Does Porn Really Cause Erectile Dysfunction?
Exploring the research and the "research" of the porn and ED link, teasing out fact from fiction.
Chatter echoed through the one-bedroom apartment my friends, and I had packed into where our subdued party with a handful of people was supposed to go down. We broke out with the drinks, some people brought ecstasy, and others smoked weed.
It was your typical party for a late teenager to be at. The music fluctuated from hip-hop to dance as different people controlled the music. The Rave lighting you’d buy at Spencer’s Gifts was set up to add that cheesy “teenage party in 2003” feel.
With the lights low, we all talked and shared as various people ingested various substances with glee. At some point, my close friends Chris and Jessica started talking to one another in the corner privately. Eventually, they slipped into the open bedroom and shut the door.
The rest of us knew what that meant, and none of us cared much.
We were all having so much fun that nobody would be the one to ruin the party. After watching them slip away, I turned back to my remaining friends, and we got lost, prattling again. I made my way through the living room of this apartment and made my rounds, talking to everyone for a few minutes. Eventually, I stopped on this young woman Vanessa who I’d known for years but had little opportunity to interact with.
A few minutes later, I felt a tug on my shirt. It was my friend Chris. He’d come out of the room and stood beside me, staring at me with an urgent look.
“Joe, Joe, I need your help.”
“What is it?”
Dazed on god-knows-how-much ecstasy, he looked me straight in the eye with dilated pupils and said:
You’re soberer than me. I need you to go in there and explain to her that the reason I can’t get it up isn’t her—it’s the E.
Still, to this day, I feel a bit bad about what happened next. I busted out laughing, not expecting those particular words to come out of his mouth. It was just the last thing I anticipated him saying. After I gathered my composure, I told him I would do my best. I had no idea how or what to say to this young woman.
Nonetheless, I grabbed my drink and went into the room, where I saw a young woman lying in a bed, plopped on the floor without a bed frame. She was naked beneath the thick, blue comforter, with only her neck, collarbone, and face exposed. Her face rested in her palm as she stared at the comforter. She looked sad, intensely embarrassed, and ashamed.
I did the best I could to cheer her up. Compliments were useless for what she was going through, but I cracked a few self-deprecating jokes, which seemed to do the trick.
The problem is: I’d never had erectile dysfunction. I had no idea what it was like, but I’d heard enough lame jokes and urban legends to know it was a thing that happened to people who took too many stimulants. Cocaine, ecstasy, and other drugs can restrict blood flow, making it difficult to fill the penis and get an erection. This much is true. But I had no real-world experience with the issue.
We know drugs can cause ED, but what about porn?
The short answer is no; porn does not cause erectile dysfunction.
I was browsing Reddit yesterday and saw a post in the Ask Me Anything section, which is usually a treat to read. This time, it made me sad:
How do I explain to my wife that my ED is caused by porn and not her?
My mind instantly went back to that party and my friend Chris. The only difference is the drugs actually were causing Chris’ erection problems. Porn, on the other hand, does not. It certainly does not cause ED by itself, and it almost certainly isn’t a mitigating factor in men’s ED problems.
Usually, there’s something else going on, be it non-life-threatening problems, like anxiety and depression, or more severe health problems, like cardiovascular concerns.
Professional scientists and doctors try to be gentle when explaining things like this to people. They have jobs they can be fired from, they have research grants that can be denied, and they try to hedge their bets when they make statements about this kind of stuff.
In the words of Nietzsche, “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
And the idea that porn causes ED (or that porn is addictive) is an illusion. Fortunately, I don’t have these limitations (thank you, paid subscribers, for keeping The Science of Sex independent). The idea that porn causes erection problems becomes untenable when you think about it for a while.
After all, porn is a lot more likely to cause actual erections than prevent erections. Otherwise, people wouldn’t use it as a masturbation aid during their private moments. People would satisfy their needs with their imaginations. But porn is the most frequently-used masturbation aid precisely because it’s so effective.
But what about all that science that says that porn causes erection problems? You may be surprised to learn that it doesn’t actually say that.
Let’s dive into it.
Teasing Out Fact From Propaganda
I’ve covered the anti-porn propaganda outlets in great detail here, here, here, and here, among other places, so I won’t spend much time on that except to say that nearly all of the movements that cropped up over the past decade saying porn is addictive were religious movements trying to get people to stop masturbating.
Until the early 2000s, they tried the tired old “masturbation and porn are sins, and you’ll go to hell if you indulge in them” message. My friends and I laughed at these messages and memes.
Eventually, they figured out that the “porn is bad for your health” message worked much better and stuck with that. They created special interest groups and non-profit companies flush with cash to spread the anti-masturbation gospel.
They spread the myth that pornography (and sex) is (are) addictive like a drug. This became so memetic it caught on like wildfire, and pretty soon, it expanded into social media addiction, food addiction, and other behavioral addictions. The myth of sex addiction has been around since the 1990s. I recently covered how and why psychology went over the top when publishing papers on behavioral addictions on Medium here. Long story short, most psychology papers published in the past 10-15 years haven’t been replicated (called “the replication crisis), and thus, the information that makes headlines is ultimately meaningless. Diederik Stapel is a researcher who was caught fabricating data whole cloth in 58 peer-reviewed articles. He was faking the data in his scientific papers and getting them published.
They spread the message that porn causes “desensitization” to sexual stimuli—when you see too many naked bodies or people doing nasty stuff in porn, you become “desensitized” to standard bodies, normal sexual behaviors, and normal sex in general. The argument is that too much of a good thing is bad.
They spread the message that this desensitization is what causes erectile dysfunction. They took the drug addiction model, that more and higher doses of drugs are needed to get the same effect, and applied it to porn.
Thankfully, science has firmly disproven these myths.
Many people think they’re suffering from porn addiction or other behavioral addictions, or PIED (porn-induced-erectile dysfunction), but what’s probably happening is they have another underlying condition they’re attributing to porn, sex, social media, etc.).
The “Desensitization” Myth
The “desensitization” myth was first popularized by Gary Wilson, who started with an anti-orgasm message. Wilson and his wife Marnia—who published a book called Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow—rightly believed that sex causes dopamine to rise and orgasm causes it to subside. But they probably attributed far too much of a change in the dopamine system to sex.
Sex is an extremely weak stimulant of the dopamine system, while drugs like Adderall moderately stimulate the dopamine system, and methamphetamine majorly stimulates the dopamine system.
Besides, if excessive sexual stimuli caused “desensitization” to future sexual stimuli, why don’t swingers have erection problems? Why is it only people who watch porn? Fear not; we’ll get into the science in a moment.
What about male porn stars? Why don’t they have erection problems? They can keep it up for hours and hours. And though some male porn stars take drugs (Viagra, Calais, and steroids) to maintain an erection across an eight-hour workday, not all do. Not to mention, that’s a really long time to have a boner, so, understandably, some would turn to drugs.
While some of Wilson and Marnia’s ideas were good—that sex needn’t have an orgasm to be “good”—others were just downright bad.
One man in their movement said he “hopes never to intentionally have an orgasm again.” I get this sense the couple was trying everything in their power to come up with controversial ideas that would make headlines so they could monetize the attention.
Eventually, Wilson stumbled on the idea that porn might be addictive, probably coming into contact with preexisting church propaganda. He started the blog YourBrainOnPorn dot com and gave a TED Talk for TedX called The Great Porn Experiment, which isn’t quite the same as your standard Ted talk because anyone can get up on stage and give a TED Talk—no expertise, no research, and no credentials necessary.
Still, TED put a warning before his TED talk (which has since been removed from TED, probably after they figured out he was lying through his teeth), saying:
This talk contains several assertions that are not supported by academically respected studies in medicine and psychology. While some viewers might find advice provided in this talk to be helpful, please do not look to this talk for medical advice.
Undeterred, Wilson continued his blog and used the notoriety from the TED talk to write a 2015 book called Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction. It seems he and his wife had a years-long obsession with sex that took on a negative character. Wilson is clearly a biased person who’s made up his mind before the evidence was even in.
Wilson enlisted some scientists to conduct research in an attempt to prove his preformulated hypothesis that porn (and orgasms) were addictive and borderline ruinous.
He was one of the lead authors of a 2016 study published in a predatory science journal, which are science journals that publish extremely low-quality studies, often to help the study authors make money. Still, they’re really created by political and religious movements to spread propaganda that looks like science, or they’re for-profit and publish junk science so the study authors can make headlines.
Still, the study was later flagged as having an undeclared conflict of interest. Even when he’s trying to lie using dubious outlets, he still can’t seem to get it right. And even worse, his shady study disproved his own hypothesis.
It found that only moderate porn users experienced erectile dysfunction, while heavy and light users had no effect. That disproves the theory that porn is “desensitizing” us to sexual stimuli. If it did, you’d expect heavy users to be more desensitized than light or moderate users.
Just wait…it gets worse…
The Trail Leads to Nowhere
Wilson cites research that was also cited by a sexologist named Liz Walker when she declared, “Before the internet appeared, erectile dysfunction in males under 40 was reported as being about 2-5 percent, now that figure has jumped between 27 and 33 percent.” She cites this study which cited this and this study as sources for the research conducted. And both of these studies—the original sources—found that porn was not causing erectile dysfunction.
This is how pseudoscientific propaganda is created. The original study says one thing, people spin that to fit their political needs and hope nobody (like me) comes along to check the sources and ensure they’re not bullshitting everyone.
While Walker is right that ED has risen, so has obesity, so have diagnoses of depression and anxiety, and a whole host of other conditions that cause or influence ED.
In the 1990s, about 5% of Americans were diagnosed with depression. Today, 29% of Americans are diagnosed with depression. Fortunately, depression rates aren’t likely on the rise so much as people are actually seeking help, getting diagnosed, and being treated, as stigmas surrounding mental health treatment are lessening.
In their study, Wilson and the gang note that the rise in ED is much greater than the rise in obesity rates. This is correct. But he flippantly dismisses the idea that anxiety and depression could make up for the lack—and those are just two diagnoses of a plethora of possible mental health conditions that could cause ED.
The authors of Wilson’s study say:
Obesity rates in U.S. men aged 20–40 increased only 4% between 1999 and 2008; rates of illicit drug use among US citizens aged 12 or older have been relatively stable over the last 15 years; and smoking rates for US adults declined from 25% in 1993 to 19% in 2011. Other authors propose psychological factors. Yet, how likely is it that anxiety and depression account for the sharp rise in youthful sexual difficulties given the complex relationship between sexual desire and depression and anxiety?
In other words, “This might ruin my hypothesis, so I’m just going to ignore it entirely because it’s inconvenient.”
By the time Wilson’s study was published, the idea of porn causing ED had already been debunked. You may have seen my interview with Dr. Nicole Prause, Ph.D. here on The Science of Sex.
In 2014, she published a study that found that men who watched more pornography had more sexual responsiveness to their partners, not less as the “desensitization” hypothesis claimed.
A Croatian study from 2015 found small and inconsistent results. The study author concluded:
We found little evidence of the association between pornography use and male sexual health disturbances. Contrary to raising public concerns, pornography does not seem to be a significant risk factor for younger men's desire, erectile, or orgasmic difficulties.
This all demonstrates how destructive the internet has been. Social media and search engines can be easily gamed to bring titillating content up to the top of the pile. When you search, it’s the first stuff you find, drowning out other voices. And massive organizations with unlimited funds—like big churches—have the resources to game these systems to spread their message, which is ultimately composed of lies.
So what does this mean for all the people out there who insist they’re suffering from conditions like porn addiction and porn-induced ED? It’s likely they have other underlying illnesses that are yet to be diagnosed and that removing the porn will not magically cure all of their symptoms. Only addressing the true cause will fix their problem.
It seems that virtually all of the slander about pornography has proven untrue, fear-bating in the name of profit. People like Gary Wilson, the “coaches” over at NoFap, and others have made incredible money spreading these lies (though the churches have spent incredible amounts of money, they had moral motives, not financial ones).
For what it’s worth, I don’t really watch porn myself. Occasionally, my girlfriend and I will show one another what we used to watch before we got together, or we’ll use it to illustrate an idea we’re interested in trying, but that’s about it.
It’s not because porn is unhealthy or morally wrong when you have a romantic partner; it’s simply because porn doesn’t look so good when you can have real sex with a flesh-and-blood human.
Is there any merit to the “death grip” and losing sensitivity? Or being asexual because I never successfully directly projected my sexual energy outward but rather inward?