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By RIIHANNON WILDE
Are you lurking alone in your bedroom browsing porn websites, eyes tracking clitoral peak orgasms or ejaculations?
Perhaps you’ve been telling yourself you’re learning about yourself and your desires... You’re imprinting your body-mind with a fascinating landscape of fantasy.
Don’t worry; you are not alone. More than one hundred billion people (109,012,060,000 to be exact) visit porn websites yearly. Porn has become the main source of sexual education on the planet today - for better or worse?
Why Do We Do It?
To release stress?
You are feeling lonely?
To spice up your relationship?
To get rid of shame?
Out of curiosity and fantasy?
To perpetuate trauma?
...Because watching it has become a real addiction?
Is porn the secret antidote to liberating you and the rest of humanity into the next step of shameless evolution? Or what if the hundreds of billions of visits to porn websites is not an act of collective sexual liberation but rather a continuous retraumatization and servere altering of the brain's neuroplasticity? Moreover, what if this makes our species less fit for survival?
This article investigates the scientific takes on these questions.
How can you and I can evolve in the most fruitful way for humanity? Does it involve taking full responsibility for our bodies, relationships and mind?
The Science Several speculations, concerns, debates and scientific studies have inquired if watching porn is good or bad for humanity. Some studies have shown positive effects of watching porn - especially for women - as a stress release tool. Other studies have shown negative effects like porn addiction.
This article will go beyond what’s been researched to take an embodied inquiry.
Screen Time, Electronics & The Human Social Connection Nervous System
Porn has been available since the 90s, but it has grown to a new level of normality over the past 10 years. Internet speed increases with global access! Over the same time period, more and more people have reported feeling alone. There are several contributing factors, but could there be a correlation?
Could it be that these two factors might correlate as re-traumatization?
The Polyvagal theory by Stephen Porges <CITE> explains how the autonomic nervous system is linked to social behaviour. He also shows through his studies how a part of our nervous system (“the social connection nervous system”) is not developed until after we are born (Tabel 1).
The social connection nervous system develops through eye contact, facial expression, touch and “heart connection” (define) - all elements of emphatic relating. Depending on the quality and amount of this type of interaction you experienced from caregivers as an infant... and the quality of this connection...you will develop different levels of safety that will impact how easily you relate to others. If you have an “open heart” (you need to define/quantify this… use HearthMath research), how you feel when you are socializing, and if you are more prone to feeling isolated in the world. In other words, how safe you feel deeply connecting to another human being.
Let’s cite where these images came from?
When watching porn, you are looking at a screen- not being with another human being. You are not interacting, connecting or relating. You are watching a screen that doesn't give you reciprocal eye contact, touch or facial connection.
However, studies show that while having sex or while watching porn, your brain produces oxytocin, the neurotransmitter also produced during breastfeeding. Yes, for those of you who were breastfed, that was a very real experience of human connection… And herein lies the confusion! For a moment, you feel like you are having a connected experience, even though in reality there is no real connection! Afterwards you return to the same reality of pre-porn loneliness, leaving you feeling disconnected (what is the neurochemistry of disconnection in this case?). The oxytocin high makes you want to feel that again and again; so you watch more porn.
Could it be that porn is keeping us in a cycle of lacking deep social connection in our nervous systems? Could it be that since your nervous system has not been soothed properly (because you do not feel safe to deeply connect in an intimate and vulnerable way), watching porn therefore becomes the easiest way to at least feel something?
Could it be that a big part of the current adult generation has grown up with the trauma in their social connection nervous system from not feeling deeply seen and met? Was digital porn, as it is today, created from this level of traumatized consciousness?
We know from studies that social connection, eye contact, physical touch and feeling truly safe in relating not only creates deep relaxation in the nervous system, but that they are required to survive and evolve as a species.
Social Cognitive Neuroscience is a discipline that analyzes how brain function underlies social thinking and social behavior. One of the founders, Lieberman, states that: "Mammals are more socially connected than reptiles, primates more than other mammals, and humans more than other primates,(...) what this suggests is that becoming more socially connected is essential to our survival. In a sense, evolution has made bets at each step that the best way to make us more successful is to make us more social. (...)Someday, we will look back and wonder how we ever had lives, work and schools that weren't guided by the principles of the social brain.”
With this in mind, the following question becomes valid.Is porn actually contributing to evolving humanity in a direction of weakness and loneliness rather than becoming morefit for survival through enhanced connection? Considering the world’s current collective crisis, this is especially an interesting question to entertain Could sexual shame and fear of rejection be the roadblocks?Imagine you are one of the hundreds of billions of annual porn consumers. You are a human being...everyday feeling sexual shame and fear of rejection if you were to actually sharing your deepest sexual desires, needs, vulnerabilities and longings with a partner… but instead you chose the quick fix to watch porn alone.
Could it be that this sexual shame and fear of rejection actually stem from our sex-ed-deprived upbringings? Or from generations of parents who viewed sex as something shameful to not talk openly about? Spend a moment dear reader, and think about your own upbringing. Our memories and socialization are formulated in or brain. Let’s tour what’s possible inthe brain.
Neuroplasticity
“{Neuroplasticity} at its most basic level, refers to the brain’s ability to change. When you learned to ride a bike, your brain didn’t just logically process the steps involved in riding a bike, your brain literally, physically changed itself into a brain built for bike-riding. It can mold and shape itself, like a playdough, as it responds to outside forces and experiences”.
When we engage in an activity—particularly a pleasurable activity, and particularly if it involves repetition and intense focus—the brain alters itself so that it’ll be better and more efficient to do that activity the next time. Our brains create what are known as “neural pathways.” The more we engage in an activity, the stronger the pathways associated with that activity become.
Once formed, those pathways can become remarkably long-lasting and resilient. Pathways neglected or ignored, even for years, are still there, ready to be revitalized. Hence the saying: “it’s like riding a bike.” Porn can take our brains’ natural stimuli, our desire for intimacy and connection, our longing to feel desirable in our relationships, our interest in a particular feature or activity... and it can give us more quantity, more exaggeration, and more “supernormal” versions, until it overrides what we think is normal, warp what we perceive as exciting, and make real intimacy seem less interesting.
This is why Dr. Simone Kühn and Dr. Jürgen Gallinat concluded that pornography affects the brain through an “intense stimulation of our reward system” ultimately making “pornography consumption more rewarding than real life intimacy in a relationship.” With awareness of neuroplasticity, it is easy to conclude that frequent porn consumptiomre-wires our brains.
Let's look at what happens in your body when you ejaculate and only focus on getting a clitorial peak orgasm:
Porn focuses on fast fucking, peak orgasms and ejaculation, not on long lasting intimacy and emotional connection. CAN YOU ADD IN A STATISTICAL COUNT to back this up? Perhaps there is a very good reason for this? Quick addiction equals quick money.
We know from research CITE that dopamine levels greatly increase during orgasm. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter responsible for feeling pleasure, desire, motivation.It activates the reward system and thus can create addiction, whether it is drugs, social media or porn. After ejaculation or peak clitoral orgasm, dopamine levels drop, and you feel hungover, longing for the next dopamine high. Oxytocin is also activated during masturbation, which gives you a sense of connectedness. After ejaculation or peak clitoral orgasm, oxytocin levels also drop.
Research on male rats has shown that they experience a reduction in testosterone receptors for up to a week after ejaculation resulting in a decrease in energy. When a man’s testosterone levels decrease after ejaculation, he feels less like a man. He feels the need to pull away and may even lose interest for a while.According to Harvard studies, Vasopressin helps a man hold the interest in a woman and increases when he’s sexually excited, but it drastically decreases after he ejaculates.
Thus, it becomes clear that like any technological industry under global capitalism, the porn industry is feeding off neurotransmitter addiction. Just like sugar addiction as a money machine. Many men and also women have come forward around the world to report how porn addiction can ruin lives. Some porn sites even have disclaimers using it as a part of their way of pulling in.
However, we as consumers are in the end the ones who have the power and responsibility for what we buy into.Do we dare to feel what is underneath our addictions?
Let's take an even deeper look at what actually happens in the body when you repeatedly ejaculate or get clitoris orgasms.
Why does most of humanity only focus on the clitoral peak orgasm and ejaculation?
Female genitalia contains a huge number of nerve endings (the clitoris alone has more than 8,000 nerve endings alone), which are, in turn, connected to large nerves that run up through the body to the spinal cord. On the other hand, the vagus nerve bypasses the spinal cord.It performs many other functions in the body in addition to innervation, and therefore feedback to the brain during sexual stimulation.
For most women and men, pleasure equals stimulating the clitoral part of the vagina and ejaculation for men. Therefore, it is also this kind of neuroplasticity that you teach your brain to respond to just like if you were riding a bike. Another way of saying that you teach your brain's reward system to respond to a very specific way of stimulating the 8000 nerve endings of the clitoris. Get that peak orgasm and go to sleep! We can say that neuroplasticity has created a pattern. What is sex, intimacy and connection?
While some will say that porn is liberating us, a concern is that it doesn't show emotional intimacy, heart connection and authentic communication, which we now know is a crucial part of real life relating. When we look at the world and notes that most of humanity experiences generational trauma, sexual abuse (every ⅓ of women has been sexually abused - more than 10% of all men according to WHO) , lack of emotional and heart intelligence, there is a lot of things pointing to the fact that porn is an energetic repetition of our collective trauma. It is also a big concern that porn is the biggest “sex educator” on the planet as it actually only shows a small fractions of what is possible during sex. Let's dive into this at the end of the article.
The positive side of porn - and the timeline aspect - that the scientific standpoint neglects: Let's have a look at some of the reported positive sides of watching porn!
If you have experienced a lot of shaming and repressed sexual energy from the people around you (like most of humanity) in your upbringing, could watching porn be a way for you to live out shame and repression in a way that serves you?
Could it be that the diversity in sexual expression, desires and fantasies that porn shows is a way that people can feel met and save marriages? According to Michelle Montoro, porn saved her sex life because she was able to see women like her, with her body size and it sparked her sexual desire
Could it be that if you have had a rough childhood and were about to get into some gang shit that porn would be your addiction savior?
Can it be that watching porn helps to save marriages because you can get relief for your sexual fantasies without having to live them out in real life? According to the famous singer Robbie Williams porn was his savior.
Could it be that the positive effects of watching porn stems from women who are via today's society more in their masculine energy and by watching porn and getting a peak orgasm it makes them more relaxed and gives them a good night sleep? We all know the benefits for health on a good night sleep and how that let alone improves one's life.
However what we see with all the positive effects of porn is that it all stems from deeper issues that are based on a very specific timeline and problem - where porn comes in as a helper in all these cases!! As a symptom treatment but actually not dealing with the root cause! So when science or personal stories report positive effects we need to look at the timeline of each individual and at the underlying deeper issue.
What could be even better than watching porn? Imagine a way where your dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin levels could always be active and high? The neurotransmitter components that are needed for us to feel pleasure, motivation and deeply connected as earlier described. A recent research by Dr. Nicole Prause showed that not only is the biggest reason for having sex pleasure but also that the greatest reward, using electrocephalograpgy EEG (where you measure the electrical impulses in the brain) to measure, is in fact the high arousal state during sex and not the 8-12 rytmic contactions during the normal peak/ejaculation orgasm. This can indicate that conserving your high sexual arousal state is the way forward.
Imagine that you could experience long lasting orgasms for 30 min up to several hours rather than 5-10 seconds! Imagine sex and intimacy as a tool for humanity to reach higher states of consciousness and connection instead of separation!
Most of humanity does not realise that there are 2 types of orgasms. Peak orgasms and valley. Valley orgasms are about resting into The body and building your sexual energy instead of leaking it. For women that means that more than 8 different types of orgasms are possible through 4 unique nerve pathways - the Vagina, the Uterus, the Clitoris and the Cervix! 6 of these orgasmic experiences will require that you don't have the normal peak orgasm but circulate your sexual energy in to Valley orgasms and stay neurotransmitter high. According to tantric sexologists and tantric practitioners this is all possible, if you know how to work your science, as Dr. Nicole Prause also discovered. Instead of giving in to the high dopamine of the peak orgasm and ejaculation rush but instead circulate your sexual energy as a wave without climaxing.
Let's take a look at what many independent tantric researchers have found to be true on what happens in the body when you don't peak on the clitoris orgasm or ejaculate as a man but with slowness and presence keep circulating and storing the sexual energy :
There is a difference between ejaculating and getting a peak 5-10 seconds clitoris orgasm and to circulating the energy and not peaking and how the neurotransmitters are affected by this. A part of this knowledge comes from science and another part of the embodied knowledge on circulating sexual energy is only experienced by a relatively small number of people on the planet at this time.
Interestingly hundreds of tantric practitioners report this same information - how by circulating the sexual energy that oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin and melatonin stays high and can potentially under the right circumstances activate DMT into the spinal fluid which together gives the experiences of altered states of consciousness as similarly reported in plant medicine. There are different factors making this possible. Two of them are that both parties being deeply vulnerable with each other / heart fully open and that the body is fully de-armoured from emotional blocks and trauma armour. Underlining that a relaxed nervous system and a balanced human social connection nervous system is crucial for this to happen. As we concluded earlier, the heart connection is a vital part.
Could it be that in a time of huge climate crises, health crisis, economic crisis and trauma crisis aso that the solutions we are seeking are not out there but to be found in our neurotransmitters, level of consciousness and our social connection nervous system bringing us closer and connected through the heart and not through rubbing our genitals though porn behind a screen ?
Imagine what effect it would have on our collective consciousness if the 109,012,068,000 billions of people each year watching porn would instead feel safe to be vulnerable and connect eye to eye,body to body - heart to heart and potentially work towards altered states of consciousness?
What effect would it have on you if you felt deeply connected and loved by someone in everything that you are ?
Upon this collection of research studies, it has become clear that porn does affect our brain, neuroplasticity and nervous system in a possibly traumatic way. Porn is also affecting our relationships and is enhancing isolation and addictiveness instead of creating deeper human connection.
Depending on personal timelines there can be both positive and negative outcomes from watching porn, however there are no indication that porn can heal trauma or solve root causes in people's lives - and therefore it is clear that we must be aware of the addictive neurochemistry that is activated in the brain and nervous system with a constant high and low of dopamine and oxytocin levels that. Like sugar and other addictions, watching porn is blocking humanity to think long term and being able to elevate into higher states of consciousness and human connection - and through that creating a better and safer world where we take care of each other, the Earth and every other living species.
On a personal level: If you have childhood trauma of not feeling seen, heard and truly met by your parents as a child - watching porn doesn't seem to be the solution for you and humanity to engage in or dwell into. Relational trauma can only be rewired in relating to our social connection nervous system through interaction with other people. If your heart is truly longing for intimacy - porn is never the solution! It will work like a bandaid but do not address the real issue. On a collective level: Even Though we might assume porn being a small thing we do alone in our bedrooms compared to the collective challenges we face we are now more than ever invited to see how the micro level of human consciousness has created the macro level. In a time of economic, health, sexual, racial, environmental and inequality crisis that is slapped in our face, especially since the effects of covid-19 showing us even more so how much we are deeply interconnected, dependent and affected by one another. We have learned or HAVE to learn that the only way to solve things is through elevating education & consciousness - and to truly stand together and connect through empathy and solutions for the higher good and not for the greedy ego wanting instant gratification.
Fittest for survival
Can it be that the solutions we seek for our collective issues does not lie in keeping our nervous system’s in a state of short term defence/survival mode due to trauma and repeatedly using porn as an escape to feel deeper and safe for a little while - but that our ability for survival as humanity at this moment in history lies in the ability to be able to be vulnerable and connect deeply - and to be in a deep rest and digest state and feeling how everything is interconnected - through a continuous flow of oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin high - we get to experience the deep sense of connectedness to life with another human being and that THIS is what we truly need to move beyond our egos and live in a more sustainable, loving and cohesive way on the planet?
May this article be an inspiration into how the micro level of your life affects the macro level and for you to through the knowledge of science to dare to receive the love and connection that you truly long for!