CYBERSPACE — Neuroscientist and clinician Nicole Prause completely debunks the myth that watching porn causes erectile dysfunction, in an article for The Daily Beast today.
This anti-porn myth is one of the cornerstones of the religiously funded “War on Porn” being waged across the United States, lobbying legislators and politicians with harmful misinformation to declare a made-up “public health crisis” supposedly caused by exposure to adult entertainment.
“Seven independent labs have been unable to find an association between time spent viewing sex films and experiencing more erectile difficulties with a partner,” Prause wrote in her Daily Beast’s feature article “Porn Did Not Break Your Penis.” “So why are men reporting porn effects that studies cannot find?”
Prause explained that as a neuroscientist and clinician, she was skeptical when some men started claiming a link between their porn-watching habits and their sexual performance.
“Not only are people poor reporters of their bodies' own physical response,” she wrote, “but neuroscientifically it seemed very unlikely that merely viewing sex films would transfer to partnered sexual experiences. Perhaps our first clue should have been that, after showing people porn in a lab, they run home more likely to have sex with their partner.”
As one of the article subheadlines simply states, “sex and porn are different.”
Prause quotes several reputable, peer-reviewed studies, including one by Samuel Perry, who attempted to answer a key question regarding the crucial difference between causation and mere correlation.
How do we know, asked Perry, that masturbation itself, regardless of secondary stimuli, is not causing the effects being misattributed to sex films?
Prause revealed that Perry's findings seem to indicate that that's the case.
The complete article is well worth reading and bookmarking for whenever an anti-porn propagandist or lobbyist brings up the deceptive “Porn Is a Public Health Crisis” campaign. You can read it in full here.
