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)