Actual experience, however, suggests that intense stimulation can alter sexual tastes in some brains. Indeed, some of today's Internet porn users are undergoing unnerving changes in their brains and arousal patterns—a possibility now well explained by many experiments revealing the plasticity of the brain. These changes are difficult to reverse while porn use continues. In short, sexual cues that start out as insubstantial and meaningless as cobwebs can become cables, that is, can lay down brain pathways that are given high priority because they are associated with the intense reward of orgasm.

In past articles we've pointed out that these changes can be very disturbing if they are mistaken for changes in fundamental sexual orientation. But they can also be less dramatic. Consider this guy's experience:

Justin: I used to have a big thing for enlarged breasts. Yesterday there was a clip on the news about girls with silicone implants and their health hazards. They showed a lot of these girls on the beach etc., which would once have got me drooling and set me off on a porn frenzy. But after a month without porn, they actually looked weird. The unnatural, augmented breasts put me off. I was thinking, "Why would they do this to themselves? What's the big deal about big breasts?" And this is from a guy who spent a lot of his life worshiping them.

To rid the brain of an unwanted arousal cue, one has to cease activating the associated brain circuits—in this case by not masturbating to similar cues. Disuse gradually inhibits the relevant circuits, although it may not extinguish them completely. Flashbacks are not uncommon.

Bare bottoms and an uneasy mind

In the past year, we've heard from both men and women about another porn-related plastic change that is causing distress. A European woman wrote:

In porn, bodies and genitals are usually depilated, so one automatically becomes conditioned to privates and bodies without hair. Familiar looking depilated genitals then trigger the porn user's reward center's urge to pursue the reward. Most porn also involves anal sex, so the viewer is also conditioned to buttocks as a cue for orgasm. Any naked, depilated bottom will then trigger the urge to orgasm, whether it belongs to a male, female or child.

How did I find out? I have a little girl of 2 years living in my home at the moment, and she loves walking around naked. I am ashamed to say that some of her spontaneous positions triggered my own self-inflicted porn conditioning. Certainly, I decide what to do with a trigger and (sorry to say that) arousal. I would never, ever act on it.

But it is scary that, even though I haven't watched porn in over two years, the unconscious triggers are still there, ingrained in my brain, and only reveal themselves now. And mind you I am female! It is also scary that I never noticed before how porn had conditioned my subconscious. I still remember times when women in my country didn't shave. Not even their legs, and no one would have felt bad about it. And now? You feel like a real outsider if you don't shave, so you do.

Okay, that's one person's experience.

Hairlessness: an unwanted sexual cue

More recently, an equally thoughtful man reported this experience:

I first got interested in the psychology of pornography a year or so ago when I read The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. In one chapter he discusses a client he worked with who was having problems with online pornography. The book is excellent, but this chapter really got me thinking about how I came to battle with my porn use. My story is unusual, but probably not isolated.

I really didn't use pornography at all until I was about 28 and even then, at such a low level as to be almost negligible. I was briefly exposed to it as a sixteen-year old, but just never got into it. A combination of things changed all that. The main thing though was having private and easy access to lots of pornography via computer. I started using it more often because my wife and I had our first child and as such, a heap of things changed, some of which I was expecting, and some not.

I like to think of myself as a pro-feminist male. I married my wife because she is a serious feminist and I respect and love her for it. I love being involved in raising my two young boys, and we work hard to have a very loving and fair relationship. And so, with myself and my wife tired from our new parental responsibilities I thought I would use pornography as a way to have some harmless enjoyment, and leave my wife to get all the sleep she needed. We even discussed this, and she was all for it.

Little did I know what I was in for. It has been quite disturbing to experience the changes in my mind that have happened as a result of my increased pornography use. After using porn, for the next few days I find unwanted images and thoughts in my mind, sparked by the most unexpected experiences.

What really shocked me was an experience at a good friend's place one night, whilst over for dinner. My two little boys were sharing a bath with their 8-year old daughter and I went in to get the kids out and changed. All of a sudden, upon seeing a naked 8-year old girl, my mind started bringing up sexualised thoughts. I was so shocked I walked straight out and asked my wife if she could take over.

This is not something you can tell anyone. These are not thoughts that I have ever in my life even entertained, and yet, there they were, out of nowhere. But not really out of nowhere. I now realise that a lot of the porn I had been looking at depicts women with no pubic hair - not something I particularly like, or had even noticed - but, it had, unbeknownst to me, become etched in my mind.

The fact that pornography could do this to me, disturbed me very much, and as a result, I had a discussion with my wife about my increasing use of porn. I have taken steps to manage it, but it is difficult and I have to remain quite vigilant. I don't know what our society is going to do to stop this problem. I know that for me, if I hadn't had a computer and easy access to it, I doubt that my porn use would have ever become the issue it has become.

It is encouraging that there are now places where men can openly discuss the dangers of pornography for our psyches. Because, largely in our society, and especially amongst the vast majority of men, we are encouraged to laugh it off as a trivial matter, which increasingly, many of us know that it isn't.

Juvenile genitals