The Pornofication of Desire: How Fantasy is Rewiring the Male Mind

Fantasy has created victims in the hundreds of millions. Porn isn’t just entertainment — it’s a medium that’s shaping minds, warping expectations, and giving rise to new forms of harm. Men whose minds have been captured by porn seem less interested in dealing with the messy reality of real connection, and more interested in finding a toy to play with to fulfil their fantasies — they have come to see women as tools for their personal gratification.

I do not think all porn is “bad” — there are beautiful representations of sex out there that also fall under the porn qualifier — but there’s a pattern of representation present in mainstream media that is negatively affecting our psyches, particularly the male mind. Porn as a fantasy is costing us dearly.

In this short essay I will offer my thoughts, not as a definitive answer to what porn is doing to men — and women — but rather as a way to explore what’s happening within the minds of men and what consequences I see unfolding before my very eyes.

How porn distorts connection

Porn doesn’t model intimacy. It is theater masquerading as pleasure. Pornography sells a performance, like the one you’d expect to find attending a play. It is incapable of imitating what human connection feels like. Early exposure to porn shapes expectations of what sex should look like.

The consequences of consumption are going largely unnoticed. It’s like eating candy every day, unaware your teeth have rotted — and no one telling you you’ve been hurting yourself. Then once you get a real opportunity to have sex you suddenly find yourself eating fruit — and thinking it is lacking.

Porn offers full control, endless novelty, and zero risk — it never asks you to be vulnerable the way sex does. There’s no negotiating, no tenderness in asking the questions necessary to understand someone’s idea of pleasure, there’s no fear of rejection, there’s no waiting, no messiness. Porn isn’t sex, but an illusion, and this illusion has been shaping our expectations and desires around sex.

When performance becomes more stimulating than presence, then real intimacy starts to feel undesirable. It is mostly men who seem to be rejecting the nature of real sex. They expect their partner to be perfect in form and remain their idea of “perfect” throughout the woman’s lifetime, like a toy without an expiration date.

Porn doesn’t teach us anything about sex — it teaches us how to see. It is training men to watch rather than feel, to take rather than ask, porn teaches a form of disconnection masked as desire. The gaze it trains is not neutral. It centers the viewer, usually male, and frames women as bodies to be used, rated, conquered. She exists for his arousal. Her desire is either secondary or irrelevant — not equal.

Her desire is framed through the eyes of what men want, not what she wants. Her boundaries and desires don’t exist. It is the man who consumes, controls, and performs. He does not listen to her. He doesn’t wonder about her desires. It is assumed that what he desires, she desires — even though most women can’t achieve orgasm from vaginal penetration and the underlying mechanics of desire for them are different.

Over time the “male gaze” becomes the default. Attention narrows. Where it lingers, and why, becomes shaped by repetition. We don’t even notice it’s happening, like a frog not noticing it’s in a pot of water brought to a boil. When the “male gaze” is the default, any opportunity for real connection becomes lost to the expectations set forth by the fantasies that lie within the mind.

A Cultural Mirror

Men have created a whole language around porn — a language that is affecting our youth and the expectations of women. I don’t blame men, the vast majority are victims of a doctrine that’s being perpetrated through the production and consumption of porn — only a small fraction of men produce it, promote it, and fight for its existence. I call this phenomenon the “commodification of sex”. These men treat sex as a market place with high value and low value goods. Sex isn’t seen as a language of intimacy, but rather as an exchange, and being sold access.

Women aren’t free of that influence. I have met women who fell for my mind and intense personality — not my skinny body, which is universally assumed to be unattractive — and learned what love really means. They found themselves on the verge of tears because it was emotionally confronting — disarming to the point of disbelief. And I think they felt this way because they themselves have come to see themselves as commodities that reduce in value over time. If they had felt worthy of love, and if they saw themselves as a soul occupying a body, they wouldn’t recoil at genuine connection. They would welcome it and revel in it.

Porn isn’t just personal, it’s deeply political. It reflects what we value and what we’re afraid of. It reveals a type of masculinity shaped by conquest, not connection. The more beautiful the woman is that you’ve managed to “bag”, the higher your status among men who share these values. It is disheartening. What woman would willingly want to be subjected to a man who doesn’t actually see her as a person — whose value disappears the minute she’s no longer physically attractive to her man, a standard that is entirely unrealistic to maintain?

Porn is a perfect reflection of the “enshittification” of everything that capitalism touches. Tech platforms are designed in the same way. Feed the dopamine receptors. Shorten the delay to gratification. Eliminate discomfort. Increase control. It’s no surprise that in such a world, human beings become a real inconvenience. Real sex requires patience, understanding, sensitivity and a willingness to face your fears and abandon control.

Porn is changing how we date

Roughly 60% of young men report not dating at all (Pew Research, 2022). I can’t make any evidence supported claims about why, but I can give you my intuitive sense of what’s driving the disinterest.

1. Men — or rather, a subset of men — have started to desire a type of sex heavily influenced by the consumption of porn, whereas women seem largely uninterested in participating in those fantasies. I don’t think young men are actually choosing not to have sex. I believe women have woken up and decided not to participate by not making themselves available at all until the problem is addressed.
2. Young men have warped expectations about what is required to “get a girlfriend” — they have internalised these expectations through the consumption of porn. They believe that standard to be unreasonably high and are therefore opting out. They believe that this standard is primarily based on looks, whereas women don’t share that view.
3. Women — in general — do have higher standards than men, but those standards are neither unreasonable nor high. They want to be treated with dignity, respect, kindness, understanding — they want to feel safe while vulnerable. They want their partner to be caring, in both how they treat others and themselves. They want a partner they feel physically attracted to. That means that they expect their partner to practice good hygiene, exercise, and have good-to-excellent self-care routines. Young men have internalised the belief that this is too much work — not because they’re incapable, but because they’ve been taught that relationships should be effortless and transactional.
4. Young men experience tremendous pressure from the socio-cultural expectation of men needing to be providers. But that narrative isn’t relevant anymore in today’s world. Women can take care of themselves just fine. Men don’t understand their place anymore — and nobody is talking to them about that. They lack drive — and now live in a world where, due to economic pressures, it’s getting more difficult to get their needs met. That pressure erases any desire to even try to improve their outlook and how they take care of themselves.

The Road Ahead

There is nothing inherently wrong with fantasy, but we are not setup to handle 24/7 access to so much sexual stimulation. The average man before the 90s saw maybe a handful of women naked in their entire lifetimes. And most of it wasn’t sexual, but rather a natural consequence of being alive. Now men have access to billions of tits and increasingly violent forms of porn at the click of a button. The average male brain has been captured by the imagination, with devastating consequences to both men and women. I think the only reasonable way forward is to become aware of the dangers of consuming porn — and tell everyone you know.

Anything you expose yourself to is programming you without your consent. And your influence on how that programming is received is limited until you are deep into adulthood, and even then, you need a certain amount of intelligence to realise it and act on it. Sex requires you to slow down, negotiate about consent and limitations, it requires a mind attuned to the present — where pleasure lives. These are practices that must be taught — and the only real teacher is experience, but in order to learn you first need a map of the terrain.

We can unlearn the stories we tell ourselves through porn by first becoming aware that the problem exists and then talk to our men (and boys) about the realities of sex and set realistic expectations. Real sex, real love, requires us to slow down, to listen, to say present. We must not abandon desire — or even the practice of capturing the beauty of sex through film — but learn to navigate the messy reality of it in the presence of another human being.