Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson dispute the common conception that the penis never lies.
Editor’s Note: The blocked quotations, unless otherwise cited, were taken from the comments sections of posts and message board conversations where men were talking about sex.
Once upon a time, men could trust their penises to tell them everything they needed to know about their sexual orientation. Even recently, behavioral neuroscientist Paul Vasey confidently opined, “Sexual orientation is what you think about when you’re masturbating.”
Really? What if porn, to which you once happily fapped, no longer does the job? Could this be why viewers who would never harm others are viewing violent porn? Why gay porn viewers are feeling baffled by their tastes for straight rape porn or lesbian porn? Why straight men are bewildered by their tastes for transsexual or gay porn?
Psychiatrist Norman Doidge explains in The Brain That Changes Itself:
The content of what [patients] found exciting changed as the Web sites introduced themes and scripts that altered their brains without their awareness. Because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images increased at the expense of what had previously attracted them.
Do a viewer’s most recent porn tastes reveal his “deepest urges and most uninhibited thoughts,” as Ogas and Gaddam claim? Does his sexual orientation change along with what he views? Or does cyberporn manufacture superficial tastes, sometimes unrelated to sexual orientation? Most likely the latter.
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Porn Has Changed … A Lot
It’s common for people to say, often casually, that they are “addicted” to the Internet, to email, video gaming, Facebook, iPhones, or even Internet porn. Even though the sensory input from such multimedia is nothing new, these activities are, in fact, physiologically, potentially addictive. Surfing the net, especially for porn, incorporates activities that spike dopamine levels and keep the reward circuit buzzing: seeking sexy material, the anticipation as each page loads, having novelty on demand, surprising and shocking visuals.
Obviously, a once-a-month Playboy or an 1980s VHS tape cannot compare to using three high definition screens, with nine windows open, to search for new scenes, genres, whatever, until you find just the right shot to take you home. After a five-minute breather you can search via Google for something you’ve never seen, so you can whack away once more. Unlike static porn of the past, today’s Internet porn is so stimulating that, in some brains, it can gradually produce addiction-related changes.
No wonder a guy’s brain can grow numb and stop responding to conventional sexual cues. Once vanilla porn is no longer doing it for him, his sexual tastes may prove surprisingly fluid. When his current cyberporn genre doesn’t arouse him, does he think, “Oh, that’s a sign that my brain needs a time-out to return to normal sensitivity—why don’t I lay off the porn?”
No. He unthinkingly does something that none of his ancestors had the option of doing (but would have done too). Out with the old and in with the new, because novelty triggers the surge of dopamine he needs to become aroused. He clicks around the Web until he hits something that engorges his penis. A novel pornstar may be sufficient, but perhaps after his fourth session of the day, he needs an added jolt of shock or anxiety to goose his dopamine and light a fire under his brain’s sluggish reward circuitry.
For some guys this innocent reflex can have one or both of the following undesired effects:
1. Rewiring: The user inadvertently carves new arousal pathways into his limbic system. As researcher Jim Pfaus points out, “the mating brain is opportunistic.” It’s not strictly bound by intrinsic wiring, but rather it adapts to promising sexual cues. This is especially true during adolescence, when the brain is primed for wiring up such cues.
Thanks to evolution, fertilization is the brain’s top priority, so—even if a porn user would prefer to forget what he just saw—his brain carefully wires up all associations that led to his orgasm. It wants him to be able to “fertilize” this target again in the future. With enthusiastic use, a new brain pathway can become a “pathway of choice,” irrespective of fundamental inclinations. In short, nerve cells that fire together wire together—especially if they produce a “bigger ‘n’ better” orgasm.
2. Desensitization: “Two hours edging to porn? That’s what Google is for.” “Two ejaculations since dinner? Let me fire up my old laptop so I can watch more windows on an additional screen.” Unlike other mammals, a guy can override his natural limits using ever-novel porn.
Over time, a user’s brain can physically change. Signs of fundamental brain alterations (as contrasted with short-lived habituation) may include: chronically weakened impulse control, craving spikes in response to cues one associates with porn use, and decreased sexual responsiveness. He’s no longer registering pleasure normally; his desensitized brain is desperate for the dopamine hits from stimulation. To climax, he needs to watch for longer or move on to new material.
Small wonder that, as users slide along the porn spectrum in search of the next big “O,” they can end up climaxing to visuals that are unnerving—or even illegal:
Anthony: I started looking at porn, on a regular basis, about five years ago. First there were the beautiful women, then the hardcore porn, then the weird insertions, then the transvestites, then critters, then the hermaphrodites, then the teen porn, then the younger models and now prison (soon to go). As the years passed I became less and less interested in masturbating and more and more interested in “novelty” searching. Looking back, I just don’t see how I failed to recognize that I had a problem.
Sexual Orientation vs. Synthetic Sexual Tastes
Obviously, a user who climbs aboard the Internet porn train can end up getting off at stops that were once inconceivable. Perhaps the most bewildering is, “Help! My penis is only responding to erotica I associate with someone else’s sexual orientation.”
Ryan: I seriously thought I was turning gay. My obsessive thoughts about this issue were so strong that I was contemplating taking a dive off the nearest high-rise. I felt so depressed. I knew I loved girls and I couldn’t love another dude, but why did I have ED? Why did I now need transsexual/gay stuff to get off? It’s like I made a mistake that I cannot correct anymore. I want to go back to my old days when I was only turned on by the female body.
Brains desperate for sensation can find anxiety-producing material particularly arousing. Such emotions release extra dopamine (and norepinephrine) in the brain. In essence, they are a response to risk-taking.
Some of today’s cyberporn users develop obsessive-compulsive patterns around shocking porn. For example, a user may keep testing to see if a particular porn genre is arousing—because he happens to find that prospect horrifying (and exciting). Then he masturbates to relieve the anxiety produced. He is like a person who can’t stop checking to see if the stove is turned off. Interestingly, addiction and OCD produce similar anomalies in the brain’s reward circuitry. Satisfaction becomes more elusive and drives continued unwanted activity.
Said one 21-year-old with a girlfriend, whose anxiety began three months earlier when he got an erection from watching a man’s penis in a video:
Now, I constantly feel the need to keep checking by using porn to prove that I’m still straight. I use any available moment to PMO to women, sometimes even in the same room as my girlfriend as she sleeps! This behaviour really upsets me but I find I can’t help it. It offers comfort for about 10 minutes before the doubt kicks in again.
Porn makers know how compelling this orientation-anxiety can be, and consider transsexual porn a “straight porn specialty.” When interviewed, the operator of several transsexual porn sites said, “My main audience, and the audience for most [transsexual] porn, are straight dudes. That’s how it’s always been. I will say that all of the visitors to transsexual sites are straight.” [Emphasis added.]
“Who am I?”
If a gay viewer starts climaxing to straight porn, or vice versa, is he discovering his “true sexual orientation?” Probably not. But brains are plastic and, users can inadvertently wire new stimuli to their erections, just as Pavlov’s dogs learned to salivate to the bell. In both situations, dopamine activation (anticipation) prompts autonomic effects downstream. The brain’s primitive reward circuitry isn’t aware that the bell isn’t food, or that “new” porn isn’t “my” porn. Its axiom is simply, “Dopamine good.”
Fortunately Ryan can, with patience and self-discipline, once again unwire his unwanted associations. (More in a moment.) Meanwhile, he may need to beware of well-meaning folks who try to tell him his changing tastes reveal buried clues about his true sexual orientation. Maybe they do; maybe they are totally devoid of significance. Said one 22-year old:
During middle school and high school I watched porn for hours. After high school I dated a girl I really liked, but I didn’t feel as much arousal around her as I felt when watching porn. In college I got confused about sexuality because I wasn’t feeling as much sexual attraction as other people. I was also turned on by gay porn and thought maybe I had latent homosexuality. My senior year I went to sexuality counseling and a coming-out support group for a quarter. Neither brought me closer to understanding sexual orientation or attraction. Yes, I got turned on by some gay porn, but I didn’t feel attraction to, or fantasize about, guys. The gay guys that I met seemed much more certain of their orientation. After a while I wasn’t sure I belonged there. I’ve started feeling more sexual attraction around women now that I’ve cut down on porn and masturbation.
Or consider Ryan again. When he began using porn, all he thought about was girls. He watched lesbian porn because he didn’t want to watch men having sex. Only after years of continuous porn escalation did he began to doubt his orientation. Recovering porn users on our forum often report developing, and discarding, multiple “tastes” as their addictions worsen. It’s evident that these mutually exclusive, transient tastes cannot all reflect buried sexual-orientation clues—if indeed any of them do.
For example, how could a taste for “transsexual porn” reflect a sexual orientation? Isn’t this evolutionary impossibility more likely to be appealing simply because it’s a cornucopia of compelling sexual cues (breasts, erect penis, arousing acts), lit with extra dopamine for the viewer who finds it exotic or anxiety-producing?
A radical change in porn tastes is likely to be little more than a sign of progressive brain desensitization. In other words, Ryan can’t be sure of much until he stops climaxing to the unwanted stimuli and returns his brain to normal sensitivity. This can take months.
A Better Test (Than Erections) for Sexual Orientation
A raging Internet porn addiction appears to operate independently of sexual orientation. However, the myth that “my sexual orientation is determined by what I masturbate to” is so powerful that many of today’s porn users do not realize that their random tastes are a function of overstimulation leading to tolerance, and therefore reversible.
Fortunately, research is catching up with reality. For example, scientists are learning that prediction of fundamental sexual orientation isn’t as simple as they once assumed. As Sexual Fluidity author Lisa Diamond says, “Sexual arousal … is only one element of sexual orientation and identity.”
So if “visuals + erection” can mislead, how do you recognize your sexual orientation? Obviously, whatever you climaxed to when you first started masturbating is a useful clue (assuming earlier childhood events haven’t distorted it).
Yet a more fundamental test of sexual attraction (or aversion) is: with whom do you want to do deep kissing?
Attraction and aversion are most powerfully displayed in the appeal of (or aversion to) engaging in intimate sexual activities that involve touch, body orifices, and body fluids such as saliva, vagina fluids, or ejaculate. Men are generally much more “turned on” by the smells, orifices, and fluids of one sex than the other.
In fact, one expert we interviewed noted that men can have profound aversion to these characteristics in other men—even to the point of nausea and vomiting (perhaps after the thrill of the “forbidden” or the effects of alcohol have passed). Said Ryan:
I ALWAYS do not want to kiss a guy. For some reason, a guy’s saliva would seem so nasty, and a girl’s is just so perfect. For me, the thought of a guy’s saliva is … disgusting, almost seems germ-filled. A gal’s saliva seems almost sweet to me.
Unwiring Plastic Changes
As a porn user’s addiction progresses, masturbation habits may tell him very little about his actual orientation. However, guys on our forum have discovered that if they (1) give their brains a rest from porn and porn fantasy (and ideally masturbation and orgasm), and (2) replace their former habits with socializing, exercise, meditation, and other comforting activities, they can start to see changes in their sexual tastes surprisingly quickly. Here’s Ryan’s report after only a month:
I spent the last year of high school jacking off to Internet porn compulsively, and escalated to gay porn several months ago. I found it disturbing to watch; it fueled my OCD and subsequent depression.
Now I’m feeling almost like a new person. I’ve been through nearly 4 weeks of hell, and had to get my antidepressants adjusted. I’ve been biking daily and interacting with others at college. But I do not get aroused at gay porn anymore. It’s like I have gotten rid of those circuits. The thought of lesbian porn is once again arousing. I am also slowly starting to get my libido back. It’s not over yet, but I have conquered part of it.
I have literally been on forums with thousands of pages of posts by people who were dealing with desensitization and escalation to weird stuff. I’m really unhappy when people tell others that what they masturbate to is “what they are.” Maybe that was true 20-30 years ago, but it is not anymore.
Is his brain already unwiring or is its dopamine signaling improving (reversing desensitization), or both? It seems that as users resist climaxing to a particular type of porn, fantasizing about it, thinking about it and worrying about it, the related brain pathways physically weaken from disuse. As neuroscientists say, when nerve cells fire apart, wires depart.
As the abandoned pathway stops producing a dopamine payoff, the brain—ever eager to go through the motions of reproduction—dusts off and fires up earlier brain circuits. Of course, if an addiction has progressed to the point where someone cannot climax without extreme porn, quitting will not be easy. He will need a lot of support. Severe withdrawal symptoms are common, but worth it for many users:
Mike: Relapsed at day 23. Already I can see that if I do quit this addiction, I will be completely able to have healthy sex with women. Along with my binge came a silver lining: those first few times masturbating were very exciting, and it was to very softcore porn. My sexual tastes had begun to normalize. Very reassuring. This vanilla stuff wouldn’t even have been a blip on my radar four weeks ago, but now it drove me wild. Of course, as the binge continued I progressed onto more extreme material, again making all too clear how the addiction screws with my tastes. I had to escalate to more extreme material to get that same rush.
Shawn: It’s hard to believe that a year ago, the main thing that got me off was transsexual porn. Arousal for real women has boosted to a level I’d forgotten during years of porn viewing. I’m now seeing just how sensitive I am without masturbation to porn. My erections are rock hard, and they feel great. I love that even the lightest touch from my girlfriend makes me respond like crazy!
We humans may want to be more farsighted and selective about the sexual cues to which we wire our orgasms. Apparently a primitive, subconscious, and very persuasive part of our brains doesn’t much care.
—Photo andronicusmax/Flickr
[…] if a patient complains of inability to control behavior, porn tastes morphing in unsettling ways, or the need for increasing sexual stimulation—many a therapist will assure […]
I would like to know, too, why GMP have given the authors control over moderating this article.
I don’t have control over comments on my GMP posts, which I think is right. And I have received personal insults on some threads. Which are not deleted. I don’t understand this preferential treatment.
I have contacted GMP by email to this effect.
I find this post a little bit worrying.
The ‘science’ of the brain it refers to has been challenged. I will find some links.
It also seems to suggest only men watch porn!
It also is very negative about gay men and also ‘extreme’ porn and S and M sexualities.
I am a woman. I don’t use much porn but the only porn I am interested in is S and M. That is where my sexual interests lie. This is NORMAL! Just ask Freud.
yes but you use examples of the porn being more ‘extreme’ – e.g. ‘violent porn’ or ‘rape porn’ to indicate escalation. Which suggests ‘gay’porn and sexualities are more ‘extreme’ than hetero ones.
whatever turns you on, I suppose!
What happened to Blanchette’s posts?
A snake ate his posts
Amazing piece. Thanks for bringing new light and information into a popularly discussed topic Gary and Marnia.
I second Mr. T’s concern with regards to the presentation of this very marginal theory as established fact. Opinion pieces are fine, but this series of postings are and have been presented as scientifically factual, therefore requiring an appropriate level of diligence, statistical significant repeatability, peer reviewed corroboration, and a clear means of falsification.
On Richard Dawkins – suggest that those interested read The Extended Phenotype as a good follow up, as it clarifies many of the ideas in The Selfish Gene.
I don’t understand. What “theory”?
Is Marnia’s husband speaking? Gary, I will always refer to you first and foremost as Marnia’s husband. I will never refer to your career first.
If this feels demeaning, well, we women get called someone’s wife every single day and our careers are addressed as an afterthought.
So you’re doing it to men because men do it to women?
Gary and I write as a team. Since this is a men’s magazine, I think it’s appropriate that his name goes first. After all, men rightfully wonder what the heck a woman knows about how their private bits operate. (Little do they know how many thousands of posts I’ve read from guys struggling with such issues.)
The GoodMenProject is not a men’s magazine, the entire website is controlled by feminists.
A true men’s magazine is not into deleting of comments.
Thank God it’s not just me. I’m not just being defensive about my porn use, the scientific reasoning and argumentative logic really are questionable here.
How dare you, though, bringing in one of the philosophical pillars of the modern scientific method. That’s not playing fair, bringing in all that stuff about the tentative nature of scientific knowledge. Scientific truth is just true, dammit! Theories are “just theories,” but “scientific truth” is “true.” Obscurantist.
P.S. This was in response to elissa’s list of Popper’s principles. Say that five times fast.
P.S. I’m left out the whole question of environment. Genes get expressed within an environment, which includes other genes. I don’t know how this relates to porn, but it could very well be that our brains are “evolved” to do one sexual thing in one context and another sexual thing in another context. There’s a North American bird species that mates for life on the East Coast and has multiple mates on the West Coast. Same species, different mating patterns. Which one does evolution “want” for it?
“Thanks to evolution, fertilization is the brain’s top priority….”
Perhaps, maybe, kind of, in a way. If that’s true, the human brain is really, really incompetent at it. There’s that whole tool-making side of the brain that’s developed knowledge of human fertility, created birth control, etc. That reproductive priority is thwarted every time a man masturbates (unless he’s doing it for IVF sperm collection, in which case that tool-making side is actually helping fertilization).
Thank goodness for that neo-cortex! By pointing out that the brain evolved to encourage procreation we are certainly not suggesting that sex should be reserved for making babies. *shudder* But that’s the subject of another post….
Have you read Mean Genes or The Selfish Gene? Our genes’ top priority is getting themselves into the future. That’s what drives evolution.
In fact, if “nature” has any desires at all, it is NOT at all friendly to living beings. The universe is most decidedly antagonistic to the long-term survival of ANY organic life as we know it. For most of its existence, Earth was without life at all, and one day probably will be again. That’s would be the “most natural” intent of the universe, astrophysics-wise. Genes are just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic for a while. I find it more reassuring to ignore the question of intent sometimes.
I don’t want to quibble but our genes have no motivations or priorities. None whatsoever. I have read a lot of Dawkins and he always cautions readers to be careful about anthropomorphizing what our genes do. Calling genes “selfish” is just a metaphor. I guess I have a tiresome need to point this out when I statements like “our genes’ top priority is….” 🙂
Thanks for clarifying. I guess we thought that if Dawkins and Phelan (UCLA biology professor and co-author of Mean Genes) could anthropomorphize to make the point that evolution is all about getting genes into the future, so could we. It’s common knowledge that a major function of the reward circuitry is to drive mating.
It’s great as a metaphor but in pop culture, it’s misunderstood. Dawkins knows what he means when he says genes are selfish but even he is careful to point out, repeatedly, that genes aren’t really “selfish.” Like I said, I just have a tiresome need to point this out for the benefit of the masses.
Yes but this does not explain homosexuality.
Your research is incredibly ‘heteronormative’.
I think the whole of (American) culture has ‘Heterosexual Obsessive Compulsive Disorder!
But sure if you say you are heterosexual, you are heterosexual. Though plenty of heterosexual men enjoy watching men naked and er*ct in pornography. So…
On that point, I totally agree, sex is one of our most powerful drives. Every one of us is the descendant of a direct line of billions of ancestors, going back to the primordial slime, and every single one of our ancestors in that unbroken chain, without exception, reproduced successfully (obviously!). So it is hardwired in to us, no doubt about that.
Here we go again, Gary’s name comes first because he is the man.
I want to hear you call yourselves Marnia Robinson and Gary Wilson. And I want to hear Gary addressed as Marnia’s husband.
The biography of Marnia and Gary subly perpetuated male privilege. Gary’s career was addressed and Marnia was called his wife. Please!
“What you want” Is really of no consequence. Constantly on this site i see you harp on what other people do in their own private lives. If Marina and Gary wish Gary’s name to be listed first, that is their business and not yours. If they choose to do otherwise, that is likewise none of your affair.
You are an annoying busybody who for some reason seems to think she has a right to dictate how other people run their lives. Newsflash: You do not have this right.
stop it.
Well, despite the preponderance of sexual images in our culture, it is always a very narrow view of sexuality. There’s still an idea of “right and wrong” when it comes to sexuality. So, a person can be somewhat disturbed by what they view or read online but not because there’s an actual problem with his/her sexuality but because he/she has incorporated societal judgments about the material into his/her mindset.
Personally, I favor the idea of exploring (in a safe way) the dark “stuff” we have inside ourselves. You know, that whole “what you resist persists” thing.
That’s great if you can deal with it. Not every one can deal with it, and not everyone wants to deal with it. I don’t think people should be made to feel ashamed if they want to set limits on what they feel is acceptable for themselves.
Not everyone’s identity is determined by the placement of their name in the byline.
I agree. The ‘neuroscience’ does not explain these men’s desires it just comes up with an excuse or an ‘explanation’ that suits the beliefs of the researchers.
I have become interested in various things via looking at pornography that is one of its benefits in my view – it opens minds. If it wasnt for porn I might still be stuck in the missionary position.
I wonder what gay people would make of the phrase “escalated to gay porn.” I’m sure many of them would say they “discovered gay porn”….
Yeah, I know. There’s a bias in this article that infers that gay porn is somehow more deviant than straight porn.
For straight guys it is.
Feel bad about what you enjoy? Simple. Just change the wiring in your plastic brain so you feel good about it. Maybe some affirmative audio tapes — “It’s okay to like penises. It’s okay to like penises. It’s okay to like penises.” Voila. Problem solved. Guilt, shame, judgment, alarm, doubt, all just brain chemicals!
For several years I attended Sex Addictions Anonymous meetings and this article ties in with what I observed there. Great inquiry into a problem which takes a toll on a man’s peace of mind and a toll on his interpersonal relationships, usually bad consequences.
Absolutely right!
What a fascinating read. I am familiar with the brain that changes itself and find it so unbelievable that our brains can change so radically without our realizing it. I found myself reading the line, “replace their former habits with socializing, exercise, meditation, and other comforting activities.”
I think that applies to just about anything.
I am familiar with the brain that changes itself and find it so unbelievable that our brains can change so radically without our realizing it. (Tom)
Come on Tom, are you serious? If the change was that radical do you not think you would not realize it? Talk about sensationalism. 🙁
Great, informative piece. I used to work at a sex addiction clinic and we saw clients with this issue all the time — novelty-seeking behavior to jump-start libido and fuel performance.
Protip: most men don’t spend every waking hour watching porn and whacking it nonstop.
Statistics on website viewership would disagree.
Bet me? I have done it for years.