the effects of watching porn and masturbation?

[CapnAwesome]

I won't comment on morality because that's a can of worms I don't want to open. That said, I think that pornography has harmful mental effects. I feel quite strongly on this matter.

The act of intercourse, sexual images, and so forth affect the brain in many ways. Various hormones are released, the nervous system is flooded with stimuli, and lots of other biological things are happening. Now, we have access to any and all kinds of porn with the click of a mouse and people are experiencing this flood of stimuli on a daily basis if not multiple times a day for some people. It's not that much different from other addictions. People get hooked on the rush of getting off on porn.

Here's the harm as I see it: desensitization. If you binge on porn daily, your real life sexual activities with your partner will suffer. I figure somebody will chime in and say, "I watch porn everyday and my real sex is great!" Good for you. You're an outlier. Anyway, over time the same old, vanilla porn that you watch will probably stop being as effective in helping you get off. This will inevitably result in seeking out more effective stimuli. A person seeks out porn that pushes the envelope and is more "hardcore" or "extreme". You see the slippery slope here? It's just like with drugs; to get the desired response, you have to take something stronger as you build up a tolerance.

I'm off of porn and have been for a long while now. I feel better physically, I perform better, and I feel better about myself. All that time spent fapping in front of the computer can be spent reading a book and channeling that energy into something productive.

EDIT: OP, I recommend the "Men and Porn" series of articles at Art of Manliness. Related articles are listed toward the bottom of the page. Regardless of your personal opinion on porn, you should give it a read.

How much time are you really saving not watching porn? 10 minutes a day. It's probably a time saver for me, because it helps me get the job done quicker then imagination alone. Vanilla porn gets boring after a while for people predisposed towards kink. Kink predates porn by centuries or millineua and the idea that it's somehow caused by porn is false. The second thing that is false is that kink is somehow bad. We need to get out of the idea that sexual exploration is bad. All that you have said about a slippery slope is that watching porn may lead to exploring your own sexuality. I fail to see how that is a negative thing at all. If Vanilla porn is going to get boring then Vanilla sex is going to get boring for the same person. So that cause and effect are the same whether or not porn is involved at all. The whole argument that's presented by both you and that article assumes that any type of non-vanilla sex or porn is somehow a negative thing. This is the kind of anti-sex thinking that is holding back our society and making whole generations of people afraid of exploring their own sexuality. If that's the slippery slope you are talking about, sign me up. If on the other hand you are implying that porn consumption will somehow lead to more sexual assaults, the data just doesn't support that and in fact the opposite may be true. Quoted from a 2009 abstract on porn and it's relation to sexual assault.

Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships. Although these data cannot be used to determine that pornography has a cathartic effect on rape behavior, combined with the weak evidence in support of negative causal hypotheses from the scientific literature, it is concluded that it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to increased sexual assault behavior.

http://www.calcasa.org/2010/03/what-is-t...y-on-rape/

Porn is positive, it helps people explore their sexuality, explore what they are into. Porn can be a great addition to the sex life of couples (women watch porn too, duh) and it may even decrease sexual assault. Being anti-porn is backwards and anti-sex.