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Is Internet Porn Making Us Numb?
You can access any type of porn on your cell or laptop 24/7. You can make your own vid and post it on amateur porn sites and become an overnight star. You can view streaming porn until your battery wears out. Is all this porn making
us numb to actual physical contact?
[click for
Numb]
Amateur Superstars
Studio porn DVD sales are down, way down. Relax, we're not becoming saints, we're
just downloading amateur porn from the Internet. Why? Because watching amateurs going at it is hot,
real, and strips the ridiculous Hollywood element from porn.
[click for
Amateur Porn]
It is hard not to notice how many high ranking "straight" men in
recent months/years have used the internet to behave in naughty ways
that were at one time thought something only gay guys would do.
Powerful men have always been sexually voracious; unlike today, they
didn't have the internet to spread their desires.
With texting, web cams, and the social websites, the inclination to
expose private behavior is much more accessible, even to straight
guys. So many of the straight guys caught up in sex-tinged scandals
have exposed themselves -- sometimes literally -- through their own
willing embrace of technology. Gay guys have known these resources
have been available for years.
So what is driving this fascination with exposing yourself for the
whole world to see? Could it be the widespread availability and
consumption of free porn i actually be rewiring the male brain,
affecting men's judgment about sex and causing them to have more
difficulty controlling their impulses?
Therapists and sexual counselors have been connecting the rise in
pornography consumption among young males with an increase in
impotence and premature ejaculation. These were healthy young men who
had no organic or psychological pathology that would disrupt normal
sexual function.
The hypothesis among experts is that pornography is progressively
desensitizing men sexually. Hardcore porn's effectiveness in achieving
rapid desensitization in guys has led to its frequent use in training
doctors and military teams to deal with very shocking or sensitive
situations. Researchers found that guys quickly required higher levels
of stimulation to achieve the same level of arousal. Porn use was
desensitizing healthy young men to the erotic appeal of their own
partners.
We know that porn delivers rewards to the male brain in the form of
a short-term dopamine boost, which, for an hour or two afterwards,
lifts men's mood and makes them feel good. The neural circuitry is
identical to that for other addictive triggers, such as gambling or
cocaine.
The addictive potential is also identical: just as gamblers and
cocaine users can become compulsive, needing to gamble or snort more
and more to get the same dopamine boost, so can men consuming porn
become junkies. After the dopamine burst wears off, the guy gets
irritable, anxious, and longing for the next fix.
This dopamine effect explains why porn tends to become more hard
core over time: ordinary sexual images eventually lose their power,
leading guys to need images that break other taboos in other kinds of
ways, in order to feel as good. Moreover, some guys have a "dopamine
hole" -- their brains' reward systems are less efficient -- making
them more likely to become addicted to more extreme porn more
easily.
Like any addiction, it's difficult for an addict to stop doing
things -- even very self-destructive things -- that enable him to get
that next hit of dopamine. This might be why straight guys, who in the
past who would take steps to conduct affairs behind closed doors, now
can't resist the impulse to send a naked text.
Seems as though straight guys can't keep it in their pants just as
much as gay guys. Hmmm, guess we're not all that much different
eh?.
Goodbye Porn Actors, Hello Amateur Porn Stars
Just like regular television has lost it's audience recently,
conceding prime time slots to reality television,
so too have big-budget porn productions. In place of these
legendary movies of crappy plotlines and bad acting
has emerged a new genre of porn: “amateur”
porn.
And it’s grabbing the country by the balls. Gary Blumenthal, Webmaster for OnTheHUNT.com, a spin-off of Manhunt.com that invites its members to be filmed
having sex with other members, says that the reality porn genre kicked off a few years ago – the same time video Internet started gaining steam. People were tired of regular porn, they were ooking for a change, he says, something they hadn’t seen before.
Reality porn has been around forever, there are now actual sites to view it. Sites like XTube and GayTube have given amateur porn stars a place for
people to view their homemade vid.
Now even many video distributors and video-on-demand sites have sprung
which specialize in this type of homegrown reality amateur porn. OnTheHUNT, which is on the cutting edge of reality porn is as real as reality porn gets. When it launched, the site
received more than 4,000 inquiries from Manhunt members interested in meeting other members to have their
sex taped. “We send a famous porn star like Jeremy Hall or Collin O’Neal or Matthew Rush to
the amateurs’ home to film the hook up just as it is happening,” Blumenthal explains. “In the editing process, we
leave in about 99 percent of the footage so people can see the good, the bad, and the in-between.”
Christopher, who answered OnTheHUNT’s call, says he had never been in front of a vid camera before
signing on to star in a reality porn film.
“I received an e-mail inviting me,” Christopher recalls about the first time he heard from OnTheHunt. “I wasn’t
sure if I was up for it because I knew so many people would eventually be able to see me do whatever it was I was
going to do, but I submitted my photos anyway, thinking what the odds were of me being picked. Next thing I know,
I was chosen and showing my junk on a vid.”
Christopher says he enjoyed the experience so much that he’s decided to pursue his newfound fetish
even further.
“As of now, I have not been cast for any scripted porn by any studio,” he says, “and I’m not sure how the transition
would be, really. But I’m always up for any challenges.”
A lot of guys just don’t care much about a
dumb plot or artfully rendered dialogue in a porn flick. They might like
fiction and the fantasy, but they’re really in it to watch the
sex. People who watch porn seem to have their
finger on the fast forward button when they are watching scripted
porn.
Straight porn is
farther ahead in reality porn than gay porn.
Fewer gay content studios embraced the reality porn genre in the early
days until they realized amateurs were submitting their own x pics and vids to various gay sites.
While there is no shortage of participants in reality porn, Alexa, a
Web info company that consistently ranks the most
visited Web sites in the United States, ranks Pornhub.com and YouPorn.com
as numbers 28 and 40 in total site hits.
To put these statistics into perspective, both sites receive more traffic than
those of corporate giants Fox News and Disney.
The beauty of reality porn is there are no real stars, the stars are the guys next door who are
filming their own hookups and bros.
It represents the future. Like the old television sitcoms that continue to die a slow death, only to be replaced by reality television, so too are over-the-top porn productions now relegated to an X-rated graveyard.
We are going to see more exhibitionist sites, more sites with live video like Manhunt’s Mancam, and more everyday guys jumping in front of the camera.
Veteran porn stars, stand by. Your pink slips are coming.
[return to The Gay Surf Report]
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