Is porn making young men impotent?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I would say that anyone who thinks porn isn’t affecting them should try to quit fully for a few months and see. It costs nothing, and you might find out that you have less control than you thought. The effects can be more subtle than what is mentioned in this article: for example constantly craving for novelty despite being in a good relationship with someone you love.
When I did pick up the habit for a while after I had kids, I noticed a marked decline in my interest in putting out "effort" to have romance when a video would suffice.
I found porn made me lazy, not impotent. Anyway, cutting that out has been really good, it makes me have to work to maintain a healthy relationship with my wife.
This is obviously anecdotal, I went through a lot of changes in that time period as well, not working out as much, having kids, etc. But it's a little thing I can control to make life happier.
Its to the point that I can't sleep well without it. That's bad.
What I'm doing, right now, is to create a simple chart of the days that I venture to the "dark side". So when I do go, I know in the back of my mind that I will have to write this stuff down.
Another step is, when you find yourself going down that rabbit hole, to do you best to stop it immediately. Your mind is very clever at making excuses like "You deserve to see this. Its just this one time. Promise." For me, what I ended up having to do is to get out of the room of the device and let myself relax.
Its getting warmer out. So I'll probably take a walk around the block if I notice the habit returning. I want to get rid of it so badly.
Support groups are out there either virtually or in person. Perhaps that's another way to go about it.
Good luck!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17062768
Relevant Image: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*n6SXZ6_p4vX9sprDI...
A man in the 1980s had a testosterone level of around 525, that level is now getting into the 400s, this is a massive change in the hormone that is responsible for sex drive, etc.
I actually watched Larry King on CNN when he had the person with the brain tumor say 'My cell phone gave me this tumor'... And lo and behold the meme is now "Cellphones cause X"
If, however you want a good hormone disruptor candidate, look no further than BPA and other estrogen-like compounds. With the amount of plastic we have in our biosphere, along with 'interesting' resultants from decomp, my money'd be on hormone disruption.
I have to wonder if any uni is actively investigating this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/xenoestrogen is very much a thing.
We are so adamant about finding the “one true cause” of any given thing that we don’t stop to consider that it doesn’t matter what it actually is.
If we pretend it’s all of them, what’s the worst outcome? We watch less porn, eat better food, spend less time with our phone and use less plastic? What a terrible scenario that would be. We might do all these good things for no good reason!
It’s the same problem we have with climate change. Always looking for the scapegoat instead of recognizing that the problem can be alleviated without finding the one true cause, assuming there even is one.
I also linked to a valid area, and asked if there were human studies in synthetic estrogens and plastic byproducts. You know... Science.
You don't need to carry a phone with you everywhere you go all the time and keep it in your pocket. Hell, a lot of phones don't even fit in pockets anymore. You can keep it on your desk or in your bag. You can even do something crazy like leave it at home or in your car and go to the beach. You probably won't die. And because you live in a world with other people in it, it's possible that if you do set your phone down for a little bit and you have a medical emergency someone else could call for you.
Clearly all of those things have some benifits, else we wouldn't be doing them in the first place. To stop doing them because they might be harmful would make the world a worst place if they are not actually harmful.
And if we actually want to solve a problem, understanding its cause is generally important.
For instance imagine solving global warming without establish the cause is greanhouse gasses. Sure, we might make the world "better" by starting a campaighn to cure all the gay people, but that won't actually help with global warming, and would actually make the world worst (the first statement is fact, the second is a value judgement)
Global warming is such a great example. Instead of doing anything we all argue about what's really causing it. Some people say it's a natural cycle, some people blame it on cars, some people want to blame it on livestock. It doesn't really matter. In fact, I hope somehow the "climate deniers" end up being right. I really, genuinely hope, that we find out that the rise in CO2 is part of a natural cycle. Because then there's a real sense of urgency. Reduced consumption is no longer a single solution. If it's part of a natural cycle we have to reduce consumption to zero immediately AND find a way to remove CO2 form the atmosphere or we will just be the next victim of mass extinction.
For a lot of problems the exact cause doesn't matter because we already know what the solution is. We just have to accept the fact that solution is bundled with a bunch of other things, and if we do them all we might accidentally do something excessive, like make the air cleaner in the process.
Livestock have also shifted from grazing to eating soy- or corn-based products. Fish are more-likely to be farmed.
Nobody knows what the true long-term consequences of this are.
I think people would also be surprised to see what happens on farms. Seeing chickens and pigs eat mice and rats while knowing how much garbage and neurotoxins are laid out for those pests--they end up inside humans.
1-https://www.livescience.com/62667-puget-sound-mussels-opioid...
My testosterone level is currently lower than even most women, and I can still get an erection.
It plausibly could have a negative impact and the probability that you have children that themselves have children; I suspect that children of imprisoned fathers are more likely than the population average to die before having children themselves.
My bet, BTW, is with "multiple factors".
And while many states are legalizing marijuana, it's still a life-ending felony in all 50 to get caught with a vial of Testosterone Enanthante in one's gym bag.
I'm not going to raise the MR issue, but when you say "nobody cares" it seems you're definitely hyperbolizing a bit.
The things that T contributes to becoming less important to survival, social status, and economic status probably are all factors. There's a number or candidate physical environmental factors, too, IIRC.
"While non-organic sexual dysfunctions have been presumed psychological in origin, and therefore the province of mental health experts, the unexplained sexual dysfunctions now rising sharply in young men (ED, difficulty orgasming, low sexual desire) are, to the extent they are reversible by quitting Internet pornography, not arising from “performance anxiety” (that is, psychosexual dysfunction, ICD-9 code 302.7), although performance anxiety may certainly accompany them."
It seems they fall short of saying porn is "making" these men impotent, but rather that quitting porn does improve the situation.
Similar to Facebook, and other social media - giving people more (and more, and more) of what they like can have serious dangers.
A lot of it has a blue icon beside it on a certain website that also has orange in its color scheme. The whole point of that icon is to denote content less likely to be of a mainstream/professional nature. Of course that never stopped anyone from putting every keyword imaginable in the title.
Very true. Furry porn is overflowing with loving expression. It might not be coincidence that most furry artists (and furries in general) are something other than cisgender and heterosexual men.
[1] SFW, it's just a chart https://cs.phncdn.com/insights-static/wp-content/uploads/201...
I rehosted it because the domain phncdn.com could get people in trouble at some employers, even if the content is not pornographic.
It must be hard for the actresses when they enter the gap between teen and milf porn age wise (unless you are Japanese according to that chart).
I've read that many prostitutes are single mothers. (I think such activities should be allowed between consenting adults, but please don't break the law in your jurisdiction.) Hentai can simply be downloaded and watched.
1 - https://visual.ly/community/infographic/health/porn-effects-...
2 - https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/relevant-research-and-articl...
If stopping porn treats the symptoms though: phew, we can all sleep at night knowing that there is nothing wrong with the way society collectively rears children (through parents, school, "SFW" media) that leads to anything less than healthy sexual relationships.
My own take: Erotica is a good thing to the degree that it takes the edge off of libido. Being dragged around by your "little man" is a curse, and your life will greatly improve once you figure out how to stop this (one way or another).
Your first reaction to a naked woman should be "meh". It's only after you know her well that it might be more.
A paleo media diet may be the right direction. Confine ourselves mostly to the nearest practical approximation of the info environment we evolved with, a bubble of a few dozen people and the work that sustains us. That would result in people with smaller lives, but maybe also healthier ones. But then people inclined to believe this wouldn't be reading this.
In practice, a significant portion of the news habit is a sort of FOMO, a desire to be included in water-cooler conversations, complete with intelligent opinions and "hot takes". Which is fine as far as it goes; but, it does come at the cost of the emotional rollercoaster of a highly manipulative news cycle (not to mention tribal battle lines[0]). Those who focus their water-cooler game on relative trivialities like sports and pop culture might actually be on to something.
And it all stems from the mind. Think about it. The trigger/need to watch porn stems from the mind before the body responds with an erection.
The mind is a powerful tool which can be used for good or bad.
Could that be due to an entirely different reason? A gay man would react in the same way, for example.
"Are eggs making young women fertile".
The saying is "film at 11."
Though to argue against this point, humans every year score on average better than they did last year on old IQ tests. The size of human skulls and brains are also increasing too, so natural selection may be working, just in a different way than we would expect.
You have to compare childhood mortality rates. Countries with high rates of childhood mortality see mothers having more children.
The cost of having a child also factors into it, in Western countries each child is really expensive. (30k for birth in the US! And that is just the cost to get started!)
Also you are making the implicit assumption that people in poorer countries are having "worse" babies than people in developed countries.
Off the top of my head, a few countries that used to be looked down upon by everyone else include England, Germany, Ireland, and the US. Also all of northern Europe, all of SW Asia, and all of East Asia. The fact that China thought the same thing about Europe that Europe thought about China is also a good indicator that "undeveloped" is a rather crude benchmark.
Every major study has shown that if you correct for environmental pollution, childhood nutrition, and childhood health care, IQs between regions of the world are all within spitting distance of each other, and human potential falls along a nice bell curve.
tl;dr clean up the air, feed the kids, get them to doctors, and everyone thrives. Also stable environments means there be less pressure to have lots of kids, so the population will stabilize than decline.
I only follow US data somewhat closely, so this is a US-centric claim, but I suspect the same is true elsewhere.
Teenagers, the poor, and the less educated are seeing much sharper fertility declines than the wealthier or better educated.
Teen births are down 55% since 07.
Statistically poorer minority groups are seeing the sharpest fertility declines, more than double the decline that White or Asian groups are seeing. (I can't find income-based data, just racial)
Likewise, fertility has fallen for the college-educated (bachelor's degree) by only half as much as for the less educated.
Birth rates are getting less like the "Idiocracy hypothesis" than they were before, not more.
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I don't agree with many of the political views of this organization, but they do wrap up all the data in a nice article with good graphs here:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/baby-bust-fertility-is-declining-...
This is called the Flynn effect. It unfortunately peaked in the mid 80's, and is now on a steady decline.
Yeah, epigenetics, however that is not my point. My point is that the genetic pool is degrading and environment and culture are not going to fix that.
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