I grew up in the era of dial-up internet, and I remember many of my friends touting the blessings of high-speed internet. A few gamed, but ultimately it was all about one thing: how quickly you could download porn – first pictures, and then video. It’s a temptation most guys face (I’ve talked to priests who have admitted that more than 90% of guys whose confessions they hear struggle with an addiction to pornography at some point).
Of course, in a fallen world which views orgasm-at-any-cost as nearly sacramental, few would question the “harmless personal choice to consume” that pornography represents (with maybe a cursory nod towards making sure women aren’t forced, or children exploited, of course).
Then, I stumbled across the following TEDx talk by Gary Wilson, titled “The Great Pornography Experiment,” and my jaw figuratively hit the floor: The TED folks have done many pieces on sexuality before, but few people—if any—anywhere outside the confines of the “right, conservative, Christian” sphere have had the gall to question whether the rise of now ubiquitous internet pornography was actually the blessing so many have assumed it to be (one group, very surprisingly, was Cracked.com, an informative comedy site that self-professedly makes it’s money from “d**k jokes.”)
Watch the following video:
High Points and Takeaways
Somewhat depressingly but filed in the not-too-surprising category, at 3:44: Experiment hits a snag after discovering single college-aged males that have never looked at online porn do not exist
At 5:29, he admits that “internet porn is as different from real sex as today’s video games are from checkers.”
Moments later, at 5:44, he proposes that, of all activities on the internet, says a dutch study, porn has the potential to be the most addictive.
Dr. Wilson argues that extreme versions of natural rewards have a unique ability to capture use: high calorie foods or “hot, novel babes” trigger dopamine, massive surges of which can tell your brain either that it’s hit the evolutionary jackpot, or that it needs to kick in the Delta Fos-B, which beings to accumulate int he reward circuit in the brain, which builds up and alters the brain, promoting a binging/craving cycle. Having numbed the pleasure response, nothing else satisfies, and only pornography titillates. ALL addictions share these similarities.
At 9:30:”constant novelty at a click can cause addition.”
At 10:00, “the Resurrection of Guys” – a grass-roots movement of men “quitting internet porn.” Many are giving it up entirely because they’re bodies aren’t working correctly anymore.
And lastly, at 12:00, a rather moving testimonial from a former a porn addict.
The Turning Point
So, I don’t know what this means, per se, but it’s possible that the secular world might just be ready to begin to admit that an endless stream of novel sexual imagery at a click might not be the best thing. It might be utterly as addictive as heroin, far more wide-spread, and every bit as harmful.
We might be at a point when even folks like Dr. Drew could admit that pornography might actually harm the “user/consumer.”
Ironically, chronic use may in fact cause the consumer to—as the ancient warnings forebode—”go blind,” at least to the world around them.
Image courtesy Martin Gommel