With free porn at the click of a button, the access to the many weird and wonderful (some just downright weird) types are changing how we view sex and no one knows where it’s heading. We are the Internet pornography lab rats.

The internet paved the way for the erection of a massively accessible porn superstructure and we 20-somethings are the crash test dummies in a car without seat belts;the little white lab mice in an experiment with no literature; the Forlorn Hope bounding headfirst into a psychological and social unknown.

Pornography once existed as smutty magazines and on the big, blue screen, in those adult cinemas that colourfully garnish Hong Kong’s history. Then came the VCR followed by the VCD and, all of a sudden, pornographic home entertainment became a viable option and a profitable industry. Men and women were no longer limited to static media and no longer had to suppress the hygiene alarm when in a porn theatre. Hands were no longer idle when the box was on at home.

But home brought with it a myriad of problems. Where to hide the tapes, the VCDs? How did one find time on the communal family television? In the dead of the night, anxiously working as fast as possible before someone woke from their slumber for a quick wee. The personal computer and Internet revolution has worked tirelessly at eliminating these annoyances and now, in many households, personal computer actually means personal computer. It’s no mystery why the Internet seems to slow down past midnight. The 20-something is not quick to question the enormous availability of porn (a search for “porn” on Google or Yahoo returns over 190 million sites). He or she does not ask whether the massive access to porn is having a massive effect on people. Perhaps it’s the same kind of aggressive absence of mind we once took to fast food and diet. Now, with the Western world experiencing alarming rates of heart disease and obesity, the knee-jerk reactionary campaigns have kicked into fifth gear.

Pornography is undoubtedly changing us, especially those of us who have experienced nothing else our entire lives. For 20-somethings, puberty and Internet porn went hand-in-hand. The Internet superhighway? Yeah, with traffic jams at every XXX stop. How is it changing us? The documentation exists, but most of it is correlation and lacking in consensus. There just hasn’t been enough time elapsed to study pornography’s true effects. Are we all porn-addicted zombies, just waiting for our next fix? It sounds far-fetched, but think about it for a moment: a long day at work, a couple of drinks after and an hour to kill before bedtime. Think it ends with marriage? The 2003 meeting of the Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers in the US saw most of the lawyers stating pornography played a significant role in divorce when just eight years earlier porn played nearly no role – a similar time frame to the rise of Internet porn. Stimulation from viewing porn releases dopamine. We all know the word dopamine. We all know the word addiction.

What about the more direct effect of pornography? Does it change the way we relate? The way we have sex? Third-wave feminist Naomi Wolf, author of the seminal piece The Porn Myth, talked on porn as if it was a drug: “If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up.” Her implication is potent. Like riding on the rollercoaster at Ocean Park a hundred times is sure to numb the excitement, is pornography doing the same to sex? Because of pornography, is sex moving further into extremes? Wendy and Larry Maltz, authors of The Porn Trap, say that people “who regularly masturbate to porn demonstrate an increased potential for being sexually violent in real life.” Again, correlation. An increased potential.

Perhaps the better thing to do is to ask yourself if porn is changing you. To what extreme have you “upgraded” to? Softcore to hardcore? One-on-one to gangbang? Guys, when you’re having sex and hammering away like you’re in Slut Punishers 3, does your partner have a glazed, bored look in her eye? We’re all different and therefore vary in our susceptibility to changing influence. Certainly, it might be a good question for the willy-wagglers in the random-access webcam world that ed-in-chief Tom Cassidy warily dipped his feet into [Chatroulette].

But regardless of how it changes us, of how we’re affected by the aggressive presence of porn, it’s safe to say that most of this crash test dummy generation are content without their seatbelts. So what if we get thrown through the windshield later on? At least it was a wild and free ride.

Words: Hugo Stanford

Tags: addiction, cyber sex, Internet, porn, sex, smut, XXX
Posted in Features