By: Stuart Billingsly

Sexual anorexia is a term that refers to a man’s inability to get an erection in any sexual context without the aid or supplement of porn—to which in many cases it’s entirely solitary. And scientists have found that the number of men suffering from sexual anorexia have increased dramatically within the past decade.

After a couple decades of men becoming inured to the consumption of porn that promotes either violent, derogatory, deprecating, or all of the above attitudes towards women, men are now divorced further from interacting in real-life sexual situations. Studies have shown that men who started watching porn at the beginning of puberty and into young adulthood, on average, watch porn daily and can often not get aroused without it.

Porn, experts say, promotes ideals of a world where women are purely sexual creatures to be bent to the will of a man’s libido, and when men are confronted by the perceptibly daunting reality that women are more complex than their preferred sex position it often becomes harder for men to interact with women, inevitably leading them back to easy-and-accessible porn at the click of a button.

But there’s a dark side to continually and routinely watching porn: a man’s libido goes down. This is the essence of sexual anorexia. It’s a break not just with sexuality within modern culture, but rather the breakdown of gender relations and how we identify with one another. Call it a canary in a coal mine, or whatever, but sexual anorexia is indicative of a much larger problem.

We’ve divorced ourselves from certain realities about human nature. And rather than confronting said divorce from reality, many have chosen escapism routes by delving further into their delusion through the access to porn.

But it’s not a fatalistic diagnosis. Scientists have found that sexual anorexia is a reversible condition. Of course, it doesn’t come easily. In some cases, men have become mentally addicted to porn and need therapy. In other cases, i.e. the majority, it’s simply the power of will—what Nietzsche would have referred to as the will to power. The will to power, for those not familiar with Nietzsche’s teachings, is the life-affirming philosophy to not use crutches in confronting the realities of life, no matter how much we might suffer. Rather than using porn to escape the potential rejection and despair of a love life, the will to power is the acceptance of those qualities and the perseverance through them so that we may, hopefully and theoretically, become better people for it.

It’s certainly food for thought. And if you’re wanting to test if you’re addicted to porn, a common test is to see if you can go at least a week without viewing any porn. Perhaps through denying yourself the decadence of instant gratification that porn provides, you might find that you can have a meaningful relationship with the outside world, even a special someone, precisely because you are a meaningful individual.