Figure 1 Porn on the brain: effects of excess viewing on brain centers
Porno penises are bigger than life. The average erect male penis is between 5 and 6 inches. The average male penis does not make porn. Most men who don’t look at penises all day (like I do) can feel inadequate when they see a porn penis, but there’s a reason it’s a porn penis. It’s entertainment. Spectators don’t like to watch average athletes who are of average height and average strength making average plays. Same with porn. But is professional sex actually better? Being a porn star “comes” with its problems, and so does watching porn. This chapter goes behind the scenes of the male porn star’s world. It also uncovers the psychological implications of viewing porn. Porn may be used to spice up a relationship and break through taboos, but it can also become an addiction and desensitize a man, undermining his ability to relate to a real person.
It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. So what would it be like to be a porn star? This is a question that has crossed many (I daresay most) men’s minds, if only for a fleeting moment. Perhaps you fancy yourself an amateur porn star, or perhaps, given the subject matter of this book, you are, in fact, an actual porn star. But if you are like most men, you have simply gazed with wonder and almost certainly intimidation at the action on the screen, wishing you had a third hand to hold your smartphone.
Interviews with porn stars reveal that being “hard” at work is indeed hard work. The average 20-minute clip can take about 4 to 8 hours to film. This entire time, the male porn star must be able to have an erection on demand—and keep it for hours—and this is with a camera crew, lights, and onlookers. Compare that to the 2 to 8 minutes of intimacy for the average couple.1 The male porn star has to come on demand—no faking—and with the power and accuracy of a sniper. No drizzling for the big screen. Full facial glazing has become an industry standard. His costar may not be someone he finds sexually appealing, may be irritable or sick, or may be strung out on drugs. Sometimes the male porn star just isn’t up to the task and can literally take hours to finish, until finally a stunt double may be called in—or a pump bottle of lotion in a pinch.2 And it’s not all satin sheets and candlelight either. It gets cold out by the pool. The floor is murder on the knees, and those shower scenes require the balance and strength of a gymnast—a gymnast with a perpetual erection, that is. Every 28 days he has to submit to STD testing,3 but that’s not really going to cover him, because these performers often have numerous liaisons offscreen with people who aren’t porn stars and aren’t getting tested. The average male porn star has had sex with almost 150 partners,4 compared to about 6 for us civilians.5 The female porn stars have had sex with, on average, 75 partners. In Los Angeles, where 70 percent of America’s porn is created, condoms are used only 17 percent of the time in heterosexual porn.6 Gay porn has made a much stronger commitment to condom use both for the performer’s benefit as well as to set an example for viewers.7 But this is eroding with the increase in amateur gay porn now available online, as well as an increased false sense of security because treatments are now available for HIV.8 The Los Angeles health department has reported thousands of cases of STDs, including HIV, among the porn stars who have submitted themselves for testing.9
Sex may sell, but male porn stars don’t necessarily cash in. The average male porn actor makes a few hundred dollars, sometimes more, per movie—no royalties—and is kicked to the curb after a very brief career. They often start as actors who hit the skids. Once you’re in porn, there’s really no going back to the mainstream acting world. In gay porn, it can pay to suck, but the pay sucks worse than in straight porn. Gay porn producers have an insatiable appetite for fresh new faces because they are giving their audience a voyeuristic fantasy. Consumers don’t want to see a familiar face—they can get that at home, after all. In straight porn, the male performer has a longer career since the screen shot typically crops out the man’s face, focusing more on his equipment and the woman’s face. Male porn stars may eventually perform in both gay and straight porn. In gay porn, straight men will often stay on “top,” but versatility lends to greater longevity. On or off the menu of services are kissing, rimming, topping, bottoming, and ejaculating while bottoming (particularly valuable). It’s basically about keeping the work “coming.” Most gay male porn stars have to supplement with stripping and escorting.10 So why do it? Do they like their work after all? The answer is a definite maybe. Porn star satisfaction surveys indicate that they are as happy and well adjusted as the average Joe, but there is skepticism about these answers in that a porn star’s definition of self-esteem and happiness may be unhealthy and unsustainable at its core. For example, having his self-confidence based on sexual stamina and conquest may drive the male porn star to perpetuate that personality both on and off the screen, perhaps ultimately to the exclusion of a satisfying long-term relationship.11 Anecdotal mea culpas of ex–porn stars fill the Internet, with their tales of woe and regret often centering on the theme of losing touch with the ability to love.
What about the spectators? With the advent of the Internet, pornography has become ubiquitous. Pornography and the Internet have been strange bedfellows from day one. Back last century, in the days of dial-up Internet (for you young’uns, dial-up is the online equivalent of two cans and a string), one of the most popular downloads was ASCII porn—erotic images made only of various keyboard symbols, cleverly arranged line by line. Back then, that’s about the best you could do—think texting porn with no photos and no eggplant emojis (8==>, get it?). Our sexual appetite for more than just asterisks and exclamation points drove the ever-widening bandwidth we all enjoy today. Downloadable pictures progressed to downloadable videos, which progressed to on-demand streaming, which is now 3D virtual reality. There are even haptic-touch feedback-powered porno peripheral plugins to plug into.
You can thank porn for online credit card transactions, the concept of free content with upgrades to a premium service, and perhaps e-commerce itself. Pornography is likely what made the Internet what it is today.12 You could say that, because of porn, the Internet became ubiquitous. Sex sells—and how. Globally, pornography is a $97 billion industry, with about $12 billion coming out of the United States.13 So if you feel that you have been overexposed to pornography, it’s not by chance. Pornography has been thrusting itself at your face for years, and it quite literally tries to hit you in the eyes with the money shot any chance it gets. By 2020, it is estimated, more than 190 billion pornographic videos will have been watched and the average viewer will have watched more than 500 on his cell phone that year alone.14 I’m not sure how many gallons of hand lotion that involves, but it means it’s important for you to keep a firm grip—on reality. Pornography is a premise that is seductive but can be destructive if you don’t have the proper perspective—and I don’t mean POV or first-person shooter.
So, is pornography addictive? Well, it certainly has a lot of the characteristics of an addictive substance, but whether viewing porn is a true addiction is controversial. Yes, so-called “porn addicts” seem to watch more and more and need harder- and harder-core action and seem to feel less excitement—sounds like a drug, right? On the other hand, if they stop watching porn, there is no actual physical withdrawal—unlike with a drug. So in that regard, perhaps it’s more like eating chocolate—you may have a hard time controlling yourself, but if you can’t get it, you don’t actually get ill. On the other hand (that’s that third hand I was talking about), pornography can cause real harm to relationships and to an individual’s sense of self-esteem and ability to relate to others, and that makes it more like a drug than like chocolate.
As pornography has become increasingly available, it has become increasingly available to children. It’s jaw-dropping what those birds and bees are doing now. So many adolescent boys and young men (and some young women) have the depictions of pornographic sex burned into their brains. This is how they “learn” sex. But Internet porn is not meant to be educational, it’s meant to be entertaining and a fantasy. If porn reflected real life, it wouldn’t be a multibillion-dollar industry. Twenty minutes of Olympic-level sex is the result of many hours of filming, makeup, prescription drugs, enemas, soft-tissue injuries, and tedium. But your brain doesn’t like to make such distinctions, and so porn sets an unrealistic expectation for the viewer, as well as his partner. Everything is extreme, from the size of the penises to the size of the breasts. The duration of thrusting, the Cirque du Soleil positions, the exotic but extremely uncomfortable locations, and yes the high-volume/high-velocity money shots—all are extremes, and that’s just straight-up “normal” porn. It gets a lot harder and a lot stranger the deeper you dive. Learning sex from porn is like learning how to drive a car by watching The Fast and the Furious—you will eventually crash.
My colleague Stephanie Buehler, who has literally written the book on sexual behavioral medicine (What Every Mental Health Professional Needs to Know about Sex), has sadly gained a whole new group of patients since the massive uptick in Internet porn consumption. These are women, typically in their thirties, who have been rejected by their partners because they don’t respond sexually the way the female porn stars do in the videos. The guys are convinced they are doing everything correctly because, after all, they learned it from the videos and they studied the “plays” over and over. The woman must have a problem since she isn’t having vaginal orgasms like all the women in porn. Turns out 20 percent of women do not have vaginal orgasms, and that’s just a natural variation. About half of these women do have orgasms, but with clitoral stimulation other than vaginal penetration. These women are normal, healthy, and capable of intimate, satisfying relationships, but they have been labeled defective by guys who, unfortunately, think Internet porn is some kind of online sex school.
A milder version of this syndrome arises when men in relationships get an appetite for new kinds of sex they see in porn, but they are afraid to mention it to their partner for fear of seeming deviant or “gross.” When asked, most of these men’s partners would be happy to discuss it, although middle-aged women would be a lot less inclined to accommodate these requests than younger women in younger couples who themselves have also been watching porn. In these younger couples, the women may interpret that more exotic sexual acts are a normal requirement for their partner’s satisfaction and so be more enthusiastic. However, some couples who watch porn together do so mainly while they are under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and one of the two doesn’t really like what they are watching and what is stimulating the other, but buries it with the drugs or alcohol. Eventually that resentment surfaces and can hurt the relationship “unexpectedly.”15
We know we can’t play basketball like LeBron James, but watching him doesn’t make us feel inadequate because we know he is exceptional. One of the reasons we know this is because we have seen mere mortals play basketball. In fact, most of us have even played basketball with other average people. We know what an average layup, jump shot, and (rare) dunk looks like. But most of us haven’t been up close and personal with other average people having sex. Watching porn can lead to an unrealistic and unfounded disappointment with our own very normal equipment. Almost a third of men who watch porn think they got shortchanged, and they are twice as likely to think they are running around half-cocked compared with men who don’t partake.16 In fact, about 40 percent of men who come to urologists’ offices seeking penis enlargement surgery got the idea that their weenie was teenie from watching porn.17, 18, 19
Not only is the normal penis getting cut short by porn, it’s getting deflated as well. Since the advent of Internet streaming “porn tube” sites, there has been a dramatic spike in the percentage of young, healthy guys who can’t get it up. Before the current tsunami of streaming sex, only about 5 percent of men under 40 had this problem; now, up to 1 in 3 guys peters out. To make matters worse, desire for sex has plummeted. And more and more guys are left high and dry—unable to reach a climax and ejaculate. Don’t it make your brown balls blue?20 Even teenagers are suffering from erectile dysfunction. When I was a lad, boners were as natural for teenage boys as pimples and greasy hair. Sadly, this is not the case for many high school seniors who like to sneak a peek at porn, with up to 25 percent reporting difficulty getting erections.21 As of 2014, over half of college-aged men reported being exposed to Internet porn prior to age 13, more than triple the amount just 6 years earlier.22 Men who suffer from compulsive sexual disorder reported they started watching porn around age 14, whereas unaffected men reported first watching at around age 17.23
Regular viewers of porn are at greater risk of losing interest in sex with a real, live partner. And even if you were content to retreat to the holodeck and just have cybersex, the porn itself becomes less stimulating over time. Guys who watch a lot of porn have a hard time getting hard, even when watching really hard-core stuff. The stimulation that pornography provides is especially powerful because it revs up a drive that is primal and that we are already programmed with. It’s like pouring gasoline on a fire.24 There is a brain center that drives the desire to see something new or different when watching porn. It’s called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, or DACC. This center will drive the frequent porn user to keep seeking more and more novel images, but all the while it becomes less and less responsive, and so he needs to feed it even more.25 The guy will have to up the ante. Half of men surveyed reported venturing into explicit territory they may have never previously found appealing or even stuff they may have found to be disturbing.26 Dr. Stephanie Buehler, the prominent sexual medicine specialist I mentioned earlier, shared with me that she is seeing a new trend in which young straight men show up in her office confused and scared because they are inexplicably attracted to transgender pornography and convinced that they must be gay, even though they don’t identify as gay in any other way. She carefully evaluates them and finds that, indeed, they are straight, but their adventure into pornography has revealed erotic images they weren’t expecting and, given their limited experience with real partners, they don’t have the perspective they need to understand their own reactions to what they are seeing. Many will go so far as to arrange an intentional sexual encounter with a transgender person but usually back away from the rendezvous at the last moment as the Internet fantasy comes bumping up against reality.
But there is hope. Turned-off men who turn off the porn eventually can be turned on again—by a real partner.27 What about guys who do have partners—as in married guys? A 10-year study of marriages showed that the more porn the husband watched, the greater the chance of problems in the marriage. Marriage satisfaction steadily declined as the husband increased his viewing from occasional to a few times a month to a few times a week. Marriage satisfaction then took a sharp nosedive when the husband viewed porn daily.28
Ironically, many married men who watch porn do so to keep sexually aroused with their partner.29 Sexual arousal is associated with a surge of dopamine in the man’s brain. Dopamine is the main brain chemical associated with pleasure, and dopamine surges are seen with other addictive activities as well.30 Sexual reproduction is a basic requirement for our survival, just as food and water are, so it only makes sense that our brains are geared to want the very things our survival depends on. The critical difference is that the reward centers of our brain that respond to sexual images are the same centers that respond to addictive drugs like meth and cocaine. This is not true for food and water and other natural rewards.31, 32, 33 The more the addictive centers are stimulated, the stronger the desire becomes, and this can lead to impulsive Internet usage, if not actual sexual behavior.34 Interestingly, it’s not the actual watching of the sex itself that boosts dopamine; rather, it’s the anticipation of what the person is about to see. The same phenomenon can be seen with gamblers whose thrill is not so much the playing of the game, but rather the anticipation.
With frequent viewing, a guy can develop a disconnect between what it takes to “turn on”—to satisfy the wanting—and what he actually likes or loves. So in order to actually get an erection, he’s got to watch harder- and harder-core porn, but it’s not really what he likes and so he has trouble keeping his erection in good old partnered sex with a real person—even though he genuinely would like to have sex that way and may genuinely care for that person.35 Sadly for very affected individuals, not only is sex impacted by a porn addiction, but the part of the brain that lets us enjoy all sorts of everyday stuff gets blunted too. This part of the brain, called the prefrontal cortex, also gets blunted with drug addiction, making it hard for addicts to ever feel “normal.”36 It’s like eating something sugary sweet right before you bite into a piece of fruit—it makes the fruit taste bland. Turning to porn before your sweetie can make her or him seem blander too. One study demonstrated that the more porn men watched, the less satisfaction they had with their partners in terms of affection, physical appearance, sexual curiosity, and sexual performance.37
So how much is too much? In one study of men with compulsive sexual behaviors, these men were glued to the screen for 20 hours a week versus “normal” guys, who watched about a half hour of porn a week.38 It’s estimated that 3 percent to 6 percent of men are classifiable as “sex addicts”—addicted not just to porn but to strip clubs or sex with sex workers or other consenting adults.39 Many years of compulsive viewing of porn can actually shrink parts of the brain that are important for romantic love—and for keeping erections. These include the right caudate of the striatum.40, 41 The putamen, another deeper brain structure that sends the signals to actually make you hard, powers down with more and more porn.42 Notably, gay men watch more Internet porn than straight men.43
The depictions of sex—the positions, duration, orifices, fluids, additional partners, and various combinations thereof—set a standard in the minds of the guys who are watching with any regularity. Aside from the fact that these depictions were neither done in real time nor candid, and aside from the fact that they are the result of unusual and often grueling video recording sessions, it’s also important to understand that the vast majority of women are not even watching this stuff44 and don’t realize what these guys expect from themselves and from them. But the producers of porn do know how to push the right buttons. In fact, scientific studies of eye motion tracking reveal that the two most eyeball-grabbing aspects of straight porn are first, the woman’s face, and second, the erect penis. Put the two together and that’s why the money shot—ejaculating on the woman’s face—is the money shot.45
Figure 1 Porn on the brain: effects of excess viewing on brain centers