It’s a good article about how motivated reasoning and cherry picking turn opinions into bad statistics.
One thing it doesn’t mention is that ubiquitous promotion and availability of ED drugs has led to recreational use that can be statistically mistaken for incidence of ED.
I suspect the real issue is often untreated diabetes or other cardiovascular stuff… that’s how they discovered viagara back in the day - they didn’t go into a lab intending to create an ED drug.
What could be causing it? Well, there are quite a few candidates: there’s evidence for correlations with obesity, diabetes, smoking, drinking, and lack of exercise, anxiety, and more; and the evidence for any of these is a lot stronger and a lot clearer than that for pornography consumption.
Based on my limited understanding of biology, CVD, downstream effects of insulin resistance, I would lean more towards environmental inputs rather than visual stimulation and psychosomatic effects. I significantly changed my environmental inputs 15 years ago and just speaking anecdotally, I've seen all the porn and do not have these described physical limitations.
I'm basically you. I am married, have been watching porn for a _long_ time, still have a good sex life and have never had any issues with ED. If anything, as I've got into my 30s, I've become even more horny than ever before! I also lift, HIIT, etc. (gym 3 times a week), am generally active, eat well, don't smoke, and I'm not overweight.
I would say the same, but recently, it became clear to me that my SO has little interest in making our sex life more interesting. Knowing that the exciting things I see in porn will probably never happen in my life has dramatically decreased my desire. The thought of sex is now poisoned by these sad and guilty thoughts that I probably would never have if it hadn't been for porn. I don't have ED, but the result is effectively the same.
It's funny how we treat all dopaminergic reward system highjackers as dangerous (e.g. drugs, food addictions, any addictions) but any critique towards pornography and you're treated like you're Amish.
Pornography should be strictly regulated, for the benefit of both the users and the "actors"
As far as I am aware, the idea that pornography "hijacks" the "dopaminergic reward" response is largely based on pseudoscience spread by the Your Brain On Porn website and their affiliates.
>There have been multiple neurotransmitters that have been implicated in addictions that range from dopamine to serotonin and now a role for glutamate and dynorphin has been elucidated.(37-38) The same has not yet been elucidated in research of pornography addiction. Further studies in this direction are warranted. Evidence regarding neurotransmitter activity in pornography addictions and substance use disorders
(39) has tended to be complementary.
Since the article I linked mentions structural MRI findings, I feel the need to point out that this does not establish any causality; furthermore, evidence of heritability of compulsive pornography use could of course suggest the causal arrow goes the other way. See also:
You will also find studies showing that dopamine agonists increased hypersexual behavior, which is rather the opposite of the suggestion that pornography use is a dopamine releasing activity (usually, the brain wants to suppress the effects of a drug!). Other studies show that naloxone (opioid antagonist) decreases pornography use. Dopamine is a stimulating neurotransmitter, and most people would not report feeling more energetic after engaging in sexual activity.
No one has to justify to you their choices in life. It's their life, not yours. Forcing others to adopt what you or any other group consider to be a good long term strategy for life is not your place.
According to the last poll [1] only about 3/5 HN users are in the Anglosphere, so equating "we" on this website with "Anglosphere" seems a bit of a stretch.
One problem is that the same argument applies to sex as well. Pornography is just the "junk food" version. But I don't think anyone would be ok with the government regulating what goes on in their bedroom (with consent, obviously) - nor should they be.
Drugged out gullible young girls in a perverse and depraved industry, creating "content" that can potentially isolate and mess with the minds of teenagers, consenting adults ?
Does the government have a role in trying to ensure the actors are capable of legally consenting? I.E. they were not under the influence, posessed their own passport vs it being held, there was no implicit threat used, they were of age, etc.?
But are there any real blocks to stopping underaged people from having access to adult content?
Unless parents are tech savvy enough to get content controls, which even then suck. Like the parental controls for TMobile has no granularity, Comcast only allows basic filtering on the router level, and very little in logging and alerting.
I feel like this is in keeping with regulation in the real world. A kid needs an id to buy adult magazines, a person needs to be involved selling that item. With the internet, where are those societal safety's? It doesn't stop all, but it would handle most.
But is there any real evidence that adult content is harmful to underaged people? Unless scientists have put together a rigorous study, which even then there are confounding factors. Like all existing studies are small and don't control for desire to access such material.
I feel like this regulation is outdated in today's world. We have an opportunity to review existing practices to see if they make sense. With the internet, will children have issues? We don't know so we shouldn't jump the gun.
> But is there any real evidence that adult content is harmful to underaged people? Unless scientists have put together a rigorous study, which even then there are confounding factors. Like all existing studies are small and don't control for desire to access such material.
Plenty of people who have gotten completely out of pornography can tell you directly about the difference in their lives. That doesn't require a study. It's as simple as, I touched the hot stove, I got burned. Perspective provides better answers than numbers. We don't need a controlled study of 1500 randomly sampled people to establish that touching a hot stove is bad. The difficulty is that this "touch" can play out over years or a lifetime and is done principally within your mind and affects your relationships and emotions. You can find various studies [0] to support these general conclusions also.
When you're a regular consumer of porn, you cannot really see its effect on you unless you have a clear perspective of what it is like to not be a regular consumer of porn and indulging in objectifying sex objects in your mind. Teenagers, or worse, children, who have become addicted, haven't had the time or experience to have any other perspective. All they know is the haze of porn sexuality.
It clogs up your love receptors and transmitters like a drug. It's like seeing love through a thick fog, being unable to really comprehend it. Without perspective the individual just assumes they can see everything clearly. That a sexual relationship can be cheaply bought at a glance and satisfied in a moment and then tossed in the trash when inconvenient without even needing to talk to someone. It creates the appetite for low effort relationships, which are often short-lived instead of durable. We should strive for the kind that can go 60 years of happiness for both parties and be more in love than when they started. That's what we're capable of. But with lust addled minds mired in selfish indulgence — we don't get there.
Problems can often be solved far better, and with far less threat of violence or use of force, when solutions are persued via means of education instead of censorship.
> any critique towards pornography and you're treated like you're Amish.
If you're finding that people react poorly towards your criticisms of pornography, you might want to do a little introspection about the bad faith engagement on display in this sentence.
There are plenty of people who identify themselves in ways that would certainly distinguish them from a devout/peculiar religious community... and still have their own critiques of pornography or concerns about access, and will engage thoughtful discussion about how it should be treated.
But if you come at it from a conservative religious position ("it's bad because it violates my purity culture norms but I'm gonna dress it up using terms I don't understand like 'dopaminergic reward system' because I know that bestows a hint of modern legitimacy"), you might get treated like a conservative religionist.
How will you define pornography? People are aroused by what’s forbidden- ban or strictly regulate say, nudity, they’ll eventually seek out crap like the Sears catalog with the same… energy.
Isn’t it the same authoritarians who want to jail people for drugs and pornography? And while I wouldn’t want to disparage the Amish, aren’t those authoritarian urges largely rooted in Christian theocratic doctrine?
Which of those can you do hundreds of times without going to jail? Or, to change the angle, tell me about your proposed porn regulations and what happens to people who just cheerfully go on filming themselves fucking and ignore the regulations?
Regulating porn is regulating sex. It’s been tried. Heck, look at Indonesia today. It’s adorably naive. It is much less practical than regulating drugs because literally every person on earth who has genitals and a cell phone can be a supplier.
> Or, to change the angle, tell me about your proposed porn regulations and what happens to people who just cheerfully go on filming themselves fucking and ignore the regulations?
I haven't proposed any porn regulations whatsover... You seem to be confusing me with someone else.
> I haven't proposed any porn regulations whatsover... You seem to be confusing me with someone else.
Well, that's embarrassing and I apologize.
> Take a look at
Yes, to the extent being cited for an single infraction will stop horny people from filming themselves having sex and sharing the video, that is very relevant.
However, most (all?) jurisdictions treat repeated infractions as misdemeanors. When it comes to the hypothetical of "regulating" porn, there are two possible outcomes: 1) porn producers who ignore infractions and any resulting fine are not prosecuted, and the regulation is meaningless, or 2) punishments for repeatedly ignoring the regulation are severe enough to deter repeat offense.
I just don't see how you get (2) without jail. Therefore, I stand by the assertion that any regulation of porn that is going to be effective is going to have to be prepared to jail people.
Cocaine and alcohol both have societal measures in place to prevent abuse (mostly shame based, excluding hollywood and the "adult industry"). Remove those and what do we have ?
Overindulgence, dissolution, and complete shift towards hedonism and away from eudaimonia. Those two should be balanced.
honestly yes because (a) getting the coke won't be as insanely dangerous as it now since there wouldn't be a need for an unregulated dark market, (b) there would be more regulation around it, increasing safety, and (c) there would be more support for recovery that don't involve incarceration and the recidivism that comes with that.
GP's comment is about inconsistency of the discussion regarding similar things.
The child comment states that; actually, the people complaining tend to be the same people. So they're consistent.
Which actually jives with my understanding. People that are fine with Porn are usually fine with other little rushes', in so far as they aren't harmful outside of themselves.
Gambling without the poverty is: fine.
Enjoying food without the health complications: also fine.
This is a good strategy. There's a trend to frame a comment as a question, as a tactic to disarm the people you disagree with. But the deeper the comments nest, the more likely the discussion will become confused
To be fair, the reaction is similar towards most of the other potentially addictive things also. People talk a lot about sugar addiction, video game addiction, porn addiction, etc. but few are willing to do anything about it other than tell the addicted people to get themselves straightened out.
To me it seems clear that we need some sort of regulation and/or cultural defence mechanisms against this stuff like we have for alcohol and drugs. What exactly it would look like, I don't know. Otherwise we are just going to entertain and eat ourselves to death.
...and then you go on to list a bunch of things that share the property that they are enjoyable.
There really are addictive substances; but honestly, sugar isn't one of them. These are behaviours that people become habituated to. It's not fair on real addicts to claim that your serial adultery is the consequence of "sex addiction".
The kneejerk responses you're getting from other commenters appalled at the thought of anyone taking away their precious wank sites and jazz mags rather illustrates your point.
Call me crazy but I don’t need every life decision to be backed by peer reviewed studies. I’m perfectly happy using my intuition to tell me that e.g. yes the more I jerk it to a pixels on screen portraying (often unrealistic) sex the more I’m conditioning myself to have issues with the real thing.
I know a number of highly intelligent people in the sciences who make decisions like this (searching/waiting for Science to tell them what’s right) and who laugh at me when I follow intuition/folk knowledge.
Don’t get me wrong, academic research is an amazing thing. I follow many research backed protocols for fitness, diet etc. But I also think when it comes to systems as complex as our bodies, there’s much collective wisdom in our intuition and societal traditions that science hasn’t and may never catch up to.
Eh, at the same time our society is often very closed off about these things, such that I doubt just how much folk wisdom there might be floating around. For example, something very basic occurred to me not too long ago: if you orgasm to something repeatedly you will condition yourself to seek out more of whatever the situation was when you orgasmed. I wouldn't say it's downright Pavlovian, but it's not far off classical conditioning.
It'd be nice to get some studies etc. to back it up, because it's still just a hypothesis at this point, but now that I reflect upon this, it should have been like, stunningly obvious. It should be the sort of thing parents tell their kids at puberty, basic word of caution. Yet just typing it out triggered all sorts of "oh, that's socially taboo!" warning bells for me. You shouldn't speak about conditioning in humans, you shouldn't speak so openly about pornography, etc.
You may be right with respect to "what works for me" - because you can literally experiment on yourself and tell (if you're keeping honest track of effects using various good practices from science / experiment design).
But you wouldn't be in a good position to argue against anyone saying otherwise.
There are numerous problems with folk beliefs and personal intuitions. Much like we are 100% fooled every time when we look at optical illusions, we can be fooled about other things. I'm glad you've figured out what works for you, but it's not anecdotes but only good science that can tell us what is "on average" going to happen (without investigating the individual particularities).
But that’s what folk beliefs essentially are: “on average this is going to happen”
Isn’t that inherently what happens when you play telephone across time and cultures? You end up with stories stripped down to the essence, the most important advice from those who came before us boiled down.
Are you advocating that when we find what works for us we don’t share that finding with others? I think that’s exactly what’s wrong with the “science is the only right answer” mindset..
I sincerely doubt any folk belief around sexuality - given the history of humanity. I grew up (in Russia) with my mom literally telling my 6-ish y/o self "don't touch your pipi or it will turn black and fall off". Given that people went insane 100 years ago when a skirt was short enough to expose an ankle, I doubt that kind of society would produce good folk beliefs around pornography or sexuality in general.
You're not crazy. The statistical power of most studies is very poor, and aggregating over narratives extracted from stat analysis is just gonzo. I mean, read from Aquinas or from Supreme Court decisions to see the erudition and "scholarmanship" required to even claim you're taking multiple takes into consideration.
Learn to listen to your body, this is inordinately important. I didn't pay attention to these chills I was getting that weren't warranted by the weather nor were accompanied by fever and... let a few days slice and I was admitted to the ICU with sepsis + an immune system shutting down.
Well here's the question for you. Is it the pixels, or the acts you are watching, which you yourself described as unrealistic; or even the single "fast food" chain you wander to sate cravings?
The mainstream stuff seems all the same, "rough and with step-$x". Eating the same meal over and over and over is gonna cause issues.
Intuition suggests other problems to me. Wanking is releasing a bunch of positive reinforcement brain chemicals, but nothing has been done to deserve such a reward. Wanker did nothing to win over an actual mate.
Yeah I think the article is a bit of a strawman: if you take ED to be more broadly “issues around sex” I think you’ll find a lot more people agreeing of the correlation
Just browsing the replies here I see many guys saying effectively “Well I watch tons of porn and my penis still works” which is kind of a level 1 analysis on how porn might be affecting their brain
While pornography isn't the root of all evil, I wonder if self-denial in general is good for you. Does giving up an arbitrary thing for a month give you benefits just from the exertion of willpower? Has anyone quantified it?
I also suspect the people who take No Nut November seriously include a higher than chance number with actual problem behaviour. Maybe the not-quite-porn-addicts and the not-quite-alcoholics self-select for No Nut November and Sober October because they know they've got a problem, and these months provide a nudge to make a change.
Science can illuminate things we didn't know before, but it can't negate thousands of experiences lived by real men.
The one scientific study the author of this post links to is really not worth refuting. It just asked college students how aroused they got after watching a short film in a psychology lab.
There was that time I watched a YouTube channel about ‘NoFap’, went a month without ejaculating and then when I did it was, without hyperbole, the most physically painful thing I’d experienced. I am not doing that again.
My experience with NoFap was that in the beginning I was incredibly pent up from withholding, but over months I just lost the libido as my body adjusted to 'skipping' the daily habit.
Fucking idiotic trend that permanently altered my sex drive in a negative way.
I don't know about porn, but we know pretty conclusively that obesity and related illnesses can cause ED. Considering the high and rising obesity rate in the US, and the related illnesses also on the rise (diabetes), it's unsurprising we're seeing an increase in ED. If you couple this with falling testosterone levels in American men, there are likely several factors which combine to create a higher incidence of ED. Porn does not need to be the explanation, or even have a strong causative factor to explain our issues as a society.
I ve watched porn almost daily (way more on average) and had erectile dysfunction like 10 times MAX in total in 31 years for reasons id say were 100% unrelated (work mostly). Im no weeb, id say im an average "engineer player" with 50+ women off bars and tinder, sometimes even super tired or high+...
Last time checked my T levels, well i was not really able to compare them b.c. im in europe and units made my head explode, but it actually seemed in the low end.
I think erection and sexual desire are 100% psychological, and even more precisely, super contextual of whats on your mind right now. At some point i did a bit of meditation and found that with a girl, focusing on emptying my brain and just smelling her and focusing on that made me horny 100% of the time.
Also id recommend reading "Sex god méthod" (even though i disagree with the overall life vision of the author) and "conversations impudiques" for the french people (a free thinking book where a guy tells his path of discovering sexual stuff which include erectionless orgasms, mutiple layerd orgasms for girls and is basically a super nice and enlightning conversation about sex.)
Probably not, but it does redirect the mating impulse "harmlessly" away from actually interacting with other people. It probably also reduces the attractiveness of getting with ugly people, relative to pointing your browser to some tube site.
That's a problem that extends beyond pornography and the sex impulse. Watching people have a life on YouTube even displaces having a life.
Remember all the hoopla in the news about how election polls have been repeatedly wrong because Republicans didn't want to talk to pollsters about their love of Trump, or Democrats not wanting to talk about their affiliation in red states where being openly Democrat could be bad for your health?
How much more reluctant must men be about having erectile dysfunction? This is a taboo subject and a great source of shame for many people. I'm sure plenty don't admit having it if they do, or just don't want to talk about it at all.
So all these studies consisting of people answering questionnaires on the subject are pretty suspect.
What we need to get to the bottom of this are measurements.... and, ideally, large double-blind studies. But that's obviously never going to happen.
So for the foreseeable future bloggers, pundits, psychologists, and social media users are going to be arguing about studies that are next to worthless.
Asking help from a doctor for your ED is different from answering a questionnaire for a study. The former could help you directly, the latter only indirectly (if at all) by maybe attracting attention to the problem from the medical community.
But if you don't have ED you're not likely to either go to a doctor for a condition you don't have, nor participate in such studies.
If some recent headlines about declining sperm counts are to be believed, it won't be too long before it doesn't actually matter (for social policy purposes) whether porn causes ED or not.
> If some recent headlines about declining sperm counts are to be believed
Spoiler, they probably aren't.
There are questions with the quality of the studies used:
> Even so, Marion Boulicault of Harvard, Sarah S. Richardson and colleagues, publishing in the journal Human Fertility, suggest weaknesses in the data, such as men’s ages only being known in two-thirds of the cases and other missing crucial information.
sperm count is not linearly tied to fertility:
> Who says the sperm count observed in the ’70s in the “West” was the species’ optimum? Sperm count above a critical threshold “is not necessarily an indicator of better health or higher probability of fertility relative to less,”
and finally, no one as far as I am aware is able to present solid data on any causal link which makes projecting the trend out to apocalyptic scenarios another 30+ years in the future a very fraught endeavor in the first place.
You beat me to it. And as far as I'm aware, that finding was legit science. A dramatic decline which is further accelerating, with zero knowledge on tangible causes.
The finding wasn't shared very widely or at least didn't turn a lot of heads. Which is odd given the pretty existential nature of the issue. In places where I saw it shared on social media the consensus was: "good!", but that seems to be the response to any news that hints at population decline/collapse.
If the control group are men in long term marriages with active sex lives, then I dare say we don't have sufficient sample sizes for a real world study.
The Guardian's editorial standards have always been lacking, with the most egregious example being Greenwald's reporting in 2013. They simply have no interest in verifying that there is any truth to the claims made in their articles, so they don't do the simplest checks like verifying that there is a source or that the source documents say what has been claimed.
> There was, however, a link between self-reported problematic use of porn—feelings of addiction or compulsion—and higher rates of ED
I believe this is the crucial point of the article. it’s not that porn use per se causes ED, but that “problematic” usage can, presumably from guilt, shame, regret, and even desensitization, especially if you’re hiding it from your partner.
AFAIK it's quite the contrary. It's a muscle and the more you use it the more it will function even in old age.
EDIT: Yup, it's not a muscle ^^, but I am still certain that I read in some medical journal that a lot of masturbation does not cause ED and that it can actually help to prevent ED.
Watching pornography doesn't necessarily cause erectile dysfunction, but like any other addictive activity it messes up with you dopamine circuitry and your nervous system.Your dopamine pathways affect your mood, attention and memory.
if you liked this article, I recommend the podcast _You're Wrong About_ where Michael Hobbs and Audrey Gordon debunk basically the entire health and wellness industry (which is FULLLL of shoddy research and FUD like the kind shown here).
Wouldn't high dose fast-acting Niacin (500mg) help resolve it like it does help resolving almost any addiction by bumping up levels of NAD+ in the brain, reducing cravings to continue whatever addiction a person has? With the added benefit of improving cardiovascular system.
More interesting are the potential social effects of pornography, in terms of relationship expectations.
In many Western nations, we have a plummeting birth rate, and this may well be because women are increasingly refusing to have sex on men's terms. Immersed in violent, degrading pornography, the expectations of many men regarding sex are now incompatible with women who want a loving relationship in which to raise a family.
The situation is really very simple. Many people in developing nations NEED to have children due to the lack of a pension system. Secondary factors are a lack of education, contraception, and traditional societal expectations. All of these reasons can be summed up as the choice of having children, as well as how many, not being fully free.
In a situation where people are free to decide on wanting children (and how many), and not really REQUIRE them, they will go for 0-2. When given the choice, people simply do not want more. It's as simple as that. This is a universal finding throughout the world.
0-2, which typically averages to 1.6 - 1.8 in many countries, is below replacement rate. Mystery solved. We simply don't want more.
What if we would need to work less, would we have more children? No. What if we had higher incomes, better child support, would we have more children? No.
Counter intuitively, the "luxury" of having a say in having children means we have less of them.
> In many Western nations, we have a plummeting birth rate, and this may well be because women are increasingly refusing to have sex on men's terms. Immersed in violent, degrading pornography, the expectations of many men regarding sex are now incompatible with women who want a loving relationship in which to raise a family.
That's not it at all. Women are more picky with regards to partners because they have more economic agency. Kids also aren't a given for the same reason, plus less societal pressure to have kids.
This is purely anecdotal but more of my partners were into "rough" sex than 18 year old me would have ever expected. Women (and men) also have much different criteria for casual sex versus life partners...
> Immersed in violent, degrading pornography, the expectations of many men regarding sex are now incompatible with women who want a loving relationship in which to raise a family.
This is just traditional gender roles applied to the bedroom. There are certainly women (and men) who want nothing except gentle, loving sex. But that's not universal for either gender. Likewise for any fetish you can name. The trick is finding someone who you overlap with enough to make things work, which is why "no sex before marriage" seems so self-defeating to me.
I don't know. In my experience most of my sexual partners wanted choking, forceful behaviour. Also, there's so much porn that's not violent or degrading. Maybe don't extrapolate from yourself ;)
Citation need for the claim that people dont have babies cause of refusal to have sex. Afaik, there is enough sex going on to produce babies, but people use protection to specifically avoid babies.
One thing it doesn’t mention is that ubiquitous promotion and availability of ED drugs has led to recreational use that can be statistically mistaken for incidence of ED.