It’s the 17th day of the movement control order (MCO). You’re bored out of your mind after having binge-watched “The Witcher” on Netflix in record time while couched in Oreo dust.

So you hastily look at your door to make sure it’s locked. Then you click on the incognito tab on your Mozilla Firefox browser and spend the next hour helping yourself to a veritable buffet of unclothed bodies performing unspeakable acts.

I’m speaking, obviously, about pornography. It’s the elephant in the room in the lives of many today under the rule of our month-long partial lockdown. But unlike most other elephants in the room, porn is often not spoken about – not openly, at least.

Pornhub, the world’s largest porn site, has jumped on this opportunity and started offering all its premium content for free to ensure its viewers don’t go without pornographic content that keeps their hearts full and testicles empty. Ah, what did we do to deserve such generosity?

The fact that most porn sites are blocked in Malaysia hasn’t stopped our ingenious netizens from finding ways to flout the restriction – just as many are doing with the MCO.

And according to a report last week quoting Pornhub, there has been a spike in the number of people worldwide turning to porn, with Malaysians ranked fourth when it comes to searching for “coronavirus porn”. Don’t even ask me what that is.

But I have some bad news for those who visit porn sites. In recent years, more and more data is upending the widely-held view that watching porn is a fairly harmless time sap. Sure it may be a waste of time, but little more, many may think.

They are wrong.

Pornography, like cocaine and tobacco is a superstimuli. You may ask how I can lump porn together with things as insidious as drugs and cigarettes.

That’s because the desire to consume them is dictated by a hormone called dopamine, which creates a feeling of pleasure and motivates us to act in a certain way or to go after things.

See a shiny new BMW in the showroom? Dopamine rushes in. Catch a glimpse of the co-worker you have a crush on? Dopamine rushes in. See some ice-cream on a hot day? Dopamine rushes in.

But the problem with porn is, watching the cavalcade of men and women who are at your disposal at the click of a button leads to a dopamine overload. And over time, you would need more and more stimulation to get the same dopaminergic high.

This means the type and variety of porn needs to constantly be ratcheted up to achieve the same amount of pleasure. A major side-effect of this is that people may enjoy real-life sex less.

This could be deeply distressing to your partner. And if you don’t have one, a contributing factor to that could be your use of porn, through which you vicariously and virtually partake in sexual activity without actually having to be intimate and form a real connection with a significant other – something that may be difficult but is deeply rewarding.

Psychiatrist Norman Doidge writes in his book “The Brain That Changes Itself” that his patients who watched porn experienced “increasing difficulty in being turned on by their actual sexual partners, though they still considered them attractive”. In order to get turned on, these patients had to fantasise about porn scenes.

And according to Simone Kühn, psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, men who watch large amounts of porn have smaller reward systems in their brain.

Reward systems are neural structures in the brain that induce pleasure in order to regulate and control behaviour. Kühn says: “That could mean that regular consumption of pornography more or less wears out your reward system.”

Oh, but it gets worse. Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction (PIED) is a condition that’s afflicting an increasing number of millennials and Gen Z’ers – the first generation to grow up with an overdose of unending internet porn.

This condition makes it difficult to have or maintain an erection during sex due to a lack of stimulation caused by heavy porn use that has desensitised the person to real-life sex. This is said to partly explain why people in many parts of the world now have less sex than their counterparts did a generation ago.

According to researchers Jean Twenge, Ryne Sherman and Brooke Wells, Americans in the early 2010s had 15% less sex compared with their counterparts in the late 1990s. This trend is apparent in both the UK and Australia.

The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles conducted in 2013 found that the British were having sex just under five times a month, down from 6.2 to 6.3 times a month in the year 2000.

And according to the Australian National Survey of Sexual Activity, Australians in heterosexual relationships were having sex 1.4 times a week in 2014 – down from 1.8 times a week just 10 years prior.

This is in spite of the fact that our culture today is a lot more liberal and accepting of sexual activity than previous generations have been.

In fact, things are so bad in Japan that according to the Japanese Family Planning Association, 46% of women and 25% of men there between the ages of 16 and 25 despise sex. And this in a country that is notorious for its porn industry which is wildly imaginative and, to many, utterly perplexing.

The situation in Japan could be a sign of what may come for the rest of the world – an increasingly sexless population living in an increasingly hypersexualised world.

I’m reminded of a scene from “Demolition Man”, the Sylvester Stallone-starrer which depicts a future where people don’t have actual sex but virtual-reality aided sex. Unfortunately, it looks like the world is headed in that direction – and widespread porn use is the first step.

Oh what a sad world that would be.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.