The Telangana government and courts in the state might be trying their best to restrict access to porn with the help of mobile networks and internet service providers but it seems that porn-addiction is here to stay. A recently conducted research to study internet addiction on a small sample of college students from the city, which revealed that more than half of the male students were addicted to surfing porn on a regular basis.
The report, "A Study on Internet Addiction among Young Adults in Hyderabad", based on men and women between the ages of 18-25, found that while no women were found to be addicted to "cybersexual addiction", 57 per cent of men conceded to having regular access to porn. This is significant because of the high rate of access to porn sites in India is despite the blocking of major porn sites in the country.
The study notes that internet addiction can have several effects like isolation from the environment which leads to social, emotional and intellectual maladjustments. Internet-addicted victims have also reported to be having higher depression, anxiety and stress levels compared to non-victims. However, the effects of "cybersexual addiction" are more tangible and fast-catching up with millennial adults.
The effects of it are far-ranging, with other studies, claiming that they found strong links between eating disorder symptoms and porn usage. In simpler words, it found that women whose male partners watch pornography on a regular basis are more likely to report symptoms of an eating disorder.
Other effects of internet porn induction include erectile dysfunction. In this now viral TedX video called "The great porn experiment" by physiology teacher Gary Wilson, Wilson showed that a heavy-internet porn user's brain "rewires" itself which then reflects during real sex.
"Researchers haven't asked porn users about the symptoms of internet addiction. Arousal addiction symptoms are easily mistaken for ADHD, social anxiety, depression and others. Now healthcare experts often assume these conditions are primary. However, these are causes of addiction, not the effect of addiction. These men are often medicated, without understanding internet addiction," Wilson said in the video which has been watched 11 million times.
"However men do not understand that they can change these things simply by changing their behaviour. All addiction including, porn, share the same brain changes and molecular switch. However, when scientists studied former porn addicts, they found that these brain changes were reversing themselves. That is because the brain is flexible," he added, implying that porn addiction and its effects are curable through behavioural change.
