How tech is reshaping male masturbation
“Let me assure you, babe. I’m absolutely ambidextrous when it comes to the touchpad mouse and keyboard on my computer. Being a right-handed masturbator means I’ve gotten very good at typing with my left hand.”
My boyfriend Patrick (31 years old, tattoo artist, handsome as hell) and I are driving to a dinner party. We’ve drifted into talking male maturbation, porn and technology as you do when you’re a curious sex writer without a penis of your own, with an hour-long drive to kill.
As someone who rarely watches porn when I masturbate, I ask him why he needs to do so much mousing and keyboarding when jerking off to Internet smut.
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Men aren’t just holding their penises while jerking off.
“Oh, you know, most guys go through this cycle of blow job, penetrative fucking, cum shot; blow-job, penetrative fucking, cum-shot. That way you hit all of the most high-intensity parts of the porn. But too much of that would probably be desensitizing to sex in real life,” he speculates, “because that’s not how real sex works.”
According to PornHub.com’s 2015 year-in-review, we’ve blown through 1,892 petabytes of bandwidth on the site this past year, equivalent to filling the storage on all of the iPhones sold in 2015 with porn. In 2015 we watched 4.4 billion hours of porn on PornHub.com alone. The U.S. was responsible for 41% of the XXX-rated site’s traffic this year, with women representing 23% of the site’s visitors and men 77%.
Free online porn has become so accessible that in October 2015, iconic porno mag Playboy announced its no-more-nudity rebranding in an effort to stay relevant in the modern age of digital debauchery; “The political and sexual climate of 1953, the year Hugh Hefner introduced Playboy to the world, bears almost no resemblance to today,” said Playboy Enterprises CEO Scott Flanders.
In 2015, handheld devices brought in most of PornHub.com’s traffic, with 52.9% of visits coming from phones, 10.8% from tablets and only 36.3% from desktop computers. That means men aren’t just holding their penises while jerking off.
Ian Kerner, Ph.D, nationally recognized sexuality counselor, sex therapist and author, says technology-assisted self-love could be changing the physical action of how men masturbate. He calls it “opportunistic masturbation”: “Men no longer need to plan maturbation; an impulsive turn-on strikes and they can go masturbate with the aid of technology, pretty much wherever.”
Technology-assisted self-love could be changing the physical action of how men masturbate.
As Patrick confirms, “I use technology 95% of the time I masturbate. My phone means that at any given time with the right amount of privacy I can have a nice, mind-clearing orgasm without having to conjure up that old stand-by mental image. [Writer’s note: Thanks, babe.] When I was young I could masturbate to an erotica story on the Internet or a Victoria’s Secret catalog because that’s what was around. But now, left to my own devices, I’ll scan through half a dozen to a dozen porn scenes before I actually orgasm.”
With hand-held devices, everything men need to jack off is readily available in the pockets and flies of their jeans, providing them with a hyper-stimulating cycle in short, high-impact sessions. As PornHub.com reports, the average visit to their site lasts just over nine minutes — far from the 30 minute average it takes most women to orgasm via direct stimulation and hardly enough time to light some candles before or snuggle after — a disconnect from partnered sexual experiences that could be causing more harm than good.
“Technology-assisted opportunistic masturbation can cause stress or have a negative effect on the libido for real-life, partnered sex,” says Kerner. “Men aren’t using their imaginations or thinking about real people in their lives like their girlfriends or exes — they’re not tapping into their own erotic database. There’s something that gets lost when you’re masturbating to people like porn performers, who aren’t personally or intimately relevant to you.”
Oxytocin, sometimes known as “the bonding molecule,” is just one of the many neurochemicals that floods the brain during sex and orgasm. It chemically forges emotions, feelings of attachment and even love, but when we whack it to the web it’s kind of like hitting a tennis ball into the woods rather than to a partner. That opportunity for bonding doesn’t have a recipient.
“Orgasm is a reward,” Kerner elaborates. “Having an orgasm activates the reward centers in the brain and so the more you can activate that in response to erotic memories or fantasies involving your partner, the more you’re strengthening that sexual connection to that person, which is getting lost in the age of technology. Amongst the clients I see, the low-desire male isn’t the male who isn’t interested in sex, he’s the male who’s masturbating to porn but not having sex with his wife or girlfriend.”
But certainly having easy access to porn, sexual pleasure, and self-love isn’t all bad, right?
“It’s my opinion that the benefits of porn far outweigh the downsides,” says Kerner. “I believe there is also a real positive role of porn and that masturbation is super healthy in many ways, including helping people regulate their moods or cope with depression or anxiety. Porn can also help people get in touch with their unique erotic templates, experiment with different tastes and fetishes without the real-live risk, and couples can watch porn together to keep their sex lives lively.”
So in a present-day fueled by Instagram and Snapchat, how can we ensure that our porn-saturated Insta-gasms aren’t inadvertently causing our real, partnered sex lives to snap?
“If men masturbate a lot, they can develop a very idyoscnractic masturbation pattern where they’re stimulating themselves the same way every time in very specific way. This can result in having a hard time reaching orgasms with a partner so it can be good to take a break from masturbating, switching hands, or switching techniques entirely,” advises Kerner.
“Do you miss the days of sneaking Playboys?” I ask Patrick as we pull into the driveway.
“No. My buddies and I used to trade magazines and the pages would be all stuck together,” he says. “Like, why are you doing that? You’re ruining the porno! At least you know your friends aren’t jizzing on your phone.”
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Yana Tallon-Hicks is a pleasure-positive sex writer and educator living in Northampton, Ma. where she teaches consent-based sex education to teens and college students. Yana received her undergraduate degree in LGBTQ studies and sex education from Hampshire College, worked at feminist sex toy shops Good Vibrations and She Bop, and has had sex on the brain ever since. She geeks out about lube, practices often to achieve perfection and just wants you to have an orgasm. Her written sexpertise has appeared in many national publications and can be found weekly in her sex column, the V-Spot.
