Does porn actually cause sexual arousal? Or is it not your true libido?

Imagine humanity 1000 years form now, having a discussion about how people in 2019 had natural behavior and how they(future us) forgot how to be natural. We tend to do the same but we look back from where we are today.
Behaviors are ether effective or they are not, if they are effective - they are reinforced if they are not they stop. If behavior is reinforced for a very long time, it shapes the organism structurally over generations.
This means our core patterns of behavior shaped our brains and body. Our behavior made us who we are, even physically.
All behavior is subject to change if it becomes ineffective, that is what evolution and adaptation is.
There is no proper behavior for humans, there is a set of behaviors that is currently effective and adopted by majority of humanity, but everything is subject to change.

 

In my experience, I think I have mostly masturbated to porn without feeling "really aroused".

I started nofap because I have an extremely low, almost nonexistent libido. For me, porn was just a tool to masturbate, and masturbation was a tool to get some dopamine to battle depression or anxiety. It felt like drowning rather than "feeling aroused".

I relate the words "feeling aroused" to an experience I had during junior high school. I was sleeping in the same bed as to someone I really wanted to have. But in that occasion (since I have ED and couldn't approach that person sexually) I had this overwhelming arousal without the boner or the orgasm, which I did get from porn. It was a completely different thing.

In my language, I would say that I could bust 10 nuts to porn in a row right now if I wanted to. But I haven't felt really aroused since I was in junior high school. Porn and real situations are completely different stimuli for me. Don't know if this makes sense.

 

Libido represents more of an average sexual drive individual has.
Strong libido impacts frequency and how strong desire for sex is, not sexual experience itself.
Libido is sort of an appetite for sexual activity.

I do not understand what the problem is with direct response to external stimulation, when you see delicious food someone else is eating and your moth begins to water and you feel hunger, there is no problem.
When you watch pornography you are doing the same, it just so happens that response you get is pleasurable, so you keeping watching, enjoying this feeling of hunger with no desire to satisfy that hunger.
Libido is there to get you to have sex, if you are not getting sex it will push you harder and harder to get some.

 

When I spend time without watching porn, I get very easily turned into real women and that is very uncomfortable for me.

 

People are impacted psychologically by watching any content, scary movies are scary because we get scared while watching them, we get a rush, we feel fear and this has psychological and biological effects.
Exposure to sexual content does not pose significant psychological risk, same way exposure to small amount of radiation overtime, does not pose significant risk.
Abuse of pornography, food, sex etx comes from feeling of being unsatisfied.
Person keeps edging in hopes to feeling even stronger arousal and pleasure and hopes of being satisfied.
Person keeps eating to feel more pleasure from food, because he/she is not satisfied
Person keeps changing sexual activities making them different and longer because they do not satisfy him.

When we are not satisfied, we change our behavior and try different things to get satisfaction.

This is why emotional problems lay the foundation for abuse, person is not satisfied with life on some fundamental level, and seeks that feeling of satisfaction, and never gets it.
This is very different from substance abuse where person pulls himself out of his normal experience by using drugs, and feels satisfied but only when on drugs.

Satisfaction is gold standard for stopping, people with abuse problems never feel satisfied. Healthy normal people enjoy the gift of satisfaction.

 

I think that porn is a super highway to jumpstart the male libido. Everything is exaggerated and glorified, and basically high jacks our desires in an unnatural way. So yes, I believe it is our true libido being tricked.

 

Over time PMO basically destroys libido because it initially heightens testosterone and then when used in excess will lower testosterone since it cant replenish from excess use. It's like a car engine - over accelerating destroys the pistons and puts too much heat and strain on the engine making it harder work harder so it cant adapt to its needs

 

I think porn arousal is an unnatural arousal.

The intensity of the images etc. creates a kind of arousal that just cannot be duplicated in real life. So yes it is arousal, but it's not comparable to normal sexual activity and this is why it is dangerous to our health and well being.

Since I started my porn free journey here I think I can safely say that I am on my longest streak without high speed porn access since I discovered it/it came to exist - streaming sites and such.

What I have noticed in recent weeks is that I am far more aroused by natural stimuli, my wife, reading and viewing non-sexual images. That's not to say that I am looking at non-sexual images as p-subs, it's just that I can look at them and feel a level of arousal.

Go back a couple of months and that kind of thing got no where near arousing me and that's because of the way porn skewed my brain. Porn arousal is so strong that it affects your ability to get aroused by natural stimuli.

What worse is that because of the way porn works, "normal" porn eventually stops providing arousal and this is what leads people to pursue more extreme and more damaging porn.

 

If isolated, miserable and depressed individual stops abuse of porn, he is now isolated, miserable, and depressed person that does not abuse porn.
What he is doing is learning to deal with misery without the use of porn and that is very hard, he will struggle to stop.
He has to first fix the cause of his misery and then coping will not be necessary.

I listed issues typical porn addicts has, isolation , lack of interest in social interaction with others, depression probably as a result of poor or absence of feedback from others.
When people say I spent whole day binging - I ask how in the world could you do that?
How is it that you can spend entire day doing whatever you want?
No one interrupted you? You had no plans, to cook, clean, spend time with other people, none knocked on the door? Noone called you?

Being able to binge for hours by default points to someone very isolated from the world.

 

Why does everyone think this is something new? Naked female dancers have always been around, and they danced for male observers who could watch for hours. Females changed continuously because you cant dance for hours.
Pornography has been around for as long as we have been around, in some form.

Female engages the male by mere presence, men act very differently when female is present. Females feel same way and together both sexes benefit from just being together.
In moves we often see typical "rich guy" behavior where he surrounds himself with beautiful "females", sometime in the movie it is revealed that this old rich guy cant even have sex anymore.
But he keeps the females around because they make him feel better, change his behavior.

 

I don't consider it to be something new but I do that that the arousal from porn is unnatural. All these other forms of erotic arousal and stimulation take us to 10, streamed porn takes us all the way to 11. Once your at 11, 1-10 just doesn't cut it anymore, and soon 11 doesn't either and that's when people start down extremes and they go to 12 and then 13 and so on.

For me I'd love to be fully aroused by literature or by sexual images that aren't porn.

In short I'd like to get back to the 1-10 scale, I think that's healthy and nothing to be ashamed of.

 

Calling things unnatural is to say that they go against our nature, but who defines what our nature is? Especially considering how rapidly we change behavior? Our actions define our nature.

Calling things natural or not natural is selectively looking at the past to find evidence to support your point.
Majority of the things we do today are not natural to people who lived 200 years a go....

Whole concept of natural activity implies some sort of perfect(natural) state in the past that is defined and that remains ideal, we were not more perfect in the past then we are today, miserable and sick scared in the past, and you think we were more natural then?

If you think pornography is negatively affecting your life, fix that
If you feel your arousal if unnatural because you spend hours watching porn every day, fix that
This is not a question of what is natural, its a question of what you want.

 

The use of the terms natural was in relation to the opening post which was asking is arousal by porn is true arousal.

What I was trying to explain is that prior to high intensity porn people could still become fully aroused, and like Ronila has said this can be achieved in any number of ways including things that are pornographic. References to this can be found back in classical antiquity, brothels, paintings, literature etc.

The difference is that due to the levels of arousal that can now be experienced, many people are having problems as a result. ie. PIED etc. This causes people to question whether they are truly aroused by porn, the answer is yes, but as people pursue higher level of arousal, 11 and beyond, then they struggle to be aroused by what previously caused arousal.

This whole site is about resetting or rebooting your brain, the idea is to allow your brain to reset back into the 1-10 range.

 

The thing about pornography is, you need to consider that these stimuli are merely visual in nature, males especially happen to have arousal patterns that are mostly driven by visuals, which is what makes porn especially powerful and problematic among males.

In nature you will have several senses all working together to become aroused: smell, touch, hearing, visuals, perhaps even a sixth sense science doesn't yet know about (energetical). In the case of pornography some of these senses can be replaced through self-arousal: the touching of self, self-pleasuring through self-stimulation (masturbation).

Perhaps the most important aspect that indicates pornography is unnatural is what has been discovered by a dr. named Judith Reisman and which has been named the erototoxic pathway.
Although it will still take a while for science to have undeniable proof that pornography is addictive, doctor Reisman has been a pioneer in this respect and has, through extensive research, shown that pornography is a problem. Perhaps the most shocking discovery this doctor has made is that porn overrides volitional control, meaning it bypasses the prefrontal cortex in the human brain, where reason and cognition are located (meaning you have no say over how porn will affect you when you see it). I think it's fair to say this goes against nature itself, since we are naturally evolved to first process stimuli through the evolved part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, or the neocortex in general. All addictive behaviors and substances tend to target and overactivate the primal part of the brain, effectively shutting of its evolved counterpart, making it especially hard to control and overcome the problematic behavior.