Is porn damaging your emotional health?

Thanks to the internet, porn has become central to our lives, with serious consequences for our sexual and emotional health.

Research is showing that porn is indeed addictive, especially to men, and that it damages their libido in the longterm. Experts on sexual dysfunction are seeing an epidemic today of healthy young men who cannot perform easily with their partners because they have been overexposed to pornography. With increased exposure to porn many men need higher and higher levels of stimulation, or more and more extreme situations, in order to become aroused. So it seems that people are not closer, erotically, because of porn but less sexually connected.

Porn deadens desire. A whole generation may be less able to connect erotically to real women. Some men who care about their sexuality who have moved away from porn not for moral reasons but, rather, for physical and emotional-health ones; they want to protect their desire.

The data of this epidemic should not be surprising. After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain. It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex, that is what it will take to arouse you. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free the power of Eros but dilutes it.