You're listening to Science Versus, the show where we pit fact against fat. I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and on today's show, Science Versus Pornography. Is porn really destroying our minds and our sex lives? Researchers have been celebrating a breakthrough.
This was in break-in and break-in. Covering the sins, the sick, the artists across the world. The idea of porn destroying our brains and sex lives has a couple of features to it. It starts with the fact that in this age of high-speed internet, we now have the unlimited ability to watch porn, all the porn we like, any porn at all.
And people say this is bad because, one, porn is addictive, and two, it's setting us up to have unrealistic ideas of sex, and so it's destroying sex lives. But is porn really so destructive? Well, to find out, I did some primary research, and on a lovely Sunday morning in Sydney, I sat down to watch some porn with porn enthusiast Rob Martin. What I like about the internet is like amateur porn, people film themselves and put up and it kind of gives a much more realistic view of what sex is.
And Sydney comedian Hannah Rivett. I think it's an anus. You'll hear us throughout the episode. Well, when I was eight years old, I was running around my neighborhood and I found a Playboy magazine, so that's when it started.
This is Gabriel Dean. Shortly thereafter, I discovered masturbation, and so I began masturbating to images and magazines when I was about eight, nine years old. When Gabe was 12, his family got high-speed internet. So as a seventh grader in middle school, I would come home and watch internet porn for a couple hours before my parents got home.
But he was horny and getting sex, so for Gabriel, everything was fine. He graduated from high school, went to college, and kept on having sex. But then things stopped being fine. When I was 23, I noticed that I couldn't get turned on with my partner anymore, despite the fact that I was extremely attracted to her.
He went to the doctor to test his hormones and everything looked normal. I knew I could still get an erection with porn, so I knew my penis still worked. After a month of searching, he thought he found the answer to his problems. It all clicked, it made sense, and I was like, holy crap, porn really rewired my brain or sexually conditioned myself, if you will, to where I became dependent on porn to get an erection.
And then from that day on, I gave it up, and the rest is history. Gabriel now runs a website called Reboot Nation. What's up, everybody? My name is Gabe Dean, and this channel and our website, RebootNation.org, are for helping people recover from porn-related problems, addiction...
He believes that porn is addictive, that it's making a lot of guys have erectile dysfunction problems, and Gabe also thinks that porn encourages men to push women to perform sexual acts that they don't enjoy. I would coerce some of my girlfriends through my teenage years to do what I saw in porn. But that's Gabe's personal story, because then, there's science. On today's show, we're going to probe the idea of whether porn is really causing an erectile dysfunction epidemic.
We'll also explore whether it's addictive, and finally, whether porn is infiltrating the bedroom in a bad way. Just quickly, some of the research here is really anecdotal, and that's because it's really hard to do massive... Sorry. That's because it's really hard to do massive studies where we genuinely find out about people's sex lives.
So that I feel like the evidence I'm giving here is getting into murky territory, and we don't have strong data to support the ideas, I'm going to play this music. So this is the anecdotal music. Now, let's begin. Is porn creating an epidemic of guys who aren't able to climax when they're having real sex?
Gabriel Dean says yes. I think it's very, very common with my generation. Gabriel says that watching a lot of pornography desensitize him to real-life vanilla sex. So, what's in most porn?
And could watching it really stuff up the way your penis works? Over 65% of sexual scripts are very similar. This is Dr. Russell Pratt, a forensic psychologist based in Melbourne.
And obviously when he says script, we're not really talking about a written script. Obviously, in porn, there's not really an actual script. The general script is one, two, or more men engaging in sexual activity with one woman, multiple penetration, anal, oral, vaginal, and then ejaculation on the woman's body. According to Russell, watching a lot of porn, particularly extreme pornography, can in theory change what arouses you.
The repeated exposure to this quite severe script, or this quite outrageous script, I call it, of more and more gonzo or out-there sexual activity, repeated exposure to that is going to actually change the level that you are stimulated at. So while it's possible that porn can induce erectile dysfunction, how common is it? Gabe pointed me to several studies to make his case that erectile dysfunction was very common in his generation. The largest of the studies was from Switzerland and had surveyed more than 2,500 men who were between 18 and 24.
Now that study found that 30% of those guys had erectile dysfunction. Gabe also showed me a study using data from 1992, so that's before high-speed internet, and that found that 5% of guys in the study had erectile dysfunction. In Gabe's mind, this showed a picture of erectile dysfunction rates rising along with the unlimited availability of porn. But in these studies, you've got to look at the level of erectile dysfunction and its definition to get a picture of what's really going on.
So in that Swiss study that found that 30% of guys had erectile dysfunction, it sounds pretty dire, these are young guys, but the vast majority of them had mild erectile dysfunction. So what does that mean? The team used a five-part questionnaire, and it had classic questions like, During sexual intercourse, how difficult was it to maintain your erection, to completion of intercourse? There was also the question, How do you rate your confidence that you could get and keep an erection?
And they also asked, When you attempted sexual intercourse, how often was it satisfactory for you? Now if you said that you mostly, rather than always, could maintain an erection during sex, and if you rated your confidence as high, rather than very high, that you could keep an erection, and if you said that sex was sometimes satisfactory, then you would have a diagnosis of mild erectile dysfunction. So the situation isn't as dire, and it's much more subjective than I think a lot of people would assume when given an erectile dysfunction diagnosis. Plus, it's unclear if erectile dysfunction rates have been rising in the face of online unlimited porn.
So in that paper from 1992, their definition of erectile dysfunction was different to the Swiss paper, and if you slice up the data differently, they also found that around a third of the guys between 18 and 29 had trouble achieving or maintaining an erection. Now on top of all this, a paper published this year in the Journal of Sexual Medicine surveying more than 3,000 men found that overall there was no association between how much porn guys were watching and sexual issues. Conclusion. While it's possible that porn does affect and desensitise some guys to real sex, it's probably not that common.
I used to have to download 30-second clips off Kazar, the preview clips, and you hide them within like eight different folders, and you watch the same one over and over again. Next question. Addiction. Gabe believes that pornography can be addictive, and he calls himself a recovered addict.
He says on his YouTube channel that porn addiction isn't just for those predisposed to addiction, but it can happen to anyone. Myth 3. Only people predisposed become addicted or develop a dysfunction. In general, there are a few key features of addiction.
These include becoming obsessed with an activity, in this case porn, seeking it out even when it's causing harm, like problems with friends or work issues, compulsively engaging in the activity, and, critically, withdrawal symptoms when the stimulus is taken away. So does stopping porn really bring on withdrawals? Well, for Gabriel Dean, he says it did. They were pretty intense.
Once he thought that porn was causing his sexual dysfunction, he went off the stuff. Cold turkey. I'm usually a pretty laid-back dude, and after about two weeks, the stress and anxiety I was going through was off the walls. I had a panic attack at work one day, and that had never happened to me before.
So, does porn addiction exist? Here's Dr. Russell Pratt again. Certainly.
Porn addiction, I don't have any doubt, does exist. According to Russell, many of the chemicals in the brain that are released when someone has real sex are released when someone is watching pornography, and a lot of these chemicals also surge when we take drugs of addiction. And you know these chemicals. These are the ones that make us feel good, like dopamine.
And dopamine is involved effectively in creating cravings. And endorphins, which, thanks to Legally Blonde, we all know, endorphins make you happy. They're a natural opiate. They create that high that people feel during sexual activity.
Russell says that when teenagers in particular get a lot of these chemicals. Young people are actually laying down the formations and the patterns of going back and wanting to engage in watching porn again and again and again. But when the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, also called the DSM-5, also called the Psychiatry Bible, was being drafted, experts thought about including porn addiction. But they ultimately decided not to, because there wasn't enough evidence that porn was addictive.
So what does that mean for all those chemicals of addiction that get released when we watch porn? Well, they're just the happy chemicals that get released when we do just about anything that's nice. What you'll actually see is that it does in your eating chocolate. Or if we listen to good music.
This is good music. So, just because dopamine or endorphins are getting pumped out into your brain, that doesn't necessarily mean that when you watch porn, you're on the way to getting addicted to that stuff. But on the other hand, porn is a really strong stimulus, because it's tied to sex, which is what our species are supposed to be doing. So maybe our brains are somehow wired or set up to be more sensitive to this kind of stimulation.
Oh, and we can hear that, and I got all the music right. Anyway, this idea is actually what Simone Kuhn at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin thinks. Our brain is sort of pre-wired to be interested in naked bodies in reproduction, in a way. So this seems to be, I think, a very vulnerable part, where the brain is maybe likely to adapt a lot quicker than to other visual stimuli.
Simone completely recognises that this is just a theory at this point. So to get more evidence about how porn might be affecting our brain, she put a bunch of guys into an MRI scanner and asked the men how much porn they watched. So what we found is that the more porn men watch, the smaller a brain area. That smaller part of the brain was found in the striatum, and according to Simone, this area is involved in anticipating positive things.
Which is interesting. That's interesting, but what does it mean? Well, according to the Telegraph in UK, quote, watching pornography damages men's brains, exclamation mark, end quote. But Simone says that while her research could mean that watching porn shrinks a certain part of the brain, it could also mean those people with the smallest striatum tend to seek out porn and watch more of it.
Ultimately, Simone says that until we follow people over long periods of time, hopefully before they started watching porn. Remember that time? Before you started watching porn? Yeah, that's when we need to start studying you.
Until we do that, we're not really going to be sure what's going on. And it's not just Simone's study that has this problem. Pretty much every brain scan looking into porn falls into this trap. Are guys watching a lot of porn because they have something already in their brains that means they seek it out?
Or did porn change their noggin? Plus, if you listen back to our podcast on the female brain, you'll know that these brain scans are troublesome. Because as Professor Ian Hickey at the Brain and Mind Research Institute in Sydney says, In truth, the brain is not a picture. It's a really active organ that is changing all the time.
It's not a brain in a bottle. Conclusion. It's possible that because of the nature of porn, that it's more addictive than other good things in life. But the next question becomes, how addictive?
Well, let's consider how many people watch porn. So rates vary depending on surveys, but research in the US showed that around two-thirds of men and 40% of women consume pornography every month. That's a lot of people. So if we look at addiction rates for other drugs, say cocaine, around one in every six people who try cocaine become addicted or dependent.
Around one in ten people who try marijuana become dependent. If pornography was as addictive as pot, you'd expect hundreds of thousands of men and women to have anxiety and withdrawal symptoms once they stopped watching porn. And is this what we see? We have no idea.
Other than Gabe, no one has tried to stop watching porn. Jokes. Jokes. Here's Dr.
Russell Pratt again. The majority of people, including young people, actually deal with their pornography viewing reasonably well. But there is a cohort of young people and adults for whom it's a problem. Conclusion.
Porn, it's probably not that addictive. Oh, God. It looks like his dick is about to explode from the back of the head. It's insane.
Do you have some tea, by the way? No, I'm good. And that leads us to our next stop. Is porn changing our sexual behaviour?
Gabriel says yes. He says that porn had a big impact on sex for him. I would coerce some of my girlfriends through my teenage years to do what I saw in porn. And they were all willing to do it.
So I never really got turned down on anything. I can say... What sort of things? Ejaculating on faces, anal sex, stuff like that.
And different positions and stuff that I clearly got from porn. And our comedian Hannah says that when she's having sex with dudes, she can tell if they've watched a lot of porn. Just the way that they're acting is so obvious that they've been watching heaps of porn. It's just so clear.
And I almost laugh when I'm having sex with them. You can just tell. You feel like switching positions constantly and doing crazy weird stuff. And you're like, what are you trying to get me to do?
I asked Gabe if he thought the girls were enjoying what was going on. The girls at one point would cry. You know, if you want to talk specifically about anal sex, they did not enjoy it. And this story doesn't seem to be an isolated incident.
A recent study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine asked 130 teenagers in England about their sex lives. And they found that coercing girls into anal sex was actually quite common. The authors wrote, quote, women being badgered for anal sex appears to be considered normal, end quote. They also found that there was a pervasive idea that everyone enjoys anal sex.
And, quote, women who do not are either flawed or simply keeping their enjoyment secret. Hmm. Despite this idea about chicks loving the anal sex, many of the girls in that study said they found it painful. In fact, only one girl said that she liked it.
Now, that's a really small study, so we don't know how many women or men in the wider population enjoy anal sex or the other things that we see in porn, like getting cum on your face. We also don't know how common this act of coercing sexual partners is. But say that it does happen, and we just don't have the data on it. The next question becomes, is porn to blame?
Dr Russell Pratt believes that it is, because a lot of porn shows women in various sexual positions anal getting cum on. They're slapping, they're spitting. But in virtually every one of those situations, the women are portraying that they're enjoying anything and everything that happens in there. According to Russell, when kids who generally haven't had any real sexual experience watch this stuff over and over again, it gives them unrealistic expectations of what sex is.
We know some of the recent Australian research really indicates that young people are very much influenced by the pornographic script. But Brian McNair, a professor of media communications at Queensland University of Technology and author of Porno Chic, says these concerns are overplayed. The idea that this is a big problem is very much based on anecdotal evidence and a few very small-scale studies. People in general can distinguish between media images and real life.
So young people actually do understand that pornography is not real. But in a world where many people don't have a proper sexual education and when they see porn as their first introduction into sex, fantasy and reality confuse. He's Gabe. And I know this is anecdotal, just like Brian said I should watch out for.
I knew porn was fake and the actors were paid, but I also knew that there were people out there that did enjoy those things, and I had no clue that porn could influence my actual taste. I didn't know porn could have a negative effect on me. But in Professor Brian McNair's mind, certain kinds of men were always coercing women into sexual acts, even before pornography went on mine. The idea that somehow or other those problems are new or that they're getting worse, I think is the complete opposite of the case.
We've become much more sophisticated, much more tolerant of sexual diversity. All of these trends have actually co-existed with the expansion of pornography as well. When I put these arguments to Dr Mark Lima, a researcher in public health at Lancaster University, he sent me an email saying that the picture isn't as clear as porn is evil or porn is benign. The effect might be different for different people in different places.
So, for example, in his work with marginalised young men in England, Mark said he doesn't see much evidence for a positive shift in attitudes towards women. In fact, early research supports this idea that different personalities will respond to porn in different ways, with some people being more vulnerable to the messages that pornography sends. Okay, this guy is not a gentleman, because he's just jizzed all over her, all over this young woman, grabs a towel, then wraps it around himself and walks out of the room. Sugar is dead.
I feel like I'm giving too much of myself away when I say, yeah, done it. So, when it comes to science versus pornography, does it stack up? Well, You. tako Pornography might be addictive to a small group of people.
It also might be causing erectile dysfunction in some men because they're getting desensitized to real sex. But the science is yet to demonstrate how many men have issues with this. And is pornography damaging our sex lives? Maybe for some.
I get the feeling that if women, particularly young women, had more sexual confidence, this question would be a lot easier to answer because guys would say, hey, I just saw this thing in the horn and I want to try it. And then girls could say, yeah, or no, that really doesn't get me off. Just like Hannah did. I was with this guy recently and it was the first time that we were having sex and he was just like straight away slapping my ass.
I was like, what? Don't do that. It's the same kind of chastising of like, can you please just put a coaster down on the table? It's just like a light embarrassment.
It's like, oh, I'm sorry. I thought that was a rule. But sometimes women aren't comfortable saying no. Yeah, I've got lots of girlfriends who are very, they find it difficult to do that, I think, to kind of stand up for themselves.
Even know what they want, what they want is kind of dictated by whatever part they're with at the time. So when it comes to science versus porn, that's science nothing because we have such little data on these issues. And porn destroying our sex lives? Well, I'm going to give it half a point because it does seem to affect some guys, but the research isn't there to know if this is a massive issue.
And speaking of massive, I know some guys have issues about the size of their penis because in porn, all of their penises are ridiculously massive. A study which came out earlier this year found that the average size of an erect penis is 13.12 centimetres or 5.16 inches. That's it for Science Versus. A big thanks to my co-producer, Caitlin Sori.
And if you'd like to subscribe to this podcast, please do. You can do that on iTunes or SoundCloud or your favourite podcast app. Next week, e-cigarettes. How safe is it to vape?
There are likely to be harmful chemicals in e-cigarettes, but the question is, how harmful? I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'll see you next time.