Breda O’Brien: We need to talk about porn

Enda Kenny wants a national conversation on pornography. It will be a very, very awkward conversation. Accessing porn is mind-bogglingly easy. Children do it all the time.

A couple of years ago, a Psychologies magazine writer described how her eight-year-old son and his friend came into the sittingroom, white-faced.

She checked his internet history and discovered that he had searched for “boobs”, which made her giggle – until she saw some of the results that the search engine had thrown up.

They included images of a 15-year-old girl simultaneously having anal and oral sex with two older men.

Porn is not what it used to be.

Martin Daubney, the former editor of Loaded magazine, a publication often accused of pedalling soft porn, discovered just how pervasive hard-core porn is when he presented a 2013 Channel 4 documentary, Porn on the Brain.

He describes sitting in a school hall with a group of giggly, polite and well-turned-out children aged 13 and 14. As he says, they were “good kids from good homes”.

Hijacked

When they were asked to write an A-Z of all the sex terms they knew, the first item on every list was “anal”. Every single child in the class had seen a video of anal sex.

They also knew terms that the adults present had never heard of, such as nugget, which is a girl without limbs having sex in a porn movie.

He then interviewed children aged 14-15, who calmly described sexual acts involving animals which they had accessed from others "liking" them on Facebook. Daubney concluded that an entire generation's view of sexuality had been hijacked by "grotesque online porn".

He also interviewed Prof Gail Dines, who reported that girls are increasingly experiencing rough, violent sex – and that many of them blamed it on the images their male peers are growing up with.

The documentary Porn on the Brain also used brain imaging to see if there were any differences between the brains of those who reported a compulsive relationship with porn, and those who did not.

Dr Valerie Voon, of Cambridge University, conducted the research. She confessed to being ambivalent initially about the experiment.

However, she discovered that the ventral striatum – the “reward centre” of the brain – lit up like a Christmas tree in those who reported heavy, compulsive use of pornography.

More susceptible

This is similar to what happens in the brains of alcoholics. Whether porn can lead to addiction is controversial, but it can be said that people exhibit behaviour that looks and feels addictive to them.

Some researchers believe that teenage brains are far more susceptible than adult brains because, in adolescence, the brain produces billions of new neural connections, which later will be pruned back drastically.

Any repetitive behaviour with built-in rewards is likely to create deep pathways in the brain, cueing the brain to associate sexual behaviour with specific cues.

The adolescent brain is exceptionally sensitive to dopamine, which incites novelty-seeking, overrules executive control, and helps strengthen learning and habits.

Dopamine is not a pleasure hormone – it is associated with seeking behaviour, but it is reinforced by novelty, and internet porn provides endless permutations and possibilities.

Given that the most primitive drivers of behaviour are survival, food and sex, the endless availability of online porn, in all its ugly variety, is just a disaster waiting to happen for the adolescent brain.

Porn is a lucrative and nasty business. The internet has been flooded with free porn, so inveigling customers to pay has become much more difficult.

Luckily for those peddling the product, regular users become desensitised, and require more and more extreme images to receive the same reward.

Ironically, this desensitisation has led to an increase in young men experiencing erectile dysfunction. (You know that it has gone mainstream when it is the subject of several TEDx talks.)

Abstinence

In short, using online porn compulsively makes it far more difficult to have a relationship with a real person.

There are numerous support groups online describing how long it took porn users to re-programme their brains through abstinence so that they could enjoy normal touch and affection.

There are a number of websites offering help, including yourbrainonporn.com and fightthenewdrug.org.

The latter offers an online treatment programme, Fortify, which is free to teenagers.

It also has a useful guide for parents. This includes the advice that shaming users just leads children to hide the behaviour but that, given the vulnerability of the developing brain, help should be offered as well as information.

There is a myth that talking about pornography will incite curiosity.

However, if your child goes online, owns a smartphone, tablet or laptop, the question is not if, but when, they will come across or access porn.

And what they access will probably be vile.

A 2010 study of the 50 most popular pornographic DVD titles found that 88 per cent of scenes included violence.

Of these, 95 per cent depicted violence against women by men.

In short, they depict women being beaten, raped and abused while smiling and begging for more.

Do we need a conversation? We certainly do.