Understanding the Impact of Pornography and Masturbation on Sexual Health

I was starting to get a lot of questions I was kind of surprised I thought well you know I'm male and you know maybe

that's why they feel comfortable asking me if you were saying that we're asking about pornography and they were asking

you know I I realize we want to um you know I'll just be direct about they were asking whether or not

masturbation was bad they were asking whether or not masturbation with ejaculation was particularly bad and

here's my stance on this I'm a biologist and a neuroscientist not a psychologist but what we know for sure is that if an

individual repeatedly engages in this circuitry let's say masturbation and pornography with increasingly

um potent forms of stimulation that are on a screen a couple of things happen first of all what's being reinforced

what's being reinforced is a high dopaminergic response to watching other people engage in sexual behavior which

is very different than being in a first person sexual experience okay so right there you know that what's being

reinforced is not actually any kind of improvement in communication skills it's Warriors them and and as these questions

started to come in more and more I started to realize there was a lot of kind of undertones of people talking

about fear of or experience with sexual dysfunction that clearly pornography can lead to and here I'm specifically

talking about males I actually don't know the literature on females so here I'm talking about females don't use

visual pornography to the same degree they use literary pornography so yeah so and then you start to think

about okay what happens in the Cascade or the Arc of of sexual arousal and and orgasm what happens is that initially

there's a it's parasympathetically dominant meaning if somebody is too uh stressed they actually can't engage in

sexual behavior the arousal response doesn't occur erection is blunted but the actual

orgasm response and ejaculation is strongly associated with the so-called sympathetic nervous system which has

nothing to do with sympathy has everything to do with it's a kind of a stress response and then it reverses to

a parasympathetic response and that hormone called prolactin increases dramatically after ejaculation in males

what does that do that blunts dopamine release and testosterone for a very long period of time which makes sense if pair

bonding and sort of you know in our species anywhere there's this idea that then other molecules would be exchanged

with Partners pair bonding potential for raising mates Etc without getting into a huge discussion about that the point is

this masturbation pornography are potently tapping into the dopamine system and can undermine

the very processes of which I consider healthy processes of finding a mate you know dating communication eventually if

it's appropriate sexual interaction Etc it's undermining oh so okay so here's a question if if if

you're if you're seeking sexual release through pornography and you go through the whole cycle and you get a prolactin

release do you bond with yourself so this is very interesting the um it's the biology explains it as what's left there

is a kind of an open loop a kind of an emptiness right because bonding with the self is a complicated notion I mean it

had there's a healthy version of that of course loving oneself and yeah um and self-referencing and again this is more

you're done far more your domain than mine in terms of how what a healthy self-relation is but in the absence of a

real partner there of a absence of real sexual partner there's an open loop of neurochemicals including oxytocin and

prolactin the dopamine remember dopamine goes up during Pursuit anticipation then Peaks and then crashes below Baseline

after orgasm and ejaculation so this kind of low that people fear is putting them into an a-motivated State we can

think of this if I were to kind of expand on it would be it's the kind of a neurochemical psychological equivalent

of making your home environment filthy for a while not actually putting you into this positive amplification of

dopamine so it depletes the dopamine system and it's likewise in drugs of abuse and addiction it eventually

depletes the dopamine system initially there's a huge dopamine surge with drugs of abuse like methamphetamine and

cocaine but over time people are using more and more to achieve what is not such a great High you even see this a

little bit with um kind of consumption of energy drinks like people are taking more and

more chemicals within their energy drinks and they're thinking about loud fast music energy drinks it's kind of

stacking of dopaminergic tools now that's not as pathologic in fact I'm I'm there are some energy drinks I'll

occasionally drink and I enjoy them um I don't think we need to be entirely afraid of pursuing or engaging in things

that release dopamine obviously healthy sexual behavior food that we love social engagement all of these things can be

dopaminergic it's the big peaks in dopamine that are not associated with any prior effort or organization of self

that are particularly dangerous for the human being [Music]

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