Transcriber: Mirjana Čutura
Reviewer: Amanda Chu
As a developmental psychologist,
I research something
called "sexual socialization,"
or the process of how a young person
learns how to become a sexual being.
And in today's day and age,
it means that I cannot ignore
the role that internet pornography plays
in this process.
Whenever we get to the porn section
of my human sexuality class,
every semester without fail,
I get a student who asks,
"Is it possible
to masturbate without porn?"
Yes. Yes, it is.
(Laughter)
Some people might even consider this
to be an important life skill.
(Laughter)
Although it is commonly thought
that we just always had porn,
let me assure you
that for millions of years
or thousands,
depending on your belief system,
people were masturbating
just fine without porn.
So how did we get here?
Are young people really this disconnected
from their own bodies?
Are we really this ignorant
about the evolution
of our sexual environment?
As it turns out,
only 24 states actually mandate
sex education in schools,
and of those, only 10 require
that it be medically accurate.
Only nine require discussion of consent.
And zero require any discussion
of pornography or pleasure.
But maybe that doesn't bother you,
because you're in the camp
that believes that sex education
should occur in the home.
Well, in a recent study that my team did
with over 2,000 college students,
we found that less than half had parents
who ever discussed sex more than once,
only 26% had parents
who discussed sexual violence,
and less than seven percent had parents
who discussed pornography or pleasure.
So, in the absence of comprehensive
sexuality education in schools
and consistent conversations with parents,
porn becomes a seductive resource.
And it turns out porn might not be
the best sex educator.
(Laughter)
Less than half of young women
experience an orgasm
when they have partnered sex with a man.
Some men report the need
to actually think about porn
while they're having sex
with another human being
just to maintain their erection.
Some people report
never making eye contact even once
during the sexual experience.
And some women report
that having their faces ejaculated on
or being choked
during a sexual experience
is something that they
wouldn't feel the right to say no to.
In a recent interview,
I was asked how sex becomes sad,
and this made me think really differently
about my own research.
You see, the majority of research
on pornography's effects
really focuses
on pornography and risky sex
or pornography and sexual violence.
And these are important endeavors
to continue to investigate,
but what about this vapid, lifeless sex?
Have young people always been
this disconnected and bored during sex?
When a teenager
wants to seek out sex today,
they can go online -
virtually zero barriers.
Within seconds,
they can be watching orgies.
Within minutes,
they can be engaging in webcam sex
with a stranger on the other
side of the planet.
But for those of us of a certain age,
do you remember how hard
we had to work to seek out sex?
To see actual live footage
of people having sex,
we had to sneak around
in our parents' sock drawers
when they were gone.
We had to try to sneak a peek
at Skinemax or HBO After Dark
at a slumber party.
Or if you were a lucky boy,
you had that one magazine
that lasted you all the way
through high school,
tucked underneath your mattress.
(Laughter)
So, when people say,
"Oh, but we've always had porn,"
it's really not exactly the case.
Sure, we've always drawn naked people,
we've always wanted
to look at naked people,
and we've always wanted
to watch people have sex,
but the road to today's porn
was paved relatively recently.
Although it's debatable,
our first evidence of porn
are these 20,000 BC
Aboriginal cave drawings.
Hot, right?
(Laughter)
Flash-forward 20,000 years
to Greek sculpture,
Roman frescoes,
and Renaissance paintings.
Now, up until this point,
this is all art that's commissioned
by royalty or the uberwealthy.
Commoners, such as ourselves,
would never see any of this stuff
in our lifetime,
let alone masturbate to it.
Now, with pre-industrialization,
we have the emergence of photography,
and with it, of course,
the emergence of nude images.
But photography was so expensive then
that these images
were mostly used for personal use
because copying was very expensive.
It wasn't until the '40s that we have
the invention of the pin-up girl
and the reduction of the prices
of printing presses
that we have mass distributed images,
sexualized images, across our nation.
Prior to this, you'd have to travel
to a pretty large city
to be able to see naked people
or people having sex.
This is what Playboy looked like
when it emerged in 1953;
Hustler, in 1974.
Now, by the 1990s,
you could drive or walk
to your local video store,
and you could ask for "Debbie Does Dallas"
and pay some money.
This took some effort and some courage.
It wasn't until the dial-up
internet porn days
that you could access porn for free
in your own privacy in your own home.
And if you waited long enough,
you might be able to see a breast.
(Laughter)
But now with tube site porn,
we have the paywall taken away
and so much content online
that we cannot live
long enough to see it all.
And we can watch it
no matter how old we are,
whenever and wherever we want.
So, not exactly Greek sculpture, is it?
Speaking of BLTs,
just like our sexual environment
has changed more in the last 100 years
compared to the last 10,000,
our food environment has also changed more
in the last 100 years
than it has in the last 10,000.
As we moved from working
really hard for our calories
through hunting and gathering
to being able to trade
through modern agriculture
to accessing food in grocery stores
that are refrigerated or canned
and then, of course, being able to access
fast food whenever we like,
we no longer have to work very hard
for savory and sugary foods.
Our brains just simply have not caught up
to all of this change.
We evolved intense neural rewards
to seek out high-fat, high-sugar foods
in our environment
because they were relatively rare
early in our evolution.
Similarly, we evolved
intense neural rewards
in anticipation of and in response to
new mating opportunities
because early in our evolution,
they were relatively rare.
Now we don't have to go far at all
for high-fat, high-sugar foods
because there's a McDonald's
and a gas station on every corner.
So I wonder,
if fast food has made it possible
for us to be such lazy eaters,
has unlimited access to porn
and online sex made it possible
for us to be lazy lovers?
If you think about it,
watching porn is going to be
about as helpful to you
in being great at sex
as watching the Super Bowl
would make you a great football player.
(Laughter)
But porn is more than just bad education.
So, although the number of studies
on how the brain is impacted by porn
is increasing,
it doesn't take a neuroimaging study
to convince anyone
that viewing porn is pleasurable.
And pleasure is a reward
response in the brain.
Up until about five to ten years ago,
it was thought that the brain
undergoes the most plasticity,
or ability to change and grow,
in infancy.
Now we know that post-pubescent brains
actually experience
similar levels of plasticity,
undergoing a new explosion
of brain development,
with the most plastic of that
being in the reward center.
This is what makes the teenage brain
more sensitive to and vulnerable
to behaviors and substances
that induce this reward response
compared to our adult brains.
So, what does having unlimited access
to this super reward stimulus
known as internet porn
do to a developing teen brain?
The truth is, we likely won't see a study
that can answer that question
anytime soon.
We can't randomly assign
one group of middle schoolers
to an hour of porn every day
(Laughter)
and another group
to absolutely no porn ever at all
and then see how their brains differ
when they turn 18.
Not going to happen.
We can barely get studies passed
that simply ask teens,
"Have you seen porn,
or do you masturbate?"
So the research also can't keep up
with all of this change.
So how do we help young people know
if porn is affecting them?
Well, we have to do
what we would do to determine
if any behavior or substance impacts us.
We have to try to go
a period of time without it.
Now, I'm not suggesting
a period of celibacy.
I don't think anybody should give up
masturbation or sex.
But similar to how giving up
high-sugar foods
makes strawberries taste really sweet,
some people report
that when they give up porn,
their sexual experiences become better.
For example, one student said,
"It's like the sex my body is having
is connected to the sex
my brain is having."
(Laughter)
So I wonder -
Yes, some point.
So I wonder,
Is the process of becoming conscious
about the food we consume
and being mindful
and present during eating
similar to the process of being conscious
about the porn we consume
and knowing how it is so different
from the sex we have
with real-life human beings?
Show me someone who eats fast food
alone in their car every day,
and I will show you someone
who's hungry for connection.
Show me someone who is secretly
masturbating to porn every day,
and I'll show you someone
who's also hungry for connection.
In the years since we have been recording
sexual behavior frequency,
young people today
are actually having less sex
than prior generations.
Now, of course, we can't blame porn
as the only cause of this decline,
but as a developmental psychologist,
I want to be sure that young people's
access to unlimited porn
is not interfering with their ability
to cultivate mutually pleasurable
sexual experiences
where they feel connected
to other human beings.
I know it's difficult for us to admit,
but after puberty, teens get aroused,
they masturbate,
they seek out sexual content,
sexual knowledge, sexual experiences,
and they deserve the opportunity
to be able to cultivate their capacity
for pleasure and intimacy with others.
One thing that I know is for sure
is that in today's
media-saturated environment,
we no longer have the luxury of silence.
If Pornhub has more traffic
than Amazon, Twitter,
and Netflix combined
and YouPorn uses
six times the bandwidth of Hulu,
why aren't we talking to teens about porn?
I'm afraid that if we continue to ignore
what's going on in teens' brains
and their bodies
and we do not give them
the education that they need,
that the porn industry
is going to be doing the educating for us,
and we won't like those results
any more than if we let
the fast food industry educate them
about nutrition and eating.
For the past 10 years,
I have been working in schools
to try to help adults
talk with young people about porn
by conducting pornography education.
And I've heard lots of concerns
about how to protect teens from porn.
And although there are legitimate concerns
about what teens are exposed to online,
I worry that we might be neglecting
a more, perhaps, effective approach.
What if instead of focusing solely
on protecting teens from online sex,
we start with respecting them
as sexual beings
who are in need
of our guidance and support
perhaps now more than ever?
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)
