The Seven Deadly
side effects of porn:
Porn isn't like other forms of digital media.
It is always available for no cost, and it capitalizes on one of your most powerful biological drives. That's a gnarly combination that has a massive impact on your brain.
with repetitive use, porn will...
1. Steal your joy.
Porn is a ‘low effort’, ‘high reward’ activity.
That means it’s easy to do and it triggers your brain to release A LOT of dopamine: the ‘feel good’, motivation chemical.
Feeling good is bad?
No, but your brain recalibrates to high levels of dopamine, just like your pupil contracting in bright sunlight. After a while, ‘normal’ activities like reading, exercise, and hugs don’t feel good anymore. Without brakes in place, this recalibration can progress to a point where you don't feel anything anymore. Total numbness.
This phenomenon is called ‘desensitization’ and it frequently leads to depersonalization, a numbed experience to the present moment or the feeling of 'not being here.'
This is painful enough by itself, but to make it worse, when you can’t be ‘here’ because you’re numb, you typically go to a place where you can feel something: porn.
This drives addictive use patterns, worsens your desensitization and depersonalization, and makes life feel unbearable.
Can you see how that's harmful?
2. Steal your drive.
The part of your brain you use for impulse control, emotional regulation, and long-term planning is called your ‘frontal lobe’. It’s the angel on your shoulder that encourages you to put down the Oreos or to invest your paycheck instead of buying a new PS5.
Because porn is a low effort, high reward activity, it has high addictive potential, and it has been shown to both lower frontal lobe activity and reduce the size of the frontal lobe.
In other words, watching porn shrinks and silences the angel on your shoulder until you can’t hear it anymore.
This phenomenon is called ‘hypofrontality’.
It’s another major contributor to behavior becoming addictive and it makes it harder for you to choose things that are good for you, like exercise, putting in effort at work, and saving money.
Is that something you want for yourself?
3. Steal your virility.
This one might be a head scratcher. Doesn’t watching sex make you better at it?
The problem is, porn doesn’t depict real sex.
Real sex engages all five senses, with touch and smell at the top. Porn can’t replicate that. It happens on a screen, so creators can only use sight and sound. But their job is to make the most alluring, addictive product they can, so they curate visuals and audio that far exaggerate what you get from real sex.
In porn, you see actors in absurd situations doing ridiculous things that normal people wouldn’t conceive of on their own. A real woman doesn’t like the things that women pretend to like in porn, but since the actors pretend, porn is effectively teaching you all the wrong ways to please a woman.
Porn also offers an endless variety of women for no additional effort.
Science shows us that new sexual partners are more ‘exciting’ than familiar ones-- a lever for diversifying our ancient gene pool. This drives intense desensitization for frequent users. A brand-new woman in porn gives you a higher 'reward' than a familiar one. That encourages you to seek novelty and reject familiarity.
This carries over into your sex life when a familiar sex partner no longer tops the 'reward' you get from porn, and sex with that partner begins to lose its appeal.
4. Steal your conscience.
There is a very clear link between frequent porn use and an increased tolerance for sexual violence.
Because of desensitization, even porn itself starts to lose its 'oomph' for a frequent porn user.
It’s no longer enough to just see new women, content needs to feel ‘different’ enough to continue satisfying a desensitized consumer. This demand for 'different' has pushed the proverbial envelope of ‘hardcore’ porn to become very extreme, often depicting extreme aggression and violence towards women to be 'different' enough to satisfy. If that weren't bad enough, women in porn typically respond positively to abusive treatment.
I'm sure you've seen it.
Whether this violence is simulated or not, it convincingly tells the story that women are objects for one to use as he sees fit.
For a frequent user, sexual aggression or violence towards women begins to seem normal, even good.
And when desensitization progresses far enough, even the extreme porn loses its 'oomph'.
This is the dangerous tipping point where a frequent porn user might consider doing things to real women that should never happen. Longtime porn use can even have this effect on good, well-meaning people like you.
Can you see how porn is harmful now?
5. Steal your love.
Sex is a deeply bonding activity.
The same part of the brain that modulates sex drive and processes sexual pleasure also promotes emotional bonding. This helps explain why sexual partners fall so deeply in love.
But what happens when you repeatedly experience sexual arousal and pleasure while watching porn?
You bond with porn.
Porn--and the women in porn-- become your lovers in a way that is, neurologically speaking, very similar to a real-life partner. And the more and longer you use porn, the stronger the bond becomes.
This can pose problems for committed partnerships, because the stronger your emotional bond with porn, the weaker your emotional bonds become with other people. Whether your partner knows about your porn use or not, she will begin to feel like she’s playing second fiddle to someone else. And in truth, she is.
Porn also harms your sex life (see harm #3), and bad sex will further weaken your bond with your partner and give her the sense that ‘the spark has gone out,’ when really you are just desensitized.
And because of desensitization, porn also encourages cheating and secret second lives, since frequent users often seek out new sexual partners to recapture the thrill that sex has lost. A person experiences deep personal betrayal when she discovers her partner's secret life. This is traumatic for both people and is almost always a relationship killer.
By absorbing your love and attention, porn can kill your most important relationships. Is that something you want?
6. Steal your peace.
If you read harm #1, then you learned how porn desensitizes you to pleasure.
One side effect of desensitization is the overactivation of your stress response.
There is a structure within your brain called the amygdala. It is responsible for alerting you to threats and activating your body’s stress response to help you respond quickly. For timely threat detection, your amygdala always watches what goes on around you. It reviews everything coming in through each of your five senses looking for immediate threats like snakes, bears, or angry people.
But your amygdala also keeps a finger on the pulse of what’s going on inside your body, to get ahead of any less immediate threats to your survival, things like starvation or cold. It's a devoted watchdog.
One of your amygdala’s neighbors is the part of your brain that processes rewards, the same part that recalibrates in response to porn, resulting in desensitization. To your amygdala, rewards equal survival, and when it observes no or low activity from the reward part of your brain, it concludes that your survival is at risk and it activates your stress response. Its goal is to motivate you to seek the ‘carrot’ by providing the ‘stick’.
If your amygdala always sees low or no activity from the reward part of your brain, as is the case when you are highly desensitized from frequent porn use, then your stress response doesn’t turn off.
This can manifest for you as constant anxiety, unease, and fear.
Your amygdala is always on, sending stress signals to your body, leaving you constantly on edge and never at peace.
Are you okay with losing your peace?
7. Steal your family.
Porn has clear links with human trafficking.
If you read harm #3, you know that porn desensitizes users, which drives demand for increasingly extreme content to satisfy desensitized consumers. Often, a highly desensitized consumer recaptures that elusive thrill from content that poses as taboo or illegal. For example, simulated incest, rape, or sex with minors are all popular categories with frequent porn users.
For creators, creating this kind of content is an easy way to get views, but it isn’t always easy or cheap to find women willing to simulate taboos or submit to abusive behavior on screen. Plus it’s difficult to distinguish between simulated and real abuse onscreen anyway, so creators often resort to exploitation and trafficking to create inexpensive, extreme porn that feels authentic.
More often than you realize, the woman you see onscreen isn’t choosing to be there.
More often than you realize, the abuse is real.
To put it plainly, frequent porn use creates an economic incentive for bad actors to abuse women.
This might not directly cause harm to you as the consumer-- especially if you’re ignorant of it-- but think about the effect your porn use can have on others.
What if it were your daughter onscreen?
What would you feel then?
