Adult content can make it hard to maintain one’s manhood.
So says new research which found a correlation between men watching porn — and men suffering from erectile dysfunction.
“We found that there was a highly significant relationship between time spent watching porn and increasing difficulty with erectile function with a partner,” professor Gunter de Win, head researcher, said about his team’s work, which was presented this week at the annual European Association of Urology Congress — Europe’s biggest urological event.
Researchers from Belgium, Denmark and the UK based their findings on 3,267 men’s answers to an 118-question online survey about their porn, masturbation and partnered sex habits.
“We found that there was a big range of responses,” de Win said. “In our sample, men watch quite a lot of porn, on average around 70 minutes per week, normally for between 5 and 15 minutes per time, with obviously some watching very little and some watching much, much more.”
Only two-thirds of respondents rated sex with a partner to be more stimulating than porn and nearly a quarter of those under 35 reported some amount of erectile dysfunction during partner sex — a larger percentage than de Win’s team anticipated.
“This figure was higher than we expected. We found that there was a highly significant relationship between time spent watching porn and increasing difficulty with erectile function with a partner, as indicated by the erectile function and sexual health scores,” he said.
Their findings, de Win acknowledged, are based on a questionnaire and not a clinical trial, but they prove that, without a doubt, “porn conditions the way we view sex.”
In addition to complicating men’s ability to perform, porn also creates a slippery slope to more and more intense porn: Researchers found that 90% of men fast-forward to the most pornographic scenes and that, over time, 20% required increasingly extreme porn to maintain their arousal levels.
“Our next step in this research is to identify which factors lead to erectile dysfunction, and to conduct a similar study on the effects of porn on women,” de Win said. “In the meantime, we believe that doctors dealing with erectile dysfunction should also be asking about watching pornography.”