The Relationship Between Excessive Video Game Play and Porn Use Among Young Men

Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Coulombe of The Institute for Family Studies via MercatorNet:

Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, estimates that the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming by the time they reach age 21. To put this figure in context, it takes the average college student half that time — 4,800 hours — to earn a bachelor’s degree.

There is no doubt that some gamers are women. Still, girls don’t play nearly to the extent that guys do — only five hours per week compared to 13 for young men. These problems continue beyond adolescence. A study published in the Journal of Leisure Research found that in 349 marriages where just one partner was a gamer, it was the husband 84% of the time. In the other couples where both spouses played but one person played more than the other, it was the husband 73% of the time.

Porn sites get billions of views every year. One in three boys is now considered a “heavy” porn user, “watching too many times to count,” according to University of Alberta researcher Sonya Thompson. A similar survey in the U.K. found that the average boy watches nearly two hours of porn every week. One in three of the “light” users spend less than an hour a week viewing porn, and four out of five of the heavy users watch more than 10 hours a week.

One consequence of watching many hours of online porn is teenage boys are beginning to treat their girlfriends like sex objects. According to one 16-year-old girl, “boys just want us to do all the stuff that they see porn stars do.” As a result, says Cindy Gallop, author of Make Love Not Porn, young men don’t know the difference between making love and re-enacting porn. In an online survey conducted by the University of East London, a fifth of boys between 16 and 20 years old said they were “dependent on porn as a stimulant for real sex.”

We think the negative effects of excessive, socially isolated porn use are worse for young people that have never had real-life sexual encounters. Why? They see sex as only physical performance, mechanical arrangements of body parts, without romance, emotion, intimacy, communication, negotiating, sharing, and even touching and kissing. Sex becomes an impersonal “thing,” and for men, a desirable sex partner becomes an object that they have no connection to afterward.

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PHOTO CREDIT: Lyncconf Games

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