How Pornography Really Affects Your Sex Life

                                                                 

Even if you know pornography isn’t true to life, watching it may still have very real consequences. (Mike Kemp/Getty Images)

Pornography has been blamed for everything from the casual sex culture to domestic violence. Now, a new study suggests that the world’s favorite naughty habit may even be threatening the institution of marriage. Pornography consumption is associated with a decreased likelihood of walking down the aisle, according to research from the Institute for the Study of Labor in Germany. 

The explanation is simple: Why get married when you log onto the Internet and access an endless supply of sex? 

Of course, no man would argue that a writhing woman on his laptop screen is exactly the same as a partner in his bed — and most of us realize that our professor or nurse isn’t likely to suddenly transform into a scantily clad seductress (as is so often depicted in porn).

But that doesn’t mean our brains can totally separate pornography from reality. A new Archives of Sexual Behavior study found that men who frequently watch porn tend to bring the scenes they see into the bedroom — and that mutual pleasure may not always be the final outcome.

In interviews with sex therapists, lead study author Chyng Sun was repeatedly told that pornography spills over into real-world relationships — that what men see on the screen colors their expectations of actual partners. “I heard about this pattern, but I didn’t see it examined on a bigger scale,” she tells Yahoo Health. To see if this effect consistently occurs outside the therapist’s office, Sun surveyed 487 male college students (ages 18 to 29) about their pornography use and their actual sex lives.

What she found: The more porn men watched, the more likely they were to request pornographic acts of their partner and to deliberately conjure scenes they’d seen to help maintain their erection during real-world romps. “We see that pornography is not a fantasy, because [men] actually bring it into their bedroom,” says Sun.

This is in line with what psychologists call “sexual scripts theory”—that is, what we watch becomes what we expect our interactions to resemble. According to this idea, “we learn everything from a script,” whether it’s how you behave toward your boss or how to order at a restaurant, Sun explains. Problem is, “there aren’t a lot of sexual scripts out there for us to learn from, except in pornography,” she says. “Pornography really becomes the most salient, important sexual education, particularly for young people.” In other words, the only sexual example most people have is the stuff they pull up on YouPorn, so the things they expect in the bedroom are the things they see on the Internet. 

Here’s where it gets worrisome: Past research has shown that the sexual acts in popular pornography tend to be aggressive — things like choking, spanking, and name-calling. “These acts are framed as pleasurable — not only for men, but also for women,” says Sun.

That means men may be set up for disappointment when their actual partner isn’t interested in or even feels degraded by the acts they’ve watched porn stars take pleasure in. “There’s a gap between what they want to do and what they actually can do,” she says. “This decreases satisfaction with their sex life. As one man told me, ‘Where am I going to find the girls that want to do all those things I want to do?’”

It’s not just the man’s pleasure that may be compromised. A desire for pornographic acts may crowd out the other, more intimate side of sex that many women rely on for arousal: In the study, frequent porn watchers were less likely to enjoy cuddling, kissing, and caressing than non-viewers.

Why? After being sexually primed to prefer the intense, aggressive stuff in porn, these sensual sex acts may seem boring, say Sun. “They feel limited,” she says. “Pornography is thousands and thousands of different women — it’s not just your own partner. And beyond that, there are all kinds of sexual acts.” Read: Kissing the same woman every night may pale in comparison to the thought of experimenting with a buffet of different women.

The takeaway: Pornography may not be as harmless as we’d like to think. “People say, ‘Fantasy is just fantasy. There’s no harm,’” says Sun. “That notion is very problematic. In many ways, fantasy informs your ideas about how men and women should relate to each other. It’s not benign — it’s in your brain.”