Is Porn Ruining Men’s Sex Lives?

I’m a big supporter of porn – and porn’s been a big supporter of mine. I helped found an erotic magazine, I used to review porn online, and through my writing on sex and sexuality, have actually ended up on first name terms with a number of porn performers.

But despite all this porn advocacy – I’m no longer convinced that Internet porn is “good” for guys.

It’s a realization I had while browsing Reddit.com, normally one of my go-to places to find erotic images and content. Girls post their pictures on a subreddit called /gonewild...and it’s everything a lonely and horny guy could wish for!)

While there, I stumbled into another subreddit called /NoFap, and it made me think.

/NoFap is a subreddit dedicated to men who are attempting to give up “PMO” – or Pornography, Masturbation and Orgasm. Why the hell would they want to do that, you ask? Because many of them believe it’s ruining their lives.

The movement’s origins stem from the theories of anatomy and physiology teacher Gary Wilson, who argued that the way technology has allowed men to access porn has totally screwed with the way they’re evolutionarily programmed to respond to sexual stimulation. On his website, YourBrainOnPorn.com, he writes:

“To the human brain, Internet porn is as different from erotic magazines as “World of Warcraft” is from checkers. This has major implications for your neurochemical balance.

“High-speed Internet pornography users in their twenties are increasingly developing sexual performance problems (erectile dysfunction, delayed ejaculation). Italian urologists recently confirmed the impotence-porn use connection via a large survey- with 70% of the young men seeking clinical help for sexual performance problems using Internet pornography habitually.

“Most men are astonished to learn that pornography use can be a source of sexual performance problems. Only after they experiment for themselves do they become fully convinced that pornography use was indeed the source of their dysfunction.”

It’s something that resonated very powerfully with me, as I’d been noticing similar problems with my own sexual performance recently, and it had coincided with me looking at more porn on the ‘net.

Internet porn, you see, is kind of like the fast food of sexual stimulation. When I was growing up, in the days before the Internet, I used to get turned on by reading sexy segments from my mother’s collection of romance novels (anything by Julie Burchill or Jilly Cooper is good).

But Internet porn has come along and now you don’t need to thumb through a dog-earred paperback for some sexy prose. You can find whatever sexual fetish you’re looking for at the click of a mouse; in explicit, high-definition video.

And what does this mean for regular guys? That reality pales in comparison to what’s being offered up by the Internet, and our sexual performance is affected as a result.

There are two ways in which this manifests itself.

The first is physical. As Gary Wilson mentioned, a large number of healthy young men are experiencing erectile dysfunction as a result of looking at porn. Because porn serves up every sexual permutation you could possibly dream up at the click of a mouse, some men are finding that “real” sex doesn’t get their body responding in the same way; and when they’re in an intimate situation with a real person, they can’t perform.

The other way in which porn can affect men’s sex lives is by denying them one in the first place. Porn gives men an easy way to relieve themselves of sexual frustration without any effort, or fear of rejection. As a result, men don’t go out – and it robs them of the drive to turn their sexual fantasies into sexual reality. This is the reason many men cite when they explain why they are experimenting with /NoFap.

But what does No Fap mean?

It’s a hiatus on “fapping” (masturbating) and a complete cold-turkey on Internet pornography. The results, according to the thousands of posters on Reddit.com/r/NoFap, can be incredible. The term “superpowers” even gets thrown around occasionally.

As Sker wrote:

“NoFap is one of the greatest tools to actually do what I want in life. I'm finally reading the books of the great writers I always wanted to read and get in the company of. I'm finally not wasting my talent and writing like I'm supposed to (not in English). I'm finally learning myself about (screen)writing, what I always wanted to do.”

So it’s something I’ve started to try myself. And I do feel like a kind of “porn funk” has been lifted from my brain, and the hours I used to spend browsing for porn online has been invested much more productively elsewhere.

But am I saying that is porn bad?

I don’t think you can say “porn is bad” any more than you can say alcohol is bad, or fast food, or smoking pot. They’re addictive substances, and can negatively impact your life if abused, but in moderation they can be enjoyed responsibly – and I believe high-speed, Internet porn is exactly the same.

But the difference is that people are educated about how alcohol and junk food can be bad – but not Internet porn. In fact, once you get past the puritanical rubbish that the Christians and Feminists try to sell us (that all porn is inherently bad) most people seem to think that porn and masturbation are positive things.

And while for women that might be true, I think that the average male brain is simply not wired to process high-speed Internet porn in the same way. As a result, I think the connection between porn and male sexual performance is something we’re going to be hearing about a lot more in the coming years.

What do you think? Has internet porn affected your sexuality? Or that of somebody you’re close to? Do you think /NoFap is a legitimate movement? Or is this all fantasy, stemming from our society’s puritanical obsession with sex and sexuality. I’d love to know your thoughts.