The reward of orgasming and men’s addiction to pornography.
Have you heard about this?
Researchers studying the clitoral orgasm found that when a woman orgasmed the part of the brain that exercises self control over your basic desires, including sex, goes silent!
What could be the reason for this?
A similar release was seen in the prefrontal cortex which also lit up during orgasm, which is the part of the brain that governs social norms which can help us piece together this puzzle. My theory is that we’ve developed a habit of escaping life’s stress with the act of having sex or with the specific outcome of having an orgasm. So while we are experiencing pleasure during orgasm, we are also intentionally releasing tension and releasing inhibition from who we’ve been conditioned to be. For some people, sex might be one of the only things that takes them completely out of the worries and fears of every day life, or helps to quiet judgemental thoughts and voices for 30 seconds or more as we indulge in an experience of euphoric bliss.
Sexual Addiction
This is why sex can be addicting! That feeling of freedom from the constraints of society, coupled with the pleasurable feelings of an orgasm, are a high value experience and the more stressful life is, the more one could crave this silencing of their brain.
In fact, there was a study on the brain and men’s orgasmic response that found ejaculation as rewarding as taking heroine, which is why many young men are addicted to pornography.
Porn Addiction
Here’s the science. The body registers that it is faster to get a hit dopamine from pleasure through something like pornography, than it is to masturbate without porn. It is especially faster to watch porn, than it is to engage in sexual relations with another human and go through all the steps of sexual and consensual communication and the physicality of working with a partner.
So the more men reach for porn, the more dopamine they can access, the more addicting it becomes.
It actually becomes really difficult to disentangle sex from porn for men who have gone down this path.
Porn is the modern man’s infertility problem.
We live a world where porn is so easily accessible in all of our media, and in fact, you really don’t even have to go searching for it to find some form of sexually explicit or pornographic imaging. More and more men, and at younger and younger ages, are exposed to pornography and use pornography with which to experience orgasm.
Because Porn is taboo, even though it’s very accessible, the shame associated with porn a drive men to go deeper and deeper under ground into the world of pornography which creates and even more disconnected relationship with sex in real life.
What ends up happening is when men do engage in sex and pleasure with a partner, they no longer receive the physiological responses they once would to a real life encounter because they’ve conditioned their bodies to respond to a fictionalized version of sex on the internet.
Ditching the porn, and reconnecting with self, this is the work of our men.
So the real work of our men is to detox from porn. Remove porn from their lives as a commitment to rediscover what pleasure is like with themselves without porn, and how to communicate what is pleasurable, and to pleasure their partner without porn.
How to change the porn patterning
Changing your addiction to porn and your connection to sex and orgasm requires some reprogramming and unlearning where pleasure is derived from in the sexual experience. First start by removing pornography from your life. What does that mean? Either go cold turkey and block the sites you frequent, or ween yourself off. Either way, it is a commitment you are making to your own health and wellness. Then you’re going to go back to basic after a period of being without pornography. That can look like
exploring touch alone without visual stimuli (lubricant recommended)
Trying new pleasurable experiences outside of your go-to norms, to discover and really learn what you like
Playing with your senses. Explore all of them!
Letting your partner take the reins
Communicating with your words what you would like from your partner
As you orgasm without pornography you are rewiring your brain and reprogramming where you get your dopamine from!
What’s the point? What will this rewiring do for our chances of having a baby?
If your man was previously having difficulty getting an erection or ejaculating without the presence of pornography, then physiologically speaking, rewiring and rebuilding this connection with you and your body is going to bring pleasure to the table, and to the brain, throughout your entire day, not just when you’re having sex!
You’ll be making babies in a much better vibrational and intentional space as you are solely focused on each other and this will strengthen your relationship as partners, which is really important when you’re raising children.
Thank you for reading!
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—Nessa