Doctors attending the 112th Annual United States Urology Convention returned home with bad news and, perhaps, the discovery of a new syndrome: erectile dysfunction caused by excessive pornography consumption.
The Disturbing fact
It was by distributing a questionnaire to more than 300 women and men between the ages of 20 and 40 consulting in a urology clinic, that American doctors realized three surprising things. First, 3.4% of these men said they would rather masturbate while watching porn than have sex with a partner. Worrying, knowing that it was a population aged 20 to 40 years, of which three quarters consume X at least once a week (and at least three times a week for 40% of them).
Then a significant number of these X users encountered erectile dysfunction when they had a relationship with someone. “The rate of organic causes (physical cause, Editor’s note) of erectile dysfunction is extremely low at this age, underlines Dr. Mattew Christman, one of the researchers who carried out the study, so we had to look for what could explain the increase observed in recent years in this group”. Regarding the porn-induced erectile dysfunction this is an important matter.
“We think that pornography can be the explanation”. Note that no disorder was noted among women who watched pornography (less than a third of the women surveyed).
Our brain loves it
The mechanism of porn addiction was already known to neuroscientists. In his book “All addicts!”, Professor David Linden, from Johns Hopkins University (United States), describes what happens in the brain when we look at pornographic images: “Male and female subjects show a strong activation of certain key elements of the pleasure circuit ”. Our brain loves it and wants more. “Internet pornography, in particular, is a super stimulant of this reward circuit, probably because of the possibility of instantly and uninterruptedly finding ever more sexually exciting images,” says Dr. Christman.
A study conducted among students and published in 2015 had already shown that the risk of suffering from a lack of libido, dropped from 0% for those who did not watch porn to 6% for those who consumed it less than once. per week and 16% for those who watched more than once a week. One explanation, supported by another Kinsey Institute study, is that heavy X users tend to seek out new stimuli and turn to unusual or extreme sexual practices, which would make sex “vanilla” (classic, Editor’s note) boring, even if it’s real sex (with a partner) and not lonely.
Withdrawal to treat porn overdose
For erectile dysfunction induced by porn overdose, other mechanisms could be added to this one. In particular the impression that sex is always efficient (failures are rarely present on the pornographic web) which induces “performance anxiety” detrimental to erection or even erotic pleasure. Especially since the sexual scripts are often devoid of eroticism, intimate exchange and realism. In addition, even the “amateurs” who exhibit themselves are most often real paid actors when it is not a question of a real sex industry exploiting prostitutes. Ultimately, withdrawing from porn is often the first step to recommend to men under forty who complain of sexual problems, erection or libido.
