Addressing the Effects of Porn Addiction
“There’s a scene in Don Jon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s new comedy about a womanising New Jersey stud with a rabid porn habit, in which Julianne Moore’s character gently breaks it to Jon that the sex they had was, well, not that good. That, actually, she felt like Jon was pretty much masturbating using her instead of his hand. Jon is stunned, mortified and finally completely confused by his sex life. Because, the truth is, he’s not enjoying it much either. Porn is what he really loves.
Jon’s not alone in his love of porn.
The question is: does it matter? If we’re all getting our kicks and having a good time, what’s the problem?
“It’s a disconnection from what’s really in front of you,” says Gordon-Levitt, who directed, wrote and stars in the film. “Rather than engaging with a unique individual and listening to what the other has to say, we put people in boxes with labels. We objectify each other.”
In his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, the psychiatrist Norman Doidge writes about a phenomenon he began to notice among his male patients in the mid 1990s. They watched porn and were experiencing “increasing difficulty in being turned on by their actual sexual partners, though they still considered them attractive.”
That’s because they had rewired the arousal pathways in their brains. “Pornography,” writes Doidge, “satisfies every one of the prerequisites for neuroplastic change,” – that is, the brain’s ability to form new neural circuitry. The most important condition is the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that gives us a feeling of exciting pleasure, which porn triggers. The more often you watch porn and get the dopamine hit it delivers, the more the activity and the sensation become entwined in your brain.
A related problem is what addiction experts call “tolerance”, in other words the need for more of a given stimulant (harder and weirder porn) for the same amount of dopamine.
Even among more casual users, porn is wreaking havoc in the bedroom. Last year, American GQ’s sex columnist, Siobhan Rosen, complained about the “pornified sex” men seemed to expect from the very first encounter. She wrote about men she had just started seeing who brandished ball gags, ejaculated on her body and used really nasty language during sex.“You don’t want to do those things with someone you hardly know.”
Advertising executive Cindy Gallop became so irritated with this phenomenon that she made it the central complaint of the 2009 TED talk launching her website, makelovenotporn.com. The talk went viral.
Gallop decided to set up Make Love Not Porn to promote “real sex”. “Guys watch porn and when they go to bed with a real woman, all they think about is recreating that scenario,” she says. And women, who are watching porn in ever-greater numbers themselves, “start believing that that is what they have to be like in bed as well.”
The American porn star and sex educator Nina Hartley calls this “doing it on someone else’s template”. Gallop agrees. “The poor guy is going, ‘That porn actress loved it when he did that, so why doesn’t she?‘ Meanwhile, the girl is lying there thinking, ‘The porn actress really loved it when he did that so why don’t I?’” But, she goes on, “in real the world , every single partner you will ever have is different. Different things will turn them on.”
Unfortunately, Rosen says, “a lot of girls don’t speak up” about not enjoying a new partner’s aggressively porn-y approach. “Instead, they’re just like, ‘I guess this isn’t going to work and, you know, it’s over.’ And the men I’ve said something to have felt horrible when I’ve told them. They have no idea and are so sorry. Most of the time they really don’t know they’re doing anything wrong.” All they know is that girls keep breaking up with them.
This romantic failure is especially apparent among boys in their teens and early twenties. Psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair interviewed a thousand children aged between four and 18 across America for her new book, The Big Disconnect. Among her findings was a marked tendency among boys to approach girls they liked in a sexually aggressive manner. They send extremely crude messages – and, unsurprisingly, “the girls don’t like it.”
“The boys are very confused about how to approach girls,” she says. “Their sexual education is porn. And it’s very misogynistic and violent porn.” Porn has become more extreme over the last two decades, probably because its users’ “tolerance” has rapidly increased with the ubiquity of internet connections. Steiner-Adair had conversations with boys who wanted to know why women liked being choked when they were having sex or why women liked being urinated on.
Because young men lack the experience that would allow them to differentiate between an extreme sexual performance and real sex, says Steiner-Adair, some of them “are surprised when the girls don’t want to play out the scenarios that they have been watching.” The result is mutual unhappiness, frustration and disappointment.
Ultimately, says Gallop, “the issue isn’t porn. The issue is the complete absence of a counterpoint to porn.” Nina Hartley agrees. “Watching porn to learn to have sex is like watching Vin Diesel movies to learn how to drive. I’m paid to give this performance. It’s not the kind of sex that I have at home.”
Nine months ago, Gallop launched MakeLoveNotPorn.tv – a collection of videos of real couples having sex. She was surprised (and delighted) when several porn stars sent their own home videos in. They show just how true Hartley’s words are. “Let boys know they don’t have to be hyper-masculine in order to get girls. Let girls know you don’t have to be doormats in order to be popular,” says Hartley.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt hopes that Don Jon will “entertain audiences with laughter and a healthy dose of honesty, and perhaps inspire them to consider what real intimacy means. It’s not only a movie about how people objectify each other. It’s about how we connect with each other, and how that feeling really is better than anything else.”
Edited from source: The Telegraph by Nisha Lilia Diu (Nov. 2013)
