Porn and the Peter Pan Syndrome
Without prudence, pleasure enslaves us
Roger Scruton called porn ‘one of the great social diseases’, and sexual obesity is now a psychiatric term. Whereas the virtuous man - whose reason rules his senses - eats in order to live, the glutton - his reason ruled by his senses - lives in order to eat. His disordered desire for pleasure damages him.
And so it is with sex. Just as we desire food to preserve our individual lives, we desire sex to preserve the life of our species. The pleasure attached to satisfying these appetites induces us to fulfil our duty. But the desire has to be tempered and ordered. Without temperance, Reinhard Hütter notes, the helmsman of prudence cannot guide the ship of the soul through pleasure’s treacherous waters. It is dashed on the rocks of disordered desire.
And this risk is greatest with sex because - contrary to Peter Singer’s famous claim that ‘sex raises no unique moral issues at all’ - no pleasure is more intense than sexual pleasure. This is because, as Edward Feser explains, sex is for generating new human beings and this involves great costs and responsibilities, so sex is greatly pleasurable to ensure we engage in it anyway. It is also the most unifying way possible of remedying our incompleteness, so it is not just physically but psychologically pleasurable.
But pleasure can impair our ability to perceive the truth when what we take pleasure in is something that is in fact bad. Some people eat themselves to death. Some alcoholics drink themselves to death. And porn makes this plain, too. In removing sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners to display them to third parties, porn perverts the giving of spouses to each other. Everyone involved - the actors, the vendors, the consumers - becomes an object of mere pleasure and profit.
Unlike in painting or sculpture, where the body is a model subjected to a reworking by the artist, in porn there is ‘no transfiguration of the model’ (John Paul II). Porn in the modern sense began with the invention of camera. And today’s high-definition, realistic streaming images are unprecedented.
An Esquire article puts the point powerfully: 10-year-old boys can now see ‘more naked women on their phone in 10 minutes than most grown men in history saw in their entire lifetimes. And they can see these women performing acts most men in history would never have dreamt up, let alone witnessed.’
Everyone involved is also immersed in the illusion of a fantasy world. Dr Jordan Peterson warned of this when he referred to the ‘fairy of porn’ in discussing the Peter Pan complex of man-boys who refuse to face reality - wankers at the window.
But this insight was originally G. K. Chesterton’s: ‘the inevitable result of love…is incarnation; and the inevitable result of incarnation, which is crucifixion; yes, if it were only crucifixion by becoming a clerk in a bank and growing old.’
Women motivate men to choose love despite the inevitable crucifixion. But without Andromeda tied to the rock, Perseus flies on. And research shows that “porn disconnects the reward system of the male sex drive from the drive to master reality.”
It is less satisfying than a real relationship but also far easier. Unlike real women, porn isn’t discerning. It doesn’t call forth the hero. It’s an aid to sexual failure. As one teenage boy explained, ‘who needs the hassle of dating when I’ve got online porn?’
Real women even become less attractive. Elizabethan women used to put a peeled apple slice in their armpits to absorb their sweat. Their lovers prized these tokens. In On Love, Stendhal describes a lover turned on by a minor defect in his mistress’s face because he has experienced so many emotions in its presence.
But most porn stars are artificially enhanced, and they claim they can’t compete with computer-generated models. Likewise, the porn user also becomes less attractive to women. Like the pill, porn makes men and women find each other less attractive. Porn and the pill are sexual solvents, dissolving the bond between men and women.
Because it increases men’s desire for sex without emotional involvement, it is a leading contributor to the disintegration of the family, leaving men lost boys, hungry ghosts - frogs forever lacking the kiss that will turn them into princes. And without that kiss, they’re stuck in the swamp.
C. S. Lewis’s warning about masturbation also applies to porn:
‘for me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back, sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself.'
As Dr. F. W. Foerster warned at the outset of modernity, ‘the old idea of loyalty with its immense educational power, one of the pillars of all higher culture and civilisation, has become a thing of mockery.’
So many social pathologies follow from family breakdown - poverty, mental illness, crime, drug use, depression, suicide - that porn is far from a private matter: it harms not just the individual but the family and the whole of society. And it does so by rotting the root: the fertility rate.
Sex is for procreation and for bonding parents to ensure family stability, but porn reduces the desire for children, especially - and tragically - female children. Why girls in particular? Perhaps it’s because porn is fundamentally an assault on femininity. It even harms girls more than boys in how it fuels people trafficking.
But the real clue is probably in the fact that men who watch porn report worrying about the way they see their daughters and girls their daughters’ age. Most people think the main reason to ban incest is to prevent genetic abnormalities. But we have the technology to prevent that easily: the German ethics council has called for the decriminalisation of incest between siblings.
So why is incest wrong? Aquinas gave three reasons:
It is contrary to the order of relations that should exist between parents and their children. Daughters should be able to hug their fathers without worrying about sexual advances.
It is contrary to the binding together of humankind and the extending of friendship (an incestuous union doesn’t join two unrelated families).
And ‘a wide scope would be afforded to concupiscence if those who have to live together in the same house were not forbidden to be mated in the flesh.’
Prohibiting incest protects chastity by tempering and ordering sexual desire. And chastity protects integrity, marriage, and family. The fathers worrying about how porn makes them see their daughters are showing that Aquinas’ insights about incest also apply to porn. Both jeopardise the family and society.
And the consumers themselves are harmed: they risk impotence, habituation and desensitisation. One psychiatrist explains how the men coming to her for help ‘looked at things they would once have considered appalling—bestiality, group sex, hard-core S&M, genital torture, child pornography’.
The psychiatrist Norman Doidge notes that his patients ‘craved pornography but didn’t like it.’ At the centre of Dante’s Inferno is ice, not fire; the heart of hell is not lust but indifference. This is why many accounts of addiction to porn note ‘a certain bleakness’.
Sexual excitement releases dopamine, increasing sex drive, facilitating orgasm and activating the brain’s pleasure centres. Porn hijacks the dopamine system. The brain has two pleasure systems: one relating to exciting pleasure (imagining sex) and the other to satisfying pleasure (having sex).
Porn hyperactivates the former - the appetitive - system. Since neurons that fire together wire together, it changes the brain because of the repetition and the rapt attention. And the dopamine released consolidates the neural connections. But tolerance builds: the addict needs more and harder porn to get the same effect.
There is no society in the abstract: it is only the sum of individuals. So as it rewires individual brains, porn also rewires society. Not only did Roger Scruton see porn as ‘one of the great social diseases’. He also saw the reason for its legalisation: ‘the culture of the liberal elite and…the strategy of legal activism whereby that elite continues its relentless assault on majority values.’
The ideological roots of the culture of the liberal elite are in the Frankfurt School: Marcuse’s liberated society is all about pleasure.
Selected studies
Sexual dysfunction:
https://doi.org/10.3390/bs6030017
Damaging to marriages:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-016-0770-y
Infidelity:
https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2012.31.4.410
https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(08)00658-7/fulltext
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0038-4941.2004.08501006.x
Mental health:
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2010.02030.x
Rewiring the brain:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/1874574
Violence:
https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12201
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18307171/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17405620600562359
Addiction:
https://surgicalneurologyint.com/surgicalint-articles/pornography-addiction-a-neuroscience-perspective/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/009365086013004003
Sexualising children:
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-03332-002
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-15406-005
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-09167-022
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-13795-002
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/088626087002002005
Mass media:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16488814/
https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/114/3/e280.short
Selected Bibliography
Norman Doidge, 'The Brain That Changes Itself' (Penguin, 2007)
Pamela Paul, 'Pornified' (Henry Holt, 2005)
Stoner and Hughes, 'The Social Costs of Pornography' (The Witherspoon Institute, 2010)