How Porn Can Be Bad For Your Sexual Health

Those who prefer the theoretical sex of pornography to the real one, run the risk of ending up in a complicated trap. Consuming pornography leads to difficulties in real sex: a study just presented at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association in Boston explains it.

While working on the survey, the researchers examined 312 men, aged between 20 and 40, who were in a San Diego urology clinic for the treatment of erectile dysfunction. What emerged is that 26% said they saw pornography less than once a week, 25% once or twice a week, 21% three to five times a week, 56% a week ten times, 4% over 11 times a week. Of all the participants, 72% mainly used the computer or smartphone (62%) as a tool for viewing videos. Women were also found using pornography: a smaller survey revealed that about 40% of women watch hardcore videos.

The key figure is that 3.4% of men said they preferred to masturbate in front of pornographic images compared to a real sexual relationship and the researchers found a statistical relationship between porn addiction and sexual dysfunction.

“The organic causes of erectile dysfunction in this age group are extremely low, so this phenomenon has to be explained in another way,” explains researcher Matthew Christman, “The use of pornography can be a piece of the puzzle”. Pornography consumers would suffer from a sort of “addiction biology”, in which sexual behavior acts on the brain like a drug, activating a reward system similar to that triggered by cocaine and methamphetamines, which can lead to recurrent behavior.

In particular, it emerges that pornography on the Internet exerts a stimulus so strong as to raise the threshold of “tolerance” to uncensored images in people and create dependence similar to that of narcotics, lowering the capacity in their sexual response. Basically the more you consume pornography online, the more you risk erectile dysfunction when faced with moments of sex with a partner, given that to get excited properly you need a load of pornographic type images. Contact with pornographic images also risks creating unrealistic expectations in the young and inexperienced, a sort of “libido anxiety” that occurs when the sex of the real world does not match the one intercepted online: comparing the performances seen in hard videos to one’s own can generate states of anxiety, explains Dr. Joseph Alukal of New York University.