If you haven't yet, check out Your Brain On Porn. It's an interesting site with a lot of interesting articles and studies. It has a noticeable ideological bent against pornography (specifically internet pornography) but even if you're not a crusader against porn (which I'm not) it's still worth it to check it out.
Porn for me was always the case of "I could take it or leave it". Sometimes it's cool to watch, sometimes I'd rather just masturbate with my imagination. I've watched porn one time in the past week and probably twice in the past three weeks. It's just not something I watch all that often. And when my first laptop died I went about 10 months or so without porn without any issues. And of course by porn I mean "video of two (or more) people having sex". I'm not talking about still pictures of naked (or near naked) women. I'm not sure what to call those things, but I'm sure they are not pornography.
So needless to say I don't quite relate to a lot of the work done on pornography and its effects on men, particularly young men. But I do find a lot of it fascinating. The idea that regular porn consumption makes men less likely to go out and seek sex from real live women or the idea that it can really screw with your brain intuitively makes a lot of sense.
I was watching a youtube video about weight lifting and physical fitness in which the speaker was talking about video games (in particular the "first person shooters" or FPSs) and how they impact your physical fitness. The idea (which I'm sure is controversial) is that when you play a video game in which your brain thinks it's running around avoiding detection, shooting at other people, fighting, etc. but your body isn't actually doing these things, you screw up a lot of your internal mind-body synchronization. It reminded me a lot of the porn use research. I'm sure tricking your mind into thinking you are having sex when in reality you are not (aside from your genitalia) can be damaging to you, especially if you do it regularly.
Where I tend to hop off the bandwagon is the idea that giving up porn will result in porn sexually assertive or "hunter like" men. Like all the dateless losers out there are only so because they watch pornography. I was a pretty passive guy before I ever saw porn, I'm a passive guy when I watch porn, and I was the same way when I went 10 months without it. Some guys are just sexually passive and seek porn to cope with that, rather than the porn causing the passivity.
So I guess what I would like to see is some research done on porn and the involuntarily celibate (incel) or love-shy guys (or even gals I suppose) to see the effects on porn consumption on that segment of the population (if there are even some effects). Having known people who watch porn for years, I've never noticed a substantial impact on their social lives as a result of watching porn. I obviously have no knowledge of their sex lives because, well, I don't have sex with them. I think there's more to the story than just porn is what I'm saying.
So if Gary Wilson or Marnia Robinson are reading this: I'd love to hear some of your thoughts or responses on this. Same with anyone else doing research in this field.
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