Men’s Brains Reward Them with Happiness When They Look at Porn

Money, Porn, or Gaming? Men’s Brains Are Wired for Wanking.

In general, men like money and what it can make possible. Whether they have money or hope to make some, many men like to gamble. Men also lean into online gaming having grown up with console systems and computer games. Much to the chagrin of moralists who like to pathologize normative sexual behavior they disapprove of men love porn. This isn’t a series of conjectures. Human Brain Mapping recently published new research that backs it all up with numbers and the New York Post covered it.

It's not every day that a study requires its participants to be right-handed, but that was one of the qualifying factors for the 31 healthy men, aged 19 to 38, surveyed. Once accepted into the study, each man was asked to select their favorite internet-based genre of stimulating images. Their choices were video game screenshots, pictures of money, or pornographic photos. Regardless of the genre selected, participation in the study earned each person a small financial payment.

Surprisingly no one, most respondents felt more attraction to and reward from viewing the explicit pictures. From this, researchers concluded that online porn, and by extension sex, are more addictive for men than gambling or gaming. In other words, the more men enjoy something, the more they want to experience that enjoyment again. This is in line with the results of previous research that also found porn to be better able to make participants feel aroused and leave them with a sense of well-being.

To make sure the results weren’t a fluke, researchers also paired geometric figures with images from the three genres to create an association in the minds of the study subjects. A fourth neutral, geometric shape was accompanied by no reward. When asked to rank the four geometric shapes, the reward-free shape came in last, and the one associated with porn reigned supreme. Of the three pleasure-related genres, explicit sexual imagery inspired the brain’s reward-processing pathways before those of gaming or money. The experiment was repeated 68 times, and the responses were measured in three different ways.

First, each man reported his subjective experiences of arousal and pleasure both before and after the geometric shape portion of the experiment. Next, skin conductance responses (SCR) were measured, tracked, and recorded with special attention to changes in the men’s sweat gland activity. This way, researchers could see how physically aroused each man was when he looked through the various shapes and images.

Finally, brain activity was scanned in an fMRI, which allowed the research team to map the minimum number of neuronal stimulations needed before each man felt a reward. They were also able to watch different regions of the brain during the perception of stimuli and to study their relationship to each man’s responses.

Given that humans reproduce sexually, that looking at sexy people naked often results in sexual arousal or desire, and that solo or paired sex leaves most humans feeling relaxed and happy, it’s not startling that men would rather look at porn than gamble or game. Not that you can’t do all three these days, especially on the internet.

What is new and important about this study is that it introduces science-based research about how men’s brains process internet-specific rewards into a debate that previously had no verifiable, peer-reviewed evidence on the subject. It is hoped that the data from the study will be useful in the discovery and treatment of addictions. Hopefully, it will also help science better understand healthy contexts within which a man can enjoy his so-called “vices.”