Gregor Schmidinger was eight when he viewed his first porn magazine, found in a rubbish bin in his hometown in Austria. Aged 11, he had access to the internet at home, which he used to explore his burgeoning attraction to men. As the years progressed, he spent more time masturbating to increasingly hardcore – and in some cases violent – pornography online.
“Once I’d climaxed I would look at the screen from a new perspective, and it was always weird or alienating,” says Schmidinger, now 31 and a film-maker.
But trouble started in his 20s when he discovered that, when faced with real sexual partners, he couldn’t sustain an erection or reach orgasm. It happened enough times that he started to avoid sexual contact altogether. “Porn was always my sanctuary. That was the space where ‘it’ worked,” he says.
After a visit to a urologist confirmed that he had nothing wrong physically, Schmidinger turned to Google and stumbled upon a website – Your Brain On Porn – that described something called porn-induced erectile dysfunction. Something clicked. “It perfectly described what I was experiencing,” Schmidinger says.
Schmidinger is one of thousands of men, and some women, who report that their compulsive use of internet pornography is negatively affecting their real-world relationships, whether through erectile dysfunction, decreased sensation, or feelings of isolation and shame. Many believe that pornography is addictive, and that the endless stream of on-demand internet erotica catering to every imaginable fetish has hijacked their brain’s reward system. Compulsive porn use is often paired with a tight-grip masturbation technique that can’t be replicated by a human orifice. The result? Real-life sexual experiences are no longer stimulating enough.
For those who think they have a problematic relationship with porn, there are large online communities such as Reddit forum NoFap (the largest, with almost 180,000 members), Your Brain Rebalanced and Reboot Nation. These offer support and advice for those seeking to take control over their lives, advocating a period of abstinence from porn and masturbation called “rebooting”.
According to anecdotal reports, rebooting promises benefits including increased libido, better sex and an increased motivation to meet real-world sexual partners. On top of this, some rebooters report that they feel less social anxiety, less “brain fog”, more energy and a greater ability to empathize with others.
In Schmidinger’s case, he went cold turkey from adult material and, after around six weeks, noticed he felt “charged with some energy”. He put this energy and the extra time to use by going to the gym. It was a virtuous circle, and within months his erectile dysfunction was gone.
Alexander Rhodes, 26, founded the NoFap subreddit in 2011 as a place for people to anonymously discuss their perceived porn addictions. A Pittsburgh native, Rhodes first encountered porn as a pop-up on a video gaming website aged 11 and, like many teenagers, spent the next few years diligently masturbating.
By the time he was 19, he didn’t feel as though he was in control of his habit and found he wasn’t as attracted to female partners as he was to the fantasy sex he saw online. “I would find myself fantasizing about porn while having sex with women,” he said.
Something similar happened to Brian Parks, a 32-year-old manager from Toronto. He progressed from finding his father’s Playboy collection to spending up to two hours a day streaming porn in his late teens and 20s. Problems for Parks’ sex life emerged when he was 24 and his girlfriend went away for a few months. He turned to porn to keep himself occupied.
“When she came back I was excited to see her and we ripped each other’s clothes off and it was like … nothing’s happening. I couldn’t get an erection. I wasn’t nervous. This was my girlfriend,” he says. Even so, he didn’t connect the dots.
When that relationship ended he started going out to meet women, but when he went home with them he would again struggle to get an erection, sometimes even when watching porn on his own. “I remember thinking to myself, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have normal sex again,” he says. “That was my lowest point.”
The doctor prescribed him Viagra, which helped him get erections but didn’t seem to fix the underlying problem. That’s when he found the thousands of men online discussing similar problems and decided to quit porn to see if his sexual encounters with women improved. “Even though I could only really get off to porn, I knew inside that real sex and a real connection with a real person was what I wanted,” he adds.
Quitting involved deleting folders of files, installing web filters and documenting his feelings and actions in a journal. Once he understood his triggers, he restructured his life around them, stopping himself from taking his laptop to bed and heading straight to sleep or doing pushups if he came home drunk after a night out.
The strategy paid off after around four months. “I had great sex for the first time in maybe a year,” he said. A short while later he set up a website called The Reboot Blueprint to help educate and mentor others.
The recovery hasn’t been so complete for Cory Cook, a 25-year-old software engineer, also from Pittsburgh. He initially abstained from porn aged 19 to boost his natural testosterone levels to improve his performance in the gym. “But once I stopped I realized there were other benefits,” he said.
Cutting down has made him feel stronger and have more stamina, and he’s found great comfort in the online forums, where he can talk to other people going through something similar. “When you are feeling tempted to go back to porn, you take one trip to NoFap and you have a support group of thousands of people. It’s the best thing ever,” Cook says.
Yet Cook acknowledges that he may be vulnerable to expectancy bias – a kind of placebo effect that comes from reading so many glowing reports about the side-effects of coming off porn. And there’s a flip side to the support from peers: Cook says he now now feels like he’s letting the community down when he relapses. “It has added a whole new level of disgust and shame,” he says.
Even after cutting down on his porn use, Cook has reduced sensation in his genitals, which he attributes to his “death grip” and frequent masturbation. It makes it harder for him to enjoy the sensation of sex. “I have to make eye contact with what’s happening so I know it’s actually happening. I can have lips on my penis and if my eyes are closed I wouldn’t even know there was contact.”
The repercussions of compulsive porn use can be particularly difficult for partners, as 39-year-old Alison, not her real name, from Illinois discovered.
She only became aware of her husband’s compulsive porn use when he was about to be fired from his job over it. She had always assumed he was playing computer games until 4am and it hadn’t occurred to her that porn might be to blame when he failed to orgasm during sex.
Alison wouldn’t go into detail about why her husband lost his job, although the police were involved. When pushed to explain why, she starts sobbing. Even with the promise of anonymity it’s too shameful to verbalize, she says.
“I can never allow myself to speak about it completely freely except in counseling, and even at that time it’s terrifying. My family and friends would be shocked and horrified if they knew. They couldn’t even guess how bad it was if they tried.”
Alison and her husband have been working together to get their relationship back on track with therapy, through cycles of abstinence and relapse. Both believe it would have been less shameful if he were an alcoholic or drug addict.
“Most of society knows that if you’re an alcoholic then you need to quit and sobriety is a good thing. But [with porn addiction] you can’t talk about it. You can’t say ‘20 days sobriety!’ You can’t celebrate and show people your chip or invite them to a party with a cake and pink lemonade,” she says.
Those prepared to talk to the media about their porn addiction typically arm themselves with a mixture of scientific research, theories of evolutionary biology and anecdotes aggregated from thousands of fellow rebooters. The line between science and anecdote isn’t always clear.
The way Rhodes explains the issue is that human brains have evolved to reward us for having sex by releasing dopamine at orgasm, since doing so allows us to pass on our genes. This mechanism evolved before the abundance of porn, which is now tricking our brains into thinking we are having lots of sex – in Alexander’s case, up to 14 times a day with different on-screen “partners”.
“My brain thought I was in a very successful relationship for passing on my genetic material, but in reality I was inseminating tissues,” he explains.
He thinks that over time the brain becomes wired to prefer pornography – the easiest route to orgasm – over real people. “This encourages us to consume more porn at the expense of relationships, career and the ability to function well in society,” Rhodes says.
Ditching porn, at least temporarily, pulls back the curtain on this mating charade. As Rhodes puts it: “Our brains will wake up and think, ‘What’s going on?’ I’m a total loser, I am in my mother’s basement, I’m fat, I’m not meeting people, I have no friends and I have a neck beard. I need to get out there and build relationships.”
His theory seems extremely neat and seems to make sense, but the scientific research hasn’t yet been able to show that pornography is addictive. While there are many clinicians offering to treat pornography addiction, it is not officially recognized by the DSM-5, the bible for psychiatric diagnosis.
There are certainly similarities between the brains of those addicted to drugs and those hooked on porn, as shown by research done by neuroscientist Valerie Voon at Cambridge University. Her work shows that just as drug addicts are driven to seek their fix because they want – rather than enjoy – it, compulsive porn users seem to crave porn more but not enjoy it any more than the control group.
Despite the similarities, this doesn’t prove that porn itself is addictive in the way that drugs are. Nor does it say anything about non-compulsive use of pornography. It is possible that people with a certain type of brain are more likely to gravitate toward porn.
Nevertheless, Voon thinks the consensus is shifting toward it being recognized as a disorder. “It fits the same pattern as addiction. We just need more studies.”
Not everyone agrees. David Ley, a clinical psychologist and author of The Myth of Sex Addiction, says there is overwhelming evidence that what’s being described as porn addiction is actually related to other existing issues.
The men who come into his clinic typically lack an effective coping mechanism to deal with stress, anxiety and depression. Some of them use porn as a way to cope and manage those feelings. Others might have a preexisting high libido and a sensation-seeking personality. Therapy, he says, should focus on addressing the underlying issues rather than the “symptom” of excessive porn use.
“If I walk into my doctor’s office and I’m sneezing, he’s not going to say you’ve got a sneezing disorder. It could be caused by allergies, a virus or something else. It’s really important we get to the root cause.”
For Schmidinger, this makes sense. He acknowledges that his porn use was partly habit, but partly a means of discharging energy when he felt lonely or depressed. “There’s an emotional component involved in addictive behavior. Metaphorically speaking, you use it to fill a hole.”
Ley is equally skeptical about “porn-induced” erectile dysfunction. It’s true that the prevalence of reported erectile dysfunction has risen over the past few decades, from 3% of under-45s in 1948 to 7% of under-40s in 2014, but despite a lot of finger-pointing toward porn, the scientific data isn’t conclusive.
Neuroscientist Nicole Prause’s research found no link between porn use and reports of erectile dysfunction. She believes that marketing for products such as Viagra and Cialis give the impression that men should be rock hard and ready to go at any moment. “That’s not realistic,” she says.
“These online communities have whipped themselves into a frenzy when in the past men wouldn’t have been concerned. Then the next time they go to have sex they are causing themselves more distress,” she explains. It’s a vicious cycle, and it’s easy to blame porn.
Ley doesn’t deny that there are men who struggle to get aroused by anything but online porn and experience delayed ejaculation, but he puts this down to conditioning, not addiction.
“If I ring a bell every time you are masturbating, eventually you are going to have difficulty getting turned on unless I ring the goddamn bell,” he says. “The same happens to men who only masturbate to pornography.”
Instead of banning porn and masturbation, men should learn to have a healthier, less shameful relationship to their sexuality, something Ley advocates in his forthcoming book Ethical Porn for Dicks.
“Just because it might be socially inappropriate doesn’t make it a disease,” Ley says.
From the outside, the behaviors Ley describes and the those described by the NoFap community look pretty similar; there are men using lots of porn and experiencing delayed ejaculation accompanied by social anxiety and feelings of depression. Where they disagree – vehemently – is which is the source of the problem.
“If it’s acknowledged as a disorder, it will be taken more seriously in terms of treatments and there will be more research,” explains Voon, adding that treatment would also be covered by insurance. “It also validates what people are experiencing. It’s no longer some hidden, shameful personal behavior.”
For Schmidinger, the title “addiction” isn’t important. “The only thing that matters is, if I stop watching porn, does it improve my experience with an actual partner. For me it does.”
Meanwhile, Alison and Tom are three weeks into a 90-day “reboot” – involving no porn, masturbating or orgasm – combined with a concerted effort to spend time cuddling and communicating each day.
“It seems like anti-marriage advice. Having marital problems? Just stop having sex with your wife for 90 days!” Alison jokes.
“But for the first time in a very long time I actually have hope we can save our marriage.”
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