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Does watching pornography cause erectile dysfunction?
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoevidently not when watching it.
- realce 4y ago
- palashkulsh 4y agoTrap
- bryanrasmussen 4y agono hands, please.
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- optimalsolver 4y agoAnd hairy palms. I've saved a lot of money on mittens.
- n4bz0r 4y agoI'd like to say that I see what you did there... but I don't.
- pfdietz 4y agoFriction against an area of skin tends to cause that area to lose hair, so if anything I'd expect this to be a treatment for hairy palm, not a cause.
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- CoastalCoder 4y agoI honestly misread that as "... kittens." I still have no idea what that would have meant.
- bell-cot 4y agoIf 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.
- fleddr 4y agoYou 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.
- enragedcacti 4y ago> 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. https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/2021-05-10/ty-article/.premium/spermaggedon-in-the-west-relax-harvard-has-good-news-for-you/0000017f-e0c8-d75c-a7ff-fccdcc640000 https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/2021-05-10/ty-art...
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- throwawayEerecD 4y agoWatching 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.
- 4gotunameagain 4y agoIt'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"
- haunter 4y ago>we Who are these we? HN is very anti regulation of drugs see the countless posts about micro dosing, LSD, marijuana etc.
- ethagknight 4y agoAnti-regulation, or anti-criminalization? This response is exactly what the above post was talking about
- 4gotunameagain 4y agowe would mean the average member of the Anglosphere, since we are on hackernews, to which the average HN user has not so much in common.
- brookst 4y agoIsn’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?
- rootusrootus 4y agoTL;DR: No I think the suggestion that the causation (to the extent that it exists at all) may be in the other direction is more plausible.
- PaulHoule 4y agoThere 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.
- Utkarsh_Mood 4y agoNot stimulating yourself again or not going on a similar streak again?
- PaulHoule 4y agoGoing on a similar streak.
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- imchillyb 4y agoThat's not a normal reaction to that. You may want to see a physician. Your reaction sounds like there's a kink in your plumbing somewhere.
- amelius 4y agoDid you notice any benefits, though?
- rngname22 4y ago
- brookst 4y agoIt’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.
- dontbenebby 4y agoI 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.
- brookst 4y agoAlso a good confounding factor.
- iwillbenice 4y ago
- dustedcodes 4y agoAFAIK 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.
- feffra 4y agoMore 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.
- brookst 4y ago> women are increasingly refusing to have sex on men's terms [citation needed]
- RamblingCTO 4y agoI 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 ;)
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- watwut 4y agoCitation 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.
- MrStonedOne 4y ago
- AlexandrB 4y ago> 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.
- bamboozled 4y agoCould be an outlier, watched porn for many many years, my penis works and I have a sex life.
- andrewclunn 4y agoIf 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.
- pmoriarty 4y agoRemember 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.
- seydor 4y agoUnlikely? Because ED is treatable , so people are likely to seek help to a professional. Talking to pollsters is inconsequential
- pmoriarty 4y agoAsking 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.
- bitL 4y agoWouldn'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.
- tboyd47 4y agoScience 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. For a much more robust review, please read: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/6/3/17/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/6/3/17/htm
- MrStonedOne 4y ago
- seydor 4y agoConsidering the precipitous drop in testosterone and sperm quality, it's remarkable that there isnt widespread ED. Maybe porn has helped
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- LinuxBender 4y agoThe article may be answering it's own question. 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.
- Enginerrrd 4y agoAnecdotally, watching porn increases my desire (and resulting frequency) for sex with my partner pretty substantially with no resulting ED issues. But I'm pretty healthy. I lift, I do HIIT, I do long slow distance etc. throughout the week and I eat very clean by most people's standards.
- supersparrow 4y agoI'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.
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- 1MachineElf 4y agoI 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.
- FooBarBizBazz 4y agoProbably 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.
- strken 4y agoWhile 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.
- jkcorrea 4y agoCall 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.
- phkahler 4y agoIntuition 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.
- jkcorrea 4y agoYeah 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
- thanatropism 4y agoYou'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.
- throwawayUS9876 4y ago
- karol 4y agoOf course.
- herrrk 4y agoPlastics in the food/water deserve a mention
- tristor 4y agoI 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.
- lern_too_spel 4y agoThe 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.
- davidguetta 4y agoI 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.)
- temporallobe 4y ago> 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.
- nunez 4y agoif 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).