The Bedroom Crisis Nobody Wants To Blame On Porn

I was sitting across from a friend in a restaurant as he told me about his porn addiction. He grimaced uncomfortably, lowered his voice, and said, “And this is getting really personal but … I have performance issues.”

Five years ago, I would have struggled to understand what this confession had to do with the topic at hand. But now, after reading numerous studies on how pornography use can lead to sexual dysfunction, I just sighed sympathetically and said, “Yeah. That’s very common.”

Rewind a few years. This time I’m talking to a fellow woman. She’s telling me about how, in her first relationship, her boyfriend would frequently pressure her into doing things he’d seen in pornography. Usually, this was an aggressive or dominant act, like choking. She further shared how he would constantly compare her to the women in pornography. “Why don’t you make noises like them?” “Why don’t you look like them?” “Why don’t you act the way they do?” These first sexual experiences were so unpleasant for her that, for a while, she believed she simply did not like sex.

These are just a couple of stories. But they’re a small sampling of what an entire generation of people are experiencing en masse: Pornography has made their sex lives worse.

These lived experiences counter the talking point that pornography is sex positive, or that watching pornography will spice up the bedroom. Nothing could be further from the truth. This isn’t just anecdotal evidence. Dozens and dozens of scientific studies show just how devastating an impact pornography is having on people’s sexual and romantic relationships.

Let’s start with my male friend’s problem: sexual dysfunction. Since the popularization of free internet porn, erectile dysfunction rates have skyrocketed among young men. What these men often find is that they can function just fine when masturbating to porn, but not so with a real partner. When they quit porn, however, the sexual dysfunction heals.

This alarming phenomenon has caught the attention of numerous researchers, and we now have dozens of studies suggesting that pornography can lead to the development of sexual dysfunctions. Scientists theorize that this is because pornography rewires the sexual arousal template in the brain so that some consumers can eventually only become aroused by internet pornography and don’t recognize a real partner as a cue for arousal.

Is there anything less sex positive than a substance that can actually render you physically incapable of having sex?

Further, even if pornography doesn’t lead to sexual dysfunction, it still often leads to sexual dissatisfaction. As celebrated actor Orlando Bloom put it: “Porn is super-disruptive to your sex life, to your libido … When you watch multiple people at multiple times in one evening, how is your actual real-life partner going to match up? It’s just so destructive.”

And Bloom’s words are backed up by the research. A meta-analysis of 50 studies found that men who consumed pornography had significantly poorer sexual and relationship satisfaction than men who did not consume pornography. These 50 studies included experimental, longitudinal, and cross-sectional studies, so this is fairly strong evidence for causation. While this meta-analysis did not find a significant association for female participants, it missed a huge portion of the research on women. We currently have 40 studies that show female porn use to be associated with lower sexual and relationship satisfaction — none of which were included in the meta-analysis. Pornography also affects women’s sex lives even if they don’t watch it. That’s often because their partner does. And this has a whole host of implications.

Research conducted by the BBC attempted to examine the relationship between pornography and women being pressured into unwanted aggressive acts. They surveyed a representative sample of over 2,000 U.K. women, aged 18-39, and found that more than a third (38%) had experienced unwanted acts of choking, slapping, gagging, hair-pulling, biting, or spitting during sex. When the BBC asked men who had committed these acts what inspired them to do so, over half (57%) named pornography as an influence.

Another study found that women whose partners used pornography were more likely to feel sexually objectified by their partner and to suffer from low self-esteem, body shame, and symptoms of eating disorders. As the woman who shared her story with me attested, it’s hard not to feel inadequate when you know your partner is comparing you to pornography performers.

There is often deep reluctance to criticize porn, for fear of being viewed as prudish. But it’s time for that to end. This is no longer simply a “purity culture” issue, a religious issue, or a conservative issue. It’s a matter of sexual health, and it’s time to move past the stigma and break open these conversations.

Whether Left or Right, secular or religious, pro-sex positivity or pro-chastity, we should all be paying attention to science and taking the harms of pornography seriously. If we want people to have healthy, happy, flourishing sex lives, then we must push back against pornography.

***

Lily Moric is a communications and content strategist for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the leading national nonprofit organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking, and the public health harms of pornography. On X: @NCOSE.

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