I believe I was 12 or 13 when I first viewed porn on the Internet. There were of course some shameful instances where I was caught by my parents - I was smarter after that. It wasn't too bad of a thing when I didn't have regular access to a computer, more like an occasional treat. But once I got my own laptop I started using a porn a lot more. Not having a girlfriend for a long time, nor much romantic contact, meant that porn was practically my only source and outlet for my sexual energy. I started using it every time I wanted to get off. I didn't think too much of it. A year or two I had an encounter with someone and had some trouble, functioning, shall we say. This got me to thinking and I found r/NoFap. They're a little dogmatic for my taste but they introduced me to this wonderful video on the brain and porn. I figured something was wrong and here was some evidence. It's not a proven science but it makes sense to me. So I quit watching porn about a year ago and haven't looked back. Honestly I haven't had much trouble quitting it, even with constantly having to be on my computer. Unfortunately I still haven't had much luck in the romantic department to finally see if quitting has helped me out. Still, I feel porn is fine for some people but I think it has had a negative effect on myself.
Thanks for sharing that video: I hadn't seen it before. We may not be able to find a perfect control group (men who have never seen porn), but we could probably find imperfect groups based on society's norms. For example: we could compare people who watch one-standard-deviation or fewer minutes of porn to people who watch one-standard-deviation or more minutes of porn. Like all psychological research, it's challenging to isolate the biases (lots of people lie about their porn habits; if it's true that addiction takes place - as I suspect that it is - then many of them probably don't even know they're lying!), but it's still a starting point. I'm an occasional porn user. I certainly wouldn't say that I was an addict. But I'm older than the average person on Hubski, and I'm aware that this probably makes a significant difference to how much pornography I had access to, and how early. When I was in my mid-to-late teens, Internet pornography involved slow downloads of mediocre images over dial-up modems, and video? That involved squinting just right at encrypted cable channels! Despite being a "geek", I didn't see Internet video porn until my late teens - and even then, we're talking about tiny snippets of low-quality video that would fit into tiny animated GIFs of today. Again; thanks for sharing - great video.