Porn is probably bad for your sex life

POPSCI: A scientific slant on what’s trending in popular culture

Porn sites draw more monthly traffic than the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined — they’re even being bought up as prime real estate for ad space and used as platforms for messages of social good. But the mass uptake of porn has also brought about groups like NoFap; a Reddit community that’s dedicated to not watching porn. In a span of just four years, the group, which initially started out as a joke, grew from 50 people to over 157,000 members today.

A recent study looking at the brains of internet porn users, found reduced responsiveness to erotic stills. “It’s hard to compete with the internet,” laments repeat Playboy cover star Pamela Anderson. They also found that the hours and years of porn use were associated with decreased grey matter in the regions of the brain associated with reward sensitivity.

“People can watch porn occasionally and not suffer significant side effects,” writes psychologist Philip Zimbardo. “However, plenty of people out there, including teens and pre-teens with highly plastic brains, find they’re compulsively using high-speed Internet porn with their porn tastes becoming out of sync with their real-life sexuality.”

After all, less grey matter in these areas means less dopamine and dopamine receptors — which are crucial to our reward system. “Regular consumption of pornography more or less wears out your reward system,’ explains Simone Kühn, lead researcher on one of the studies. The more porn we watch, the more we need in order to to get our kicks.

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Written by Rebecca Smith, behavioural analyst at Canvas8