Perhaps you’ve heard that if you (ahem) “enjoy” too many adult videos, it’ll make arousal difficult. Well, sex researcher Nicole Prause is here to tell you — that’s a gosh durn lie.
Prause studies human sexual behavior, addiction and the physiology of sexual response, and in a recent article, she wrote, “Seven independent labs have been unable to find an association between time spent viewing sex films and experiencing more erectile difficulties with a partner.”
Looking at previous sex studies, Prause found that sexual images and sex itself activate entirely different regions of the brain. For example, being touched by another person stimulates brain regions associated with socializing and sex. Watching someone else being stroked or stroking yourself doesn’t.
“Pictures of sex are not sex,” she writes. That is, the mere watching of adult videos can’t possibly account for a person’s lack of interest or physical response to sex. Rather, she found that masturbation is likely to be the cause for men’s non-arousal.
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This may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s an important distinction because few studies on smut-viewing and sexual response actually take masturbation into account — they assume that triple-X films alone are to blame for lower arousal. But if you watch Man-Slammerz in a lab without touching yourself, you’d probably run home to hump your honey(s) afterwards. Watching alone wouldn’t reduce your desire.
Related: GOP Platform Is Going After Internet Pornography, Which It Calls A “Public Health Crisis”
But you know what does affect your ability to get hard? Alcohol, medications, tiredness and anxiety, and a lack of sexual interest in partner(s). In fact, all of these often compel people to watch adult videos in the first place, she says, and all of them affect your ability to stay erect during intercourse. If your partner values non-penetrative sex or blames you for not getting hard — projecting their own insecurities on you — that’ll affect your wood as well.
She quotes Olympic fencer Jason Rogers:
“Most men think they should be able to snap their fingers, immediately get an erection, and perform like a champ. But sex is a complicated physiological and psychological process and virtually all men have struggled with this in the past. So cut yourself some slack.”
Blaming adult videos for a lack of arousal may actually drive some men away from them, when videos could in fact help them better understand their bodies, fantasies and sexual responses.
Rather than blaming smut for a lack of arousal, Prause says, “having open conversations about sex, admitting unusual sexual preferences, finding a partner who is supportive, and exploring fears about our own sexual body” can all help guys better understand their bodies much better than merely avoiding another viewing of Latex Bottomz Vol. 4.
jomax36
Who doesn’t watch porn. It helps all around. Never understand these bullshit studies. It’s a crock.
CenterRight
There are plenty of gays who don’t watch the disgusting porn. This so-called study or studies are so biased that they are probably funded by the porn industry. Porn addiction is well documented and once you are hooked, you want something increasingly darker and sleazier. And what about the minors who are exposed to this harmful and destructive stuff? The laws should be strengthened to verify the age of the porn watchers with a valid credit card.
Juanjo
CenterRight, as usual, is center wrong.
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
Am fairly certain Centeright’s issues also have issues….
Toofie
And I think we’re all fairly sure who Centeright really is..
Gadfeal
Porn can be useful or not. However, when the only exposure of intimacy to an impressionable or fragile mind, it can lead to self-doubt and implausible expectations of physical attractiveness in oneself and others.
You only have to look at some of the “specifications” on hook-up websites; they look more like shopping lists than a search for human intimacy. When the average US male’s erection is just under 6 inches but a lot of “profiles” search criteria are for a “minimum” of 8 inches i.e. in the top fraction of 1% of the population, it means that at least 99 men out of 100 are excluded!
Then, your only course of action is to masturbate and have no intimacy.
Creamsicle
Hook up and even dating apps have always read like a shopping list for what people THINK they want in a sex partner. I agree that a lot of it seems to do with how easy it is to access porn now, or at least, it’s become noticeably worse now that porn is ridiculously easy to access.
JJinAus
Smut? Says something about the writer. I would question the content.
Heywood Jablowme
There’s the problem, mentioned above in comments, of real-life sex partners usually being not as perfect as those on screen. But there’s probably only ONE practical/physical problem with too much porn-watching. That’s the “death grip” – written about a lot by Dan Savage (yeah I know, but he’s right on this). If a young guy watches porn incessantly for a few years, and that’s all he knows about “sex,” and then he attempts sex IRL, and all he knows is the “death grip,” he may have trouble functioning with real-life people.
radiooutmike
Well, The only issue with porn I think is if it makes you ignore your partner.