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About the Author
Joseph Burgo, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist with over 40 years of experience, specializing in narcissism, shame, and psychological defense mechanisms. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including The Narcissist You Know and Why Do I Do That?, and has written for mainstream outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Psychology Today.
Our evolutionary past endowed us with a reward system in which behaviors that increase the odds of passing along our genes to offspring via sexual intercourse will give us pleasure. For men, that means genital stimulation leading to arousal and ejaculation during intercourse will release neurotransmitters that produce feelings of pleasure. Relying on the same reward system, men who self-stimulate and ejaculate in the absence of an available sex partner will also experience pleasure.
In other words, men masturbate because it feels good.
Men also masturbate to relieve tension. When surveyed, men consistently rank stress relief among their primary motivations for masturbating. According to one study that appeared in Psychology Today, as much as 80 percent of men report masturbating as a form of stress relief. Masturbation as self-soothing behavior has also been observed in non-human primates and other mammals. While we can’t know the exact psychological motivations of chimpanzees who masturbate in captivity, researchers have long assumed that masturbation in captive primates is directly connected to the stress of confinement.
Men and other male primates masturbate to relieve stress and calm feelings of anxiety.
In the wild, low-status males masturbate more frequently than high-status males. Lower-ranking male rhesus macaques mate less frequently than their dominant counterparts and, on days when mating doesn’t occur, are significantly more likely to masturbate. Among a group of bearded capuchins studied in the wild, all five of the masturbation events observed were performed exclusively by the lowest-ranking male in a colony of seventeen. It is their position on the dominance hierarchy that limits their access to females and drives the behavior.
Men and other male primates masturbate when they lack access to mates, and it is their rank on the status hierarchy that determines that access.
Research suggests that among non-human primates, when a male observes conspecifics copulate, it can trigger masturbatory activity directly, implying that such stimuli heighten arousal sufficiently to initiate the behavior. Human males respond to visual sexual stimuli in the same way, but rather than waiting for a chance observation of others having sex, they deliberately seek out pornography in order to increase arousal, intensify orgasm, and maximize their pleasure.
Men watch pornography because it heightens their feelings of pleasure during masturbation and makes for more satisfying orgasms.
With me so far?
To assert that sex-induced pleasure in the service of procreation is “good” and self-pleasuring “bad” goes beyond neuroscience, and concerns the variable rules human civilizations establish to regulate sexuality within the differing social systems we inhabit. And to state the obvious, those rules usually reflect an underlying moral code. In the early pages of this essay, I’ve tried to describe the reasons why men masturbate without reference to such codes.
I invite you to pause for a moment and examine your reactions to what you’ve read so far. You might be feeling an urge to object though you don’t have a readily identifiable reason. Maybe your own moral code has been activated by the word “pornography” with accompanying feelings of disapproval or disgust. The idea of men masturbating in front of computer screens running pornographic videos tends to trigger negative reactions in many people.
I believe this same visceral response drives many of the recent books condemning pornography and its supposed harms. This is not to accuse anyone of dishonesty. But when we begin with a strong emotional response such as disgust, alarm, or moral concern, confirmation bias is difficult to avoid. Without necessarily realizing it, we become more receptive to evidence that confirms what we already feel, and less receptive to evidence that complicates it.
In The Righteous Mind and his broader research on moral psychology, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt demonstrated that moral conclusions typically precede the reasoning used to justify them. We feel something to be wrong and then go in search of an argument; the rational case is constructed after the fact to support an intuition already firmly in place. He called this phenomenon “moral dumbfounding”—the experience of feeling certain that something is wrong while being unable to articulate a coherent reason why it should be so. The tell, in Haidt’s research, is disgust, particularly relevant around violations of purity and sanctity, which is to say, around sex.
Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation is currently the most prominent popular account of how the brain’s reward system drives addictive behavior, and it illustrates Haidt’s point with particular clarity. Lembke is a Stanford psychiatrist writing from within the neuroscientific tradition, which gives her conclusions an air of clinical authority. Yet near the end of her first chapter, having established the dopamine framework, she pivots abruptly to “over-consumption” and observes that the “world’s natural resources are rapidly diminishing.” It’s a remarkable sentence to find in a book ostensibly about brain chemistry. What it reveals is that the addiction framework is functioning as a vehicle for a broader moral anxiety about pleasure, indulgence, and excess. It has less to do with dopamine receptors and more with her belief that people are consuming too much of the wrong things and ought to stop.
This is not merely a theoretical observation. A substantial body of peer-reviewed research has examined the relationship between moral attitudes and perceived pornography addiction, and the findings are striking. Across three studies, researchers found a robust positive relationship between religiosity and perceived addiction to pornography, mediated by moral disapproval of pornography use. Crucially, these results persisted even when actual levels of pornography use were controlled, meaning that moral disapproval predicted feeling addicted to pornography regardless of how much pornography subjects actually watched.
Researchers in this field use the term “moral incongruence” to describe this mechanism: individuals who morally disapprove of pornography but engage in its use experience a discrepancy between their ideal and perceived selves, which can result in psychological distress. This distress may lead them to label themselves as addicted even in the absence of dysregulated consumption. In other words, the feeling of being addicted to pornography tells us more about a person’s moral attitudes toward pornography than it does about their actual patterns of use.
The books that have popularized the pornography addiction argument illustrate this pattern well. Your Brain on Porn by Gary Wilson, Pornocracy by Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel, and The Porn Myth by Matthew Fradd all arrive at the same destination (pornography is harmful and must be condemned) by different routes.
Matthew Fradd’s The Porn Myth is an explicitly Catholic text, and its conclusion that pornography is sinful is never seriously in doubt.
In Wilson’s case, the moral destination was declared in advance: while writing his ostensibly scientific account of pornography addiction, Wilson was simultaneously teaching Karezza, a practice based on the belief that avoiding orgasm and intense sexual pleasure leads to greater spiritual and physical wellbeing. Wilson had no scientific training or academic qualifications and, according to historian Brian M. Watson, had made a career “peddling pseudoscience.” Wilson’s widely viewed TEDx talk on porn addiction was ultimately removed from the official TED site but is still available on YouTube, with a warning that it “contains several assertions that are not supported by academically respected studies in medicine and psychology.”
The same dynamic is at work in Pornocracy, though Bartosch’s framework is feminist rather than religious. As the Irish Times observed of the book, it “announces itself as an investigation into the harms of pornography but delivers agenda in drag as scholarship, a book built from contradiction, moral panic and logical fallacies rather than research.” The same criticism, I would argue, applies to the genre as a whole. Whatever their differences in emphasis, neuroscientific, religious, or feminist, these books share a common architecture: the moral conclusion comes first, and the argument is then constructed around it.
The preferred scientific vehicle for that conclusion is the language of addiction. Pornography use, these authors argue, hijacks the brain’s dopamine reward system in the same way that drugs do and is therefore an addiction like any other. But this framing significantly mischaracterizes the true nature of addiction. In classical addiction, as the neuroscientific literature and the DSM-5 establishes, the brain’s dopamine system undergoes measurable structural changes in response to a substance. Tolerance develops as dopamine receptors are downregulated, requiring escalating doses to achieve the same effect. Abrupt cessation produces withdrawal: a distinct cluster of negative physical and psychological symptoms driven by the brain’s attempt to restore homeostatic balance. These are not merely behavioral patterns but neurological adaptations with identifiable mechanisms.
According to one study, substance use disorders are characterized specifically by pharmacological tolerance and withdrawal, alongside impaired control and social or lifestyle impairment. The fact that dopamine is involved in both drug addiction and the pleasurable experience of watching pornography does not make them equivalent phenomena, any more than it makes falling in love or eating a good meal an addiction; both of these also release dopamine. By this logic, any experience that activates our evolved reward system becomes a candidate for the addiction label. The label then loses all diagnostic meaning.
A related argument, prominent in Pornocracy and elsewhere, holds that pornography users inevitably seek out ever more extreme content over time, driven by the algorithm and by a growing tolerance to milder material, and that this escalation constitutes evidence of addiction. But the evidence here is, at best, equivocal. Peer-reviewed researchers themselves acknowledge that whether escalating patterns of pornography use reflect genuine addictive mechanisms “remains contentious,” with scholars both acknowledging and refuting the legitimacy of tolerance to pornographic stimuli. More fundamentally, seeking novelty is not the same thing as developing tolerance. The fact that pornography users prefer to watch something new rather than re-watch the same video they saw last week is no more evidence of tolerance than my preference for a new television series over re-watching Game of Thrones for the fifth time. Novelty-seeking is a basic feature of human curiosity; it is wired into the same reward system that makes us into explorers, readers, and travelers. To label it pathological when it occurs in a sexual context, while ignoring it everywhere else, is to reveal that the concern is not really with the neuroscience at all.
These authors consistently blur the distinction between addiction and compulsion, which are not interchangeable terms. Addiction, as we have seen, is defined by neurochemical dependence; by tolerance, withdrawal, and escalating consumption driven by the brain’s adaptation to a substance. Compulsion, by contrast, is a psychologically driven behavior rooted in anxiety, shame, and emotional pain; it functions as a coping mechanism for intolerable internal states. The World Health Organization drew precisely this distinction when it classified compulsive sexual behavior disorder in the ICD-11 not among addictive and substance use disorders, but among impulse control disorders. The evidence does not support the claim that its underlying mechanisms are equivalent to those of substance addiction.
Research consistently finds that men with compulsive sexual behavior show elevated levels of shame and guilt, and high rates of comorbidity with anxiety and mood disorders. This suggests that the behavior is best understood as a response to psychological distress rather than a symptom of neurological hijacking. According to one study, stress levels are positively correlated with compulsive sexual behavior; the sexual behavior functions as a form of relief from that distress, however temporary and however costly.
In other words, if a man is watching large amounts of pornography and masturbating frequently, the most clinically useful question is not “what has the algorithm done to his brain?” but “what is he trying to escape, and why does he need such relief?” As Jason Winters, a lecturer in human sexuality at the University of British Columbia, has written, “psychological problems and mental disorders can lead to problematic porn use as a means to cope and self-medicate”—not the other way around.
What is a man trying to escape when he turns compulsively to pornography, and why does he need so much relief? The answer, I would suggest, lies not in the architecture of pornography websites but in the conditions of men’s lives. Do we have reason to believe that men in our culture suffer from elevated levels of shame, stress, and status anxiety? After decades of hearing about #MeToo, the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, male privilege, and rape culture on campus, is there reason to believe that men today seek out pornography not only because it is more readily available but because they feel bad about being men?
In 2023, American men died by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. Among young men between the ages of 18 and 23, two-thirds report feeling that no one really knows them. Richard Reeves, in Of Boys and Men, published by the Brookings Institution and hardly a manifesto of the men’s rights movement, documents in careful detail how boys and men are falling behind educationally, economically, and socially across the developed world. These statistics describe a group under considerable stress, struggling with shame, and in urgent need of relief.
The books I have discussed in this essay aren’t wrong to notice that many men watch a great deal of pornography. They’re wrong about the reasons why they do it.
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Two things I think the author has mischaracterized—the feminist critique of pornography and escalating porn use. The author describes the feminist critique of pronography as a moral judgment. That pronography is morally wrong. It is not just feminists who know that pornography is inherently harmful to women and children. It is harmful to those involved in making pornography and is harmful to women because it normalizes violence against women. That is a documented fact, not a moral judgment, though the facts may certainly lead people to adopt the moral position that pornography is wrong.
And another factual misrepresentation by the author is that men are simply watching new or different pronography, as a desire for novelty. Not true. The pronography of today is categorically more violent, and violent toward women and children, than pornography of 15 or 20 years ago. And again, men's documented use of pornography does show not just novelty seeking on a level plane of violence, but rather more violent, hardcore porn viewing over time. These two mischaracterizations by the author that porn use by men for masturbtory enhancement is a benign evoltuionary phenomenon makes the point about masturbation but misses the broader implications of porn by a mile
The piece has a serious logical flaw. Variety is not the same as escalation. I read many books and watch many TV shows with variety, but not escalation. The author should not be so dismissive of the desensitization argument. I would argue that the specific cases being described in that passage are unambiguously desenzitization. Variety is different from escalation.