Pornography Viewing: Keep Calm and Carry On

Sexual medicine has expressed concern about the presumed negative effects of pornography on sexual aggression, sexual relationships, and sexual function since the inception of the scientific study of human sexuality. Ivan Bloch,1 the German physician who coined the term sexology, asserted as long ago as 1902 that “[t]here is no sexual aberration, no perverse act, however frightful, that is not photographically represented today” [p. 204]. Experimental studies of pornography and aggression conducted in the 1970s and 1980s appeared to support an assumed relation between pornography and anti-woman sexual aggression, with Malamuth et al2 concluding broadly, in 2000, that “… exposure to both nonviolent pornography and violent pornography affects both aggressive attitudes and behaviors” [p. 44]. Extending the harm-focused narrative, many have recently suggested that pornography damages sexual satisfaction and harms intimate relationships. For example, in 2010, Lambert et al3 reported that “[w]e have examined whether the consumption of pornography affects romantic relationships, with the expectation that higher levels of pornography consumption would correspond to weakened commitment …” [p. 410]. In their report, evidence collected across five studies showed that higher pornography consumption was linked with lower levels of relationship commitment, more extra-dyadic flirting, and higher levels of relationship infidelity. More recently still, activists, clinicians, and researchers have asserted that pornography use is linked with sexual dysfunction and that there have been unprecedented increases in what is termed “[p]ornography-induced erectile dysfunction (PIED) and pornography-induced abnormally low libido”4 [p. 3] as a result of the availability of sexually explicit material on the internet. The possibility that pornography use might causally influence sexual aggression, sexual and relationship dissatisfaction, and sexual dysfunction is of considerable significance for sexual medicine, and we comment briefly on the available evidence.