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.

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