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Notes -
Pornography is a symptom of the problem. Men often go to porn because they can’t get it normally. And it’s not to say men aren’t willing to work for it. If you want to get to the apple, you’ve got to climb the tree. But if someone comes along and tells me I have to climb the Eiffel Tower to get it, I’m going to ignore them.
There's problems with men accessing porn even when in relationships; Nancy Friday* of 90s sex book fame recounted an anecdote of how, as a young woman, she felt rejected and hurt when her older lover masturbated - she was there, she was available, he didn't have to do that! But she learned to accept, thanks to his careful teaching, that men have needs and different attitudes to sex than women, and sometimes guys just want to get off without complications.
*These books were first published in the 70s but were hits again in the 90s, when erotic publishing for women really took off with the likes of Black Lace and others.
I’ve read Nancy Friday myself and I’m aware of the problem you’re talking about. Porn consumption doesn’t always stop just because people are paired off. Some men just want to get off easily without caring for their girlfriend or wife, and some do get sucked down the hole of addiction. But these are peripheral issues at the margins that lie away from the core of the problem among those who watch it.
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I'm inclined to think it's both a cause and a symptom. There are observable issues that can be directly linked to widespread pornography use, including porn-induced erectile dysfunction.
Men go to porn because it's easier than dealing with a real woman, men also have more difficulty doing what has to be done to get a woman because of porn.
This is by no means intended to imply that modern women don't have their own major issues going on.
I think you’re both right. Porn has a lot of social and sexual downsides, which we find hard to talk about, because they’re squeezed between feminist critiques of porn (which don’t really care about practical effects on male sexuality unless they can be marshaled for critiques of objectification), religious critiques of porn (for which any objective problems are post hoc evidence for a position already held), feminist arguments in favor of porn (in which case male sexual consequences are almost irrelevant), and general male liberal arguments in favor of porn (for which any sort of critique registers as one of the above, and thus dismissed).
Porn-induced is a strong word, but certainly porn-exacerbated sexual problems when encountering a real woman are real and serious. As is what the nofappers talk about with escalating pornographic taboos, where the attraction to normal vanilla content becomes exhausted by the massive overflow of sexual novelty available in porn, leading to attraction to more taboo kink content to get off, leading to exhaustion of attraction to taboo kink content, leading to more taboo kink content just to get the same arousal…
It’s not hard to meet men who’ve never touched a person’s genitals before but their entire sexuality is organized around complex kink structures. And you can’t run before you can walk, so the young pornbrained guys are unable to comprehend vanilla sex experientially.
That said, I think tretiak is right that young guys feel like they have narrow options in terms of sex. And I’m not actually convinced that men are using porn instead of meeting women, as I think men’s desire for companionship is much more complex than just locate nearest vagina. They use porn to get off, but of course the emotional longing and the desire for intimacy and the want for someone to hold on cold winter nights still remains.
Where porn damages sexuality becomes prevalent much later, if they do meet a woman they like, where they realize they’ve seen a thousand women have sex with men, but don’t know the first thing about what they’re doing.
Introversion has something to do with it, and the internet in general, but this affects both genders, and the flip side of the young men playing video games instead of touching grass are the young women scrolling TikTok instead of touching grass. I’ve met women like that. They’re often very dateable, especially if you’re an introvert. But unless you get very lucky, you’re not going to meet them.
What your argument seems to suggest is that men aren’t meeting women as much because their hunger is satisfied by porn, but I’m not at all convinced that lonely men are that way because they’re not hungry enough. But the young men we’re talking about are simultaneously ashamed, inexperienced, overexposed, under-touched, desperate for intimacy, terrified of humiliation, and living inside a culture that offers him infinite simulacra and few bridges to reality.
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Addiction or misuse of anything will always lead to problems. The solutions that would best stymie its consumption aren’t likely to materialize because of the ideology of personal choice that dominates western social life. They do often go to it because it’s easy on occasion, yes that’s true. But most of the time it’s because they’re lacking in opportunity.
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