, in theory, "porn induced sexual dysfunction" is possible.

It doesn’t seem to be very common, however.

While figures vary between surveys, there’s no clear evidence that erectile dysfunction rates have risen as a result of online pornography. Additionally, a paper published this year published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, which surveyed more than 3000 men, found that overall there was no association between how much porn men were watching and sexual issues.

The notion of ‘porn addiction’ is also debatable. Pratt believes that certain men can become addicted to pornography, and that teenagers are particularly at risk. "I don’t have any doubt that porn addiction does exist," he says.

Pratt says that chemicals in the brain which are released while watching pornography, such as dopamine and endorphins, also surge when people take drugs of addiction. Consequently, when young people watch porn, they "are laying down the formations and the patterns of going back and wanting to engage in watching porn again and again".

These brain chemicals, however, are not conclusive proof of addiction. They are part of the brain’s reward system, and are activated whenever a person experiences most kinds of joy. As Pratt acknowledges, they are also released when we eat chocolate, for example.

When the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, widely known as the ‘bible of psychiatry’, was being drafted, experts considered including porn addiction under the banner of hypersexual disorder. Ultimately, however, they decided not to, because there wasn’t enough evidence that porn is addictive and the team were concerned it might lead to the medicalisation of normal sexual behaviour.

Studies that have tried to pin down how pornography influences the brain have led to inconclusive results. Meanwhile, research from the University of California published last month found no evidence for pornography addiction.

According to Dr Mark Limmer, a public health research from Lancaster University, the focus on addiction and erectile dysfunction is "missing the point". While a small group of people might be affected by pornography in this extreme way, the problem is much larger.

"There is a broader concern about the impact of day-to-day, casual consumption and sharing of pornographic and sexualised images among young people," he says.

Pratt agrees that some people, particularly those watching pornography before having real sex, are heavily influenced by the pornographic script.

While data on the influence of pornography on our sex lives is limited, a recent, but small, study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine may be telling. Researchers spoke to 130 teenagers in England about their sex lives found that coercing girls into anal sex was common.

"Women being badgered for anal sex appears to be considered normal," the authors wrote. They noted a widespread belief that everyone enjoys anal sex and "women who do not are either flawed or simply keeping their enjoyment secret".

Brian McNair, a professor of media and communications at Queensland University of Technology and the author of Porno? Chic!, says many concerns surrounding porn are overplayed. "People, in general, can distinguish between media images and real life,’ he says. ‘So young people do understand that pornography is not real."

To make his case, McNair cites large social attitudes surveys, which tend to find growing support for women’s rights and rising intolerance for domestic violence. "All these trends," he says, "have co existed with the expansion of pornography."

Dr Limmer at Lancaster University notes that it is not as clear as porn being either evil or benign. Its influence may differ depending on the personality, sexuality, educational and socioeconomic status of individuals.

Early research has found that different personalities respond to pornography in different ways, and some people are more vulnerable to the messages in porn.

Despite the uncertainty and limited data regarding porn’s influence on our sex lives, talking honestly and openly may be one of our best defences against its potentially unwelcome messages.

This post originally appeared on the ABC and was republished here with full permission. 

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