The state of Utah recently passed a resolution that identifies pornography as a public health crisis — a full-blown porn epidemic. Internet Ebola. Anti-masturbation rhetoric is far from uncommon. While we can talk about the dream-haunting, Victorian-era devices created to kill the urge, the debate is still very relevant today.
In recent years, several countries have attempted to pass anti-porn laws with varying degrees of success and enforcement. What’s more, there’s a clear surge of self-motivated interest in quitting porn as evidenced by these Google Trends graphs — there are 10 times more searches for “no fap” than there were in 2011.
Gary Wilson is a prominent figure in the anti-porn movement. He’s the author of the book Your Brain On Porn and his TedX talk, entitled “The Great Porn Experiment,” has nearly seven million views. His take, in short, is that porn is bad. The repeated hits of dopamine from excessive masturbation cause DeltaFosB, a “molecular switch for addiction,” to be over expressed in the brain. This in turn causes brain changes that lead to bingeing and dependence, not to mention social anxiety, depression and loss of interest in other facets of life. He paints us a grim picture of an isolated, shambling porn monster.
He cites the Coolidge effect, in which an animal — whether it’s a rat, a bull or a human — can bang to exhaustion with one partner, but get a second or third wind when a new, receptive sexual partner is presented. With porn, this is when a masturbater loses sexual interest in the stuff they’re used to watching and has to reach for weirder stuff to get off. If taken to extremes, this could completely mess with a real-life sexual relationship. If your partner is comfortably vanilla and you can only get off to German dungeon orgies, you’re gonna have some problems.
However, Jason Winters, a sex therapist and sessional lecturer at the UBC psychology department, disagrees. A text post that has the same text as one of his blog posts circulates occasionally around the pages of reddit.com/r/nofap, a steadily growing community of almost 200,000 members who choose to abstain from porn or masturbation. The post stomps on a lot of what Wilson says in his book, talk and website.
Winters claims that the whole anti-porn movement stems from the work of Gary Wilson and his partner, Marnia Robinson. Neither of them has a strong background in psychology and many of their claims have to do with the effects of addiction upon the brain. While it’s pretty undeniable that a physical addiction like meth will change how your brain functions, the claim that a behavioural addiction like porn or food is less substantiated.
What’s more, Winters points out that the idea of mental illness being caused by porn addiction does a huge disservice to the many mentally ill people who self-medicate with rewarding actions such as taking drugs, having sex or using porn. Confusing the symptom with the cause is dangerous when it could prevent somebody from getting treatment they need.
In a Reddit post, Gary Wilson confronts Winter’s arguments directly. He points out that the DSM-5 designates behavioural addiction as a valid form of addiction — a moot point, considering Winters never denied that porn addiction existed — and cites all the reports he’s read of people quitting porn and immediately finding their lives improved.
Bottom line — plenty of forums and sites exist for people whose goal is to quit porn. Many of them say that quitting has resulted in more time, higher self-esteem, better relationships and more satisfying sex. And power to those people! Controlling compulsive dependence on anything is an accomplishment whether it's porn, food or video games.
Like in all things, balance is important to maintain. To close with a quote from Winters's blog post, “Internet porn is like fast food. It's full of fatty, salty, artificial deliciousness, but it has no nutritional value whatsoever. Having a real sex partner(s), and assuming you're doing sex right, is like eating a well-balanced diet. This might mean a little fast food now and again, especially if your fridge is empty. But if you eat nothing but fast food, you're going to be unhealthy.”
Share this article
