Today, online pornography reaches a vast range of people. Anyone with access to the Internet can expose themselves to more sexual stimulation than their genitals can handle.

Everyone knows how it feels to be a little pre-pubescent bucket of hormones. That being said, overexposure to vast archives of aggressive porn may leave us with more severe mental impressions than we realize.

When using pornography for stimulation, everything revolves around you. Overuse of porn may be causing sexual dysfunction in men, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Indirect sex with a screen provides high stimulation and requires no regard for anyone else. Extended use of pornography can cause an individual to get bored and seek out new, more stimulating, content. The act can become highly addictive.

Nowadays, kids often come into contact with considerable amounts of porn before engaging in real romantic relationships. Primarily, younger boys are using porn to masturbate while women often view it out of curiosity, according to The Journal of School Nursing.

As a result, kids may be using porn as a model for real world sexual partnerships.This could be causing adolescents to lack skills in creating and maintaining real romantic connections.

Heavy porn users become increasingly good at isolating their sexuality. Their sex organs become simple mechanisms to acquire pleasure and move on. Consequently, intimacy and human connection might become difficult to associated with sex, according to TED Talk The Demise of Guys.

The important thing to realize is that these issues do not stem from the porn industry itself. Rather, they come from our own attitudes and behaviors toward porn, according to Psychology Today.

I am not saying that all porn is bad.

“Porn is so varied,” said Danielle Hidalgo, assistant professor of sociology.

The question of whether porn is good or bad for your brain becomes problematic very quickly, Hidalgo said. There are simply too many factors to consider. A better question would be “what can we learn about ourselves through porn?”

People are horny and sex partners are not always readily available. Ergo, we masturbate.

Excessive masturbation, in certain forms, can affect your sexuality. Sex is a physical expression between two people, porn is an isolated fantasy.

Grant Schmieding can be reached at [email protected] or @G_Schmieding on Twitter.