Critique of claims surrounding “Sexual Responsivity and the Effects of Negative Mood on Sexual Arousal in Hypersexual Men Who Have Sex With Men” (2020)

Link to abstract of above paper

As men who have quit porn and recovered from sexual dysfunctions (during partnered sex) demonstrate, porn-induced ED appears to be primarily due to conditioning their sexual response to online porn rather than real partners. Their difficulties are not due to “hypersexuality.” In fact, men who report the problem are–just as this 2020 paper suggests–sometimes “hypersexuals” and sometimes not.

There are two ways the men figure out that porn use caused their difficulties:

1. Testing whether they can get erections and ejaculate without using porn. If they can’t, but can get aroused when using porn, then they have likely conditioned their arousal to porn. See PIED test video for a fuller explanation. Consider this test from “Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports.”
   

   One simple test healthcare providers might employ is to ask, “whether the patient can achieve and sustain a satisfactory erection (and climax as desired) when masturbating without using Internet pornography”. If he cannot, but can easily achieve these goals with Internet pornography, then his sexual dysfunction may be associated with its use.

2. Eliminating internet porn for a time and seeing improvements in their sexual response, as multiple case studies and other papers have reported. (More below)

For more on porn conditioning watch this video by a recovered man.

The new 2020 paper: it can tell us nothing about porn-induced sexual problems

A carefully organized press campaign was created to “interpret” this paper for propaganda purposes just as it became publicly available. Predictably, given that most of this study’s authors are members of a blatantly pro-porn website (that infringes on the trademark of my site, and tweets and curates cherry-picked research that props us the porn industry’s interests), the related propaganda proclaimed that PIED was disproved.

In response to this orchestrated campaign, a neuroscientist tweeted, observing that the propagandists were employing, “the same fallacy as saying Pavlov’s dog is still able to salivate (to the sound of bells!), therefore there is no conditioning effect.” Why would he say this? Because the researchers hadn’t properly tested for the hypothesis that porn use can condition sexual response–and not just in “hypersexuals.” Yet the propagandists act as if they had.

Thus, although porn shills like David Ley claim this paper provides evidence against porn-induced sexual dysfunction (PIED), it actually tells us nothing about it.

To begin, PIED is the inability to achieve erection with a partner. (In some men, the reduced pleasure response behind this conditioning grows so severe that they eventually notice impaired response even when using porn, but that is uncommon.)

The fact is that men with PIED can usually achieve an erection with porn. After all, their arousal is conditioned to porn! They can “salivate to a bell,” but they may also be so conditioned to porn that they have difficulty with partnered sex, or even getting erections without porn. The researchers didn’t check for the latter conditions.

In any case, this study didn’t assess PIED. It only assessed sexual response while viewing porn. And all of the subjects (MSM, or men who have sex with men) were porn consumers – although the researchers didn’t share the measure they used to determine this in their write-up.

The point is that both subjects and controls had already had the opportunity to condition their sexual response to porn. Neither subjects nor controls were asked to eliminate its use to see if their sexual function improved (the most reliable way to determine if PIED conditioning is at work).

Incidentally, all of the subjects and controls had rather low sexual response. Consider this paper: Erectile Dysfunction and Premature Ejaculation in Homosexual and Heterosexual Men: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Comparative Studies (2019). It reported that men who have sex with men have higher rates of erectile dysfunction, porn use and porn addiction (CSBD).

While it is interesting that there wasn’t a significant difference between “hypersexuals” and others, this result does not negate the potential of porn use to condition sexual response in porn consumers.

Although these authors deny it, PIED is a “thing.” Seven peer-reviewed papers have so far demonstrated that when patients eliminated digital porn use, chronic sexual dysfunctions healed. There are some 32 additional studies linking porn use to sexual problems or low arousal during partnered sex. Studies with excerpts.

It is concerning, but not surprising, that Dr. Ley and others would misrepresent PIED and twist irrelevant findings into unsupported propaganda. He is being compensated by the porn industry to assure porn users that its consumption is harmless.

The new paper does not “replicate” a 2007 experiment

Porn industry shill and co-author of this paper Prause and her sidekick Ley mistakenly claim that this new paper is the same as experiments described in 2007 in a book chapter by Bancroft and Janssen (also a co-author of this new paper). “The Psychophysiology of Sex., Chapter: The Dual-Control Model: The role of sexual inhibition & excitation in sexual arousal and behavior.” Publisher: Indiana University Press, Editor: Erick Janssen, pp.197-222. Link to chapter

Yet this new paper is not the same as the earlier experiments, and here are some of the differences:

Difference#1 – The 2007 study interviewed the men who couldn’t get aroused by porn to assess the likely cause.

First, unlike the new 2020 study, the 2007 researchers interviewed the 50% of young men (average age 29) who mysteriously weren’t becoming aroused by test porn in the lab, and hypothesized that increasing exposure to porn was the likely cause. The scientists explained that the men frequented bars where porn had become omnipresent. Excerpt from the 2007 study:

When we applied this design (with the two types of sexual film, distraction and performance demand) to this new sample, however, we encountered another unanticipated, yet intriguing, phenomenon. Twelve men, or almost 50% of the first 25 subjects (mean age = 29 years), did not respond to the sexual stimuli (i.e., penile rigidity of less than 5% to the noncoercive film clips; 8 men had 0% rigidity). This is, to our knowledge, one of the few psychophysiological studies in which men participated who were recruited from the community–in our case, from bath houses, STD clinics, bars, and so on.

In some of these venues, sexual stimuli (including video screens) are omnipresent, and this, in combination with comments from participants about the lack of more interesting, specialized (“niche”), or more extreme or “kinky” stimuli, made us consider the possibility that the unusually high rate of nonresponders could be related to high levels of exposure to and experience with sexually explicit materials.

Difference #2 – the 2007 study determined porn use was cause!

The researchers also noted that, “Conversations with the subjects reinforced our idea that in some of them a high exposure to erotica seemed to have resulted in a lower responsivity to vanilla sex erotica and increased need for novelty, variation.”

Conversations with the subjects reinforced our idea that in some of them a high exposure to erotica seemed to have resulted in a lower responsivity to “vanilla sex” erotica and an increased need for novelty and variation, in some cases combined with a need for very specific types of stimuli in order to get aroused.

Difference#3 -2007 study added a 2nd experiment based on porn-induced low arousal.

The researchers even added a second experiment to take into account porn-induced low arousal. The second experiment included newer, longer, more varied clips, and allowed subjects to choose clips themselves. Still many didn’t respond!

We redesigned the study and decided to eliminate the distraction and performance demand manipulations and to include newer, more varied clips, as well as some longer film clips. Also, instead of presenting subjects with a set of preselected (“researcher-selected”) videos only, we let them choose two clips themselves from a set of 10, of which 10-second previews were shown and that included a wider range of sexual behaviors (e.g., group sex, interracial sex, S & M, etc.). We recruited an additional 51 subjects and found that with the improved design still 20 men, or approximately 25%, did not respond well to the sexual video clips (penile rigidity of less than 10% in response to the long self-selected film).

The 2007 experiments assessed “low responders” individually, and reported that: “the analyses suggested that as the number of erotic films seen within the past year increased a participant was more likely to be classified as a low responder.”

Difference#4 – 2007 study did not assess hypersexuality

The 2007 experiments did not assess hypersexuality. The 2020 study did, and compared a hypersexuality group to controls. (Yet there was no individual assessment of contributing factors to ED, as in 2007). That said, the 2020 hypersexual group had less genital response to porn than control group:

The authors then “controlled” for somewhat arbitrary factors – so as to artificially equalize the responses of the two groups and conclude that the groups did not respond differently from each other. Again predictable, given their pro-porn sympathies.

So, beware of porn shills shrieking untruths. Consider the source, and look carefully at the underlying findings. As is so often the case, the propaganda about this paper does not mirror its actual, inconclusive content.