The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It (6 page)

Roughly 71 percent of adult males in America are overweight.
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When men gain weight — the bad kind, as opposed to bulking up muscles — a metabolic change happens that drops the hormone levels in the body. Researchers from the University of Buffalo recently determined that obese men have lower levels of testosterone, and when that male hormone drops, one of the biggest victims is bedroom performance. The study shows that 40 percent of obese men have abnormally low levels of testosterone.
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Obesity can also trigger Type 2 diabetes, one effect of which is restricted blood flow to veins, especially the small ones in the penis and testicles. That surge of blood is essential for male erections. An interesting corollary of the combination of obesity and testosterone decline in males is the rise in their bodies of the female hormone estrogen, which can lead to erectile dysfunction and infertility.
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Over the last few decades, physical activity among youth has decreased while screen time has increased. Sedentary behavior fills time that children could be spending in physical activities or even sleeping, contributing to excessive snacking and eating meals in front of the television or computer screen. “Young teen boys
in particular
who spend their nights playing video games or texting their friends instead of sleeping are putting themselves at greater risk for gaining unhealthy amounts of weight and becoming obese,” reported April Fulton in a recent National Public Radio article.
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Childhood habits tend to stick with people for the rest of their lives. Thus kids who watch television and play video games instead of being active are setting themselves up for a sedentary future, reported a recent Harvard University Medical School Special Health Report.
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Not surprisingly, several studies have found a positive association between screen time and prevalence of overweight in children.
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There may also be a strong correlation between family trauma — like divorce — and being overweight. In a survey of almost 300 morbidly obese patients, researchers found a very high occurrence of severe family dysfunction, particularly sexual abuse. About 50 percent (both male and female) reported they were sexually assaulted or abused as children, a rate 300 percent higher than the general male population. Pretty much all those surveyed reported experiencing some lasting form of childhood trauma. Weight gain often immediately follows a distressing life event. Examples of this on a large scale include divorce, and divorce rates increased considerably in America before obesity began to soar.
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Young boys often have more difficulty adapting to a parent’s divorce than young girls — especially if the father leaves the home, putting them at higher risk.

Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that, first of all, we have to
figure out what they are. That’s not so easy. Technology isn’t good or bad, it’s powerful and it's complicated. Take advantage of what it can do. Learn what it can do. But also ask, “What is it doing to us?” We’re going to slowly, slowly find our balance, but I think it’s going to take time.
— Professor Sherry Turkle, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self
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To a young man, the thrill-packed worlds of online porn and video games are far more exciting than real life. And these sources of stimulation are now totally pervasive. Internet, videos and television are available 24 hours a day on a variety of devices (computers, laptops, phones, TVs, iPads, and so on.). Part of the problem is that we are telling boys their inner worlds are unacceptable and scary, therefore they have no other outlet for their impulses. This is all contributing to an overall decrease in motivation to contribute or partake in real-world events and social relationships.

Pornography is a dopamine-producing machine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with activation of the brain’s reward system. Its presence helps initiate feelings of enjoyment and pleasure. Rewarding experiences such as eating, taking drugs and having sex release dopamine into two main brain regions, the nucleus accumbens and the frontal cortex. However, once a person develops an addiction, the dopamine pathways become pathological. Neutral stimuli and events that are associated with the addictive substance or its process, such as gambling casinos or drug-taking sequences, can become conditioned to generate further arousal and add to the body’s chemical addiction. When excessive porn viewing becomes addictive, the brain lights up as if it were on heroin.

Many people who watched Phil’s TEDTalk commented that porn and video games should not be lumped together. Video gamers are not necessarily porn users, and vice versa. In many ways, porn and video games are different, but they share many characteristics. Both video games and porn are entertaining and have interesting and useful applications, but they can also be a huge waste of time and potentially psychologically and socially damaging to some guys. We are concerned about young men who are
excessively
using one or both porn and video games
in
social isolation
. We consider four hours or more a day of playing video games alone to be excessive. There has been no established guideline about what constitutes an excessive amount of porn; the effects of porn are more abstract and difficult to define.

Both video and online porn are relatively recent forms of digital entertainment that have been added to the social environment. The industries are increasingly merging and becoming particularly seductive to gamers, as Andrew Doan, author of
Hooked on Games,
points out:

Eroticism and motivation are both fueled by arousal. If there is lust, arousal veers in a sexual direction, and if there is a need to triumph, arousal sends one down the path of goal setting and long-term success. Real life is competing with digital alternatives for nearly every aspect of existence; since porn and video games are readily accessible, burden free and fun. The choice for lots of young men is often the digital alternative.

Though nearly every social need in reality now has a complement in the digital world, it is unclear whether the digital alternatives satisfy those needs in the same way. In Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, physiological and safety needs must be met in physical reality. Is it possible, however, for the top three needs in Maslow’s hierarchy — belongingness, love and esteem, and self-actualization — to be met in digital reality? Could a person be just as, if not more, fulfilled in digital reality? The answer is yes and no; some needs can be achieved in the digital world, but because these needs are met without risk of consequence, and frequently in social isolation — as if in a dress rehearsal — a person may be able to achieve their esteem needs yet completely bypass belongingness and love needs. Therein lies a major problem: entitlement without the ability to relate to others. Furthermore, self-actualization could not be reached without the fulfillment of the other needs, so a lack of intimacy and appreciation for others creates a distorted sense of potential and actualization not based in shared reality.

It’s unclear how well kids can move between reality and digital worlds. Katie Salen, director of design at the Quest to Learn school in New York, says, “People talk about this distinction between the virtual world and the real world, and there’s concern that there is an inability on the part of young people to separate the two. I actually think that that distinction is a very adult idea, an idea that has come from a generation of people [for whom] virtual didn’t exist and it was something new that was then added to the real world. But kids have that ability to move kind of seamlessly between the digital and the real.”

Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, says, “The distinctions between real and virtual world are becoming blurred, even interchangeable.” In the documentary
Digital Nation
, Bailenson makes a realistic-looking avatar of host Douglas Rushkoff:

Woody Allen once said, “Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best.” Or is it?

One high-school-age guy from our survey commented, “I think the on-demand pleasure, gratification, control and stress release of pornography and video games reduces our patience, makes us hold ourselves to unrealistic expectations and cripples us socially.”

Pornography is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter meant to stimulate sexual arousal and satisfaction. Unlike art or erotica, porn has little artistic merit and is focused on the physical act of sex rather than feelings and emotions. Depictions of sex have been around since prehistoric times, but the concept of pornography was not widely understood until the latter half of the 19th century. The large-scale excavations of Pompeii in the 1860s kicked off discussions on what exactly qualified as obscene, resulting in many of the erotic objects discovered being carted away to private museums.

The production of pornographic films quickly followed the invention of the motion picture in 1895. Quickly after that, sexually explicit materials were deemed obscene and made illegal, which continued through the 1960s. Today, access to pornographic material is limited to people over 18, though enforcing “community standards” is tricky, especially online. Most people would agree that hard-core pornography should not be available to children, but access to it — voluntary and involuntary — is difficult to regulate.

In 1970, the total retail value of hard-core pornography in the United States was estimated to be $10 million. The porn industry revenues in 2006 were estimated at $13.3 billion.
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Despite what appear to be large profits, industry executives say the business of porn is suffering these days due to the weak economy, piracy, and free or inexpensive porn available online.
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While huge profits used to be made from hotel room adult entertainment and DVD sales, the market has shifted in favor of the affordability and anonymity that the Internet provides; porn is now only a click away. Technology has also made it easier to enter the industry; anyone who wants to have sex on camera can be a porn player — and if they’re any good at enticing viewers, a porn star.

Can guys learn about sex from watching porn videos? Sure, somewhat. They can learn that sexual acts can be quite varied and, thereby, a continual source of pleasure over one’s lifetime by consensual experimentation with one’s partner. Beyond that, the take-away message from porn viewing is likely to be ego deflating because of the assumption that what you see is what is the norm, the acceptable way to perform, the appropriate way to relate to a sexual partner; worst of all, you see that size not only matters but dominates.

Most Internet porn has no story line, no buildup to the sexual performance. There are no words, just actions. There is no suggestion that in real life there are romantic precursors, negotiations, discussions, tender moments, kissing, touching, complimenting and even just talking. Then there is the implicit understanding that the women wants sex as much or more than the male in the video, and she might even initiate unzipping him, take his pants off and start oral sex. That is not going to happen often in the real world.

Imagine learning to play basketball by watching Orlando Magic’s Dwight Howard dunk over his adversaries, or baseball by watching all-star hitter Albert Pujols smack three mammoth home runs in the World Series. They are exceptional athletes with dominant bodies trained for years to be among the best in their profession. So they might inspire, but you learn the game by diligent practice on Little League fields or on playground courts with coaches and peers whose ability level, age and size are comparable to yours. In porn, male actors have enormous penises. They are selected for their size and stamina, and then likely take meds to enhance their arousal. What you don’t see are breaks in the action to change camera angles during which they may get “fluffed” by an assistant, take meds or get secondary assistance from vacuum pumps or penile injections. So, too, their seeming ability to perform nonstop for 20 minutes may also include offscreen timeouts.

A certain negative effect of boys watching lots of porn is a growing feeling of penis envy, of not measuring up, so to speak. That self-consciousness in a realm so important for male identity is surely a source of disguised discontent. This can be seen in public locker rooms, where many young guys refuse to disrobe, undressing in the showers and covering themselves when they come out. Consider that more men under 30 are being prescribed Viagra than ever before to ensure adequate performance.
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Once such drugs are perceived as necessary to sexual success, it becomes meds over matter in that realm. Ad campaigns that started with old-timers years ago have shifted to ever-younger looking men who want to be ready for action at the hint of sex.