the effects of watching porn and masturbation?

[Divinity]

Porn doesn't really desensitize you, or at least it shouldn't. Performance Anxiety is a far more likely cause of feeling desensitized than porn is.

There's many studies that say porn is bad for you, and there's many studies that say it has no negative effects. In fact some studies say it has positive effects.

If you're using porn as a substitute for sex, then you're doing it wrong. Porn is a wonderful tool that allows people to explore their likes and dislikes, as well as fulfill their sexual needs outside the bedrooms. Needs that aren't always met by your partner.

[Alex K]

Not everyone has the opportunity to have sex with a partner, Divinity, nor should one simply declare everything else "wrong". That's stupid and hurtful.

[Strider]

Very well said.

Thanks. I find the other typical sophomoric responses amusing. Unfettered access to pornography is changing the average person's perception of normal sexual relationships, warping and distorting their preferences and ability to actually engage in intercourse, and I doubt that they even know it. Despite not being religious, I am a traditionalist in many ways.

[Brakeman]

Very well said.

Thanks. I find the other typical sophomoric responses amusing. Unfettered access to pornography is changing the average person's perception of normal sexual relationships, warping and distorting their preferences and ability to actually engage in intercourse, and I doubt that they even know it. Despite not being religious, I am a traditionalist in many ways.

Horseshit!

You have no impericle evidence of any of your claims, and as one of your "outliers" I am still aroused by the same images of beautiful women that I was when I was 16. Porn has never had any detrimental effect on my life. I have a wonderful wife that likes sex just as much as me and we've never had any issues over the past 21 years.

You are simply and completely wrong.

[Strider]

Horseshit!

You have no impericle evidence of any of your claims, and as one of your "outliers" I am still aroused by the same images of beautiful women that I was when I was 16. Porn has never had any detrimental effect on my life. I have a wonderful wife that likes sex just as much as me and we've never had any issues over the past 21 years.

You are simply and completely wrong.

Completely wrong? Hardly.

Read all of the articles I provided a link for in my first post in this thread. There is indeed evidence and some research supporting my claims that pornography has ill effects. Also, go online and search for groups of people trying to kick porn and read their stories. I'll take hundreds and hundreds of different people's firsthand experiences (all very similar) as evidence any day.

As I said, there are outliers, as is apparently your case.

EDIT: Browse through these and then decide if I'm still completely wrong:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014.../?page=all
http://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/porn-debate
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tec...s-intimacy

Those are just a few of the many, many articles available on the matter. If you are so inclined, you can also dig into the sources/studies referenced in each of those.

[Brakeman]

Horseshit!

You have no impericle evidence of any of your claims, and as one of your "outliers" I am still aroused by the same images of beautiful women that I was when I was 16. Porn has never had any detrimental effect on my life. I have a wonderful wife that likes sex just as much as me and we've never had any issues over the past 21 years.

You are simply and completely wrong.

Completely wrong? Hardly.

Read all of the articles I provided a link for in my first post in this thread. There is indeed evidence and some research supporting my claims that pornography has ill effects. Also, go online and search for groups of people trying to kick porn and read their stories. I'll take hundreds and hundreds of different people's firsthand experiences (all very similar) as evidence any day.

As I said, there are outliers, as is apparently your case.

Yes, completely wrong. You are aware of the religions that fear women's sexuality and freedom from male possession so much that they condemn pornography. You are aware that this global bias would be a bitch to design a test around too right?

So lets get to the mechanics of your claims.

You say porn desensitizes. Why purpose does mental sexual sensitivity play in a healthy relationship with a partner? Are you saying that it prevents premature ejaculation? Are you claiming that it reduces sex demands on one's partner?  How much sex is required in a relationship? These are unanswerable questions because the relationship isn't based upon just sex. If I look at hundreds of naked beautifully photoshopped girls and then go to bed with my wife, I didn't just discover that my wife is not the sexiest woman on the planet. I knew that long before the internet. I knew before I married her that she had a flat butt and a "B" cup. I couldn't marry the perfect body woman if she existed, and I didn't try. I loved her for who she was and is and no amount of porn will affect that. It is the relationships that fail and fail often, that generates the anecdotal storied of porn's sinful side affects, not the other way around.

If relationships are really built upon sex then divorces should be pretty much universal as people age.

Sex is something you do not who you are. A relationship is not built upon sex and reproduction as it was during the bronze age. If you are in a great relationship you will also usually like the sex in that relationship. If your wife is unhappy that you speend too much time looking at porn then she's also unhappy that you spend too much time on-line yelling at theists.

[Edwardo Piet]

If you're using porn as a substitute for sex, then you're doing it wrong.  

And when you don't get any sex...?

Porn is a wonderful tool that allows people to explore their likes and dislikes, as well as fulfill their sexual needs outside the bedrooms.  Needs that aren't always met by your partner.

And when you don't have a partner or casual sex..?

I'm just glad I'm rather bored of porn now I guess...

[Brakeman]

When I was younger I could actually have sex 10+ times a day I never really "ran out" I just got tired or had to go to class. Masturbation doesn't consume anything that doesn't build with use, like exercising your muscles.

My knowledge of sex was a boon to my wife not a hindrance. Having first time virgin like sex all the time where ignorance of the existence of other sexual bodies and methods is a hard sell to us as a panacea.

Sexual attraction is an evolutionary trait and it does not get "broken" by use. Because I had many partners in my youth does not effect my ability to maintain my monogamy now. What was difficult to overcome was the dishonesty in the other relationships, not the memory of their body image.

[CapnAwesome]

I won't comment on morality because that's a can of worms I don't want to open. That said, I think that pornography has harmful mental effects. I feel quite strongly on this matter.

The act of intercourse, sexual images, and so forth affect the brain in many ways. Various hormones are released, the nervous system is flooded with stimuli, and lots of other biological things are happening. Now, we have access to any and all kinds of porn with the click of a mouse and people are experiencing this flood of stimuli on a daily basis if not multiple times a day for some people. It's not that much different from other addictions. People get hooked on the rush of getting off on porn.

Here's the harm as I see it: desensitization. If you binge on porn daily, your real life sexual activities with your partner will suffer. I figure somebody will chime in and say, "I watch porn everyday and my real sex is great!" Good for you. You're an outlier. Anyway, over time the same old, vanilla porn that you watch will probably stop being as effective in helping you get off. This will inevitably result in seeking out more effective stimuli. A person seeks out porn that pushes the envelope and is more "hardcore" or "extreme". You see the slippery slope here? It's just like with drugs; to get the desired response, you have to take something stronger as you build up a tolerance.

I'm off of porn and have been for a long while now. I feel better physically, I perform better, and I feel better about myself. All that time spent fapping in front of the computer can be spent reading a book and channeling that energy into something productive.

EDIT: OP, I recommend the "Men and Porn" series of articles at Art of Manliness. Related articles are listed toward the bottom of the page. Regardless of your personal opinion on porn, you should give it a read.

How much time are you really saving not watching porn? 10 minutes a day. It's probably a time saver for me, because it helps me get the job done quicker then imagination alone. Vanilla porn gets boring after a while for people predisposed towards kink. Kink predates porn by centuries or millineua and the idea that it's somehow caused by porn is false. The second thing that is false is that kink is somehow bad. We need to get out of the idea that sexual exploration is bad. All that you have said about a slippery slope is that watching porn may lead to exploring your own sexuality. I fail to see how that is a negative thing at all. If Vanilla porn is going to get boring then Vanilla sex is going to get boring for the same person. So that cause and effect are the same whether or not porn is involved at all. The whole argument that's presented by both you and that article assumes that any type of non-vanilla sex or porn is somehow a negative thing. This is the kind of anti-sex thinking that is holding back our society and making whole generations of people afraid of exploring their own sexuality. If that's the slippery slope you are talking about, sign me up. If on the other hand you are implying that porn consumption will somehow lead to more sexual assaults, the data just doesn't support that and in fact the opposite may be true. Quoted from a 2009 abstract on porn and it's relation to sexual assault.

Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships. Although these data cannot be used to determine that pornography has a cathartic effect on rape behavior, combined with the weak evidence in support of negative causal hypotheses from the scientific literature, it is concluded that it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to increased sexual assault behavior.

http://www.calcasa.org/2010/03/what-is-t...y-on-rape/

Porn is positive, it helps people explore their sexuality, explore what they are into. Porn can be a great addition to the sex life of couples (women watch porn too, duh) and it may even decrease sexual assault. Being anti-porn is backwards and anti-sex.

[CapnAwesome]

Horseshit!

You have no impericle evidence of any of your claims, and as one of your "outliers" I am still aroused by the same images of beautiful women that I was when I was 16. Porn has never had any detrimental effect on my life. I have a wonderful wife that likes sex just as much as me and we've never had any issues over the past 21 years.

You are simply and completely wrong.

Completely wrong? Hardly.

Read all of the articles I provided a link for in my first post in this thread. There is indeed evidence and some research supporting my claims that pornography has ill effects. Also, go online and search for groups of people trying to kick porn and read their stories. I'll take hundreds and hundreds of different people's firsthand experiences (all very similar) as evidence any day.

As I said, there are outliers, as is apparently your case.

EDIT: Browse through these and then decide if I'm still completely wrong:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014.../?page=all
http://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/porn-debate
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tec...s-intimacy

Those are just a few of the many, many articles available on the matter. If you are so inclined, you can also dig into the sources/studies referenced in each of those.

You know what all of those articles do, presuppose that non-monogamous, non vanilla sex is bad. They also are typically confused on cause and effect. Maybe confused in the wrong word, they may very well go in with an agenda already as the guy writing the article you linked to previously freely admitted. Often times there are quotes like this in those articles:

In a 2008 study in the journal NeuroImage, for example, men who watched erotic videos experienced mirror neuron activation and reported a desire to replicate the sex acts they saw.

Duh? It also fails to explain why that is bad. It just presupposes with typical puritan morality that it is. Even if you are watching violent porn, there are plenty of women who are consensual into that. Plenty of them. If anything more then there are men. What they are saying is actually a positive thing. Porn makes your more sexually exploitative. What they are trying to imply though in that article is that porn causes rape but they can only imply it because no data backs up that statement.

Here is another one from the same article:

Recent research suggests that this flood of visual stimulation may amplify men's evolved drive for casual sex. In a recent study, for example, Wright found that men who use porn are more likely to have multiple partners and extramarital sex.

Typically cause and effect is ignored, as is often the case. The second thing is the automatic assumption that casual sex is bad. It's not. Some people that is part of their sexual being. What is wrong with men and women enjoying casual sex? The article doesn't say, it just makes the anti-sex moral assumption. Also I've noticed that none of those articles talk about women viewing porn. Most girls I've dated and most of my female friends watch porn or have watched porn at various points in their life. Those articles again take a presupposed puritan position that porn is for men and only a male activity. This is false and again, tragically anti-sex.

Basically all those articles are anti-sex propaganda that seem to be fueled by your typical puritan agenda.