“It’s the guy thing” said Julie when she told me about how disappointing the dating scene was at university.
“What’s ‘the guy thing’?”
“Guys who can’t get an erection.”
“You mean healthy young men in their late teens and early 20s can’t perform sexually?”
“Yeah. Someone said it’s because they’re watching so much damned porn, that they can’t get it up with a real person. It’s killing my confidence. It’s all so embarrassing.”
That conversation took place over eight years ago, pre-Covid. Since then, things have only become worse.
Watch this engaging video “You Won’t Believe How Pornography Affects Your Erectile Dysfunction“. It was made by leading behavioural addiction neuroscientist and ophthamalogist, Dr Andrew Doan. In it, he explains a very popular science paper, “Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports” by Park et al, 2016. The paper has had 226,515 views so far, putting in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric. He co-authored the paper with six other experts including The Reward Foundation’s late honorary research officer Gary Wilson.
The World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases Revision 11, (ICD-11) in 2018 introduced “Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder” as a new classification to cover this emerging addictive disorder.
In the video, Dr Doan also mentions that TIME magazine did a cover story about porn’s impact on young men, that was a few years ago. In September 2024 TIME did another one about the head of Aylo, Solomon Friedman, the owner of the most famous porn company in the world, Pornhub. It states,
“Apart from offering a lightly promoted podcast about sexual wellness, Aylo seems oddly incurious about the effect their product might have on those who view it. When asked if the company was looking at the emergent research into whether porn was habit-forming or bad for mental health, Friedman referred TIME to a researcher at UCLA whose lab has been separated from the university since 2015 and a sex therapist who has long been a defender of porn. ” [Emphasis added]
If the head of Pornhub doesn’t care about the health effect of the company’s product on users, it’s time for users to worry about the effects for themselves. Dr Doan encourages men to experiment for themselves with quitting porn for a few weeks to see if it helps their sexual function. Expensive pills like Viagra don’t always work, or not for long. He explains how the brain can heal itself when you remove the stressor. Maybe young women like Julie could help the young men in their lives to try quitting porn and to ignore the propaganda so widely promoted by the profit-driven porn industry. It may be a better route to sexual harmony.
