By Matthew Loftus & Samuel James
Monday, August 31, 2026
In case you haven’t noticed, men and women are struggling
with each other. Both groups report less interest in love and family than in
any generation past. Even dating has fallen on hard times. And in romance’s
absence, some dangerous trends are emerging.
Chief among those worrisome trends is a way of thinking
and speaking about women that is becoming more common, especially among highly
online, right-leaning men. Examples of this mentality include the idea,
expressed in articles, videos, memes, and much else, that all women, or at
least all attractive women, are extraordinarily promiscuous. Several highly
followed male accounts likewise declare that women are withholding
their affections from deserving, decent men and sharing their bodies with
strangers, often while working “fake email jobs” that would not exist in a just
world. “Manosphere” influencers often portray attractive women as hypocrites
and unattractive women as worthless (or man-hating).
This type of online content talks a lot about the crises
of declining fertility, loneliness, and family formation. In that way it does
overlap with concerns of mainstream conservative voices. The difference is
that, in this online world, the problem is always female. The issue is clearly
and only women who deny men marriage and sex due to promiscuity, career
ambition, or feminism. This movement obsesses over every woman’s “body count”
(the number of men she has slept with) and publishes content warning fellow men
that every woman is, by nature, disloyal.
This is not so much an ideology as it is an attitude. And
we have a term for it: porn brain.
Misogyny or the Madonna-whore complex per se is nothing
new. What is new is the way that widespread access and addiction to pornography
shapes and weaponizes a particular form of misogyny. Porn is like the
artificial hormones that make factory-farmed chickens too heavy to walk: a
modern innovation that supercharges depravity. Porn addiction’s effects on
cognition and moral judgment are well documented, even if analyses of how porn warps social
and political views are rare.
A majority
of American men consume pornography at least several times per year. Porn is so
powerful in no small part because it takes one of sex’s many joys—another
person opens up to you and affirms your desirability—and distills it into pure
artifice, hacking the brain in similar fashion to cocaine. Internet pornography is
particularly potent, featuring a combination of endless novelty, anonymous
access, and 24-7 availability. Recent years have seen more people open up about the effects their addictions have
had on their relationships and mental health (celebrities like Billie Eilish and Terry Crews have spoken about their personal journeys to
overcome pornography).
The images and videos show women as perfectly submissive
to whatever a man wants; they are never too tired, nor do they ever just want
to talk about their day before engaging in acts that are often painful or
uncomfortable in real life. Many of them go to extremes to cosmetically enhance
or contort their bodies; certainly no stretch marks or sagging breasts can be
detected. Most have the same amount of pubic hair as a prepubescent girl.
Pornography’s prevalence in a man’s life can trigger the
experience of hyperreality: the point at which the lines between a
simulation or symbol and the thing itself become impossibly blurred. Video
pornography (by far the most consumed kind) tends to have some kind of dramatic
content. The women in the videos are called “actresses.” The sex itself may be
real, but the personalities, seduction, tension, and dialogue are all part of
the same psychological illusion that movies and television attempt. When a man
immerses himself in pornographic content, he’s not just seeing naked bodies.
He’s seeing the naked bodies talk and act in a way that builds out an
imaginative plausibility structure. Thus, the deeper this imaginative
plausibility structure takes root, the more likely he is to see a woman offline
and suspect she is, at heart and perhaps behind closed doors, just like the
characters he’s been watching onscreen (this is to say nothing of OnlyFans and
the illusion of relationship it promotes). Women who are not sexually desirable
become invisible to the porn-brained mind, while everyone who is desirable
reminds him of what he wishes he had.
We should distinguish porn brain from incel (“involuntary
celibate”) ideology. Incels critique American society for its economic and
sexual abandonment of certain men. While many incels exhibit porn brain, their
cultural critique does not require it. Porn brain is just reshaping one’s soul
by shoveling in more filth, more id than ego. Married men are not immune to
porn brain; posts blaming frigid postpartum wives and their sweatpants for our
declining birth rates reveal
porn brain at work.
To be clear, not every man who views porn develops
obvious or extreme symptoms of porn brain. That being said, even if a person
who consumes pornography does not post violently misogynistic content, the
spiritual and psychological effects are still happening within them. Porn brain
manifests itself in an intense but inarticulate distrust of real sexual
intimacy. Ironically, porn brain tends to be anti-sex. The men profiled in
Daniel Kolitz’s nightmarish report on “gooners” (a community of full-time
masturbators) are extraordinarily cynical about actual sex. Some online
influencers, including some women (e.g., Diane Yap and Pearl Davis) argue in
favor of porn brain’s major premises, on the logic that women really are
promiscuous and treacherous and that men are better off without them. Andrew
Tate, an actual pornographer and alleged sex trafficker who is more of a
straight-up misogynist than porn-brained, has claimed that having sex with a
woman because it feels good is “gay.” The more that sex is disconnected from
the reality of two souls becoming one flesh, the more bizarre one’s utterances
become.
Women are not immune. A woman who tries to make ends meet
by selling content on OnlyFans, for example, is choosing to use both her
identity as a woman and the weaknesses of men as economic leverage. This, too,
is porn brain: an outlook on life that sees other human beings as opportunities
to take. Women likewise have their own versions of genderslop, their own kinds
of porn, and their own cultural roadblocks to a rich life that brings men and women
together.
By volume, however, pornographic websites, the ones
tailored to male desire above all else, are the chief source of porn brain in
society. They habituate millions of men to imagining profoundly false things.
They offer a counterreality that is both addictive and comforting, not just for
the orgasm achieved, but for the narrative offered. Porn brain is like a
powerful pair of glasses that disfigure what men see when they look at the
world.
While every man has a choice whether to use porn, many
have never known a family or friends without it. These men are not merely
villains, they are victims, too: Victims of a political culture that was
impotent to protect them, victims of family dysfunction and social
disintegration, and victims of a rapacious industry that has fed them lies
their entire lives.
Porn brain does not have to be the end of anyone’s story.
There is help available, from software that will block access and enlist a
friend to help check on you, to support groups that offer solidarity and
guidance. “Neuroplasticity,” the capacity of our brains to rewire themselves,
is both the threat of pornography (how addiction and dependence take root) and
the hope against it. The man who has learned to think in pornographic ways can
learn to not think in them, too. For almost all men caught in the throes of
porn brain, the most powerful antidote is meaningful relationships, with men
and women, that shatter porn’s illusions and expel its appeal by giving them a
taste of a much richer, more meaningful life.
The stakes are high. Future generations depend on men and women finding one another. Porn brain’s infection of our culture is a lethal one.
No comments:
Post a Comment