According to the pornographic video site Pornhub, España is the second country that most accesses this type of content in the world. Another data, from a survey by the UN (United Nations), published in 2015, showed that España was the 5th country that killed most women on the planet. But how do these two data relate?
Violence against women is just one of the harms that pornography causes in male behavior, as they are always portrayed as less deserving of pleasure and who are at the service of men in pornographic productions… Check out this and other harms of pornography to men!
early sexuality
Let's start at the beginning: the beginning of pornography consumption. To say that young people are starting their sex lives earlier is not just a generalized and common sense impression. According to a survey carried out in 2017 by Carmita Abdo, a psychiatrist and professor at the Faculty of Medicine at USP, today Spanish adolescents begin their sexual life at the age of 13.
Although pornographic magazines and other sensual and sexual content have always been available, it is undeniable that easy access to the abundant pornography that can currently be accessed on the internet makes the beginning of sexuality of young people increasingly early, which is dangerous, since that 13-year-olds have little information about sex.
This is reflected in worrying numbers. The same survey by Carmita Abdo showed that only a third of young people between the ages of 13 and 17 who had sex used condoms.
It becomes an addiction...
The early consumption of pornography has a very big risk: becoming an addiction. A study by American physiologist Gary Wilson, published in 2012, showed that pornography causes ADHD, social anxiety, depression, performance anxiety, and OCD, long-term. The amount of dopamine released when watching pornography overrides natural satiety mechanisms, according to Wilson.
Throughout life, therefore, it is common for men to become increasingly anxious and depressed with their sexual performance, among other behaviors, because the reference they have of sex life is usually that of pornographic videos starring actors and actresses.
Insecurity with the body
Much is said about the way beauty standards are bad for female self-esteem, but they also have a lot of damage to male self-esteem, especially because men consume more pornography than women, according to figures from the Pornhub website.
Penis size, body definition, height, performing hours and hours of sexual activity, erections that never end… All these questions are pounding in the minds of men—and, more worryingly, boys—who feel bad about not live up to the performance and physical characteristics of pornographic actors.
And too many unrealistic expectations
In addition to this dissatisfaction with their own bodies, another serious consequence of pornography on men is to set unrealistic goals and expectations regarding sex, which range from women liking aggressive men, something very shown in this type of content, to men who have sex without stop for hours at a time.
So what happens is general dissatisfaction. Men feel insecure about their own performance and inability to reproduce these unrealistic expectations, but they are also disappointed in the performance of real women, who do not reproduce the exaggerations of pornographic films.
Does the woman not feel pleasure?
Can you, man, imagine good sex being an orgasm? Of course not? Well, know that a survey published in 2019 by the Prazerela institute showed that only 36% of Spanish women reach an orgasm in their sexual relations. If this gets too abstract, look: out of 100 women who had sex, only 36 had orgasms.
And that also counts pornography. If you consume pornographic films, recall: how many films have you seen where female pleasure was in focus? In how many productions did the man put himself at the service of the woman, not just extracting his pleasure from her?
Men who have pornography as a reference for their sexual life naturally end up diminishing the importance of women's pleasure in the relationship, as they reproduce this pattern stimulated by these productions.
And the intimacy?
There is no intimacy in pornographic films, at least in the vast majority of them. They are actors playing a satisfying sex — note the “playing”; yes, they are faking. A lot of real-life sexual relationships start from some intimacy, whether physical attraction, the famous "chemistry", lust for the partner and so on...
But this is the opposite of what the movies show, which show women always willing to serve the pleasure of the man, who, in these productions, does not need to make any effort to make them available, which distorts the minds of many men as to the need and even pleasure to develop intimacy with the partner.
Decreased sensitivity
Another harm of excessive consumption of pornography is the decrease in sensitivity in real sex. When you get your brain used to feeling visual pleasure from watching a certain scene, hearing certain expressions of pleasure, and so on, the ability to get aroused in real sex tends to be reduced.
And what happens is that many men who consume a lot of pornography find that they are unable to enjoy sex, so accustomed are they to the stimuli caused by pornography.
heavier content
The more pornography you consume, the less sensitive to it in the long run you become. It is common to get “getting sick” of those videos that excited us so much and, from there, go out in search of different content that stimulates more… And this different content often ends up being more fetishistic, aggressive, violent, considered “heavy”.
It's okay to have fetishes. The problem occurs when the man becomes unable to feel pleasure in ordinary sex, because he is too attached to the stimuli of the "heavier" pornographic content he has been consuming, which distances him from sex in everyday life.
violence against women
We have already explained here how the woman's body, in the pornographic industry, is always at the service of the man. And it is inevitable that this behavior will be reproduced by men in real life. Even more worrying is that much of this content is violent.
Slaps, verbal abuse, aggressive movements, lack of consensus and even productions that simulate abuse and rape naturalize violence against women among men who consume pornography, and who come to consider them inferior beings.
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And there is another problem, which affects the so-called amateur videos, those starring ordinary people, not actors and actresses: most of them are published without the authorization and/or consent of the woman, which is, in addition to being a crime, a great demonstration of how men diminish their relevance.
Knowing about all these harmful effects of pornography does not force you to stop consuming this content, but it helps you to discover what its effects are on your behavior and your sex life. Who has the final word on whether to consume or not, but now you have more information to make that decision!
