FINDING A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK WOULD BE EASIER than finding an adolescent male who hasn’t seen online porn. Surveys indicate the average boy watches roughly two hours of porn every week with porn viewing becoming common by age 15.1
The most popular porn site—PornHub—reported that the average Millennial porn session lasts 9 minutes,2 while the average age young people have sex for the first time is 17 years old.3 This means the average boy has had about 1,400 porn sessions prior to having real life sex. So why aren’t more people asking what kind of effects porn is having on these young viewers?
Almost all people can recall the first erotic image they saw; like a flashbulb memory it is forever emblazoned in our minds. There appears to be a special window of time when visual sexual interests form most readily: adolescence.4 When this critical period gets hijacked by watching copious amounts of online porn,5 it seems some men can suffer from what one Italian urology survey called “sexual anorexia,” or difficulty having sex with a real partner.6 Many of the young Italians in the 28,000-person survey started “excessive consumption” of porn sites as early as 14 years old and later, when in their mid-20s, they became inured to “even the most violent images.” Professor Carlo Foresta, head of the Italian Society of Andrology and Sexual Medicine (SIAMS), explained that the problem worsens when young men’s sexuality develops independently from real life sexual relationships. First, he said, viewers become less responsive to porn sites, then their libido drops, and finally it becomes difficult to get an erection.