By Penny Mulvey
Pornography is an artificial digital drug which is having a dramatic impact on the male brain, a Christian neuroscientist told a Melbourne seminar in June.
More than 200 predominantly young men and women attended the event titled Grey Matters: How a porn saturated culture is affecting our brains, jointly hosted by Guilty Pleasure and The Roundtable, an initiative of the Cross Culture Church.
Dr William Struthers, Associate Professor of Psychology at Wheaton College in Illinois, has studied the effects of drugs on the brain and how the brain responds to the environment since he was an undergraduate.
He told the seminar the brain is influenced by hormones – testosterone, oestrogen and progesterone – but it can also be influenced by experience.
“Viewing pornography changes how the brain works,” Dr Struthers explained.
He likened the viewing of digital pornography to the ingestion of chemical drugs, as the rush that occurs to the circuit of the brain responsible for reinforcement demonstrates a similar response when mapped by researchers.
Just as a drug addict needs more and more hits to experience the same physiological reaction, Dr Struthers said men find themselves viewing more and more online porn as the brain adapts to the sexual arousal.
“We know now that there is a generation of young men who are having great difficulty in finding pleasure in normal relationships with women,” he said. “The rest of the world, including the scientific and clinical community, is paying attention to this.”
Dr Struthers summarised the ensuing conversation about ethics:
The consequentalists – don’t view porn because it will ruin your sex life; make you feel inadequate or feel guilt and shame. The principalists – don’t do this because those rules are anchored in a principle, such as purity, faithfulness, monogamy or natural law.
The realists – stems from an evolutionary understanding that sexuality is an animal drive, a fact of life and is morally neutral. He believes Christians have adopted another version, which views sex as a necessary evil for making new lives, but declares your body is bad. “That is not a good story either because it demeans the beautiful aspect of the body.”
“As responsible mature adults we have to have a narrative, an ethic. We need to discuss sex not in a spirit of judgement, but with compassion knowing that some people will struggle with porn addiction, be unfaithful to their spouse, be abused, have impulses that they are not comfortable with or ashamed by.”
Dr Struthers believes that the solution to an over-sexualised culture won’t come from medicine.
“It will come from a change of thinking about sexuality that fits within a healthy way men and women look at each other as sexual beings. Not just sexual beings that we can potentially mate with, but as brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews.”
Dr Struthers believes men can overcome pornography addiction, and he explores the science of the impact of pornography to the brain in his book, Wired for Intimacy.
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