The following is a comment under David Ley’s Psychology Today blog post entitled “An Erectile Dysfunction Myth: Pornography is not the problem.”
PORNOGRAPHY & ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION
In theory anything that gets a man an erection is good for his erections. Each time a man gets an erection the penis is flushed with oxygenated blood and the different expandable layers of the penis are expanded. This keeps the tissues and blood vessels healthy and elastic – which is good for the penis. So at first glance pornography should be a good thing for a man’s erections.
This is however, not always the case.
If a man has no sexual partners and the bulk of his erections are through watching pornography and masturbating, then these erections are better for the penis than that man not having them at all.
Pornography plays an entirely different dynamic for a man who has one or more sexual partners. The internet makes it possible to not only find pornography, but to find exactly the type of pornography that you want. So whatever a man finds to be most erotic – young women, heavy woman, married women, young men, older men, animals, cars, etc. – whatever it is – it can be easily and quickly found online. Here lies the problem. When a man who has no history of erectile dysfunction and who is watching pornography on a regular basis and who is watching what to him is the most erotic of all things, when he is with a partner after that – the real thing (his partner) may be less erotic or stimulating than his optimal pornographic experience.
I see men almost every day in my sexual dysfunction practice in exactly this situation. They have developed over time, the inability to easily get a good solid erection with their partner and sometimes find it difficult to ejaculate with their partner.
I advise these men to dramatically cut out the pornography they watch and after a few months their erections and ability to ejaculate with their partners almost always returns to normal for them. They can still masturbate all they want during this period of time – but not to erotic pornography.
While the author makes an excellent point that clinicians, myself included, cannot support these observations with hard data and studies, the observations are so uniform among clinicians that it is logical to assume a that there is a direct correlation between a pornography addiction and erectile dysfunction, even while awaiting formal studies that conclusively prove this to the authors satisfaction.
Lawrence A. Smiley, M.D.
Submitted by LAWRENCE A. SMILEY, M.D. on September 2, 2013 – 8:31am.
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