Is Porn Destroying Us?

All that discarded spunk, lost, like tears in the rain. To some—conservative doomsayers, misogynist scolds—this is to be interpreted as a highly fertile symbol of our collapsing social fabric. To others, porn is just fun and games. What is undeniable is that we’re consuming far more of it than at any point in human history, and the effects of this are yet to fully register.

Unless you knew a pervy Frenchman with his own home kino setup, indecent imagery was hard to find before 1953, when Playboy changed publishing forever by turning ogling into a literary-adjacent activity for the modern gentleman. Today, the soft porn peddled by that magazine feels quaint. Now, all manner of guys, girls, and gang bangs lurk in our pockets at all times, waiting to be unleashed from our devices for free, instantly, in resplendent HD.

It’s easy to hand-wring about porn, or to make sweeping generalizations that fail to capture the complexity of the topic. Whenever disingenuous politicians need something or someone to blame for the downfall of society, sex workers are never far from their crosshairs, and it’s important to recognize this and call it out as opportunistic scapegoating. Yet it’s also too simple to brush off all criticism of X-rated content as sex-negative moralizing.

As we enter 2025, it feels like we’re approaching an inflection point; countries around the world are moving to restrict access to online porn, often under the guise of protecting children, and the conversation around its potential harms is expanding. At this stage, most are familiar with the age-old complaints: that porn portrays unrealistic depictions of sex, that it objectifies women, that the industry itself can be exploitative. All are points worth debating. Yet we live in a new era for porn, and it’s a new set of arguments driving recent crackdowns.

“With internet porn, a guy can see more hot babes in ten minutes than his ancestors could see in several lifetimes,” said Gary Wilson, an anti-porn campaigner, in his 2012 TedTalk ‘The Great Porn Experiment.’

Wilson, a biology professor and author of a bestselling book on porn’s neural effects, stated that our brains start to rewire themselves when confronted with this “genetic bonanza.” Since 2012, enough has changed that much of Wilson’s presentation already feels outdated, yet this part has been borne out by research. The more porn we watch, the more we come to rely on the “porn harem” for release, as an increasing numbness to everyday pleasures seeps in.

This viewpoint is particularly troubling when you consider how early this starts; many teens are masturbating to videos of people getting brutally face-fucked before they’ve even kissed someone in real life. There are important issues to consider here around sexual expectations and consent, but on a purely chemical level, research suggests we have a generation of hyper-malleable young minds being trained to prioritize short-term pleasure via porn-delivered dopamine hits. As scientist Andrew Huberman warns, “The higher the dopamine peak, the bigger the drop.” Putting PornHub in charge of your happiness isn’t a healthy feedback loop.

However, it is one that has led to the invention of an entirely new cultural archetype. ‘Gooners’—a relatively new online movement of people who spend their free time locked in extreme marathon masturbation sessions—could only ever exist at this strange moment in history. These saturnine figures ‘edge’ their way through bedroom-bound shadow-lives paying endless homage to porn through bi-hourly explosions of squirting genitalia, a relentless multi-screen Mardi Gras of open tabs, gritted teeth, and post-orgasmic regret.

There are consequences to this stuff. This week, police were called to disperse a “gooneral” held for a man named Nautica Malone, who went viral late last year when he was filmed approaching a drive-thru window naked from the waist down. Malone, who was found dead by suicide on January 11, was memorialized as a “Goonlord” and a victim of “goonicide” (a portmanteau of “gooning” and “suicide”) by crowds that gathered at Bikini Beans Coffee in Tempe, Arizona. How well they actually knew Malone isn’t public knowledge, but they caused a stir after turning up armed with live-streaming gear and pamphlets honoring the deceased.

According to local police, Bikini Beans staff members—who wear skimpy beachwear to work as part of a promotional gimmick—were told by Malone’s family on the day of his passing that the 27-year-old had ended his life “over the incident.” The police also stated that Malone had described his recent mental state as “fucked up” in a note he left for his wife.

In recent times, porn-related public health crises have been declared in 16 U.S. states. Eight have hidden adult content away behind age-check mechanisms of varying robustness. In 2023, Texas passed a law forcing sites to include cigarette-pack style warnings that “pornography is potentially biologically addictive” and “proven to harm human brain development.” (Neither have been scientifically proven, though last year the American College of Pediatricians said that high porn consumption is associated with downward shifts in the neural reward system similar to those seen in people ‘chasing’ highs from uppers or alcohol.) 

At the most extreme end of the censorship scale, groups like ultra-conservative US-based think tank the Heritage Foundation have called for online porn to be banned entirely. 

Of course, it’s possible to watch porn without getting lost in some life-wrecking gooner underworld. For many, it can be a way to normalize and explore non-mainstream types of sexuality free of harm. It also gives performers the chance to make an absolute fortune.

“With internet porn, a guy can see more hot babes in ten minutes than his ancestors could see in several lifetimes.”

Gary Wilson, anti-porn campaigner

Kazumi, a porn star who ramped up her OnlyFans presence during the pandemic and is now a multimillionaire, acknowledges that “anything in excess is probably not great for you.” But, she says, parents are responsible for educating their children about sex, adding, “Not every single person that sees inappropriate stuff as a kid becomes a weird pervert.”

The Filipino-American argues that she is merely “providing a product,” which of course she is. However, access to this kind of product via high speed internet, all of the time, almost anywhere you want it (5G allowing), is a novel phenomenon, and the consequences may take decades to fully understand. In fact, it’s exactly this ubiquity that makes porn’s effects so difficult to measure. Yet recent years have given us one example of a remote village being granted instant, high speed access to porn for the first time.

In 2023, Elon Musk’s Starlink system brought reliable internet to a remote community deep in the Amazon rainforest. The Marubo people have preserved their way of life for hundreds of years along the banks of Rio Ituí, taking ayahuasca and sleeping communally.

It’s one of the most isolated places on Earth, yet once Musk’s web connection was switched on, tribal leaders started voicing concerns about minors watching and sharing porn—despite growing up in a culture where even public kissing is frowned upon. Alfredo Marubo, a local critic of the Starlink connection, added that men in the village had begun acting in a more sexually aggressive manner, and told the New York Times that he was worried young people would seek to replicate the “graphic sex” they were now seeing on their screens.

Like social media and online gambling, porn is certainly capable of creating intense psychological cravings. One study found that roughly 11 percent of men and 3 percent of women reported some agreement with the statement “I am addicted to pornography.” However, claims by certain groups—such as anti-obscenity nonprofit The National Center on Sexual Exploitation—that porn is “potentially biologically addictive” remain contested, with academics yet to reach a consensus. 

“It’s important to remember that ‘porn addiction’ is a moral category rather than a health one—it’s people who say they’re unhappy about their porn consumption,” says Professor Alan McKee, author of What Do We Know About the Effects of Pornography After Fifty Years of Academic Research?. “The best predictor of people saying they’re addicted to pornography is not how much of it they consume, [it’s] how religious they are. Highly religious people are more likely to say they’re addicted than anybody else.”

For Tyson Adams, a sex coach who watched porn every day for 20 years, there is no doubt about the moreish nature of porn—or the recklessness of the industry that produces it. 

“Their aim is to get us addicted as fast as possible, and to get us to stay on their websites as long as they can,” he tells me. “A lot of men come to me with penis dysmorphia, where they believe they have a small cock, because porn stars have such big penises. All of this is leaving men suffering from erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation. Then, they’re afraid to bid for connection with women. This is totally fucking with our culture.”

The indivisibility of porn from the internet raises a pertinent question. Is it really porn people are getting addicted to, or is it their online devices? For those of us who treat our screen-time stats with the same level of aversion as our bank statements, it can feel as though porn—just like football, silly animal videos, or arguing with strangers about politics—is simply another vessel for the delivery of something more fundamentally intoxicating: dopamine. When we’re locked to our devices in the “machine zone” stages of hyper-dopamine production, we can feel as though the rest of the world sinks away; that nothing else matters outside of the silhouette of the screen—a less than ideal mindset to be in when it comes to decision-making.

Much has been made of the transformation in Twitter since the social media app was acquired by Musk and renamed ‘X’ in July 2023. Users have reported a drastic uptick in the amount of extreme and explicit content they are seeing in their algorithmically curated ‘For You’ feeds, enshrined by Musk as the inescapable central pillar of the platform since his takeover. So far, his tenure is perhaps best characterized as an expensive attempt to answer an array of fascinating socio-political questions, one of which was provided by Donald Trump’s election win. But there are plenty more questions, like what happens when you feed hundreds of millions of users far right ideology and hardcore porn through the same, addictive pipe?

The answer may already be with us, albeit hidden away in tens of thousands of musty ‘goon caves’ across the globe. “You get lost in the screens, sounds, and sensations,” a self-identifying gooner named Benny told VICE in 2023. “You go into a trance-like meditative state of euphoria. You lose track of time and reality, truly living in the moment.” On the one hand, you can take this behavior en masse and it doesn’t sound conducive to high voter turnouts or a functioning democracy. On the other, people have been fighting grim real-world prospects with escapism for years, and maybe gooning is no different to cinemas and night clubs.

In the tireless search for novelty, porn is also becoming more and more gung ho. OnlyFans stars like Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips have kickstarted an arms race to see who can generate the most outrage and page views. Thanks to AI, it’s now possible to create porn depicting anything you want, and deep-fake porn slop featuring political leaders and celebrities is saturating cyberspace. Immersive VR porn is very much a thing for the most pioneering onanists among us, and it surely won’t be too long before someone makes an affordable sex robot capable of providing hand relief without tugging your dick clean off your body. 

For those unwilling to invest in masturbatory tech, there is potentially another, much darker, path ahead. It’s the kind of descent that can happen gradually, and feel almost imperceptible, until it culminates in something far more damaging than anyone could have anticipated.

Like building up tolerance to a drug, it has been hypothesized that porn users may gradually have to watch content that is more and more extreme to achieve the same levels of satisfaction. Case in point: “Matthew,” whose wife “Emily” spoke to the Guardian after he was arrested for viewing images depicting child abuse. “He told me he’d been using pornography for years and it had escalated,” she said.

“I didn’t go on the dark web looking for porn,” Matthew told the paper. “But it was like opening Pandora’s box—your moral conscience is saying, ‘Don’t do it,’ but the addict’s brain is saying, ‘You could get a hit from this.’”

Watching porn tends to be an inherently private act, but the negative effects are progressively leaking out into wider society. In UK crime stats for 2022, more than 800 people were arrested each month for online sexual offenses, and research suggests that porn can serve as a gateway to illegal content depicting children.

Matthew, who didn’t go to jail but was placed on probation and the sex offenders’ register, said he came close to taking his own life after his arrest. “The only thing that stopped me was it was my dad’s birthday that weekend, and it didn’t seem fair on him,” he explained. His wife is still reeling from the effects: “I probably have some PTSD… We had to change the doorbell ringtone after the police raid because every time it went off, I couldn’t cope.”

“Your conscience is saying, ‘Don’t do it,’ but the addict’s brain says, ‘You could get a hit from this.’”

Like Matthew, many others say they’ve been pushed to the brink of suicide by porn. “I was searching for connection,” one man told me. “At the darkest points in my life, I was consuming a lot of porn. If I were at a place where I was preparing for what would mean my certain death, I would lean heavily into the instant gratification mechanism of porn to ease that pain. But every time, it made me feel worse. It always felt shameful.”

Perhaps the most universally affecting anti-porn argument of all relates to climate. Internet use could well account for 8 percent of carbon emissions by 2030, and porn accounts for a large chunk of all web traffic. (Five years ago, when PornHub’s viewing figures were half what they are now, researchers found that porn streaming generates the same amount of carbon dioxide as Belgium.) As such, it may not be inaccurate to describe the human race as quite literally wanking itself to death—and now even those guys in the Amazon are at it.

We should refrain from leaning too fully into the doom. There is certainly more than enough of it floating around in the world already, and anyway, this isn’t about demonizing sexual exploration or denying anyone their right to a BangBros subscription. However, we should acknowledge the cultural shifts tied to mass porn consumption, and how they are leading us into an uncertain new era that will likely redefine how we talk and think about sex, how we form relationships, and how we perceive intimacy. Pleasure is one of the driving forces of human civilization, and maybe porn is most useful as a barometer of how our relationship to pleasure is changing profoundly, in ways we are only just beginning to understand.

Follow Mattha Busby on Instagram @matthamundo

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