Porn May Lead to New Sex Tastes
After watching regular softcore porn for many years, viewers may desensitize and get less stimulated by it. Seeking the same stimulation as before, viewers find themselves watching more and more videos in one sitting and more and more extreme porn. Viewers may be dependent on that excitement and so pursue it despite losing energy and having guilt taking pleasure from extreme content.
The extreme content may not have interested these viewers before they were desensitized to normal pornography. In fact, it may have disgusted them. But now, desensitized to what was sexually stimulating after years of repeatedly viewing normal videos, viewers may try to get sexual arousal and excitement from this new kind of content. Culturally programmed aversion to this demeaning content may be suppressed in order to get the dopamine fix they became dependent on.
A study (cited at the end) found 49% of surveyed men described sometimes “searching for sexual content or being involved in OSAs (online sexual activities) that were not previously interesting to them or that they considered disgusting”.
Almost half of the population surveyed described said they searched for pornographic content that not only wasn’t stimulating before, but was “considered disgusting”.
Why do they do this?
Because of desensitization and the need for more extreme content.
Today, relationships with pornography may be different. We can access near limitless pornographic videos. With Free porn sites emerging in ~2005, volumes of content, mobile computing, and today’s Internet speeds, viewers can streamline endless pornographic novelty. Reflecting this, Zimbardo found boys on average watched a whopping 50 videos a week. Not only can viewers watch more than one video in a sitting, one can rapidly switch tabs between multiple videos at once. Furthermore, viewers can rewind and fast forward based on sexual tastes.
This new, novelty based sexual stimulation may release an unnatural amount of dopamine different from that in real sex. An issue is this abnormal release of dopamine may wear down dopamine receptors over time. Then content from before doesn’t give the same kick. You then seek more novelty, from different content, to get that same kick, that same dopamine burst that you’re dependent on.
Desperately wanting that dopamine fix, our minds may be aroused by content not arousing before. Whether it’s content of a sexual orientation we weren’t interested in before and aren’t interested in after ejaculating, or sex with animals, or just incredibly violent content — people may get stimulated watching this. Wearing down excitement from regular romance, we may develop new sexual tastes perhaps not only in porn but in the real world as well.
So, if you’re watching porn, watch out. You know it’s always there, and it’s stimulating and hard to stop using. It may lead you down a path not good for you, and you may not be able to stop. So I recommend trying to get it out of your life right now. Otherwise your dopamine receptivity may be impacted, and you may be less stimulated by normal life and romance.
It’s hard to inspire yourself to change when you don’t know the costs of not doing so. Now you do. It’s worth the restraint for the greater long term benefit.
Purchased my book now from Indiebound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781732182196
—
Source: Wéry A., Billieux J. Online sexual activities: An exploratory study of problematic and non-problematic usage patterns in a sample of men. Comput. Hum. Behav. 2016;56:257–266. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2015.11.046. Page 260.
