Ley is right that some objections to porn are moralistic, but he's wrong that all of them are. For example, I blog a fair amount about the pitfalls of porn. Yet neither my arguments nor my background fits his profile. I didn't grow up in a religious household, and certainly not in a Catholic or Orthodox one. I had no particular objections to porn until well after users began arriving at my website's forum desperate to quit. Many have found it extremely difficult and stressful to stop. Many have needed months and months to regain control, or have not succeeded.

Some reported that when they sought help, psychologists/sexologists gave them the rote response, "You're just feeling guilty. There's no such thing as too much. Don't worry about it!" and sent them home with a wink. However, many of these guys had been raised in homes without shame around sex, and they weren't buying it. When they tried to quit, their withdrawal symptoms were very like drug withdrawal symptoms: shakes, severe headaches, insomnia, anxiety, bouts of uncharacteristic anger and other mood swings, cravings for junk food, alcohol and of course, more porn. The material on our website about the potential effects of sex on the brain made a lot more sense to them than the rote assurances.

Here are some recent comments by PT blog readers about the standard mindset:

Unless a study is prepared and indeed able to take into account numerous metrics (i.e. not only testosterone or dopamine levels) - then detractors will simply dismiss any insinuation of masturbation being anything but an unalloyed healthful activity as "quasi-religious propaganda motivated by moral issues." It's depressing, really.

I know exactly what you mean with regard to the knee-jerk "anti-prude" reaction. I hate to admit it as an atheist, but liberals are just as anti-science as religious people. They are as hostile to the realities of neuroscience as christians are to all science.

I didn't begin to blog about my visitors' experiences until there was good news to share, too. When they did succeed in leaving porn behind, they noticed welcome changes in mood, confidence, ability to connect with potential mates, concentration, perception of women, etc. That's when I realized that their insights could help others.

Obviously, the men didn't care to blog themselves because they preferred to remain anonymous. Yet for as long as they are given no outlet, and their symptoms are automatically attributed to causes other than brain changes, they are presumed to be an insignificant minority of outliers, and the cover-up of a growing phenomenon continues.

Far from being moralistic, I strongly feel that people should do as they please...on the best information available. In the case of today's porn, I think the research usually cited is inadequate, frequently out of date, and often biased—on both sides (the finger-wagging right and the liberated left). Reisman's work can make me cringe. But I am equally uneasy when sociologist Lajeunesse concludes that porn is harmless based on questioning twenty-four college students about whether they notice any changes in attitude from using porn.

Blind spots occur in all fields from time to time, which is why the rest of us need to share our observations and compare notes based on actual experiences. For example, for years experts have taught that all calories are the same, so dieters should just limit intake and burn more calories with exercise. Now it's turning out that some calories (sugars and starches) trigger insulin changes that cause the body to store them as fat more readily, while other calories (fat) aren't as readily stored as fat. Who would have thought such subtle influences could have such a major impact on outcome? The textbooks and most experts still cling to the outdated view.

I fear something similar is happening around porn use. Many experts seem to be relying on conclusions about earlier circumstances, i.e., pre-Internet, and its superstimulating, ever-novel, life-like porn videos.

Progress on this issue may come down to a better understanding of our evolutionary history. As professor Jay Phelan (co-author of Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food, Taming our Primal Instincts) points out:

All excessive stimulations of the reward circuitry of the brain that are not tied to the behaviors for which the circuitry originally evolved are problematic. While this has become appreciated for drug addiction such as cocaine (and for issues relating to food), it is not yet appreciated for porn.

We need to understand who we are as a species and why we have self-control problems. Internet porn is another manifestation of "mismatch," the phenomenon of our modern world deviating from the world to which we became adapted over evolutionary time.

Thus, what matters is not eating junk food, using drugs or masturbating to superstimuli (or the morality of any of them). What matters is whether our ancestors' brains faced similar conditions and evolved to cope well with them. If a stimulus is well beyond the range of "normal," then there's a risk that a primitive part of our brain will continue to perceive it as very valuable, even when it causes distress. Judging from the problems many porn users are reporting, porn is indeed a superstimulus with the power to dysregulate dopamine sensitivity in the brain.

Explained researcher Paul Kenny, the brain releases dopamine in response to enjoyable experiences such as eating cheesecake, having sex or snorting cocaine. But, too much pleasure skews the brain's reward pathways by overstimulating the D2 receptor and causing it to shut down. For the rats addicted to junk food, the only way to stimulate their pleasure centers was to eat more high-fat, high-calorie food. "They're not experiencing rewards the way they should," Kenny said.

Suggesting that heavy users of superstimulating Internet porn may be tampering with their brains' reward circuitry and altering the way they experience reward (driving them to binge) is not a "moralistic" argument, just because it may motivate some users to cut back of their own free will to restore their brain's balance. Users can make their own experiments, in advance of additional neuroscience that will someday settle the question definitively. But users won't even be aware of this option for as long as their symptoms are blindly attributed to other causes. Unfortunately, the counselors people should be looking to for a balanced assessment of their risks and options seem the most predisposed to discount the risks entirely. If sexologists were trained in brain science instead of just the standard "masturbation isn't a sin" assurances, I don't think this would be the case.

I admit that I do not yet know the extent of the porn problem in terms of distress for users (my focus). It appears to be escalating rapidly and affecting younger users than ever before. But neither does anyone else know the extent of the problem. Our current level of knowledge certainly doesn't prove there isn't a problem.