Porn addictive as crack cocaine

Brain rewired by limitless access to sex videos

- by JASON WORTH

SOME claim pornography is just a rite of passage for teenagers, and that watching it can be part of a normal, healthy sex life.

And yet evidence is emerging that pornography can lead to erectile dysfunction, low energy, brain fog, insomnia, loss of attraction to real partners, severe social anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts.

So how can something that is said to be harmless on the one hand be potentially deadly on the other?

The answer, perhaps, lies at the intersection of modern internet video streaming technology and human biology. We now have an abundance of easy-access, free porn video clips (much of which you could call 'hardcore') available at the click of a button.

What was once innocent adolescent development – coming across a nudie magazine like Penthouse or grainy VHS tape at a friend's house – has evolved into high-bandwidth video streaming.

And it didn't take long before websites proliferated and offered unlimited porn clips across dozens of genres. The slang term for multi-genre, high-bandwidth porn sites is 'tubes' – because they serve up videos just like YouTube.

And to use a drug analogy, if nudie mags and video tapes were like marijuana, these tubes are crack cocaine.

To understand why tubes are the porn equivalent of crack, we need to understand the physiology behind pornography. Thousands of years of adaptation and Darwinian self-selection have resulted in a human male species that craves sex.

You've undoubtedly heard the expression that men always have sex on the brain, and there's a lot of truth to that. You and I are walking the Earth today because our fathers and forefathers were horny bastards.