Reseña: Your Brain on Porn. Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction

Abstract

Billie Eilish, a young yet famous American singer-songwriter, had been trending online because of her conversations with a radio host. At the age of 11, she confessed she first started watching pornography, which gradually made a negative impact on her life. She narrated, “I think it [pornography] really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn” (Eilish, as stated in Nicholson, 2021). Eilish is only one of the many who are secretly suffering from being addicted to pornography. Indeed, this has sparked a critical conversation about porn which many just shy away.

Porn use and men's and women's sexual performance: evidence from a large longitudinal sample

“…It is often thought that frequent porn use distorts beliefs about sexuality (Manning, 2006;Ward, 2016) and represents a threat to sexual self-competence, particularly for men (Morrison, Ellis, Morrison, Bearden, & Harriman, 2007). Accordingly, highly publicized authors have argued that porn was one of the root causes of 'escalating, morphing sexual tastes, a range of sexual dysfunctions, and loss of attraction to real partners' (Wilson, 2014; for other popular books, see Dines, 2010;Zimbardo & Coulombe, 2015).…”

The destruction of intimacy: pornography in the digital age

“…Consequently, they not only need to consume more than before to achieve the same level of sexual arousal, but they need more variety. Moreover, in the world of porn, novelty means moving toward increasingly extreme and violent images, which allow the consumer to reach the same level of physical and psychological arousal that he experienced in the beginning 27 . This is the reason why the most extreme genres of hard-core porn register more and more consumers on the internet today.…”

“…In fact, at the November 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers -a meeting that brings together American lawyers specializing in divorces -an alarming trend became the center of attention: almost two-thirds of the lawyers present had witnessed a sudden increase in divorces related to the internet, of which 58% were the result of the excessive consumption of online pornography by some of the spouses. Moreover, this figure corresponds to the social reality of 20 years ago 27 . Definitively, the results that we can observe after so many years of research allow us to reach an unequivocal conclusion: there is not a single longitudinal study that shows that pornography improves relationships, and we have increasing scientific and clinical evidence demonstrating the opposite.…”

Creating disinformation: Archiving fake links on the Wayback Machine viewed through the lens of routine activity theory

“…In addition to creating Yourbrainonporn.com, in 2012 Gary Wilson gave a TEDx talk in Glasgow, Scotland, called "The great porn experiment" (Wilson, 2012) which at the time of writing had been viewed over 16 million times on YouTube. Building upon this effort, in 2014 Wilson wrote a popular book (Wilson, 2014) and in 2016 he authored a peer-reviewed paper, recommending more research on pornography use (Wilson, 2016).…”