Welcome to the psychology undergrad. Pull up
a chair. I hope you brought caffeine because
looking at this stack of papers on the table,
we are going to need it. It is definitely a heavy
load this week. I feel like every time we open
the human sexuality syllabus, the reading list
like just doubles. Tell me about it. Honestly,
this is the module everyone in the lecture hall
has been whispering about. We are finally tackling
the pornography unit. But before we get into
it, I have to be real with you. I was dreading
this study session. I kind of expected this to
be a moral panic lecture. Just a lot of finger
wagging and back in my day kind of stuff. Forget
that. It's such a loaded topic. We aren't here
to preach. We are here to prep for the final.
And if you actually look at the data we have
spread out here from the 2017 pilot studies all
the way to this massive frontiers in child and
adolescent psychiatry paper from late 2025, the
shift in the academic consensus is just, it's
undeniable. This isn't really about morality
in the traditional sense. It's about public health.
It's wild. Okay, so to kick off this study session,
let's look at the sheer scale of the issue. I
highlighted this metric from the Cindy Pierce
notes. This is from her TEDx material. Oh, yeah,
I saw that. She breaks down the traffic stats.
If you take the number of clicks on internet
porn sites in a single month, just one month,
it equals the traffic of Netflix, Twitter, and
Amazon. Wait. Combined. No. That can't be right.
Combine. Combine. Just think about the bandwidth
that represents, I mean, Netflix alone is massive.
Amazon is the global marketplace. Twitter is,
well, the town square. And porn traffic swallows
them all whole. Right. It suggests this isn't
a niche vice anymore. Statistically speaking,
it is the primary way a huge chunk of the human
population interacts with the internet. It is
the water we are swimming in. Yeah. But here
is the hook. that really stopped me into, I think
this is going to be on the exam. Yeah. Warren
Binford, in her lecture notes, uses this phrase.
Oh, I know what you're going to say. Digital
castration. Yeah. I circled that twice in red.
It's such an aggressive term. It sounds like
sci -fi, doesn't it? Yeah. But she's talking
about a very real phenomenon. We are seeing 18
to 25 -year -old men, physically healthy, testosterone
levels are fine, prime of their biological lives.
who are unable to be aroused by real life partners.
Wow. They're effectively castrated by their own
consumption habits because they've rewired their
arousal templates for pixels, not people. And
that is the core mission of this study session,
right? We have to unpack how this super normal
stimulus, that's the term psychology today uses,
how it interacts with the developing brain. Right.
We need to figure out, is this just a bad habit?
Is it an addiction or? And this is where that
new 2025 research throws a curveball. Yeah. Is
it actually a form of trauma? The trauma angle
is heavy. I mean, I really want to push back
on that when we get there, because trauma is
a big word to throw around for watching videos.
For sure. But let's stick to the syllabus structure
for now. OK. Section one, prevalence and the
new normal. What is Dad's telling us? The landscape
has completely shifted from what the textbooks
used to say even like 10 years ago. Totally.
If you look at the Recovery Alberta notes and
the Cindy Pierce material, the age of onset You
know, the first exposure has just cratered. Cratered
is the right word. We are seeing boys exposed
around age 10 on average. 10 years old. 10. That
is fourth grade. They are still trading Pokemon
cards. And girls around 12 or 13. But the crucial
variable here isn't just the age, it's the mechanism
of delivery. Right. In previous developmental
psych models, exposure happened via, like, magazines
found in the woods or a stolen VHS tape. It was
static, finite, and hard to access. And now?
It is 90 % mobile devices. Which changes the
parenting dynamic entirely. You can't monitor
a screen that's four inches wide, lives in a
backpack, and goes to the bathroom with them.
No way. But there's this really specific mechanism
in the Cindy Pierce notes about how they find
it. She calls it the boobies algorithm. Right.
This is critical because it just debunks the
bad kid myth. We often assume kids are out there
actively hunting for hardcore content. Exactly.
Pierce notes that parents freak out when they
see the browser history, but the entry point
is usually so innocent. A 10 -year -old boy types
in boobies. He doesn't use the clinical term
breasts, of course not. No, and he certainly
isn't being in the graphic porn terms yet. He
uses a child's word. But the algorithm, it doesn't
care that the user is 10. It doesn't care about
innocence. It operates on one metric. Engagement.
And engaging in the algorithm's code means extreme.
So it sees boobies, and it says, OK, that's a
start. But if I show you this graphic video,
you're 400 % more likely to stay on the site.
So it escalates immediately. Instantly. From
a curious search to hardcore suggestions, because
that is what retains the click. And it's not
always even a search, is it? The CDC source with
Sonya Thompson mentions this trap effect. This
one really freaked me out. The pop -up trap.
Yes. There's a case study in the notes of a boy
named Joseph. He was nine years old. He wasn't
looking for girls. He was playing a video game
on a free site. A pop -up ad appeared. He clicked
it thinking it was part of the game. And he was
just lured in. It wasn't a search. It was a stumble.
And Thompson makes this distinction between curiosity
and craving. That's a key psychological distinction
for us. Totally. You think it's just curiosity
at first, the seeking system in the brain? But
the content is so hyper stimulating that the
brain gets hooked Before the kid even cognitively
processes what they're seeing so it becomes a
craving almost instantly Yeah, that brings us
to the content itself because if I'm reading
the recovery Alberta notes correctly our definitions
of porn are like completely outdated how so what
we consider vanilla or soft core now would have
been illegal or at least deeply underground 20
years ago. This is the normalization of violence
aspect. The source notes that historically, hardcore
meant showing genitals or actual intercourse.
Right. Pretty basic stuff. Today, if you go to
the front page of a tube site, hardcore involves
violent anal penetration, deep oral sex to the
point of vomiting. Literally gagging as a fetish.
Yeah. and themes of incest and gang rape. And
the terrifying part is that the source says this
extreme stuff is now accepted as soft core in
the mainstream. It's the default setting. The
baseline for arousal has just, it's moved. We
have to pause on the morality of that for a second.
Even from a secular... you know, psychological
perspective. What does that do to a developing
moral compass? I mean, if you watch people being
gagged and slapped and treated like garbage every
day for five years, doesn't that shift your window
of what acceptable human behavior is? It has
to. It's systematic desensitization. We use that
in therapy to help people get over phobias, right?
You expose them to the thing they fear until
they feel nothing. So here, we are exposing kids
to violence and degradation. Until they feel
nothing. We are essentially boiling the frog.
And the parents are totally in the dark. I circled
this stat. 75 % of parents think their kids haven't
seen it. Versus the reality, which is over 68%.
and up to 90 % in some cohorts, having seen it.
That is a massive awareness gap. It is cognitive
dissonance on a parental level. Denial is a powerful
drug. Well, speaking of drugs, let's move to
section two. We've got to put our neuropsych
hats on. We need to talk about the construction
zone. This is probably going to be the technical
part of the exam. This is crucial. If you don't
understand the adolescent brain architecture,
none of this makes any sense. The psychology
today, and Warren Binford notes, break this down.
You have to imagine the brain as a construction
site where the foreman has like walked off the
job. Right. And the two main players we need
to know are the prefrontal cortex, the PFC, and
the limbic system. Specifically, the nucleus
accumbens. Correct. So the limbic system is the
primitive engine. It's the emotional brain, the
reward center. In teenage the nucleus accumbens,
that's the part that screams do that again when
it gets dopamine, is fully mature. It's fully
gassed up. Totally. It is a Ferrari engine. But
the prefrontal cortex. That's the brake system.
That's the rational decision -making impulse
control center. And crucially, it is not finished.
This is the myelination gap. Exactly. Myelination
is the process of insulating the neural pathways
with this fatty sheath so signals can move fast.
It connects the brakes to the engine. Right.
that connection to the prefrontal cortex isn't
finished until the mid -20s. So adolescents have
a heightened sensitivity to rewards. They feel
the gas way more intensely than adults, but they
have a much lower capacity to regulate the impulse.
So you have a Ferrari engine, bicycle brakes,
and you drive it onto a track made of ice. And
then you flood that system with a supernormal
stimulus. Explain that term. Supernormal stimulus.
Sounds like a superpower. It's a mythology term,
actually. It refers to an artificial version
of a stimulus that is way more attractive than
the real thing, like a bird that prefers a giant
plastic egg over its own real egg. Internet porn
is high speed, it's infinite, it's novel, and
it's perfectly lit. It is a super normal stimulus
compared to real life interaction. And when you
drop that into a developing limbic system? You
hijack the reward system. It's a dopamine loop.
But here is the technical nuance we need to get
right. It's not just that they like it. It's
about receptor downregulation. Okay, walk us
through that. When you flood the brain with way
too much dopamine, the brain says, whoa, this
is too loud. To protect itself, it actually starts
to kill off dopamine receptors. Turns down the
volume. It turns down the volume. That's downregulation.
So now... normal things, like hanging out with
friends, eating a good meal, or just regular
sex they don't register. Exactly. You feel numb.
The baseline is too low. The Psychology Today
source compares this explicitly to drug tolerance.
You need more extreme, more novel, more shocking
content just to feel normal, let alone high.
Which explains why they spiral from boobies to...
choking and vomiting videos. They aren't necessarily
deviants. They're just chasing the dopamine dragon
because their receptors are fried. Precisely.
And while we are on brain structure, we have
to talk about pruning. This is the other side
of the coin. Use it or lose it. It is the fundamental
rule of adolescent brain development. The brain
looks at which pathways are being used and it
strengthens them. That's the myelination. And
the ones that aren't being used. It marks them
as waste and it just cuts them away. Pruning.
So if a young man is spending two hours a day
Strengthening the pathway for digital voyeurism,
for solitary sexual gratification via a screen.
He is building a superhighway for isolation.
And meanwhile, the pathways for reading facial
cues, for handling awkward silence, for emotional
intimacy. Those are overgrown trails that the
brain might just decide to, uh, pave over. That
is the risk. You are biologically prioritizing
isolation over connection. You are hardwiring
the brain to be alone. And we see the physical
result of that? Going back to Cindy Pierce and
the fraternity guys, the porn induced erectile
dysfunction. Yeah. This is the most concrete
evidence of the wiring change. These are 20 -year
-old men. Vascularly, they are fine. Right. But
they cannot get an erection with a real woman.
Because their brain doesn't recognize her as
a sexual stimulus? Exactly. She doesn't have
4K resolution. She doesn't have a mute button.
She doesn't change position every 15 seconds.
The brain has been conditioned. Pavlovian style
to respond to pixels. A real person is a sensory
mismatch. Totally. It's like trying to eat a
raw apple after you've been living on pure high
fructose corn syrup for 10 years. Apple just
doesn't taste like anything. That is a perfect
analogy. It's a desensitization to reality. Okay,
that's the hardware. Let's shift gears to section
three. Social psychology, because the brain isn't
just wiring itself in a vacuum. It's downloading
software, the social scripts. Cindy Pierce has
this term compliance training. This is where
the sociology intersects with the psychology.
Pierce argues that society already socializes
girls to be nice, to be assertive, but not a
bitch. And then porn comes in and reinforces
a very specific script. Women are there to provide
services. They endure pain. They are compliant.
But wait, isn't that just like a feminist critique?
Is there actual data backing up that this changes
how people think? Well, look at the orgasm gap
data. The script in porn is usually insertion,
aggressive thrusting, and then the woman has
an earth shattering orgasm within minutes. It
looks easy. It looks mechanical. But the biological
reality is that 70 % of women do not climax from
penetration alone. The anatomy of the clitoris,
which Cindy Pierce notes has 8 ,000 nerve endings,
is often just ignored in mainstream porns groups
because it's not visual enough for the camera.
So you have young women watching this thinking,
I'm supposed to orgasm just from this piston
action. And when they don't, they think they're
broken. And many admit to faking it to please
their partner, which just reinforces the bad
script. It's a feedback loop of misinformation.
So the boys think they're doing it right because
the porn and the faking tells them so. Exactly.
Speaking of boys getting the wrong data, I laughed
out loud at the penis size part of the notes.
But then I realized how sad it is. The body dysmorphia
is massive. The average penis size in pornography
is around eight inches. Which is, statistically,
a unicorn. It is a massive statistical outlier,
but the average real -world penis is 5 .1 inches.
And Cindy Pierce tells that story about the fraternity
brothers. She reveals this stat to them that
5 .1 is normal, and they literally jump up and
high -five each other. Think about the psychology
of that moment. They have been carrying the secret
shame, thinking they are inadequate because their
reference point is a fictionalized, surgically
altered camera angle tricked industry standard.
It's just heartbreaking that they needed a lady
in her 40s to come into a frat house to tell
them they are normal. It shows how much silence
there is around this. But there is a darker side
to these social scripts too. We can't just talk
about insecurity. We have to talk about Warren
Binford's points on hostile sexism. Yeah, this
isn't just about feeling bad about yourself.
This is about how they view women. The research
suggests that heavy porn consumption in males
is linked to what they call regressive attitudes.
They start seeing women less as equals and more
as objects or or even threats to their dominance.
So if your primary teacher of sexuality shows
women enjoying degradation. It becomes harder
to respect female authority in the workplace
or the classroom. And that bleeds into the bystander
apathy point Binford makes. This really scared
me. It should. There is a correlation between
heavy porn use in both men and women, actually.
And women do. Yeah, in both men and women. And
a decreased likelihood of intervening in a sexual
assault. Hold on. Explain the mechanism there.
Why would watching porn make you less likely
to help someone? The theory is normative desensitization.
If you consume media where non -consensual or
pseudo -consensual behavior is the norm, where
women saying no eventually means yes, it just
numbs your radar. You become a passive witness.
Exactly. You see something in real life that
looks like harassment, but your brain has seen
thousands of hours of that being presented as
entertainment so the alarm bells don't ring.
So we are morally numbing ourselves to real -world
suffering. We are training ourselves to be spectators
of abuse. That's a good way to put it. That is
heavy. It is. It's the blurring of the line between
violence and sex. Okay, speaking of heavy, we
need to get to the new stuff. Section four. Advanced
Theory. This is the 2025 paper from Frontiers
in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. This is the
centerpiece of the new curriculum. And I have
to be honest, when I first read the abstract,
I was skeptical. They're proposing we view early
porn exposure not as a habit, but as a form of
trauma. Capital T trauma. Yes. Capital T trauma.
I had the same reaction. Usually trauma is reserved
for, you know, war zones, physical abuse or severe
neglect. It feels like we might be watering down
the definition. Exactly. Are we just being dramatic?
But then you look at their methodology. They
are comparing the neurological footprint of early
porn exposure to the ACEs framework adverse childhood
experiences. Right. And they argue that trauma
is defined as an event that exceeds an individual's
internal resources to cope. Okay, that definition
I can work with. So if a child sees violent,
hardcore sex, they cannot cognitively process
it. They don't have the files in their brain
to sort that information. It creates a state
of shock and overwhelming arousal that the system
just can't handle. And the paper makes this fascinating
distinction between the bonding system and the
sexual system. Right. This is key. In a healthy
development, the bonding system love Trust safety
develops first. The sexual system comes online
later, during puberty, and integrates into the
bonding system. But porn trauma flips the script.
It attacks the developing sexual system before
the bonding system is ready. It introduces the
erotization of violence before the child understands
love or consent. It pairs arousal with degradation.
And the paper applies the classic trauma responses.
Fight. flight dissociation, specifically to porn
consumers. Let's walk through those because this
helps explain the behaviors we see on campus.
Good idea. What does flight look like here? Flight
is usually about escaping a threat. Here, the
threat is the complexity of the real world. So
flight manifests as disconnecting, social isolation,
depression. So the addiction itself becomes the
escape. Exactly. The addiction to the screen
becomes the bunker. They are fleeing reality
into the digital world because the real world
feels too demanding or scary compared to the
easy, reliable reward of the screen. OK. And
fight. This seems like the one that leads to
the hostile sexism we talked about. Exactly.
Fight manifests as identifying with the aggressor.
To avoid feeling humiliated or weak, which is
how the child felt when they first saw the scary
content, they adopt the persona of the dominant
performer. And that leads to? It can lead to
sexual coercion, dominant behaviors, or antisocial
actions. They are trying to regain control by
becoming the perpetrator. And dissociation. This
one seems particularly relevant for girls or
victims of what the paper calls re -victimization.
Dissociation is the freeze response. It's mentally
leaving the room. The paper suggests that exposure
to degrading content can teach a child, especially
a girl, that their role is to surrender. So during
sex, they dissociate. They check out. Starfishing.
Right. And this makes them compliant, which fits
the porn script, but it also makes them incredibly
vulnerable to abuse because they aren't present
to assert boundaries. to turn themselves into
objects. That is devastating. It's not just learning
bad tricks, it's fundamentally breaking the mechanism
of self -protection. It's a staining of the psyche
if we want to get philosophical. Even using secular
terms, it's a loss of innocence. You are exposing
a child to adult degradation before they have
a self -concept. We have to talk about the legal
side of this because if it's trauma, if it's
actual psychological damage, why is it so accessible?
Section 5. Law and Ethics. We have the Canadian
context from the Justice Department notes. Right.
So legally, the age of consent in Canada is 16.
That's the baseline. But there are exceptions.
And this always confuses people on the exams.
The close -in -age exception. It's important
nuance. A 14 -year -old can legally be with a
16 -year -old because the gap is less than five
years. The law recognizes that peers exploring
sexuality is different from an adult exploiting
a child. Right. No exploitation, no position
of trust. Exactly. But the definition of child
pornography is broader than people think. It's
not just photos. It includes written or audio
material that advocates sexual activity with
minors. So a story about it counts? Potentially,
yes. The law is trying to create a hard boundary.
But then we have the regulation debate. Warren
Binford brings up this uniquely American but
globally relevant tension. She says Americans
love sex, guns, and money. And freedom of speech.
Right. And the argument is often made that regulating
the internet infringes on speech. But Binford
pushes back hard. She asks a question that I
think we need to wrestle with. What's that? Should
the... freedom of speech argument protect a hundred
billion dollar industry that is actively exploiting
children's developing brains. She calls for treating
it like a utility, right? It's like we regulate
water. You can't pump sewage into the tap water
and say, hey, freedom of fluids. Exactly. We
regulate electricity. Why don't we regulate the
Internet so it doesn't have hazardous material
for kids? Precisely. She wants age verification
that actually works because right now the Click
here if you are 18 button is a joke. It's not
a barrier, it's speed bump. It's barely a speed
bump. It's a welcome mat. It effectively transfers
liability to the user. Well, you lied, so it's
not our fault. Which is, yeah. And the legal
system is lagging so far behind the technology.
We are trying to apply 20th century laws to a
21st century super stimulus. OK, we have been
pretty dark for this whole session. My cortisol
levels are spiking. I feel you. Let's move to
section six. Applied psychology, interventions
and hope. Please tell me there is hope. There
is absolutely hope, and it goes back to the brain
science we started with. Neuroplasticity. The
brain is plastic. It can change. Exactly. Neuroplasticity
cuts both ways. Just as the brain rewired itself
to get addicted to porn, it can rewire itself
back. The synapses that are pruned can't necessarily
grow back instantly, but new pathways can be
formed. Cindy Pierce has that great case study
about the detox. The fraternity brother. This
is a great anecdotal evidence point. He quit
porn for six months. Cold turkey. You have the
result? His erectile dysfunction. disappeared
his depression lifted and and this is the most
interesting part his fantasy highlight reel changed
he told Pierce that he stopped fantasizing about
the violent aggressive stuff and started fantasizing
about connection and real intimacy again he detoxed
his brain he lowered his tolerance threshold
he did But there is a warning here. Another student
in the study only quit for two months. And when
he went back to it, thinking he was cured, the
symptoms crept back almost immediately. So it's
not a quick fix. It's a lifestyle change. It
requires long -term maintenance. Exactly. It's
like getting in shape. You can't go to the gym
for two months and then expect to stay fit while
eating junk food for the rest of the year. The
brain is an organ. It responds to what you feed
it. So that's the intervention for the user.
What about prevention? We need to talk about
communication strategies. Because clearly, whatever
parents are doing now isn't working. The experts,
Pierce, Binford, all of them, agree on one thing.
The talk is dead. You mean the one big birds
and bees speech where the dad sweats and the
kid looks at the floor? Right. That doesn't work.
It's too late and it's too awkward. It needs
to be a continuous conversation and it needs
to start early. How early? Pierre suggests using
anatomical names penis, vulva, by age three.
Get rid of the shame. Exactly. If you can't say
the words, you can't talk about the problem.
If a kid only knows the word peepee, they aren't
equipped to talk about sexual boundaries. That
makes sense. And I love the fire drill approach
she mentions. Oh, this is practical gold. Tell
us about the fire drill. You know how we do fire
drills so kids know what to do before there is
smoke. Yeah. You do the same for the internet.
You tell your kids before they see anything,
you say, hey, the internet is big and weird.
If you see something naked or scary or gross
on the screen, come tell me. And the important
part. You will not be in trouble. We will just
fix it. That you will not be in trouble part
is key. Yeah. Because if the kid thinks they'll
lose their iPad or that mom will be mad. They
will hide it. And if they hide it, the shame
grows. And shame is the fertilizer for addiction.
You have to be a safe harbor. And finally, porn
literacy. This is what we're doing right now,
basically. It is. We don't just ban it. We explain
it. We explain that these are actors, there is
lighting, there is editing, that the women are
often in pain but acting like they aren't. Deconstruct
the media. Yes. If a kid can look at a video
and say, that's fake, that's acting, that's not
real life, they are inoculated against the worst
effects. They can critically analyze it rather
than absorbing it as truth. It's like showing
them the behind the scenes of a horror movie
so they aren't scared of the monster anymore.
Look, it's just a guy in a rubber suit. Exactly.
demystify it, take away its power. All right,
class, let's wrap this up. We have covered a
lot. We have. We went from the dopamine -fueled
adolescent brain rushing on gas with no breaks
to the social scripts of sexism and compliance,
all the way to the potential trauma of early
exposure. And the digital castration of a generation.
Yeah. It's a lot to process. My brain is definitely
full. But we promised an exam question, a final
provocative thought to leave you with. Right.
So here is the question I want you to mull over.
If we accept the core tenet of biology and psychology,
that the organism is shaped by its environment.
Nature and nurture. Exactly. If the environment
shapes the organism, then we have to ask, what
kind of human being is inevitably designed by
an environment where the primary sexual teacher
is an algorithm that rewards extreme violence?
Wow. If the input is dehumanization, can the
output be anything other than a dehumanized society?
That is a terrifying question. Yeah. But one
we have to answer. It's the question of our generation.
All right. I need to go touch some grass. Class
dismissed. Good luck with the reading. See you
next semester. See you then.