Why Aren’t Young Men Having Sex – Part 3
Some statistics grab our attention and raise our eyebrows in disbelief. Here’s a great example.
Debbie Herbenick, director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, recently published a study of 5,000 young women at a midwestern university. The survey revealed a shocking statistic: two-thirds of women admitted to being strangled or choked during sex.1 Unbelievable! That’s over 3,000 of 5,000 college women surveyed from 2020-2024 who either have had their own sexual preferences shaped towards violence or, more likely, have had sex with a man who has.
Porn is warping the brain of an entire generation of young men and women. The survey mentioned above is an example of porn’s impact on the brain in shaping sexual preferences. Porn never drives you towards sex the way God intended. It always drives you away; that rabbit hole only gets deeper and darker the further you go.
Jacking up your arousal template
Consider how you have developed certain tastes in foods over the years. Some you like, some you don’t, and we all have our favorites. Our tastes vary from person to person but are all developed through activation of the reward circuitry in your brain. Your brain helps you remember what foods cause the biggest pleasure response; through that process, you have developed certain tastes.
Through sexual experiences, you develop certain sexual tastes as well. An individual’s arousal template is unique to the person and reflects what excites them sexually. Through repeated pornography exposure, a person conditions themself to be sexually excited by certain things. Most users don’t realize that their sexual preferences have been shaped through their porn use.
Porn is warping the brain, and practically what that means is it’s jacking up people’s arousal templates. What was designed for a spouse alone is taking a whole new shape and goes well beyond its original intent. For the people who have had their arousal template twisted by porn, regular sex can feel weird. It’s not that good. It can become like eating food you have learned to avoid.
The author of the above study concluded, “Sexual strangulation, nearly always of women in heterosexual pornography, has long been a staple on porn sites. As with anything else, repeat exposure can render the once appalling, appealing. It’s not uncommon for behaviors to be normalized in porn, move within a few years to mainstream media, then be adopted in the bedroom or the dorm room.”
When Dr. Herbenick says what was appalling then becomes appealing, she is describing the warping of a person’s arousal template. The result is they often can’t enjoy sex without those violent or twisted elements they have gained a taste for. A lot of the taste being developed by young men through pornography diminishes the desire for real sex. Remember the question we are answering in this series: Why aren’t young men having sex?
Depraved Minds
When someone’s arousal template gets warped, it can get real weird real quick. One porn user said, “Without realizing it, I was watching a lot of taboo and extreme porn that I never would have considered a couple of years ago. I couldn’t believe I let it get to this point. I just couldn’t stop myself.”2
Child porn arrests have increased 2,500% during the decade between 2010 and 2020. Child porn users almost always start by watching regular pornography and escalate from there. When we think of child pornographers, we typically think of the creepy old guys, but today’s child pornographers are mostly young guys. In March of 2024, ICE announced one of the largest online child exploitation investigations in history, involving victims in 39 states and five countries. Eleven of the 14 suspects arrested were 30 and under.3
Young guys and child porn is a growing trend. Johnathan Hernandez was convicted of possession of the largest stash of child porn detectives had ever seen. The kicker? He was 23. Twenty-three!4 These young men aren’t having sex with women because their arousal template has been severely warped by porn.
Spectrum of Templates
There is a spectrum of where you can be in the conditioning of your arousal template. You can have a normally conditioned arousal template, a negatively conditioned arousal template, or an arousal template shaped by extreme conditioning.
The normally conditioned sexual arousal template reflects your preferences in what you find attractive in real life and is not shaped by a porn habit. However, habitual pornography use, even over a relatively short amount of time, can lead to a negatively conditioned arousal template.
Your template becomes attached to specific images, language, sounds, and sex acts, and most of the time, it is subconscious. Watching sex on a screen is very different from having sex, and that shapes your sexual appetite around voyeurism instead of real sex. This negative conditioning by your porn habit often leads to disappointment with a healthy sex life. Has your arousal template been normally conditioned, negatively conditioned, or extremely conditioned?
Listen to this porn user with a negatively conditioned arousal template describe his first experience with sex after years of conditioning his arousal template with pornography and masturbation.
“When I lost my virginity, it really did not feel that good. I was bored, actually. I lost the erection after maybe ten minutes. She wanted more sex, but I was done. The next time I tried to have sex with a woman was a disaster. I had an erection at first but lost it.” How do you think these experiences would impact this guy’s interest in having sex with a woman?
Renewing the Mind
Well, no wonder young men are having less sex with women. Whether its Porn Induced Erectile Dysfunction, an appetite for violent or deviant sex, or a preference for solo sex, porn is changing sexual preferences! Clearly, the consequence of a warped arousal template is that a person’s sexual desires move further away from God’s original intent for sex.
But there is hope! The mind can be renewed (Romans 12:2). Being aware of how porn can warp your arousal template can be a great motivation to renew your mind in your pursuit of freedom. A person’s sexual preferences can be renewed after a period of sobriety from porn. Take the Freedom Fight 30-Day Challenge to get a jump start on your freedom journey.
Endnotes
1 – NY Times, April 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/opinion/choking-teen-sex-brain-damage.html
2 – Gary Wilson, Your Brain On Porn
3 – Patrick Reilly, Florida man arrested for child porn stash detectives called ‘largest they have ever seen,’ 2013, https://nypost.com/2023/01/13/florida-man-arrested-for-child-porn-stash-detectives-called-largest-they-have-ever-seen/
4 – Secretary Johnson announces results of operation that dismantled underground child exploitation enterprise on Tor network, 2014, https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/secretary-johnson-announces-results-operation-dismantled-underground-child
