Porn Induced. Fetish.

In porn addiction forums online, I read all the time about teenagers who say that they have compulsively used porn and masturbation for years, starting very young. The average age for first exposure to pornography used to be 11 years old, but I imagine that it’s likely more accurate these days to say that it’s under 10 years old for most boys.

That boys are exposed to porn that young and that what they are exposed to is so much more graphic and explicit than the Playboys most men grew up with means that this first exposure can powerfully affect one’s arousal template and sexual development.

Overlearning

Like other addictions, porn addiction can progress and escalate in intensity and severity over time. Just like the drinker who needs more alcohol to produce the same effect, so too those who struggle with compulsive porn use can consume pornography for longer periods of time and more frequently. But often, the same old porn just doesn’t do it for them anymore. This is called tolerance, and it happens when a porn addict gets bored with the porn they’ve usually viewed. Such tolerance can cause the person to seek out novel and different forms and types of pornography. After all, the brain loves novelty.

So, the man who gets bored with heterosexual pornography may turn to gay porn. Or one may start looking into anime porn or hentai porn. Or BDSM porn. Or porn featuring transvestites. Or anything else, really. The more one views this particular type of pornography, the more this behavior is reinforced and the stronger the neuropathways in the brain become.

Learning happens when we associate a stimulus with a reward. Pavlov’s dogs learned to associate the sound of the bell with food so that they salivated when they heard the bell before any food was presented. The dog’s brain’s reward systems were firing when they heard the bell, and grooves in the brain (neuropathways) formed in response. As the saying goes, what fires together wires together.

When someone who compulsively uses pornography then repeatedly views a particular form of pornography, he is essentially training his brain to respond sexually to that stimulus. With repeated exposure to a particular genre of pornography, for example, what started as a novel means of achieving sexual arousal can lead to the development of a sexual fetish as the brain “overlearns” to associate the sexual material with excitement.

If you have a porn-induced fetish, there’s good news. If you can abstain from viewing the pornography that reinforces the fetish, you’ll stop reinforcing the sexual attraction, and the fetish will eventually diminish so that it may extinguish altogether and disappear entirely.

With time, the neuropathways that were created in response to your pornography use and formed around your fetish will wither, much like an unused path that will eventually fall into disrepair and become grown over with weeds. It’s important to nurture new, healthy, and growing sexual experiences as you abstain from porn so that you can learn to have relational, healthy sexual pleasure that is more integrated into your life (instead of being shame-based and secretive).