Jon’s not alone in his love of porn. Statistics are superfluous – we all know it, don’t we? – but here are some anyway: 97% of boys and 80% of girls who responded to a University of East London survey targeting those aged between 16 and 20 said they had viewed porn. In America, one in three women regularly watch porn and 70% of men aged 18 to 24 visit porn sites at least once a month. (And the English-speaking West isn’t even pornography’s most enthusiastic market – that honour goes to Pakistan.)
The question is: does it matter? If we’re all getting our kicks and having a good time, what’s the problem? “It’s a disconnection from what’s really in front of you,” says Gordon-Levitt, who directed, wrote and stars in the film. “Rather than engaging with a unique individual and listening to what the other has to say, right at this moment, we put people in boxes with labels. We objectify each other.”
The consequences of this are worse than you might think. The thin end of the wedge is less enjoyment during sex. Jon’s dissatisfaction with real life sex is something he has in common with a lot of habitual porn users. In his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, the psychiatrist Norman Doidge writes about a phenomenon he began to notice among his male patients in the mid 1990s. They watched porn – “everybody does,” they told Doidge – and were experiencing “increasing difficulty in being turned on by their actual sexual partners, though they still considered them attractive.” They found themselves having to fantastise about porn scenes to get turned on.