Summary: The Influence Of Pornography

The Influence of Pornography on Male Behavior Katarzyna Jurec

Pictures have power. Are the viewers defenseless while looking at them? Picture are used in advertising, in social campaign, in news and war propaganda to encourage people to join the army, to manipulate their choices, decision. Imperceptibly they influence people’s imaginations and change the perception of reality and pattern of behavior.

More important, people were always heavily influenced by pictures or at least descriptions concerning others peoples life. Jonathan M. Metzl in his article “Voyeur Nation? Changing Definitions of Voyeurism” characterized voyeuristic aspects of people behavior and how easy it is to do it by using the internet. He also noticed

“Neurons that fire together, wire together” - if it happens several times, the brain’s reward pathway ultimately changes also a viewer’s brain. This can lead to an increased willingness for other erotic movies. Not only dopamine is responsible for an addictive role and building new pathways of reward in the brain. A protein called “iFosB” is another culprit.

“IFosB” is accumulated when people watch pornography, so later it is more difficult to break free, and the resulting brain damage is more severe. Unfortunately, like every kind of addiction, a previously looked at picture is not enough because the viewer can not feel dopamine’s effect as much, so he must go and hunt for more stimuli. This, in turn, increases the levels of dopamine in the brain and as powerful arousal as the one experienced previously can be achieved. This is connected also with brain damage exactly in the frontal lobe - “the part of the brain that controls logical problem solving and decision making”. In other words, pornography can be comparable to junk food. The level of dopamine increases when we think of a chocolate cake or a kebab, but this does not mean that such brain adaptation is good for the person’s

This is much more prevalent than most people realize, with the phenomenon increasing by the day. Consider the results of two large-scale Japanese studies, one conducted in 2008 and the other in 2010. The studies found that in 2010, 36.1% of males ages 16 to 19 had no interest in, or an outright aversion to, sex with another person. This figure was more than double that of the 2008 survey (17.5%). For men 20 to 24, the percentage increase was from 11.8% in 2008 to 21.5% in