How to Talk about Porn with Your 11-Year-Old Son

Marnia Robinson and Gary Wilson have kindly given us permission to reprint their advice to parents of boys on the threshold of being teenagers. Marnia and Gary run the website Reuniting: Healing with Sexual Relationships.

Is There a Problem with Porn?
by Marnia Robinson and Gary Wilson

Suppose you’re really hungry, but it’s almost time to leave for your basketball game. What are you going to do? Answer: you’re going to listen to either the old part of your brain or the new part. The old brain is saying, “You’re hungry, go eat.” But the new brain is saying, “Sure you’re hungry, but it would be smarter to eat after the game so you don’t throw up.”

The old part is the part you share with all animals. It evolved about 100 million years ago as mammals appeared. It urges you to do things without thinking, like eat – and find anything to do with sex very interesting. The new part evolved much later. It helps you to solve problems, play music, and invent things. It thinks and helps you choose your best strategy.

The old brain gives you urges or feelings, and the new brain helps you figure out what to do with the urges and feelings. If a much bigger kid calls you a “loser,” you may have an urge to punch him, but your new brain might say, “Actually, that’s a very bad idea.”

We need both parts of the brain, because the old brain isn’t very smart sometimes. For example, it doesn’t know the difference between a picture of food and real food. Imagine you were hungry and had nothing to eat. Would you want to thumb through a food magazine with photos of yummy-looking desserts? No. Your stomach would growl, you would drool, and you would feel hungrier than ever. Your old brain is powerful enough to make your body react as if those pictures were real food, even though your new brain knows you can’t eat pictures. In fact, your new brain would probably say, “Hey! Drop the magazine and go find some real food.”

Why does your old brain react so powerfully to pictures of food? Because, for millions of years your ancestors lived where food was scarce. They had no refrigerators, and food spoiled quickly. There were no groceries or restaurants, so if you wanted to eat, you had to hunt. The old brain in your head is designed for the conditions your ancestors faced.

The result is that your old brain reacts powerfully to anything that it associates with the presence of food. So, if you were a hunter like your ancestors, your old brain would react to animal droppings, hoof prints, and any shape that looked like it might be your next meal.

This is why a commercial with pictures of fries, or the sound of an ice cream truck, can cause a powerful physical reaction in you. When your old brain decides you are hungry, it urges you to stop playing and become more alert and focused on what it thinks is important. It wants you to give your full attention to getting some food so you don’t starve.

From hunting food to naked women

As you leave childhood, your old brain expands its focus to a new task. It urges you to get excited about girls. It hopes that someday you will pass on copies of yourself in the form of babies. As odd as it may seem, this is the number one job for the old brain.

Your old brain prepares you for this future task by making you “hungry” for anything that is related to sex.

In fact, your old brain thinks sex is way more interesting than eating. That’s why sexual feelings can be much more intense than hunger.

When you stumble upon something connected with making babies – like a website with naked women on it, or some other picture associated with sex – your old brain takes over. It releases chemicals into your brain that make you feel like true happiness is just around the corner. It is like the feeling you get when you’re about to open your birthday presents. This feeling is the old brain’s way of giving you a big “yes!” for focusing on sex. As one man said, “When I saw my first picture of a naked woman I thought, ‘This is just wonderful!”

So why could porn be a problem?

There are several reasons in the next part of this article. Give them some thought. If possible, talk them over with an adult whom you trust. Use the new part of your brain to decide whether viewing porn is a good idea for you.

Here are some reasons why porn can be a problem. They may help you figure out if you want it in your life.

Pornography is not reality

A picture of a naked woman is like a picture of food. It can create as powerful a physical reaction, but it is not a real woman. Even so, your old brain will urge you to focus lots of attention on such a picture, to find it fascinating, and even to hunt for others like it. Remember, your old brain can’t tell the difference between images and physical reality. It lumps anything connected to sex into one category, the “Yes!” category, because it wants you to make lots of babies someday.

Let’s return to your distant ancestors. Imagine that you are a young caveman. Suppose you glimpse a naked woman swimming in a lake. You would probably find her thrilling. Your excitement would motivate you to learn how to flirt with her, to find out what things impress her, and, if she didn’t like you, to figure out ways to meet new females. In short, you would be motivated to learn how to find and connect with a real female, a mate – someone your old brain hopes you will be the mother of your babies.

These days, however, this plan isn’t working very well. There is a new factor present that young cavemen didn’t have to deal with. Today guys have computers and the potential to view lots of pictures of highly exciting, sexually-explicit pictures and videos. Pictures are not real girls. Videos do not help you get to know real girls.

As you may have learned, explicit pornographic pictures trigger intense sexual frustration – just like pictures of food can make your hunger worse. However, pornography also encourages you to seek instant relief – either alone in front of your computer, or with buddies who are also using porn. Porn doesn’t motivate you to learn the skills you need to attract a mate. It doesn’t encourage you to learn what girls like or what they like about you, or find the courage to meet with real girls.

Your new brain knows that connections with real people are far healthier than sitting alone with your computer, but your old brain is hard to ignore – especially once you make porn a habit.

Porn is not educational

It is normal to want to learn more about sex. However, porn videos cannot teach you about normal sex between people who love each other. The people in porn videos are actors who often do things more outrageous than Lord Voldemort in the “Harry Potter” stories. Porn actors pretend to enjoy themselves, even when they don’t like each other, or they are in pain, or they are feeling cruel – or mistreated. When the camera stops rolling, they take their pay and walk away from each other.

Sex with someone you love and trust is entirely different. It is a respectful exchange of sensual touch, and a way of expressing your affection for your mate. It is a chance to be playful and get to know another person deeply. Many traditions teach that sex is beautiful and sacred. Porn is neither.

In fact, porn is increasingly violent, with themes of men abusing women. Porn makers purposely make the videos violent. Why? Because the old brain likes to feel superior to others. It finds such images exciting. The more strongly you react to an image, the more often you return to the website where you found it – unless you use your new brain to stop.

If you get your sex education from porn video
s, there is a very real chance that you will find it difficult to interact with real females in a healthy way later on. For example, porn could confuse you and make you think women like bad treatment. (They don’t.)

Because porn fires up your old brain (and turns down the volume of your new brain), it can also cause you to focus too much on how a girl looks, rather than who she is. Large breasts unfortunately do not mean that someone is fun to be around, or kind, or sincere. Big boobs are attractive to your old brain because they look like they can feed babies really well.

Porn is like “junk food”

Your old brain is powerful, but not very clever. For example, it likes chocolate cake more than a balanced meal. Why? It evolved millions of years ago when food was scarce. High-calorie foods with lots of sugar and fat were rare, but a good source of energy.

The old brain hasn’t noticed that we are now surrounded by cookies, chips, ice cream and so forth. It still thinks you need every bit of high-calorie food to survive. In other words, it urges you to choose junk food when it sees it. If you want to have a strong, healthy body, you have to listen to your new brain. It can figure out what you need to eat for good health.

Watching porn is like being served chocolate cake over and over, without ever getting the healthy part of the dinner. Cake tastes great at first, but too much makes you feel bad. It causes a sugar high followed by a drop in energy. While your body is recovering you don’t feel so great. In fact, you may be cranky, unfriendly, or unable to concentrate. You may act like a jerk instead of like your usual, cheerful self.

Porn sets off the same cycle as too much sugary food. There is an initial rush of excitement. Yet afterward you may feel tired, jumpy or irritable. This behavior repels others, but it won’t bother your computer at all. See why it becomes easier and easier to spend time at your computer?

Both junk food and porn sex can become obsessions, because your old brain only knows how to say “Yes!” to them. It still thinks you are living millions of years ago. It hasn’t caught up with the fact that high-calorie food and sexual stimulation are readily available – and not good for anyone in such large quantities. Fortunately, your new brain can understand the reality.

Porn is addictive

Just like chocolate cake, porn sex is potentially addictive. You simply can’t stuff yourself with cake or use porn to excite yourself without an uncomfortable recovery period afterward. In fact, you may find that you feel moody, defensive, or anti-social for days.

This period of discomfort is risky. You may be tempted to do something you normally wouldn’t do just to try to feel good again. For example, you may find yourself back at your computer, looking at porn. That will offer instant relief – but the relief won’t last.

This cycle of highs and lows is the “addictive cycle.” Gamblers know it, drug users know it, porn users know it, and those who binge on junk food know it. In other words, junk food and porn can affect your brain like drugs. They can make your urges, like hunger and sexual frustration, worse over all – even though both seem to promise instant relief. This is how addicts become addicts. They are desperately looking for relief because they feel bad during the recovery, or withdrawal, period.

In short, viewing porn is like jumping on a bike with no brakes. If you’re already hooked, you will have to use your new brain as the brakes – and ignore your old brain. It may you take some time to restore your balance, but you could save yourself a lifetime of lonely obsession.

Porn is powerful

Feelings of sexual arousal are intense because your old brain doesn’t want your new brain to interfere with your old brain’s mission. Your old brain won’t much care if you find a new porn website and then don’t make it to sports practice, forget to walk your dog, or skip your homework. It wants you to make sexual arousal your top priority. It’s thinking only one thing: “If I can keep this guy focused on sex, then someday he will make lots of babies!”

Your old brain is just trying to do a biological job. It has mistaken porn sex for real sex, but you don’t have to make the same error. Use your new brain to figure it out. If you have a chance to view porn, consider some of these responses:

“I think I’ll skip the porn…

Note
This article was written with the kind assistance of a half-dozen adult men who innocently began using porn and became addicted. All of them wish that someone had found a way to explain the risks to them when they were your age.


Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson are married and live in Oregon. He teaches anatomy and physiology. She is a former corporate lawyer. Gary and Marnia have given workshops in Canada, Australia and the USA, and their articles have appeared in various magazines. They collaborated on a book, Peace Between the Sheets, which addresses the parallels between the neurochemistry of sex and ancient principles about careful management of sexual energy. They also manage a website called www.reuniting.info and produce a free monthly newsletter, Reuniting. The authors would like to thank two teens, Gary’s son and Marnia’s nephew, for their helpful advice in shaping this article.


See also:

Traffic Control: The People’s War on Internet Porn
Average age of first exposure: 11

Canada: Rural Teens Even More Likely to View Porn than Urban; Parents, Sex Ed Somewhat Oblivious to Childrens’ Porn Viewing Habits
A total of 429 students aged 13 and 14 from 17 urban and rural schools across Alberta, Canada, were surveyed anonymously about if, how and how often they accessed sexually explicit media content on digital or satellite television, video and DVD and the Internet. Ninety per cent of males and 70 per cent of females reported accessing sexually explicit media content at least once. More than one-third of the boys reported viewing pornographic DVDs or videos “too many times to count”, compared to eight per cent of the girls surveyed.

A majority of the students, 74 per cent, reported viewing pornography on the Internet. Forty-one per cent saw it on video or DVD and 57 per cent reported seeing it on a specialty TV channel…

And while the majority of teens surveyed said their parents expressed concern about sexual content, that concern hasn’t led to discussion or supervision, and few parents are using available technology to block sexual content.

“It indicates there is plenty of room for better parenting around pornography use. Parents need to improve dialogue with their children and their own awareness level. They have to be educated enough to be the ones setting the boundaries in the house,” Thompson said…

Young New Yorkers Talk about Porn’s Effect on their Relationships (explicit language)
Over beers recently, a 26-year-old businessman friend shocked me by casually remarking, “Dude, all of my friends are so obsessed with Internet porn that they can’t sleep with their girlfriends unless they act like porn stars.” A 20-year-old college student who bartends at a popular Soho lounge describes how an I-porn-filled adolescence shaped his perceptions of sex. “Looking at Internet porn was pretty much my sex education,” he says. “I mean, in school, it was just, ‘Here’s a gigantic wooden dildo, and now we’re putting a condom on it,’ whereas on the Internet, you had it all. I remember the first time I had sex, my first thought as it was happening was, Oh, this is pornography. It was a kind of out-of-body experience. I was really uncomfortable with sex for a while…”

People on the Left and the Right Share Blame for the Sexual Miseducation of Americans
Media, as the great pedagogical force of our time, powerfully functions to transmit cultural values. Among those important cultural values are expectations about how boys and girls, men and women, are supposed to act in order to conform to cultural mandates about their gender… For decades, rates of perpetration have been so high; it is incredibly short-sighted to understand the reason for this as a handful of isolated individuals acting out in ways that are unrelated to each other… [C]ritical media literacy is an indispensable component of any thoughtful approach to gender violence prevention…

I have to say that one of the persistent problems on the left is there is more lip service paid to sexism than there actually is work against sexism by many, many men who claim to care about social justice, who claim to care about oppression and other forms of exploitation…

I want to mention a chapter in the book called, “Guilty Pleasures: Pornography, Prostitution, and Stripping”. In this chapter, I look at the ways in which the pornography culture, and the prostitution and stripping industries, if you will, are helping to shape boys’ and men’s attitudes toward women and girls and their sexuality as well as men’s sexuality. This is a national conversation that is long overdue. You asked what my dream was about the book–well, one piece of the dream is that I hope my book helps to catalyze a more thoughtful conversation between men, as well as between women and men, about pornography, prostitution, and stripping. Ideologically, these are enormously influential industries. I think there has been very little thoughtful conversation about them in male culture, and certainly even in the academy. My friends and I are very frustrated by either the lack of or the superficiality of the conversation about them. For example, pornography is by far the most influential form of sex education–or sex (mis)education–in the United States. There is so little quality sex education in the schools in our sex-crazed country. The right has successfully squelched the responsible sex education movement that arose in the seventies. In the void, you have this enormous multi-billion dollar industry that has profit as its motive, not education. The pornography industry is serving as the vehicle for so many boys’ and men’s sexual socialization. And the level of brutality that has been normalized in mainstream pornography, the level of sexist brutality, is just astounding. Many people have not been paying attention, but I think they need to pay attention. It’s very disturbing, I think, for a lot of people to see–with eyes wide open–what boys and men are masturbating to. But I think it needs to happen. Sadly, in recent years many feminists have been leery of going down this road because this issue is seen as divisive, and fraught with both ideological and interpersonal conflict. I think that’s really sad because the industry hasn’t slowed down one bit–in fact, it’s only been accelerating in the last few years.

Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn Confuses Young Men about How to Behave
There’s a professor of psychology at UMass Boston who has done his doctoral dissertation and subsequent research on sexual aggression among young college males, and he’s found that in dozens and dozens of interviews that young guys will sit there in a room with him, and they’ll admit to or talk matter-of-factly about, “I did this to her, I did that, and we did this and that,” and they never once refer to themselves as rapists, of course, and they never once refer to the behavior that they’ve engaged in as raping behavior, or in any way criminal. But this psychologist will tell you that he knows that if they were under oath in the court of law, they would be admitting to first degree felonies, but they think it’s normal, perfectly natural herterosexual relations.

I travel around the country and speak to college audiences, both male and female, and mixed audiences, and one thing I find over and over again, in frank dis
cussions, is that pornography is extremely influential in the lives of young boys growing up today, and girls, but specifically I speak to guys. This blizzard of images of women in degrading and humiliating positions, guys just come to think of that as normal.

There was an article in the New York Times last week about sexual harassment in schools, how there’s a whole new area of litigation that’s opening up with young girls who are sexually harassed. If you read that article on the front page of the Times last week, you’ll find that guys are saying that they don’t know what to do, what they can do and what they can’t do, what’s acceptable and what isn’t acceptable. As I read that, I said to myself, it’s obvious where they’re learning on one level what is and what isn’t acceptable. In other words, you could take some of the dialogue out of these kids’ mouths right out of a discussion of pornography that I’ve had on numerous occasions.

Pornography is a subtext to relations between the sexes, young boys and young girls today.

Gail Dines Presents: Pornography and Pop Culture (explicit)
“When you look at print, and you see something, you can think to yourself, ‘I agree or disagree.’ You can put it down and come back. You engage with it. However, the problem with image is that we have no such immunization to the seduction of eloquence of the image. You look at that [magazine cover of buff man and woman] and you don’t engage with it. You immediately think, ‘Oh my God I’m such a fat pig. Look at me compared to her. What’s wrong with me?’ My students do this all the time… [T]hat’s the role of images…to construct your identity in relation to what is normalized.

“…[T]he bizarre thing about media is it makes normal the abnormal, and makes abnormal the normal…

“I say this to men over and over again. You might not go to pornography hating women, but you’re sure as hell going to come away with that feeling. You get much more than you bargained for with pornography, and that’s the problem with it. The other problem with pornography is it sexualizes the violence and degradation against women. And when you sexualize violence you render that violence invisible, because when men see that they can’t step back and critique it… You are basically trying to have a rational conversation with an erection and it doesn’t work.”

A Review of Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families
According to recent polls, 70% of men aged 18-24 visit a porn site in a typical month. So what exactly is the appeal? The men Paul interviewed gave a variety of answers. Some said porn helped them discover what turned them on in real life. Male bonding was also crucial. Many men’s first exposure to porn was in the pre-teen years, being initiated into manhood by an older relative or friend who passed along his copy of a girlie magazine. Thus, they learned to associate porn usage with being a normal adult man who is accepted by his peers. (p.16) Men reaffirm their masculinity on the message boards of porn websites. They compete to see who can show the most aggression and sexual prowess, in comments making fun of the female models’ supposed flaws or bragging about what they’d like to do to these women. (p.37) Paul wryly observes: “This isn’t quite the aesthetic appreciation that men make pornography viewing out to be, nor does it seem to be about men loving women.” (p.38)

American Association of University Women
According to the report [“Hostile Hallways: Bullying, Teasing, and Sexual Harassment in School (2001)”], based on a national survey of 2,064 public school students in 8th through 11th grades conducted by Harris Interactive:

• 83% of girls and 79% of boys report having ever experienced harassment.
  
  
  
  
  • The number of boys reporting experiences with harassment often or occasionally has increased since 1993 (56% vs. 49%), although girls are still somewhat more likely to experience it.
    
  • For many students sexual harassment is an ongoing experience: over 1 in 4 students experience it “often.”
    
  • These numbers do not differ by whether the school is urban or suburban or rural.

The Creation of a Pornography Addiction
“In a majority of my cases, the earlier the exposure to pornography, the deeper the client’s level of addiction. In most cases I see involvement with pornography starting between ages ten to fourteen… [C]hildren and teenagers are faced with sexual decisions before they fully understand the consequences of their own sexual behaviors.”

Victor Cline: “Pornography’s Effects on Adults and Children”
In an in-house study conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Administrative Vice division, in 60 percent of the child molestation cases referred to them over a 10-year period, adult or child pornography was used to lower the inhibitions of the children molested or to excite or sexually arouse the perpetrator of the abuse. In another study of 43 pedophiles, child pornography was found used in every one of the cases investigated. The officers reported the abusers repeatedly saying the same thing: “I used this stuff to stimulate the child, to break down his inhibitions…”

…individuals should be made aware of the health hazards involved. This kind of knowledge is most important for parents, since most sexual and pornographic addictions begin in middle childhood or adolescence, most of the time without the parents’ awareness or the children have an insufficient understanding of the risks involved.

Exposure to Pornography as a Cause of Child Sexual Victimization
Showing pornography to boys and girls is a common seduction strategy of pedophiles who hope thereby to arouse children’s sexual curiosity or sexual desire…

Pedophiles posing as young teenagers in Internet teen chat groups often send pornographic pictures or e-mail messages containing pornographic language to children. These predators use pornographic pictures to arouse the children’s curiosity or sexual interest and manipulate them into meeting. These meetings typically culminate in the sexual victimization of the child or children…

When child molesters expose targeted children to pornography, the children often feel guilty and complicit, particularly if they found the material sexually exciting or masturbated to it. According to Scotland Yard, one of the five major ways that pedophiles use pornography is to “ensure the secrecy of any sexual activity with a child who has already been seduced” (Tate, 1990, p. 24). Child molesters can often silence their victims by telling them that their parents would be very upset to learn that they had watched pornography. Even without such warnings, children often fear that their parents will blame and punish them for having looked at this material. Children who are sexually abused following the exposure may feel complicit in the abuse and thus become even more motivated to remain silent. Ultimately, this reduces the likelihood that abused children will disclose the sexual abuse to their parents or others.

Testimony in Minneapolis: Ice cream man uses porn magazine to interest children in sex
Another way that we see pornography being used in the commission of crimes is showing them to kids. I remember an interesting case in which an ice cream man, a Good Humor man, always kept an open magazine by him as he drove along, and the kids would look at it. And he would use that as some kind of manipulative technique to involve the people into talking about sex or getting interested in sex, as a comment: have you ever seen anything like this before, or have you ever done anything like this previously…

Testimony in Minneapolis: Porn, Child Molestation, Coerced Stripping (explicit language)
The first thing I want to talk about happened when I was three years old. When I was three, I was sexually abused by a fourteen-year-old neighbor boy…

One of the kids pushed me inside and shut the door. Then this boy grabbed me and he pulled down my shorts and sexually abused me. In short, he finger-fucked me and he made me masturbate him. I was really terrified. I thought I was in hell, and I was also in a lot of pain. I started crying really hard and he finally let me go, but I was told that if I told anyone, I wouldn’t be believed, that it was all my fault and that I would be punished. He also told me that he would hurt me again if I told anyone.

His sister told me that this game he had learned from his dirty books. I knew that he had these dirty books because I had seen him with them.

Porn’s “Verbatim” Accounts of the Pleasures of Child Sexual Abuse Don’t Square with Reality
Researchers estimate that, in our country, about 10% of boys and 25% of girls are sexually abused…

Reuniting: “Three Myths About Porn”
The potential addictiveness of porn has not yet been studied in depth (in part because sex research is out of favor here in the States), but there is a much circumstantial evidence that points to porn’s addictiveness, and much science that indirectly explains why it would be. The fact that not everyone who uses porn uses it to a point where it interferes with his life doesn’t prove it cannot cause addiction. Not everyone who uses alcohol becomes an alcoholic, yet alcohol is unquestionably potentially addictive. The point is that wherever one steps onto the “porn slope,” it is a slope, and it has the potential to lure one into a mighty addiction…

What is clear is that any addiction is a learned behavior that activates the reward circuitry of the brain (much of which is located in the limbic system). There certain behaviors and substances stimulate the production of dopamine, the craving neurochemical…

…addiction is not just about the highs. Over time, an addiction creates a chronic lowering of dopamine levels (or, possibly, decreased receptor sensitivity to dopamine). This sense that “something is missing” is the basis of addictive cravings. At the same time, the addict experiences a much higher than average response to triggers related to his particular learned behavior (such as an alcoholic walking into a bar). In other words, his overall state seems to be flattened (due to abnormally low dopamine, perhaps brought on by over-stimulation), while his reaction to triggers related to his addiction is more pronounced…

Dutch scientist Holstege used brain imaging to view the effects of ejaculation on the brain and discovered that the brain images were reminiscent of brain scans of those shooting heroin. His conclusion? We’re all sex addicts. It is only when we can successfully harness the more analytical part of the brain that we can control our sexual desire…

Alas, porn producers see it as their job to insure that a porn user does not engage the analytical part of his brain. One way they do this is to use imagery that raises testosterone levels in the viewer. Testosterone tends to make one more lustful (testosterone raises dopamine, the craving neurochemical), more irascible, and less fully in control…

Porn images naturally raise testosterone, but domination themes increase it even more – perhaps because males are “rewarded” for striving for the alpha male position in a tribe, troop, or other group. Whatever the rea
son, the result is that domination themes in porn are as calculated as lacing cigarettes with extra nicotine; they make porn more addictive…

It is the excess, not the substance, that sets up the potential for addiction.

Sex is as natural as sugar, but when we use it in a binge pattern, as many porn users do, then it has the potential for addiction…

People who claim that those who are anti-porn are anti-sex appear to be locked into a “feast or famine” mentality where sex is concerned. In effect they are saying that others don’t like sex unless they also approve of the extreme behaviors strategically marketed to porn users. This point of view may simply be evidence of “addict-think.” An addict believes he must choose between “pain of withdrawal,” which a porn addict understandably projects outward and sees as unwarranted sexual repression, or “the relief of indulgence,” which he equates with unrestrained expression of his addiction. Those locked in the cycle have forgotten what equilibrium feels like, and with the help of the media’s widespread tacit approval of porn use, their numbers grow daily.

Time to Explore the Links Between Porn, Testosterone, Sexual Behavior and Violence
Pornographers achieve this combination of a high number of mindbody links and maximum drug/hormone release by mixing sexual images with male dominance, aggression and violent images intended to shock and stimulate simultaneously. Porn scenes ranging from simple “male in control” to aggression, rape, torture and murder, abound in Internet porn geared to the male viewer.

These kinds of images link sexual arousal in the male mindbody with emotions of shock, anger, confusion, violence and domination which cause the male mindbody to release enormous amounts of additional testosterone, which further increase male narrowing, loss of reason, feelings of aggression, and sexual drive and arousal…

The male viewer is not only addicted to simple sexual arousal, but this arousal is linked to mindbody processes that would never be normally linked to the sexual process.

Male Attitudes about Rape Can Be Learned…and Unlearned
The subjects’ evaluations of a rape victim after viewing a reenacted rape trial were also affected by the constant exposure to brutality against women. The victim of rape was rated as more worthless and her injury as significantly less severe by those exposed to filmed violence when compared to a control group of men who saw only the rape trial and did not view films. Desensitization to filmed violence on the last day was also significantly correlated with assignment of greater blame to the victim for her own rape…

There is now, however, some evidence that these negative changes in attitudes and perceptions regarding rape and violence against women not only can be eliminated but can be positively changed. Malamuth and Check (1983) found that if male subjects who had participated in such an experiment were later administered a carefully constructed debriefing, they actually would be less accepting of certain rape myths than were control subjects exposed to depictions of intercourse (without a debriefing)… These debriefings consisted of (1) cautioning subjects that the portrayal of the rape they had been exposed to is completely fictitious in nature, (2) educating subjects about the violent nature of rape, (3) pointing out to subjects that rape is illegal and punishable by imprisonment, and (4) dispelling the many rape myths that are perpetrated in the portrayal (e.g., in the majority of rapes, the victim is promiscuous or has a bad reputation, or that many women have an unconscious desire to be raped).

The effectiveness of the debriefing…indicated that even after seven months, subjects’ attitudes about sexual violence showed significant positive change compared to the preparticipation levels.