Compliments of the season, everyone! We are in the US for the holidays.

The main news we have for you is about The Reward Foundation’s filing of a legal brief, known as an amicus brief, to the Supreme Court of the United States of America (SCOTUS). In response to the Pelicot trial, the BBC has produced a good article about how internet pornography has normalised extreme porn and shaped male desire. We have a short video by a top medical expert, Dr Doan, who explains an important research paper that our late colleague Gary Wilson co-authored about pornography and sexual dysfunction. Last but not least, we have a secret gift for all our readers and their friends. See below for more details.

If there are any other subjects you’d like us to cover or wish to give us feedback on, please contact me at: [email protected].

Warmest wishes,

Mary Sharpe, CEO

It’s rare indeed for a Scots lawyer to be able to contribute to a court case in the US, especially to such an important one against the pornography industry, but that’s what we are doing. Mary Sharpe, our CEO, drew on her experience of working at the EC Commission in Brussels on product liability law to inform the brief. The Reward Foundation is one of 27 organisations to have filed an amicus [curiae] brief to the Supreme Court of the United States of America in support of the Attorney General of Texas. An amicus brief means a note lodged ‘as a friend of the court’. See the full amicus brief here. The court hearing will be in 2025. You can read the health arguments in our blog.

The pornography industry body, represented by the Free Speech Coalition, is appealing to the Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn the very reasonable age verification law passed in the State of Texas. The law seeks to require pornography companies to have in place ‘effective’ age verification mechanisms to prove that potential users are 18 years or over. In this way it reduces the risk of children stumbling upon freely available hardcore online pornography. The Texas law was supported almost unanimously by both Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature.

Here are some highlights from our brief:

“Unfettered Access to Pornography Causes Irreparable Damage to Children’s Psychological and Physical Health

Pornography use has harmful health effects for many consumers. The negative health effects are now codified in the International Classification of Diseases – 11th Revision (“ICD-11”) published by the World Health Organization (“WHO”) in 2018, [called ‘compulsive sexual behaviour disorder] and became generally adopted by member states on 1 January 2022 (World Health Organization, 2022).

…In other words, the WHO made it clear that pornography use and masturbation are typical behaviors that can be part of this condition. Research indicates that more than 80% of people seeking treatment for CSBD [compulsive sexual behaviour disorder] have a pornography-related issue. …

…Sexual dysfunction is increasingly common among teenagers and young adults. They can be aroused by hardcore pornography but not by real people. The arousal system (i.e., the autonomic nervous system) becomes desensitized over time and needs stronger material. This means that the lesser stimulation of a real person does not register as strong enough in the brain of a person with problematic pornography use to create sexual arousal. This is a form of sexual conditioning. A young user doesn’t need to have an addiction to develop sexual dysfunctions.

Professor Gunther De Win, a urologist who specializes in adolescent sexual health, has done research on erectile dysfunction in adolescents:

… “Of the participants who had started masturbating to porn at a very early age (<10 years), 58% (11/19) had some form of ED (P=.01), compared with 20.7% (61/295) in the group who started at 10-12 years old, 20.8% (173/831) in the group who started at 13-14 years old, 18.6% (97/521) in the group who started at 15-17 years old, and 24% (17/70) in the group who started at an age of 18 years or older…

Conclusions: This prevalence of ED in young men is alarming high, and the results of this study suggest a significant association with problematic pornography consumption.” (Emphasis added)

…Recent Italian research shows that problematic pornography use was associated with higher levels of anxiety, depression, stress, loneliness, and suicide ideation, as well as lower life satisfaction. Mujde Altin, et al., Problematic Pornography Use, Mental Health, and Suicidality among Young Adults. INT. J. ENVIRON. RES. PUBLIC HEALTH 21.9 (2024): 1228, https://tinyurl.com/5n8p83mz . Gender comparison analysis revealed significantly higher scores for problematic pornography use and loneliness among men, while women scored higher in stress, anxiety, and life satisfaction.

In sum, Internet pornography is not a safe product, especially for children…”

In the French medieval town of Avignon, the burghers are reeling from the trial of Dominique Pelicot. He is the man who drugged his wife and invited over 50 men to his home over a 10-year period to rape her as she lay unconscious, and filmed it all.

On the BBC website an article by Louise Chunn called “How the internet normalised extreme porn – and shaped male desire” examines the impact of the Pelicot case. She looks at how unfettered access to internet pornography in recent years has shaped men’s [and women’s] sexual desire.

Excerpt: “According to a survey of UK online users in January 2024, almost one in 10 respondents aged between 25 and 49 years reported watching porn most days, the great majority of them male.

Twenty-four-year-old university graduate Daisy told me that most people she knows watch porn, including her. She prefers to use a feminist site whose search filters include “passionate” and “sensual”, as well as “rough”. But some of her male friends say they no longer watch porn “as they couldn’t have a nice time having sex because of watching too much porn when they were just kids“.

A 2023 study for the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, found that a quarter of 16 to 21-year-olds first saw pornography on the internet while still at primary school…

There is a dark borderline where a very basic form of heterosexual male desire – (or the primal urge to have sex with a woman, or women, in the most uncomplicated manner) – can grow into a shared endeavour, creating an esprit de corps of boundary-pushing that may pay little heed or care to the female experience.

This perhaps explains why an OnlyFans performer, Lily Phillips, recently drew a huge queue of participants in her quest to have sex with 100 men in one day.

The tendency to objectify women may in some cases also develop into a desire to annihilate the whole question of female desire, let alone agency.

Obviously male desire takes many forms, most of an entirely healthy nature, but it has traditionally been constrained by cultural limits. Now those limits have shifted radically in the UK and elsewhere in the West, and the underlying conviction that the realisation of desire is an act of self-liberation amounts to a potent and sometimes troubling combination.”

In this short video, Dr Doan, explains a very important research paper from 2016 called “Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports”. For background, Dr Doan invited our late colleague and honorary research officer Gary Wilson, author of Your Brain on Porn-Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction to join him and six other US Navy doctors to write this paper. It has been extremely popular with over 227,000 views putting it the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric.

The porn industry hates it and went to a lot of trouble over an extended period of time, unsuccessfully, to have it taken down. They made false accusations against the authors even reporting them to their respective medical boards in an attempt to cause maximum disruption and intimidate them into not writing further about this widespread phenomenon. The paper is an early warning that pornography may be causing harm- how heavy porn use can lead to sexual dysfunction, and can be reversed if a user is able to quit. There’s no “moral incongruence” here or “performance anxiety,” or any other red herring the porn industry is desperate to blame. Just as smoking can cause lung cancer, so can compulsive pornography use cause sexual dysfunction in some users. The good news is, it’s reversible for most people.

We are delighted to announce that our online course, “Problematic Pornography Use” is now available for free. For the last 6 years our course has been accredited by the Royal College of General Practitioners in London. The recent online version was scrutinised and passed by 5 senior clinicians. Since September the RCGP has changed its business model and no longer accredits such training. The course is still valid for 6 hours of self-reported Continuing Professional Development units. In the New Year we will be adding an additional module on safeguarding in schools to help teachers. It is the only online training course on this subject in the world.

With this course, you can transform your ability to work with people whose lives are affected by the physical, mental and social impact of pornography. Learn best practices from experts on how to overcome problematic pornography use; discover diagnostic tools from the most simple to the most sophisticated depending on your level of familiarity with such, and find out about treatment options and help. There are articles, quizzes and over 200 research papers in support of the topics.

This course is especially relevant for GPs, nurses, social workers, mental health professionals, psychologists, counsellors, criminal justice professionals, guidance teachers, school and university counsellors, sexual health services workers, psychosexual therapists, youth workers, pharmacists, and religious ministers. It’s suitable for parents too. With its easy modular layout, you can dip in and out of the course at your leisure.

Tis the season to be jolly,
fa la la la la la la la la!