I’m a 26 year old guy who has a pretty long (and pretty typical) history of watching pornography. I started looking at pictures online when I was 14 or 15 and progressed to videos by 16 or 17. Started having sex at 18 and have had a couple long term girlfriends since then (have been dating current girlfriend for three + years).
I probably watch porn and masturbated to orgasm anywhere from two to four times per week (maybe 15 minutes each time) with the content being relatively vanilla. I’d say this had been pretty consistent behaviour for at least the last six or seven years.
I’ve also had a history of sexual performance anxiety. For whatever reason I won’t get it up one time which leads to issues for the next couple times before I break that streak. Recently I had been having a really bad streak where I hadn’t been able to maintain a real erection for a month to two months and, if I’m being honest, the erections before that with my partner weren’t too stellar either. This caused a lot of stress which leaked into the rest of my life.
So of course I started thinking all sorts of things were wrong with me like low testosterone or some kind of nerve damage. I also happen to be a doc which shows that even we are not immune to hypochondria. In my rational mind, I knew it was psychogenic erectile dysfunction, but that knowledge didn’t seem to help things. I knew that psychogenic erectile dysfunction can be related to pornography use, but I had always associated that with much higher content use than my own.
So around the worst part of it, my girlfriend had to leave for a month for her job. Since nothing had worked, I had decided to cut out pornography a week or two before she left. Pretty much immediately after she left, I fell into a period of essentially zero libido. No morning erections, unable to obtain an erection through self-stimulation, nada, zip. I held off on trying the porn to see if that worked because I figured I had to test my theory. This lasted for about three weeks until one week before she was set to arrive home.
Things started getting a little better at this point (morning semi-erections) but really not anything bordering on usable. I was so anxious about how things would go with my girlfriend that I wound up getting a script for cialis (which really, really works). I only used it two or three times before I began having great quality erections all by myself, and have been having great sex for the past month without cialis and haven’t gone back to pornography yet (I guess this puts me around 70 – 75 days without porn).
Anyways, kind of a rambling story, but I really feel like what many would consider “normal” pornography use had a hand in my sexual dysfunction. Anxiety was obviously also a factor, but was probably not the root cause.
LINK – Even if you don’t think porn is the problem – it just might be
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