The effect of porn on teenage boys and young men

[DeviTheGaelet]

Did anyone else hear the section on R5 about porn addiction the other day? They spoke to a doctor who is looking into the defects of porn on men. A study in Italy found 40% of young men were having erectile issued, of those 60% were psychologically caused ( I think those were the stats).
The doctor suggested that watching porn during adolescence is training men to be aroused by purely visual stimuli and the visual stimuli are not realistic. As a result they are not being wired to find the smells and touch of actual sex arousing. As a result they are having election issues.
He described porn as "stunt sex" and said it was creating a generation of men who's sexual relationships were with their hand and a screen rather than another person.
I found it really interesting. We talk a lot on here about the harm porn causes women and girls but I've not heard so much about the impact on boys.
I think this should be discussed in PSHE in schools. Maybe this will be the personal impact many men need to see how harmful porn can be.

I think, and apologies if i am wrong grow, that he has put the "some woman find it difficult to orgasm through piv sex" bit together with the "if men watch too much porn they cant orgasm" bit

When the two "lack of being able to orgasm" things are completely and utterly different

Not defending him but i can see how his brain is 'working'

Unless i am completely wrong and then everyone will yell at me and i will have to leave the thread

Would never shout at you, Rufus!

How, in 2016, do we even define porn anymore?

If someone sends another person a racy video of themselves, is that classifiable as porn?

There is a book out at the moment called 'Future Sex' by an American journalist called Emily Witt. It's conclusions are liberal bullshit but it's enlightening nonetheless.

Witt has something of a mid-life crisis and embarks on an exploration of sex-tech subcultures in California. She speaks to people who create their own porn for a site called Chaturbate (the Uber of the porn world) which they can make money from. But she also finds people, including women, who create and upload their own porn for nothing - purely because they got off on making a sexual exhibition of themselves. Ultimately, she claims to find liberation in cybersex.

The book does consist of a lot of tedious hippie navel gazing, but it does make you aware of a the emergence of a completely different kind of porn which breaks with all our preconceptions about how a porn industry should work.

There are three domains to the porn world, although they all overlap. Firstly there is the trade in sex-trafficking which feeds the market for illegal material (child abuse, bestiality, snuff). This will be run by the mafia and other criminal organisations. Then there is the legal domain of material which customers are charged for in the old-fashioned way - pay per view porn sites and sites which men can masturbate on web cam to prostitutes.

Then there is the Porn 2.0 domain of open platforms in which anyone can publish anything. User-gnerated content is increasingly dominating these sites. Couples and singles make homemade videos in which there are no directors, producers or middle men at all. Of course whatever capitalist pig owns Pornhub is making huge amounts of money whenever a video is clicked on, but less and less money is changing hands on the production and distribution level in the way it once did.

That's interesting, because this is not just some evil porn studios making films - but ordinary people making porn of themselves with their phones.

Thank you helen

I think you are being generous rufus
I think he's massively invested in porn being fine. Actually my own opinion is changing on this thread, I thought men would care about the impact of porn on male sexuality but actually it's clear that their own orgasms come first. Fuck everyone else. (NAMALT, just the ones who visit here to construct straw men bonfires)
I'm with beach now I think

Not saying any of that is a good thing btw. I think it's messed up.

Porn networks have interwoven into Facebook, Youtube, Tumblr and all these other platforms. Porn is no longer a discrete domain of the internet but more and more another facet of social media.

I think you are being generous rufus

Its a fault

Better than being a cynical man hating biatch

I have no interest in whether you think I am a literal wanker or not, however I know a lot more about male sexuality that you do. telling boys not to wank and that they should be ashamed of themselves for looking at naked pictures that girls post of themselves because it's hate speech is utterly fucking bizzare. Ban all porn because i saw a few videos that called the women a whore.

Rufus - you are right in where i got the idea from. I am sure that i've even read on here that women who use a vibrator too much are unable to orgasm without it. So apparently no women ever has had this problem - well fuck me that's something ?

As for studies that suggest any man who watches porn is likely to be damaged and struggle to form relationships with women, well they're wrong.

DeviTheGaelet, I don't mean to be pessimistic and or negative and I'm pretty sure I get the feeling behind your OP and IMO it is great that you have started this thread as a discussion of what pornography does.

Decades and much energy have been spent in trying to get men to own what pornography does and what it is. So far that has been met with resistance and dishonesty. We need firm concrete legal action now. This thing has got way out of hand. It absolutely meets the definition of hate speech and I see no other realistic avenue. We need something radical that cuts off all derailment and bluster about moralistic prudishness and vacuous crap about it being women's fault / something women do too.

It absolutely meets the definition of hate speech and I see no other realistic avenue.

Once you explain how you are going to persuade the many women who make porn for nothing (see qweryts post - but i suppose you ignore it) that they are not allowed to anymore. Perhaps you might explain how you would technically achieve it ? Exactly wtf is "realistic" about any of the nonsense you are posting ?

growapear nobody is telling boys not to wank. They're just saying that their wanking should not be facilitated by industries which exploit and degrade women (and some men) and create untold misery. Your right to wank is not what this is about.

Lots of women do post videos of themselves. Sometimes their boyfriends post videos of them without their knowledge. Sometimes they're underage and what boys are wanking to technically child porn.

In fact sometimes boys themselves are victims when videos of them end up being circulated online. A boy at a school I worked at tried to hang himself when a video of him was uploaded to a porn site.

The whole thing is rancid and should be banned tomorrow.

We need firm concrete legal action now.

I agree. But like what?

Anyway - i bid you a good evening, I am getting angry at the myopia and refusal to read what other posters write when it doesn't fit with "all porn is hate and must be banned before all our young boys become effectively impotent" narrative.

Agree with qwerty

Which is a sentence i never thought i would write

I'm touched Rufus :)

In the context of this thread that might be a bad thing [qwerty]

Oops Bold fail

Men are to blame but so are some women - and even some lib fems: the Pandora Blake/Laurie Penny/Vagenda types who lots of young women listen to peddling irresponsible pro-porn rot.

Women are increasingly embracing porn, depressingly.

Growapear, women who post pornographic images of themselves on the internet are not the root of the problem - such behaviour and internalized misogyny are just yet another harmful consequence of internet pornography. As I keep saying, pornography does stuff to humans, it affects us.

Amateur selfie posts by women (concerning as they are) are peanuts.

Plus a lot of "amateur" stuff is well known to be anything but. They are a "produit d'appel" - they are cynically produced and marketed by men to men who want to consume pornography but find it tricky to get a boner if they have to consider that the woman in the films they are jacking off to hates being there, hates what is being done to her and hates the men who are jacking off to films of her being abused.

HTH

It is hard to think of ways to police the Internet.
Making all porn sites pay to view might help as it would put off kids.
Educating boys that watching porn might affect their ability to orgasm with a partner might help and can be done without making sex seem shameful or dirty.
But while people want to insist PORN IS FINE in the face of all available evidence it's going to be hard to do anything.

Making all porn sites pay to view might help as it would put off kids.

True. But as I say there's porn on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Chat Roulette - every bloody where. A lot of porn isn't even on porn sites.

About ten years or so ago porn could have been regulated. Now I fear it's too late.

That said, the big mainstream sites should be made to impose an age restriction gateway asking for credit card details.

Yes bloody Facebook gives me the rage about it. God forbid someone should see a picture of breastfeeding yet porn is fine

So as an average wife and mother sat at home on the computer, what can I/we do? I'm relatively new to the issue, but as pp have said, it seems a good starting point would be to get porn restricted to 'porn sites'...I'm assuming there are campaigns and such which I (and most other women) are unaware of? (I say other women, as sadly it seems that the majority of men still refuse to see the difference between old fashioned stills type porn and the increasingly common more extreme stuff, and the problem arising in that young girls are putting stuff out there just to feel validated as a desirable person.)
It's completely unrealistic to believe that a tidal wave of protest would shame social media sites into banning porn, but at least it would raise the issue further...