The Social Costs of Pornography: A Collection of Papers Read online

  It is reasonable to ask whether our sexual plasticity is related to neuroplasticity. Research has shown that neuroplasticity is neither ghettoized within certain departments in the brain nor confined to the sensory, motor, and cognitive processing areas we have already explored. The brain structure that regulates instinctive behaviors, including sex, called the hypothalamus, is plastic, as is the amygdala, the structure that processes emotion and anxiety.3 While some parts of the brain, such as the cortex, may have more plastic potential because there are more neurons and connections to be altered, even noncortical areas display plasticity. It is a property of all brain tissue. Plasticity exists in the hippocampus4 (the area that turns our memories from short-term to long-term ones) as well as in areas that control our breathing,5 process primitive sensation,6 and process pain.7 It exists in the spinal cord8—as scientists have shown; actor Christopher Reeve, who suffered a severe spinal injury, demonstrated such plasticity, when he was able, through relentless exercise, to recover some feeling and mobility seven years after his accident.

  Merzenich puts it this way: “You cannot have plasticity in isolation . . . it’s an absolute impossibility.” His experiments have shown that if one brain system changes, those systems connected to it change as well.9 The same “plastic rules”—use it or lose it, or neurons that fire together wire together—apply throughout. Different areas of the brain wouldn’t be able to function together if that weren’t the case.

  Do the same plastic rules that apply to brain maps in the sensory, motor, and language cortices apply to more complex maps, such as those that represent our relationships, sexual or otherwise? Merzenich has also shown that complex brain maps are governed by the same plastic principles as simpler maps. Animals exposed to a simple tone will develop a single brain map region to process it. Animals exposed to a complex pattern, such as a melody of six tones, will not simply link together six different map regions but will develop a region that encodes the entire melody. These more complex melody maps obey the same plastic principles10 as maps for single tones.

  “The sexual instincts,” wrote Freud, “are noticeable to us for their plasticity,11 their capacity for altering their aims.” Freud was not the first to argue that sexuality was plastic—Plato, in his dialogue on love, argued that human Eros took many forms12—but Freud laid the foundations for a neuroscientific understanding of sexual and romantic plasticity.

  One of his most important contributions was his discovery of critical periods for sexual plasticity. Freud argued that an adult’s ability to love intimately and sexually unfolds in stages, beginning in the infant’s first passionate attachments to its parents. He learned from his patients, and from observing children, that early childhood, not puberty, was the first critical period for sexuality and intimacy, and that children are capable of passionate, protosexual feelings—crushes, loving feelings, and in some cases even sexual excitement, as A. was. Freud discovered that the sexual abuse of children is harmful because it influences the critical period of sexuality in childhood, shaping our later attractions and thoughts about sex. Children are needy and typically develop passionate attachments to their parents. If the parent is warm, gentle, and reliable, the child will frequently develop a taste for that kind of relationship later on; if the parent is disengaged, cool, distant, self-involved, angry, ambivalent, or erratic, the child may seek out an adult mate who has similar tendencies. There are exceptions, but a significant body of research now confirms Freud’s basic insight that early patterns of relating and attaching to others, if problematic, can get “wired” into our brains13 in childhood and repeated in adulthood. Many aspects of the sexual script that A. played out when he first came to see me were repetitions of his traumatic childhood situation, thinly disguised— such as his being attracted to an unstable woman who crossed normal sexual boundaries in furtive relationships, where hostility and sexual excitement were merged, while the woman’s official partner was cuckolded and threatening to reenter the scene.

  The idea of the critical period was formulated around the time Freud started writing about sex and love, by embryologists14 who observed that in the embryo the nervous system develops in stages, and that if these stages are disturbed, the animal or person will be harmed, often catastrophically, for life. Though Freud didn’t use the term, what he said about the early stages of sexual development conforms to what we know about critical periods. They are brief windows of time when new brain systems and maps develop15 with the help of stimulation from the people in one’s environment.

  Traces of childhood sentiments in adult love and sexuality are detectable in everyday behaviors. When adults in our culture have tender foreplay, or express their most intimate adoration, they often call each other “baby” or “babe.” They use terms of endearment that their mothers used with them as children, such as “honey” and “sweetie pie,” terms that evoke the earliest months of life when the mother expressed her love by feeding, caressing, and talking sweetly to her baby—what Freud called the oral phase, the first critical period of sexuality, the essence of which is summed up in the words “nurturance” and “nourish”—tenderly caring for, loving, and feeding. The baby feels merged with the mother, and its trust of others develops as the baby is held and nurtured with a sugary food, milk. Being loved, cared for, and fed are mentally associated in the mind and wired together in the brain in our first formative experience after birth.

  When adults talk baby talk, using words such as “sweetie pie” and “baby” to address each other, and give their conversation an oral flavor, they are, according to Freud, “regressing,” moving from mature mental states of relating to earlier phases of life. In terms of plasticity, such regression, I believe, involves unmasking old neuronal pathways that then trigger all the associations of that earlier phase. Regression can be pleasant and harmless, as in adult foreplay, or it can be problematic,16 as when infantile aggressive pathways are unmasked and an adult has a temper tantrum.

  Even “talking dirty” shows traces of infantile sexual stages. After all, why should sex be thought “dirty” at all? This attitude reflects a child’s view of sex from a stage when it is conscious of toilet training, urination, and defecation and is surprised to learn that the genitals, which are involved in urination, and so close to the anus, are also involved in sex, and that Mommy permits Daddy to insert his “dirty” organ in a hole that is very close to her bottom. Adults are not generally bothered by this, because in adolescence they have gone through another critical period of sexual plasticity in which their brains reorganized again, so that the pleasure of sex becomes intense enough to override any disgust.

  Freud showed that many sexual mysteries can be understood as critical-period fixations. After Freud, we are no longer surprised that the girl whose father left her as a child pursues unavailable men old enough to be her father, or that people raised by ice-queen mothers often seek such people out as partners, sometimes becoming “icy” themselves, because, never having experienced empathy in the critical period, a whole part of their brains failed to develop. And many perversions can be explained in terms of plasticity and the persistence of childhood conflicts. But the main point is that in our critical periods we can acquire sexual and romantic tastes and inclinations that get wired into our brains and can have a powerful impact for the rest of our lives. And the fact that we can acquire different sexual tastes contributes to the tremendous sexual variation between us.

  The idea that a critical period helps shape sexual desire in adults contradicts the currently popular argument that what attracts us is less the product of our personal history than of our common biology. Certain people—models and movie stars, for instance—are widely regarded as beautiful or sexy. A certain strand of biology teaches us that these people are attractive because they exhibit biological signs of robustness, which promise fertility and strength: a clear complexion and symmetrical features mean a potential mate is free from disease; an hourglass figure is a sign a woman is fertile; a man
’s muscles predict he will be able to protect a woman and her offspring.

  But this simplifies what biology really teaches. Not everyone falls in love with the body, as when a woman says, “I knew, when I first heard that voice, that he was for me,” the music of the voice being perhaps a better indication of a man’s soul than his body’s surface. And sexual taste has changed over the centuries. Rubens’s beauties were large by current standards, and over the decades the vital statistics of Playboy centerfolds and fashion models have varied from voluptuous to androgynous. Sexual taste is obviously influenced by culture and experience and is often acquired and then wired into the brain.

  “Acquired tastes” are by definition learned, unlike “tastes,” which are inborn. A baby needn’t acquire a taste for milk, water, or sweets; these are immediately perceived as pleasant. Acquired tastes are initially experienced with indifference or dislike but later become pleasant—the odors of cheeses, Italian bitters, dry wines, coffees, patés, the hint of urine in a fried kidney. Many delicacies that people pay dearly for, that they must “develop a taste for,” are the very foods that disgusted them as children.

  In Elizabethan times lovers were so enamored of each other’s body odors that it was common for a woman to keep a peeled apple in her armpit until it had absorbed her sweat and smell. She would give this “love apple” to her lover to sniff at in her absence. We, on the other hand, use synthetic aromas of fruits and flowers to mask our body odor from our lovers. Which of these two approaches is acquired and which is natural is not so easy to determine. A substance as “naturally” repugnant to us as the urine of cows is used by the Masai tribe in East Africa as a lotion for their hair—a direct consequence of the cow’s importance in their culture. Many tastes we think “natural” are acquired through learning and become “second nature” to us. We are unable to distinguish our “second nature” from our “original nature” because our neuroplastic brains, once rewired, develop a new nature, every bit as biological as our original.

  The current porn epidemic gives a graphic demonstration that sexual tastes can be acquired. Pornography, delivered by high-speed Internet connections, satisfies every one of the prerequisites for neuroplastic change.17

  Pornography seems, at first glance, to be a purely instinctual matter: Sexually explicit pictures trigger instinctual responses, which are the product of millions of years of evolution. But if that were true, pornography would be unchanging. The same triggers, bodily parts and their proportions, that appealed to our ancestors would excite us. This is what pornographers would have us believe, for they claim they are battling sexual repression, taboo, and fear and that their goal is to liberate the natural, pent-up sexual instincts.

  But in fact the content of pornography is a dynamic phenomenon that perfectly illustrates the progress of an acquired taste. Thirty years ago “hardcore” pornography usually meant the explicit depiction of sexual intercourse between two aroused partners, displaying their genitals. “Softcore” meant pictures of women, mostly, on a bed, at their toilette, or in some semiromantic setting, in various states of undress, breasts revealed.

  Now hardcore has evolved and is increasingly dominated by the sadomasochistic themes of forced sex, ejaculations on women’s faces, and angry anal sex, all involving scripts fusing sex with hatred and humiliation. Hardcore pornography now explores the world of perversion, while softcore is now what hardcore was a few decades ago, explicit sexual intercourse between adults, now available on cable TV. The comparatively tame softcore pictures of yesteryear—women in various states of undress—now show up on mainstream media all day long, in the pornification of everything, including television, rock videos, soap operas, advertisements, and so on.

  Pornography’s growth has been extraordinary; it accounts for 25 percent of video rentals and is the fourth most common reason people give for going online. An MSNBC.com survey of viewers in 2001 found that 80 percent felt they were spending so much time on pornographic sites that they were putting their relationships or jobs at risk. Softcore pornography’s influence is now most profound because, now that it is no longer hidden, it influences young people with little sexual experience and especially plastic minds, in the process of forming their sexual tastes and desires. Yet the plastic influence of pornography on adults can also be profound, and those who use it have no sense of the extent to which their brains are reshaped by it.

  During the mid- to late 1990s, when the Internet was growing rapidly and pornography was exploding on it, I treated or assessed a number of men who all had essentially the same story. Each had acquired a taste for a kind of pornography that, to a greater or lesser degree, troubled or even disgusted him, had a disturbing effect on the pattern of his sexual excitement, and ultimately affected his relationships and sexual potency.

  None of these men were fundamentally immature, socially awkward, or withdrawn from the world into a massive pornography collection that was a substitute for relationships with real women. These were pleasant, generally thoughtful men, in reasonably successful relationships or marriages.

  Typically, while I was treating one of these men for some other problem, he would report, almost as an aside and with telling discomfort, that he found himself spending more and more time on the Internet, looking at pornography and masturbating. He might try to ease his discomfort by asserting that everybody did it. In some cases he would begin by looking at a Playboy-type site or at a nude picture or video clip that someone had sent him as a lark. In other cases he would visit a harmless site, with a suggestive ad that redirected him to risqué sites, and soon he would be hooked.

  A number of these men also reported something else, often in passing, that caught my attention. They reported increasing difficulty in being turned on by their actual sexual partners, spouses or girlfriends, though they still considered them objectively attractive. When I asked if this phenomenon had any relationship to viewing pornography, they answered that it initially helped them get more excited during sex but over time had the opposite effect. Now, instead of using their senses to enjoy being in bed, in the present, with their partners, lovemaking increasingly required them to fantasize that they were part of a porn script. Some gently tried to persuade their lovers to act like porn stars, and they were increasingly interested in “fucking” as opposed to “making love.” Their sexual fantasy lives were increasingly dominated by the scenarios that they had, so to speak, downloaded into their brains, and these new scripts were often more primitive and more violent than their previous sexual fantasies. I got the impression that any sexual creativity these men had was dying and that they were becoming addicted to Internet porn.

  The changes I observed are not confined to a few people in therapy. A social shift is occurring. While it is usually difficult to get information about private sexual mores, this is not the case with pornography today, because its use is increasingly public. This shift coincides with the change from calling it “pornography” to the more casual term “porn.” For his book on American campus life, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe spent a number of years observing students on university campuses. In the book one boy, Ivy Peters, comes into the male residence and says, “Anybody got porn?”18

  Wolfe goes on, “This was not an unusual request. Many boys spoke openly about how they masturbated at least once every day, as if this were some sort of prudent maintenance of the psychosexual system.” One of the boys tells Ivy Peters, “Try the third floor. They got some one-hand magazines up there.” But Peters responds, “I’ve built up a tolerance to magazines . . . I need videos.” Another boy says, “Oh, f ’r Chrissake, I.P., it’s ten o’clock at night. In another hour the cum dumpsters will start coming over here to spend the night . . . And you’re looking for porn videos and a knuckle fuck.” Then Ivy “shrugged and turned his palms up as if to say, ‘I want porn. What’s the big deal? ’ ”

  The big deal is his tolerance. He recognizes that he is like a drug addict who can no longer get high on the images that
once turned him on. And the danger is that this tolerance will carry over into relationships, as it did in patients whom I was seeing, leading to potency problems and new, at times unwelcome, tastes. When pornographers boast that they are pushing the envelope by introducing new, harder themes, what they don’t say is that they must, because their customers are building up a tolerance to the content. The back pages of men’s risqué magazines and Internet porn sites are filled with ads for Viagra-type drugs—medicine developed for older men with erectile problems related to aging and blocked blood vessels in the penis. Today young men who surf porn are tremendously fearful of impotence, or “erectile dysfunction” as it is euphemistically called. The misleading term implies that these men have a problem in their penises, but the problem is in their heads, in their sexual brain maps. The penis works fine when they use pornography. It rarely occurs to them that there may be a relationship between the pornography they are consuming and their impotence. (A few men, however, tellingly described their hours at computer porn sites as time spent “masturbating my brains out.”)

  One of the boys in Wolfe’s scene describes the girls who are coming over to have sex with their boyfriends as “cum dumpsters.” He too is influenced by porn images, for “cum dumpsters,” like many women in porn films, are always eager, available receptacles and therefore devalued.

  The addictiveness of Internet pornography is not a metaphor. Not all addictions are to drugs or alcohol. People can be seriously addicted to gambling, even to running. All addicts show a loss of control of the activity, compulsively seek it out despite negative consequences, develop tolerance so that they need higher and higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction, and experience withdrawal if they can’t consummate the addictive act.