Porndemic — Part 01
I was born and raised in Mumbai, city that never sleeps. As you know from my previous articles that I am a 90s kid. I have witnessed the so-called digital transformation. If you could ask the ten-year-old me about how the world would be in the next 15–20 years? I probably would have mentioned flying cars or people going to the moon for vacation or the luxury of free phone calls. Personally, the last one was very close to me, as I watched my parents stand in line at the nearest PCO to speak to their parents merely for 30 seconds and come back with happy tears. It was beautiful to watch them happy after talking to their parents, even though it was just for 30 seconds. Simultaneously, I felt terrible while realizing what if I get to speak to them only for 30 seconds or so?
I finished my schooling in a small village located in UP. We stayed there for a couple of years due to family circumstances. I remember I might have been in class 8th when I heard the phrase internet for the first time and how the internet is changing the world around us. I was excited to know and understand the internet; my brain could only comprehend the concept of internet as an object that quite looks like Personal Computer. I wondered what I would do with the internet? If I ever get a chance to operate one. With minimal knowledge and a lot of imagination as a kid growing up watching Shaktiman and Pokemon, the internet in my head kept getting bigger and bigger.
Fast forward to college days, now I had moved to a city, I looked around, and everybody has a cellphone, now we could talk to anyone anywhere in the world. Even though we would spend most of our time in college around friends, I noticed the curiosity of being connected to them after college increased. Everyone would chat, talk, tag each other on photos. People couldn’t wait to click a picture and post it online and wait for their friends to like, comment, etc. That’s when I realized maybe the internet is a good thing as it connects and helps you stay connected with everyone on the planet, it help you search, and learn about anything you want, then what’s the harm? How could the greatest invention of our time ever be misused?
I was introduced to pornography at a very early age, thanks to my school friends. It wasn’t the digital video porn at first, of course, due to the unavailability of the technology at that time. Most of us from the 90s got their curiosity about the human body satisfied through magazines or stories, which in itself was a struggle to find. Whatever exposure we had at that time was either at an inconvenient time or a location to access. Also, there was this fear of being caught or reported by someone to our parents, which we couldn’t compromise.
My first encounter with video porn was through a VCR at my friend’s house. I remember we both were scared and always on the lookout. With so much cortisol rushing, one could hardly get addicted to something like this. Addiction comes when you hack the brain’s reward system by exposing it to activities that provide the most pleasure, encouraging to continuously repeat it over and over, making the pathway stronger in your brain. In my situation, this was not the case; here, it was just two excited teenagers inside the room scared trying to watch something that was probably filmed by 1mg camera. One of us stood near the power button, ready to shut it immediately if somebody walks in.
Fast forward it today; what changed? How did today’s young, adults, married, unmarried everyone ends up using the most effective weapon (internet) of our time watching porn and destroying their physical, emotional, and social well-being?
The National Center on sexual exploitation (NCOSE), in one of their study conducted worldwide found traumatic facts.
- Every second, 28,258 people watch pornography on the internet, and every second, $3,075.64 is spent on pornography on the internet.
- 64% of young people, ages 13–24, actively seek out pornography weekly or more often.
- 51% of male students and 32% of female students first viewed porn before their teenage years.
- Porn sites receive more regular traffic than Netflix, Amazon, & Twitter combined each month.
- 35% of all internet downloads are estimated to be porn-related.
- At least 30% of all data transferred across the internet is estimated to be porn-related.
- A 2015 meta-analysis of 22 studies from seven countries found that internationally the consumption of pornography was significantly associated with increases in verbal and physical aggression among males and females alike.
- A UK survey found that 44% of males aged 11–16 who consumed pornography reported that online pornography gave them ideas about the type of sex they wanted to try.
- The world’s largest free porn site also received over 42,000,000,000 site visits during 2019 alone. (Pornhub Analytics)
- 68% of divorce cases involved one party meeting a new lover over the internet.
- 56% involved one party having “an obsessive interest in pornographic websites.
- 70% of wives of sex addicts could be diagnosed with PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder).
- Pornography use increases the marital infidelity rate by more than 300%.
- 40% of people identified as “sex addicts” lose their spouses,
- 58% suffer considerable financial losses, and about 33% lose their jobs.
What do these numbers mean?
These issues aren’t going to change as long as society continues to deny the real, proven harms of porn and a vast majority of people believe the lie that it’s harmless. At one point in time, porn wasn’t a common issue that affected millions of people, much less all of society. It wasn’t a topic that needed to be discussed with such urgency. But, just by looking at these stats, it seems like those days are over. Porn is a favorite past time for millions of consumers, and many of them have no idea what kind of harm they’re letting into their own lives or the type of exploitation they’re contributing. But we can change that. We can raise awareness, and the good news is, each of us holds power to change these numbers.
This series will look at what science & Ayurveda has to say about the negative effect of watching porn and the excessive masturbation pandemic, which we all are struggling/witnessing as one of the biggest addiction threats faced before. Extreme porn and masturbation are among the leading causes among teenagers and young adults of depression, isolation, lack of self-confidence & self-respect, lack of motivation, patience, emotions, and mental growth. Let’s find out how we humans hacked the most significant real pleasure reward system given to us by evolution/nature into something fake and meaningless, which is available in abundance over a click of a button.
Let’s make not watching porn the new normal.
