Odd Player

Traditionally, one of the factors driving Western society has been the fact that women prefer successful, affluent men over men who are less successful. Because men understood that women would be reluctant to marry men who couldn’t comfortably support a wife and children, men were motivated to be successful. That simple mechanism has suffered a double whammy in the past forty years. First, sex has been divorced from marriage. Second—and here’s what’s really disturbing to those of us in the over-thirty crowd—sexual satisfaction has been divorced from women altogether. If you don’t work with today’s teenage boys on a regular basis, you may not understand the extent to which pornographic images of women have replaced the real thing. In the general population, the best estimates are that roughly 70 percent of college-age men now use pornography regularly. Among those men, use of pornography can readily escalate from an occasional diversion to a daily pastime and finally, to becoming the preferred sexual outlet. In one Harvard study, 69 percent of men who sought help for sexual problems were experiencing “compulsive masturbation”—meaning that they were masturbating more than they thought they should be, and/or they were sometimes masturbating in inappropriate places or at inappropriate times. Fifty percent of the men in the same study were described as being “pornography-dependent,” meaning that they could not achieve an erection without pornography. More and more boys are discovering that they prefer a sexy image on a computer screen to a real live woman with expectations, a woman who has her own agenda, a woman who may say things that the boy doesn’t want to hear.

I’ve been seeing more and more young men in my office—men age eighteen to twenty-eight—who are dealing with the consequences of their overuse of pornography by asking for Viagra or Cialis or Levitra, because they find it difficult to get aroused by real women. One in three college men now reports erectile dysfunction. And I’m seeing other young men who use a different strategy: they disengage from the dating scene altogether, using pornography as their only sexual outlet.

Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail I received from a man in his late twenties after I wrote an article for the Washington Post related to this topic.

Dr. Sax, I think you’re being very narrow-minded. Recently I’ve really gotten into Japanese anime, especially the videos. I love the girls in those videos. There [sic] sweet and submissive and nice. The real girls I know aren’t anything like that. I would rather watch the anime girls than be with real girls. Why is that so bad? It’s not my fault. It’s the fault of the girls I know. They’re too demanding. They expect the guy to do everything, pay for everything, make them laugh, do it all. Why is it so bad to prefer something different?

The problem is that the technology has gotten so good, and the images are so lifelike, so real, that when those girls bat their eyelashes at him it’s easy for him to forget that they’re just pixels on a computer screen, not real girls in his room.

Not everyone agrees on this point. A recent scholarly monograph concludes that the young man for whom masturbation is the preferred sexual outlet may merely be responding, appropriately, to “today’s fast-paced social life characterized by individuality, impersonality, materialism, and social isolation. ”Another critic dismissed concerns about pornography as the outdated prejudice of “moralists and religious conservatives.”Recently, a number of critics have bemoaned the extent to which the culture of pornography has been mainstreamed in our society. Lingerie has become evening wear. Young women can take classes at the local fitness club in aerobic striptease. “Girls Gone Wild” has very nearly become primetime fare. These critics understandably see this development as a sign of cultural decadence. But I think they may have misdiagnosed the underlying dynamic. I asked a sixteen-year-old girl, as gently as I could, why she was wearing a Hooters outfit to a school Halloween party. Her shorts were very short, and her top displayed her natural endowment in a manner that invited comparison with Dolly Parton.

“Why?” she mused. “If you don’t dress like this, nobody will even notice you.” To get the attention of the crowd, girls increasingly tell me that they have to dress like the models in Maxim photo shoots—or act like the ditsy girls on “Girls Gone Wild.”