HYDERABAD: The government and courts might be trying their best to restrict access to pornography through mobile networks and internet service providers, but it looks like porn addiction is here to stay. A recently-conducted study, on internet addiction among college students in the city, showed that more than half the male students watch porn regularly.
The report, ‘A Study on Internet Addiction Among Young Adults in Hyderabad’, with subjects being men and women aged 18-25, found that while no women said they were suffering from ‘cybersexual addiction’, 57 per cent of men conceded to regularly accessing porn online. This is significant because the rate of access to porn in India runs high despite all the major porn sites being blocked in the sub-continent.
The study notes that internet addiction can have several effects, like isolation from one’s environment, which leads to social, emotional and intellectual maladjustments. Internet addicts are also reported to suffer from higher rates of depression, anxiety and stress. The effects of ‘cybersexual addiction’ are fast catching up with millennial adults.
The effects of it are far-ranging, and other studies claim there are links between eating-disorder symptoms and porn usage. It has been found that women, whose male partners watch porn regularly, are more likely to report symptoms of eating disorders. Other effects of porn addiction include erectile dysfunction.
In a viral TedX video called ‘The great porn experiment’, physiology teacher Gary Wilson shows that a heavy-internet-porn user’s brain ‘rewires’ itself, which reflects during real sex. “Researchers haven’t asked porn users about the symptoms of internet addiction. Arousal addiction symptoms are easily mistaken for ADHD, social anxiety, depression and others.
Now, healthcare experts often assume these conditions are primary. However, these are causes of addiction, not the effect of addiction. These men are often medicated, without understanding internet addiction,” Wilson says in the video, which has been watched over 11 million times.
“Men fail to understand that they can change these things simply by changing their behaviour. All addictions... share the same changes in the brain and switches at the molecular level. However, when scientists studied former porn addicts, they found these brain changes were reversing themselves. This happens because the brain is quite flexible,” he added, implying that porn addiction and its effects are curable through behavioural changes.