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Is Nicole Prause Influenced by the Porn Industry?

April 17, 2019/0 Comments/in Sexual Desire, not Hypersexuality, is Related to Neurophysiological Responses Elicited by Sexual Images /by psadmin

Introduction

Is Nicole Prause Influenced by the Porn Industry?

In 2013 former UCLA researcher Nicole Prause began openly harassing, libeling and cyberstalking Gary Wilson. (Prause has not been employed by an academic institution since January, 2015.) Within a short time she also began targeting others, including researchers, medical doctors, therapists, psychologists, a former UCLA colleague, a UK charity, men in recovery, a TIME magazine editor, several professors, IITAP, SASH, Fight The New Drug, Exodus Cry, NoFap.com, RebootNation, YourBrainRebalanced, the academic journal Behavioral Sciences, its parent company MDPI, US Navy medical doctors, the head of the academic journal CUREUS, and the journal Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity (See – Numerous Victims of Nicole Prause’s Malicious Reporting and Malicious Use of Process)

While spending her waking hours harassing others, Prause cleverly cultivated – with zero verifiable evidence – a myth that she was “the victim” of most anyone who dared to disagree with her assertions surrounding porn’s effects or the current state of porn research (See: Nicole Prause’s fabrications of victim-hood exposed as groundless: she is the perpetrator, not the victim). To counter the ongoing harassment and false claims, YBOP was compelled to document some of Prause’s activities. Consider the following pages. (Additional incidents have occurred that we are not at liberty to divulge – as Prause’s victims fear further retribution.)

In the beginning Prause employed dozens of fake usernames to post on porn recovery forums, Quora, Wikipedia, and in the comment sections under articles. Prause rarely used her real name or her own social media accounts. That all changed after UCLA chose not to renew Prause’s contract (around January, 2015).

Freed from any oversight and now self-employed, Prause added two media managers/promoters from Media 2×3 to her company’s tiny stable of “Collaborators.” (Media 2×3 president Jess Ponce describes himself as a Hollywood media coach and personal branding expert.) Their job is to place articles in the press featuring Prause, and find her speaking engagements in pro-porn and mainstream venues. Odd tactics for a supposedly impartial scientist.

Prause began to put her name to falsehoods, openly cyber-harassing multiple individuals and organizations on social media and elsewhere. Since Prause’s primary target was Gary Wilson (hundreds of social media comments along with behind the scenes email campaigns), it became necessary to monitor and document Prause’s tweets and posts. This was done for her victims’ protection, and crucial for any future legal actions. Note: within months of this page going live, Prause became embroiled in two defamation lawsuits (Donald Hilton, MD & Nofap founder Alexander Rhodes), a trademark infringement case, and a trademark squatting case.

It soon became apparent that Prause’s tweets and comments were rarely about sex research, neuroscience, or any other subject related to her claimed expertise. In fact, the vast majority of Prause’s posts could be divided into two overlapping categories:

Indirect support of the porn industry: Defamatory & ad hominem comments targeting individuals and organizations that she labeled as “anti-porn activists” (often claiming to be a victim of these individuals and organizations). Documented here: page 1, page 2, page 3, and page 4.
Direct support of the porn industry:
- direct support of the FSC (Free Speech Coalition), AVN (Adult Video News), porn producers, performers, and their agendas
- countless misrepresentations of the state of pornography research and attacks on porn studies or porn researchers.

This page contains a sampling of tweets and comments related to #2 – her vigorous support of the porn industry and its chosen positions. After years of sitting on the evidence, YBOP is of the view that Prause’s unilateral aggression has escalated to such frequent and reckless defamation (falsely accusing her many victims of “physically stalking her,” “misogyny,” “encouraging others to rape her,” and “being neo-Nazis“), that we are compelled to examine her possible motives.

This page is divided into 4 main sections:

Please note: There is unequivocal evidence that the porn industry funded the sexology profession for decades. Sexology’s agenda still appears to serve the porn industry. Thus, the evidence on this page should be viewed in a larger context. See Hugh Hefner, the International Academy of Sex Research, and Its Founding President to understand how porn-industry friendly sexologists influenced the Kinsey Institute. Prause is a Kinsey grad.

Update (November, 2019): Finally, some accurate media coverage on serial false accuser, defamer, harasser, trademark infringer, Nicole Prause: “Alex Rhodes of Porn Addiction Support Group ‘NoFap’ Sues Obsessed Pro-Porn Sexologist for Defamation” by Megan Fox of PJ Media and “Porn wars get personal in No Nut November”, by Diana Davison of The Post Millennial. Davison also produced this 6-minute video about Prause’s egregious behaviors: “Is Porn Addictive?”.

Update (August, 2020): Gary Wilson wins lawsuit against serial harasser, defamer, cyberstalker Nicole Prause. Details – Legal victory exposes Prause as the perpetrator, not the victim: her efforts to silence Wilson foiled as her restraining order is denied as fraudulent and she owes substantial attorney fees in a anti-SLAPP ruling.

Update (January, 2021): Prause filed a second frivolous legal proceeding against me in December, 2020 for alleged defamation. At a hearing on January 22, 2021 an Oregon court ruled in my favor and charged Prause with costs and an additional penalty. This failed effort was one of a dozen lawsuits Prause publicly threatened and/or filed in the previous months. After years of malicious reporting, she has escalated to threats of actual lawsuits to try to silence those who reveal her close ties to the porn industry and her malicious conduct, or who have made sworn statements in the 3 defamation suits currently active against her.

SECTION 1: Nicole Prause & the porn industry

**Falsely accusing others of saying the porn industry funds some of her research**

One of Prause’s favorite tactics is to falsely accuse others of saying that the porn industry has funded some of her research (all of which reaches pro-porn conclusions). This unfounded accusation plays well to her Twitter followers (many of whom are in the industry) and feeds into her fabricated mythology of victimhood. However, Prause has never provided any actual documentation of anyone stating that she is funded by the porn industry.

Here are a few examples of this ruse before we expose Prause’s cozy relationship with the porn industry. First, an excerpt from a baseless cease & desist letter sent to Linda Hatch PhD:

Linda Hatch never said Prause was funded by the porn industry, and Prause provided no documentation in support of either of her allegations. See: Prause silencing people with fake “no contact” demands and spurious cease & desist letters

Another bogus cease & desist letter, to Gary Wilson:

All four claims in the above cease & desist letter are groundless. Completely fabricated by Prause. See: October, 2016 – Prause publishes her spurious October, 2015 “cease and desist” letter. Wilson responds by publishing his letter to Prause’s lawyer.

Prause has posted many tweets like this one, claiming that “activists” say she or other scientists are funded by the porn industry (Prause has never linked to a single example):

Another such tweet:

Notice how she never provides documentation to support her assertions.

Finally, several 2018 tweets targeted FTND containing the same text and same two screenshots: 1) an excerpt from a Politico article asserting that FTND was “seeded with millions of dollars from the Mormon Church”; 2) an excerpt from an email that may or may not have been sent by FTND:

Over the years we have seen FTND state that it has received no funding from the Mormon Church. Not surprisingly, Politico provided no documentation for this assertion (not even a link to another hit piece). Was it simply fabricated, or fed to Politico by one of the two press relations experts on the tiny staff of Prause’s company?

Apart from offering no support for her Mormon-funding assertion, Prause’s screenshots of the purported email are a bit curious. Instead of providing a screenshot of an entire email, Prause provides a screenshot of a letterhead, and a second screenshot of an out-of-context paragraph.

The letterhead:

The out-of-context paragraph, which did not, in fact, state that Prause’s research was funded by the porn industry:

Instead of saying Prause’s research was funded by the porn industry, the email wondered if Prause had been “influenced by someone within the porn industry.” Mind you, this email is dated April, 2016, before Nicole Prause exponentially increased her harassment and libel (as documented on the pages listed above).

While there’s no evidence of any of Prause’s victims stating that Prause receives funding from the porn industry, anyone might be forgiven for wondering if she is indeed influenced by the porn industry. The Prause pages on this website are just the tip of a very large Prause Iceberg. She has posted thousands of times, attacking everyone and anyone who suggests porn might cause problems. (Prause recently purged her twitter account of 3,000 or more incriminating tweets.) She has defended the industry at every turn, much as a paid industry thought-leader could be expected to do.

Clearly Prause, who lives in LA, enjoys a cozy relationship with the pornography industry. See this image of her (far right) apparently taken on the red carpet of the X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) awards ceremony. According to Wikipedia,

“The XRCO Awards are given by the American X-Rated Critics Organization annually to people working in adult entertainment and it is the only adult industry awards show reserved exclusively for industry members.^[1]“

Photos taken at the 2016 XRCO awards (Prause & hall of fame porn star Melissa Hill at bottom-left):

In 2015 the Free Speech Coalition offers Prause assistance, she accepts and immediately attacks California’s prop 60 (condoms in porn).

California Proposition 60 (2016 election) would have mandated condom use in porn films. It was supported by AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), a nonprofit HIV/AIDS care and advocacy organization, and vehemently opposed by porn producers and interestingly enough, Nicole Prause and colleague David Ley. In the run up to the 2016 election, Prause and Ley seemed obsessed with defeating Prop 60, while relatively unconcerned about graver issues such as health care, immigration, or jobs. Both Prause and Ley spent considerable effort tweeting and re-tweeting attacks on Prop 60, and support for the Free Speech Coalition, the lobbying arm for the porn industry (tweet1, tweet2, tweet3, tweet4, tweet5, tweet6, tweet7, tweet8, tweet9, tweet10, tweet11 – NOTE: Prause deleted many of these tweets in April, 2016).

On October 1, 2015 the FSC (which has spent millions on lawsuits that benefit the porn industry) offered Prause assistance with respect to her so-called “bullies.”

The real bully here was Prause, who had her first Twitter account permanently banned for harassment and cyber-stalking. (In violation of its own rules, Twitter allowed her to create a second Twitter account.) Instead of revealing the facts, Prause fabricated a tall-tale that John Adler MD (Stanford) somehow got her kicked off Twitter. Adler had nothing to with this. Lies upon lies.

Prause emailed the FSC to accept their “help” with her imaginary bullies. Prause then promptly begins to discuss with another industry account why condoms in porn are a bad idea (the porn industry’s position):

Prause then offers help to the FSC (is this the beginnings of a mutually beneficial relationship?):

Since then, Prause has publicly assisted the FSC multiple times, including for example, supporting the FSC’s campaign against California’s ill-fated Proposition 60 (calling for condom use in porn):

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Here she retweets FSC propaganda. (Again, dozens of Prause’s incriminating pro-FSC tweets have since been deleted.):

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Smearing the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, while taking the side of porn industry reps:

Another Prop 60 tweet:

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Yet another tweet in which Prause promotes AVN’s position on Prop 60:

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Prause retweets XBIZ propaganda, attacks AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which supports condoms in porn (prop 60): https://twitter.com/AIDSHealthcare

In support of the porn industry, Prause retweets porn-producer propaganda. Prause attacks AIDS Healthcare Foundation (which supports prop 60):

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Tagging FSC, retweeting porn industry propaganda about prop 60:

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Tagging FSC while attacking a UCLA medical doctor who supported the use of condoms for porn performers (prop 60):

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More about Prause’s pro-FSC actions in this section: November, 2016: Prause asks VICE magazine to fire infectious disease specialist Keren Landman, MD for supporting Prop 60 (condoms in porn). In a series of tweets, Prause joins an “adult actor” in attacking a Keren Landman, a medical doctor specializing in infectious disease.

Here’s what is most egregious: Prause tells VICE magazine to fire expert Dr. Landman for writing an article supporting Prop 60:

Freelancer? While Prause’s degree is in statistics, Keren Landman MD is a researcher, medical epidemiologist, and infectious disease specialist who once worked for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. HIV infection is one of her specialties, having published several papers in the field. Once again, we have Prause personally attacking experts in a field, while simultaneously failing to support her position with empirical evidence. (Does anyone believe Prause’s claim that “every independent scientist opposes Prop 60″?) Whatever anyone thinks about Prop 60, Dr. Landman’s position is supported by research, and Nicole Prause’s is not.

Prause tells the world how she voted:

Prause enters a thread where Gary Wilson had already tweeted, bragging about her role in defeating prop 60 (Prause and her presumed alias RealYBOP often troll Wilson’s twitter threads – even though Wilson has blocked both accounts):

The Free Speech Coalition allegedly provided subjects for a Nicole Prause study that she claims will “debunk” porn addiction.

Does Prause’s relentless support for the porn industry arise from a quid pro quo, or more than one? Certainly, a public exchange of favors occurred in 2015 when the Free Speech Coalition (porn industry lobby) offered Prause assistance and she accepted. Immediately she attacked Prop 60 (condoms in porn, which the industry didn’t want).

A second possible quid pro quo occurred in 2016. Prause was given a bucket-load of money to produce a hired-gun study on the heavily tainted and very commercial “Orgasmic Meditation” (OM) scheme (apparently under investigation by the FBI). Orgasmic Meditation, an MLM pseudo-cult that charges big bucks to teach men how to stroke a women’s clitorises. Prause pictured here monitoring a couple engaging in OM:

We are not sure, but the study on clitoris diddling (OM) may have hit a predictable snag: the challenge of finding female subjects who want their genitals rubbed while being hooked up to machines and monitored by researchers. To reach her target of 250 OM couples, it appears that Prause may have obtained porn performers as subjects through porn industry interest group the Free Speech Coalition. The favor to the FSC? Then, almost two years later, Prause publicly began proclaiming that her upcoming OM study (which previously had nothing to do with porn) would debunk porn addiction. As of this writing (November, 2020) the OM study has yet to appear.

All the details and documentation:

Adult performer Ruby the Big Rubousky, Vice President of the Adult Performers Actors Guild, stated that Prause obtained porn performers as study subjects through the most prominent porn industry interest group/lobby, the Free Speech Coalition. (Prause has since deleted this Twitter thread).

The study (or studies) in question is said to be funded by OneTaste, a for-profit company that charged $4,300.00 for a 3-day workshop to learn clitoral manipulation. As described in this Bloomberg.com expose, OneTaste offered several different packages:

Currently, students pay $499 for a weekend course, $4,000 for a retreat, $12,000 for the coaching program, and $16,000 for an “intensive.” In 2014, OneTaste started selling a yearlong $60,000 membership, which lets buyers take all the courses they want and sit in the front row.

Here’s the official description this OM study and the funder, from page 3 of Nicole Prause’s 20-page CV (notice that Prause lists herself as “principal investigator”):

In court documents, tweets, and a lie-filled letter threatening me (Gary Wilson), Prause is now bizarrely stating that I defamed her by stating that her first Orgasmic Meditation study was funded by the OneTaste Foundation. Perhaps she is currently being funded by the newly created apparent-affiliate “Institute of OM Foundation,” but her CV doesn’t lie – even though Prause does.

Greg Siegle’s CV also lists OneTaste as funding their Orgasmic Meditation research:

As recently operational as May, 2020 the now defunct OneTaste website featured Prause & Siegle as “researching” Orgasmic Meditation:

A 2017 Yoga Journal article also names OneTaste as the funder for the OM study:

It’s well established that Prause regularly lies, defames, and even perjures herself, but why tell such an easily debunked falsehood? She’s probably trying to distance herself from “OneTaste,” which funded her research and was exposed in the Bloomberg article as a shady operation, perhaps even a sex cult.

It appears that OM is trying to distance itself from the discredited “OneTaste.” In 2020, the OneTaste website disappeared (Internet archive version), and was replaced by the “Institute of OM.” The newer “OM” science page featuring Prause & Siegle closely resembles the former “OneTaste” science page:

Strategically, the new name contains neither “Orgasmic Meditation” nor “OneTaste,” two identifiers seen in numerous articles slamming OneTaste. It wasn’t just a new website as the hosts actually let “OneTaste” go, creating two new entities: INSTITUTE OF OM LLC and the “INSTITUTE OF OM FOUNDATION” (the latter of which apparently funds research). Interestingly, the Institute of OM Foundation was created 5 months after the Bloomberg expose’:

Bottom line: which ever entity is currently funding Prause’s Orgasmic Meditation research, OneTaste funded the initial OM studies by Prause & Siegle.

More on the Prause & Siegle study(s), now publicized on the newly formed Institute of OM Foundation website (with not a word on the site about discredited “OneTaste”):

In the 2018 Bloomberg article Chief Executive Officer Joanna Van Vleck pretty much says that OneTaste was now dependent on Prause’s upcoming EEG studies about OM:

The newish CEO is betting that the study OneTaste has funded on the health benefits of OM, which has taken brain-activity readings from 130 pairs of strokers and strokees, will draw fresh crowds. Led by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, the study is expected to yield the first of multiple papers later this year. “The science that’s coming out to back what this is and what the benefits are is going to be huge in terms of scaling,” Van Vleck says

Put simply, Prause was hired to bolster the commercial interests of the heavily tainted and very controversial company, no matter what name it goes by (another article: The ‘fingering’ cult: A reader’s experience of OneTaste – is not very tasteful at all).

Again, to conduct the OM study Prause needed willing participants comfortable with being hooked up to machines, and having their genitals exposed and masturbated by a man as researchers observe their responses. It’s not hard to imagine it’s challenging to locate females willing to act as sexual guinea pigs in Prause’s office. Whatever the reasons, Ruby insisted that Prause obtained subjects for her OM study via the FSC, and that Prause had an ongoing relationship with the FSC:

If the above is true, it reveals a very cozy working relationship between Prause and the FSC. A relationship that may have started in 2015, when Prause was publicly offered (and apparently accepted) assistance from the deep-pocketed FSC. This was immediately followed by Prause throwing her scientific weight behind some the FSC’s major agendas (Proposition 60, ‘porn stars are not damaged goods’, ‘porn addiction is a myth’, ‘porn is not public health crisis’, ‘watching porn is mostly beneficial’, etc.)

The plot thickens. Originally, the study was funded to explore only the benefits of “Orgasmic Meditation” – but it then mysteriously transformed into a study to debunk porn addiction (which would certainly serve the FSC’s interests)!

Although the study is still not out as of June, 2020, in 2017 Prause began crowing that her yet to be published Orgasmic Meditation study “falsified” porn and sex addiction. Yet the study appear to have had nothing to do with porn use and likely did not involve any actual porn addicts.

In her tweets and comments Prause revealed that she showed her clitoris-stroking couples “sex films” and the results (in her opinion) debunked the porn addiction model. In short, Prause’s OM study has apparently magically morphed from a “partnered sex” investigation into an anti-porn addiction, pro-porn industry paper. Below are a few examples of Prause claiming her upcoming “partnered sex” (OM) study debunks porn addiction.

Background: In spring of 2019, the World Health Organization released a new edition of its diagnostic manual, the ICD-11, with a diagnosis called “Compulsive sexual behavior disorder.” Prior to the release of the “implementation version,” a beta draft of the ICD-11 was put online, and made available for interested parties to comment on. (A simple sign-up is needed to view and participate.)

Astonishingly, Prause posted more comments in the beta-draft comment section than every other commenter combined. In the comments section under this new proposal, Prause posted three times about her OM study (partnered sex, N=250). Prause’s comments asserting that her OM study found no evidence of sexual compulsivity (she never does evidence of addiction, even when neuroscientists say that she has):

Another ICD-11 comment:

Another ICD-11 comment:

Her attempt failed, and the new ICD-11 contains a new diagnosis suitable for those suffering from porn addiction: “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder.”

But she tried her hardest to head off the ICD-11’s CSBD diagnosis. In July, 2018, Prause let WHO, the APA, and AASECT know that her lone Orgasmic Meditation study had “falsified” the porn/sex addiction model:

What legitimate researcher would ever claim to have debunked an entire field of research and to have “falsified” all previous studies with a single study that did not recruit porn addicts and wasn’t designed to assess the signs, symptoms and behaviors of an addiction? Prause had trumpeted similar claims of “falsification” in 2015 based on her own dubious work, and was ultimately greeted with 10 peer-reviewed analyses saying she “misinterpreted” her findings.

In this tweet Prause says her upcoming OM study will correct all the “lies” by sex addiction therapists:

In this 2018 SLATE article, “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause, we were even told that the World Health Organization should wait for Prause’s OM study:

More importantly, we have no laboratory studies about actual sexual behaviors in those who report this difficulty. The first study of partnered sexual behaviors in the laboratory, which tests the compulsivity model, is currently under peer review at a scientific journal. (Disclosure: One of this article’s co-authors, Nicole Prause, is the lead author of that study.) The World Health Organization should wait to see if any science supports their novel diagnosis before risking pathologizing millions of healthy people.

There several more examples of Prause telling the world that her upcoming “partnered sex” study will debunk porn and sex addiction…for all time.

After all her crowing that her upcoming Orgasmic Meditation study would debunk porn addiction, Prause pre-registers the OM study on March 27, 2018 as now assessing “addiction models of sex film viewing.” Most irregular.

Contrary to what Prause did here, pre-registration means that prior to collecting actual data, you share the introduction and methods section of your paper with others. Prause is pre-registering her OM study 2 years after collecting data, and a year after boasting that her “findings’ debunked porn addiction. The journal that eventually publishes Prause’s OM study needs to look very closely into the unprofessional behavior surrounding this paper. So do ethics organizations.

What Prause is not telling anyone is that she may have used porn performers supplied by the lobbying arm of porn industry, the FSC. The same FSC that offered her help 3 years earlier when her Twitter account was permanently banned for harassment. (The victim of Prause’s Twitter-based harassment? The lead author of one of the most cited reviews of the literature on the porn addiction model: Neuroscience of Internet Pornography Addiction: A Review and Update (2015).)

Bottom line: Prause was offered, and appears to have accepted help from the FSC. Immediately, Prause used social media (and emails) to promote porn-industry interests, while simultaneously attacking research that reflected poorly on porn. Since then, she has waged an extensive war on individuals and organizations she labels as “anti-porn activists.”

Question: Does the University of Pittsburgh know how Prause has turned its study into a propaganda tool for the porn industry? The OM study apparently received its IRB approval through Pittsburgh and co-researcher Dr. Greg J. Siegle. Does the University know that Prause allegedly obtained subjects via the Free Speech Coalition? Does the University of Pittsburgh know about Prause’s close ties to the porn industry? Is the University of Pittsburgh aware of Prause’s long history of unethical, and sometimes illegal, behaviors (false police reports, defamation, false reports to governing boards) in support of the porn-industry agenda?

Prause’s direct support for porn & sex industry (FSC, XBIZ, Xhamster, etc.).

This section contains a few examples of Prause directly supporting the FSC, AVN, porn producers, and porn websites

IMPORTANT TO NOTE: Instead of using her own account to misrepresent the science, Prause almost exclusively used her alias shill account @BrainOnPorn during 2019 and 2020. Over 1,000 additional examples are on these 3 pages:

In April of 2019 Prause and Daniel Burgess created a trademark infringing site (“RealYourBrainOnPorn”) and its accompanying Twitter account. RealYBOP prominently features porn addiction deniers who openly function as an agenda-driven collective (RealYBOP “experts”)

In July of 2019, three of the better known RealYBOP “experts” began openly collaborating with the porn industry: David Ley, Justin Lehmiller and Chris Donaghue. All 3 are on the advisory board of the fledgling Sexual Health Alliance (SHA). In a blatant financial conflict of interest, David Ley and the SHA are being compensated by porn industry giant xHamster to promote its websites (i.e. StripChat) and to convince users that porn addiction and sex addiction are myths! See “Stripchat aligns with Sexual Health Alliance to stroke your anxious porn-centric brain.” In the xHamster/SHA maiden voyage Ley is going to tell xHamster customers what “medical studies truly say about porn, camming and sexuality”:

Will Ley tell xHamster customers that every study ever published on males (about 70) links more porn use to less sexual and relation satisfaction? Will Ley tell them that all 55 neurological studies on porn users/sex addicts report brain changes seen in drug addicts? Will he inform his audience that 50% of porn users report escalating to material they previously found uninteresting or disgusting? Somehow I doubt it. In their promotional tweet we are promised a slate of SHA brain experts to soothe users’ “porn anxiety” and “shame” (Ley and other SHA “experts” are light years away from being brain experts).

The official StripChat Twitter account reveals the true reason for paying SHA “experts”: to soothe their anxieties to prevent the loss of paying customers. The SHA will accomplish this by “talking about the latest research on sex, camming and addiction,” that is, cherry picking the work done by “their” researchers. Will Ley/SHA mention that hundreds of studies link porn use to myriad negative effects?

Another talk by David Ley, disparaging No-NutNovember (the real target is Nofap), and promoted by RealYBOP:

Look how RealYBOP (Nicole Prause alias) is tagged by Stripchat. Nothing suspicious here, folks:

Put simply, the Prause/Burgess site contains members who are compensated by the porn industry to tell porn users porn addiction doesn’t exist and porn use never causes problems. Prause’s alias account (RealYBOP) promotes David Ley’s porn website chats.

On to tweets by Prause’s official twitter account.

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Prause tags the FSC in her tweet attacking unfavorable research on porn performers:

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Informs the ACLU that she is ready to present research in support of porn industry’s position:

Follows it up with this tweet:

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Retweeting an XBIZ article (which was tweeted by porn producer @MOXXX)

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In a series of tweets Prause tags @XBIZ (The world leader in adult industry news), lending her support to their agendas:

Prause retweets XBIZ, celebrating the demise of The Pink Cross Foundation (which was hated by the porn industry):

YBOP has no opinion on the Pink Cross Foundation.

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Once again, Prause enters threads of porn performers to bolster their arguments:

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Prause tweet attacking studies reporting greater trauma in porn performers:

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Once again retweeting the FSC, and lending her spin to the mix. As usual, any science Prause disputes is disreputable, while her own heavily criticized research is indisputable, even when it opposes the preponderance of expert evidence:

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Retweeting an FSC blog post and crowing about how she signed the FSC petition:

Eric Paul Leue is Executive Director of the Free Speech Coalition

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Tweeting a dubious study:

Goes hand in hand with this. Below is a screenshot of Prause’s original answer posted in response to this Quora question (Prause has since deleted her answer): How can I overcome masturbation and/or porn addiction? What are the best methods? Prause’s suggestion to visit a prostitute is in the last paragraph:

As far as we know it is a violation of ethics code for a California licensed psychologist to advise a patient to visit a prostitute. Prause lied in the Hilton defamation suit that she never posted the above.

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Prause re-tweeting AVN, who was complaining about Dallas rejecting their convention:

In this tweet, Prause attacks a grad student who is trying to gather data about porn performers:

Prause reported her to the university.

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Retweeting AVN news:

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Again, citing a single outlier study, with a very small sample, to support the porn industry’s contention that performers are doing fine:

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Retweeting porn industry propaganda, telling the world that there is no sexism in the porn industry:

Prause contends that porn-recovery sites are sexist – as is everyone who disagrees with her or anyone who critiques her studies or assertions.

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Prause’s obsessive cyber-stalking and defamation of Alexander Rhodes and Nofap continue. Apparently, Prause’s expensive PR firm and query bombardment of media outlets resulted in yet another hit piece, published by Fatherly.com (written by Lauren Vinopal). The “journalist” did little more than copy and paste Prause’s Twitter threads, quoting her as the world’s expert on everything related to Nofap.com, reddit/nofap, and men trying to quit porn. First, here’s the barrage of unprovoked tweets, which mirrors previous unsupported drivel in this same “quitting porn causes fascism” (huh?) press campaign. Prause’s first tweet is on the Xhamster thread smearing Nofap. Prause falsely states that Rhodes “worked with” VICE founder Gavin McGinnes:

Rhodes was interviewed once, years ago, by McGinnes – before the existence of “Proud Boys.” (McInnes has since publicly divorced himself from Proud Boys.) In any case, as Alexander Rhodes explained on Twitter, at the time of the interview, as far as he and others knew McGinnes was simply the co-founder of VICE Media. Rhodes never promoted or worked with McGinnes – or Proud Boys.

On the other hand, Prause joined Xhamster’s thread with the above tweet. Does this mean she is “working with” a major porn site to attack a porn-recovery forum (again)? This occurred after Xhamster complained to the world that NoNut November was affecting its bottom line:

Here’s a second Prause tweet in the Xhamster thread, where she spreads more of her toxic misinformation and tells Xhamster to Direct Message her:

The FBI confirmed that Prause has been lying about her claims to have filed FBI reports: November, 2018: FBI affirms Nicole Prause’s fraud surrounding defamatory claims. Prause is also lying when she says Gary Wilson physically stalked her: Los Angeles Police Department and UCLA campus police confirm that Prause lied about filing police reports on Gary Wilson.

What is true? Nicole Prause appears to be “working with” Xhamster to spread falsehoods about Nofap, Alex Rhodes, and Gary Wilson.

On the same day Prause repeats her lies on a Sarah Manavis‏ thread promoting the Manavis article attacking Nofap, supporting Xhamster, and parroting everything Prause has tweeted in the previous 3 weeks:

It’s highly suspicious that Sarah Manavis somehow knew about a random xHamster Twitter thread, that her hit piece closely mirrors Prause talking points, and that Manavis did not contact Alexander Rhodes for comment. Did Prause “work with” Sara Manavis behind the scenes?

A few days later Prause crows about the Fatherly.com piece she helped with:

Thus, the Fatherly.com article rests on Ley & Prause’s Psychology Today article labeling porn recovery forum as fascists, Sarah Manavis’s hit-piece, and all of Prause tweets and Psychology Today comments. The Fatherly.com hit-piece liberally quotes Prause as the world’s expert on Nofap.com and men who quit porn:

“I think ‘No Nut November’ is largely anti-science,” psychophysiologist and neuroscientist Nicole Prause, told Fatherly. “The new designation, and it is hardly a tradition, appears supported most by the for-profit NoFap company, some religious organizations, and groups like Proud Boys. These are largely known for their very young male members and misogyny.”

More lies as NoFap.com had nothing to do with NoNutNovember, and claims that there’s a link between quitting porn and misogyny are the exact opposite of what the research shows and what men on the forums report.

Gotta give it up to Prause. It appears that with the aid of her PR firm, and apparently Xhamster, her tireless work paid off. It all started with Ley’s (and her) inflammatory Psychology Today blog post… and eventually mushroomed into a propaganda meme that “the little ol’ porn industry is the victim of evil younguns who no longer watch porn.” Sadly, this fabricated meme has now been recklessly pumped up by irresponsible “journalists” who are able to disregard facts, common sense, and peer-reviewed studies.

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Prause tagged by PornHub. Very buddy-buddy convo:

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Prause offers to testify on the side of porn producers, against a proposed Utah bill opening porn producers to lawsuits:

Note: One can be funded (or supported in alternative avenues) without direct funding of research (such as access to subjects willing to engage in sex while being monitored in a lab).

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More direct support for porn industry views:

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Retweeting xHamster:

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Supporting the porn industry’s agenda once again, Prause says August Ames’s depression was not related to her work (she died by suicide). Whether it was or wasn’t why does Prause feel compelled to defend the porn industry?

Prause also states that she will help adult performers locate “providers who have the proper training” (code for never saying that working in porn might lead to poorer emotional outcomes). Note that Prause tells performers to report any therapist who suggests that working in porn might cause problems.

The next day Prause continues to support the porn industry on this same thread:

The back and forth continues, with Prause claiming she receives zero money from porn (why did she feel compelled to announce this?):

Prause continues the debate, adding that “it is extremely rare for studies to include even an assessment of benefits of sex films viewing or participation.“

Prause’s assertion is nonsense. Many studies assess correlations between porn use and positive outcomes…. but they rarely find such correlations. For example, greater sexual or relationship satisfaction is clearly a positive outcome, yet, as far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction: Over 75 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction.

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In a twitter thread where Prause defamed Gary Wilson and Alexander Rhodes, an individual responded with a link to this very page (Is Nicole Prause Influenced by the Porn Industry?), and tweeted a screenshot of Prause and her porn-star buddies. Prause responded with disingenuous gibberish to explain away her close relationship with so many names in the porn industry:

Prause is not studying, and has never studied, an aspect of the porn industry – including the performers. Propaganda.

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A large percentage of Prause’s Quora comments were direct and indirect attacks on Gary Wilson (ultimately Prause was banned for harassing Wilson: March 5, 2018 – Prause permanently banned from Quora for harassing Gary Wilson). In this Quora answer Prause responds as if she is an expert on a career in porn:

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Here she answers again as if she is an expert on the porn industry. Prause’s propaganda is that porn industry is poor, and that many “harassers” say her research is funded by the porn industry:

Prause has never provided any documentation of anyone saying she is funded by the porn industry. The claim that her science has not been challenged is laughable as there are 14 peer-reviewed critiques of her flawed studies and her unsupported claims about them: Questionable & Misleading Studies.

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Add to the above examples, hundreds of social media attacks (many more examples in section 3 below) and behind the scenes harassment of any researcher, person, or organization reporting less than stellar effects of porn use or performing in porn. Just a few examples of 2,000 or more similar tweets (most of which have since been deleted):

Nonsense. The vast preponderance of legitimate studies on porn report negative outcomes: https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/research/

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The only study that Prause can cite that reported more so-called egalitarian views is a Taylor Kohut study with some very creative methodology apparently employed to produce the desired results: Critique of “Is Pornography Really about “Making Hate to Women”? Pornography Users Hold More Gender Egalitarian Attitudes Than Nonusers in a Representative American Sample” (2016). In reality, Kohut’s findings are contradicted by nearly every other published study on the subject (see this list of over 35 studies linking porn use to sexist attitudes, objectification and less egalitarianism). See this 2016 review of the literature: Media and Sexualization: State of Empirical Research, 1995–2015.

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Why does RealYBOP chronically posts tweets in support of the porn industry, when RealYBOP claims to be concerned about porn’s effects on the users?

The answer is obvious. RealYBOP is likely Prause.

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RealYBOP trolling the New York Times OBGYN Jen Gunter because she’s not a fan of porn. RealYBOP links to an article by Free Speech Coalition employee Lotus Lain. Helping out the porn industry whenever possible:

RealYBOP claims that “Many viewers also experience improved body image” are debunked here: Body Image Section.

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Prause & Ley disparaging the Gottman’s, while supporting porn industry

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Support for BackPage:

No surprise that Prause and Daniel Burgess’s legal counsel is Wayne B. Giampietro, who was one of the primary lawyers defending backpage.com. Backpage was shut down by the federal government “for its willful facilitation of human trafficking and prostitution.” (see this USA Today article: 93-count indictment on sex trafficking charges revealed against Backpage founders). The indictment charged backpage owners, along with others, of conspiring to knowingly facilitate prostitution offenses through the website. Authorities contend some of the trafficked people included teenage girls. For details on Giampietro’s involvement see – https://dockets.justia.com/docket/illinois/ilndce/1:2017cv05081/341956. In an odd turn of events, backpage.com assets were seized by Arizona, with Wayne B. Giampietro LLC listed as forfeiting $100,000.

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Comments on a retweet of porn industry lawyer disparaging actor Jon Hamm who opened up about his experience working in the porn industry.

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RealYBOP promoting this porn studio’s films: https://twitter.com/adulttimecom

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Direct promotion of porn industry: chummy with well known porn star & director Tommy Pistol

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RealYBOP retweeting article (i.e. propaganda) by XBIZ (note how RealYBOP/Prause calls everyone anti-porn extremists):

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RealYBOP (an alias) – Direct support of former porn site owner, turned pro-porn activist Barnett:

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Support for prostitution:

No surprise that Prause and Daniel Burgess’s legal counsel is Wayne B. Giampietro, who was one of the primary lawyers defending backpage.com. Backpage was shut down by the federal government “for its willful facilitation of human trafficking and prostitution.” (see this USA Today article: 93-count indictment on sex trafficking charges revealed against Backpage founders). She continues to defend her lawyer’s former client (BackPage.com):

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PornHub was under tremendous scrutiny in early March, with a petition gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures:

People have been calling on me to start a petition to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable. Here it is. Please sign and share. https://t.co/llzoBsr1Jd

— Laila Mickelwait (@LailaMickelwait) February 11, 2020

Politicans started getting involved, asking for an investigation

“Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are criticizing the adult video giant Pornhub[‘s]…role in perpetuating sex trafficking on the internet.”Pornhub’s failure to remove nonconsensual pornography from its website is destroying lives,"⁦@RepSpeier⁩ https://t.co/60vKLhArpv

— Laila Mickelwait (@LailaMickelwait) March 11, 2020

RealYBOP and its members went to twitter in support of PornHub. First, it begins with RealYBOP misrepresenting the study it cited (the table tweeted is irrelevant to the study’s findings) to say that porn is not abusive.

The abstract with the actual findings:

We found that the films either directly or indirectly supported several sexual scripts: Explicit Verbal Consent Isn’t Natural, Women are Indirect/Men are Direct, Sex Can Happen Without Ongoing Communication, Lower-Order Behaviors Don’t Need Explicit Consent, and People Receiving Sexual Behaviors Can Consent by Doing Nothing. Further research is needed to examine whether viewers are acquiring, activating, or applying these scripts. Sex education programs could benefit from acknowledging how consent communication is modeled in pornography and by teaching about pornography literacy.

RealYBOP continues. In response to Laila’s efforts, RealYBOP tweets a Tracy Clark-Flory hit piece. Why is RealYBOP concerned with poor little ol’ Porn Hub and not with Pornhub posting videos of trafficking victims being raped and abused? Because RealYBOP is a shill for the porn industry. PornHub is involved with actual misogyny, not the fabricated misogyny conjured up by RealYBOP.

March 10: legislators from the US and Canada ask for an investigation of Pornhub

Yesterday, Senators & Members of Parliament in Canada & the US wrote to their governments about MindGeek & #childexploitation, #sextrafficking, & sexual assault. This reflects the urgency of this across borders & parties. pic.twitter.com/n1giZ5F3Lr

— Arnold Viersen, MP (@ArnoldViersen) March 10, 2020

Guess who comes to PornHubs defense? RealYBOP twitter and RealYBOP members! First, RealYBOP member and close Prause ally, David Ley defends PornHub (even a sex worker castigates Ley – but he knows where is bread is buttered)

RealYBOP retweets another David Ley tweet in support of Pornhub:

RealYBOP tweets RealYBOP member Taylor Kohut’s support for Pornhub:

Here are some gems by Kohut from the CBC article:

I don’t believe there is any woman that would willingly expose herself to today’s pornography, which is very brutal,” said Walker.

“I want the government to indicate that there’s no difference between trafficking, prostitution and pornography. They’re all one and the same.”

That’s an idea that Taylor Kohut, a research associate in the Department of Psychology at Western University, calls “profoundly ridiculous.”

Kohut studied how pornography influences the way people feel, think and behave for more than a decade.

“I don’t think porn is inherently evil or exploitive or dehumanizing or degrading. I don’t think it must contribute to anti-woman attitudes and acts,” he explained.

“If the real goal is to reduce trafficking of women and children, I think focusing on pornography is rather naïve and misguided and erotophobic … There are definitely alternative ways to get at the issue.”

Though his own research doesn’t reveal a connection between porn use and anti-woman outcomes, Kohut said some correlations have been reported by others.

“The field lacks methodological rigour and there are clear political influences that have likely contributed to a degree of confirmation bias, on all sides,” he explained.

“Putting it all together, there is no clear evidence that pornography causes negative attitudes toward women or sexual violence. And my personal interpretation of the available evidence is that it does not.”

He suggests the solution to outlaw or extremely censor pornography would be unrealistic and a “tremendous loss.”

He compares Pornhub’s struggle to the one Facebook has with disseminating false information.

“How do you control and regulate that when your customers are essentially building your content? It’s a difficult and technical social challenge.”

Kohut is dead wrong about porn use and negative attitudes about women. As mentioned numerous times, RealYBOP member Taylor Kohut’s paper contained some very creative methodology apparently employed to produce the desired results. In reality, Kohut’s findings are contradicted by nearly every other published study. See this 2016 review of the literature: Media and Sexualization: State of Empirical Research, 1995–2015. The abstract:

The goal of this review was to synthesize empirical investigations testing effects of media sexualization. The focus was on research published in peer-reviewed, English-language journals between 1995 and 2015. A total of 109 publications that contained 135 studies were reviewed. The findings provided consistent evidence that both laboratory exposure and regular, everyday exposure to this content are directly associated with a range of consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater self-objectification, greater support of sexist beliefs and of adversarial sexual beliefs, and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women. Moreover, experimental exposure to this content leads both women and men to have a diminished view of women’s competence, morality, and humanity.

Real simple: RealYBOP and its “experts” are taking the side of Pornhub over sex-trafficking victims. RealYBOP’s true allegiance is not in doubt – the porn industry.

RealYBOP attacks Exodus Cry. Propaganda 101 – if you can’t defend your position, defame the messenger. RealYBOP calling anti-porn activists “hate groups” while supporting Pornhub’s disgusting practice of allowing videos of sex trafficking victims.

Note that Prause has defamed and harassed Exodus Cry and Laila Mickelwait in the past: February, 2019: Prause falsely accuses Exodus Cry of fraud. Asks Twitter followers to report the non-profit to the Missouri attorney general (for spurious reasons), Appears to have edited the CEO’s Wikipedia page.

RealYBOP propaganda in support of pornhub continues

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A tweet in support of porn site “YouPorn”:

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While PornHub is being exposed as having videos of sex trafficking victims, RealYBOP is out there defending MindGeek:

More love for PornHub:

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March 25, 2020: A second tweet attacking NoFap. This one features a hit-piece by XBIZ (revealing once again RealYBOP’s close alliance with the porn industry). Is it coincidence that a few hours before the XBIZ article RealYBOP disparaged the National Review and NoFap on twitter? Did RealYBOP have anything to do with XBIZ writing this article? Inquiring minds want to know.

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Tweeting about the AVN convention in Las Vegas

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Retweeting XBIZ hit-piece, in support of the porn industry:

XBIZ article is a convoluted mess trying to discredit theguardian.org. But what XBIZ neglects to mention is that the nefarious theguardian.org is not only supported by Humanity United but a host of other players including none other than the Open Society Foundation. I doubt if any entity on the plant has done more to normalize commercial sexual exploitation than OSF/Soros. So the article is built on a house of cards.

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Promoting pornhub, who has been monetizing rape and sex trafficking videos on its platform:

Pornhub was the first account to tweet about RealYBOP!

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Promoting Pornhub, even when it is under investigation for regularly hosting child porn and rape videos! The ever loyal RealYBOP.

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RealYBOP trolling a feminist who is critical of Pornhub for monetizing sex trafficking & actual rape videos:

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RealYBOP (@BrainOnPorn) pushing the propaganda envelope for the porn industry:

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Talk about supporting the porn industry agenda. Laughable.

How about categories like these RealYBOP – https://twitter.com/LailaMickelwait/status/1251171998895652867

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RealYBOP directly supporting Mindgeek, owner of Pornhub. Here’s Laila’s original tweet which RealYBOP attacks:

The CEO of Mindgeek who owns Pornhub just started following me. After I tweeted about it he immediately changed his name and location. #Traffickinghub pic.twitter.com/9NhOMMMFxZ

— Laila Mickelwait (@LailaMickelwait) April 19, 2020

Here RealYBOP attacks Laila & defends Mindgeek’s CEO (RealYBOP lies when she claims the account isn’t Mindgeek’s CEO (we have additional evidence that it is!)

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April 23, 2020: WOW. Direct support for Pornhub, while attempting to disparage NoFap (who is suing RealYBOP for defamation):

Damn, RealYBOP scouring PornHub as if she is a moderator.

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Tweets XBIZ propaganda by XBIZ news editor Gustavo Turner

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Tweets a “sex worker’s ” propaganda in support of PornHub:

Uhh, nope, there are now 50 neuroscience-based studies providing strong support for the addiction model as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies.

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Continued support for pornhub (which is being outed as hosting numerous child porn videos):

It’s clear that Prause and Ley are chums with many porn industry insiders. Yet, ee have always suspected that both communicate behind the scenes, assisting the porn industry with its propaganda and its attacks on Prause usual targets. This January, 2020 XBIZ hit-piece by RealYBOP buddy Gustavo Turner is proof positive that RealYBOP (run by Prause) is collaborating directly with the porn industry: The XBIZ article acknowledges RealYourBrainOnPorn as their source for lies about YBOP. XBIZ claims that YBOP is “murkily funded”. Pure bullshit, as I have stated for 10 years that YBOP receives no funding or ad revenues. In addition, my share of the proceeds from my book go to charity.

Oh, as for the XBIZ/RealYBOP claim that YBOP is “unscientific”, see the main YBOP research page containing links to about 1,000 studies reporting myriad negative outcomes related to porn use. In reality, porn industry shill RealYBOP is the unscientific “organization”. This page exposes RealYBOP’s so-called research page as nothing more than a handful of cherry-picked, often irrelevant papers (many are not real studies), and its egregious omissions.

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Spreading porn industry propaganda

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Retweeting propaganda from XBIZ.

RealYBOP complicit in covering up the truth:

Racism is rife in porn so don't believe Pornhub's latest propaganda about being onside with #BlackLivesMatter. Dr. @GailDines of @CultureReframed speaks with Dr. Carolyn West about how common racism is in porn. https://t.co/9SqSIwTel8

— Liz Walker (@LizWpresents) June 11, 2020

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Retweeting XBIZ propaganda

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Retweeting XBIZ propaganda:

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Retweets porn star upset at my tweet:

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RealYBOP directly supporting PornHub’s criminal activity (hosting child porn and sex trafficking videos):

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Supporting “sex work

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Supporting Jerry Barnett (who once ran a porn site), falsely stating that porn use is overwhelmingly positive for most everyone!

Her article is completely debunked here: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?”, by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).

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Reteeting XBIZ hit-piece attacking many of NP’s usual targets:

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Celebrating the downfall of Sasse’s and Merkley’s bill, titled the Stop Internet Sexual Exploitation Act, would impose this restriction on all platforms and require consent forms to be uploaded for every individual appearing in the video. It would also mandate that sites hosting pornographic content prohibit video downloads, set up a 24-hour hotline for people to video removals, and require the removal of the videos within two hours of victims flagging them.

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On a podcast Prause is asked about the campaign to hold Pornhub accountable for profiting off of child abuse and sex trafficking videos (Laila Mickelwait is spearheading the expose’ of Pornhub’s reckless and illegal content). Prause is seems to be letting Pornhub off the hook. She used her RealYBOP alias to attack Laila and defend Pornhub. See – RealYourBrainOnPorn (@BrainOnPorn) tweets DIRECTLY supporting the porn industry, especially Pornhub

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So, tubes sites, with hard core porn, have led to all sorts of wonderful benefits (cites nothing):

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2 tweets supporting decriminalization of prostitution:

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2 tweets supporting sex work, specifically camming:

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Lying that Laila was involved in claimed death threats. Why is Prause harassing Kristof, who exposed Pornhub’s illegal and vile activities?

How disgusting is it that Prause tweets lies under a video by a victim of Pornhub?

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Prause’s intimate relationships with porn industry performers, directors, producers, etc.

Section exposing Prause’s close relationships with porn performers and producers. Prause’s “lab” and residence are in the heart of Los Angeles.

Prause posing, sandwiched by two well known porn stars:

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Well-known porn actor/producer welcomes Prause to Twitter (July, 2014). Several hashtag comments on her looks (why didn’t she call him out for misogyny?)

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July, 2014: Porn producer saying it was so nice to meet Nicole Prause. Prause’s tweet is unavailable because her old twitter account was permanently banned for harassment.

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August, 2014: Porn actor/producer (Tim Woodman) tagging Melissa Hill & Prause, saying he wished he could have gone.

Prause’s tweet is unavailable because her old Twitter account was permanently banned for harassment.

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Porn producer/writer flirting with Prause (why didn’t she call him out for misogyny?). RedditIAmA – I’m Adam Christopher / Tarantino XXX Adult Film Writer/Director for TarantinoXXX.com and I have a challenge for the real Quentin Tarantino AMA.

Prause’s tweet is unavailable because her old Twitter account was permanently banned for harassment.

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Porn producer/director again, with an intimate exchange:

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Prause presents “Science over Stigma” to an adult performers gathering:

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Prause describing her time spent with another pornography legend:

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Why would a supposedly impartial researcher be tweeting about a porn performer union?

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Prause provides advice to an adult performer:

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Again interacting with performers, as if she has inside connections:

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Prause tweeting an article where she defends porn & sex workers, and lets us know about the true nature of being in porn:

Retweeted by FSC and porn producers.

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On the Twitter thread of two porn performers, Prause tells them that porn stars do not have more emotional problems and that performing porn is not harmful (as if causation could be demonstrated):

Note: Prause cites no studies to support her assertions.

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Major porn producer calling Prause “our superheroine.” Prause takes a bow for her noble services.

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Close Prause ally David Ley also admits to knowing several porn producers (we have many more Ley tweets confirming his close ties to the porn-industry)

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In a very personal tweet, Prause sends her condolences to the family of William Margold, the former director of the Free Speech Coalition who was a co-founder of X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO):

FYI – During the initial broadcast of NBC’s Tomorrow Coast-to-Coast with Tom Snyder, Marigold said he would consider performing a sex scene with his own daughter. When asked if he would allow his daughter to enter the porn business, Margold replied, “Not until she’s eighteen. And then I might even work with her myself.”

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Convo with porn performer/producer claiming that “anti-porn” is misogynist, yet porn performers are not:

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Prause tweets an article by porn producer “Ms Naughty.”

The porn producer (Ms Naughty) is attempting to smear Susan McLean, a federal government cyber-safety adviser, who is concerned about young people mimicking what they see online. The Daily Mail article covering this. Prause calls it a “panic story.”

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Promoting AVN/porn show:

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In 2017, she claims to be “an (unpaid) board member for the porn performers union“:

My goodness. On the board of a porn star union. Talk about an intimate relationship with the porn industry.

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Prause cheers on porn director Mike Quazar (over 500 porn films), telling him to “PREACH” the truth about porn’s effects:

Prause’s link goes to her lone, flawed anomalous EEG study: Prause et al., 2015. The results: Compared to controls “individuals experiencing problems regulating their porn viewing” had lower brain responses to one-second exposure to photos of vanilla porn. Prause claims these results “debunk porn addiction.” What legitimate scientist would claim that their lone anomalous study has debunked a well established field of study? Lower EEG readings mean that subjects are paying less attention to the pictures. Put simply, frequent porn users were desensitized to static images of vanilla porn. They were bored (habituated or desensitized). See this extensive YBOP critique. Eight peer-reviewed papers agree that this study actually found desensitization/habituation in frequent porn users (consistent with addiction): Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015.

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As stated in the introduction, Prause began openly harassing, libeling and cyberstalking Gary Wilson in 2013. In one of her most egregious, yet revealing incidents, Prause prepared a libelous blog piece, which she posted on an adult industry website. (Original url: http://mikesouth.com/scumbags/dr-nicole-prause-destroys-yourbrainonporn-dont-fall-22064/). The site describes itself as follows:

Mike South adult industry blog, the premier destination for adult industry news since 1998. Mike South was a small-time porn producer, who won two AVN awards, turned adult news blog pioneer. South was cited on a host of major news sites, and Gawker.com acknowledged him as “the gonzo king of porn gossip.”

Below is screenshot of Prause’s defamatory post, which was removed from MikeSouth.com right after Wilson tweeted this. Prause working directly with Mike South provides clear evidence of Prause’s porn-industry connections.

On the same day, Prause also posted this same porn-industry blog post on Quora. This resulted in her being permanently banned for harassment. In her defamatory piece, she knowingly, falsely stated that,

[Gary Wilson] claims to have been a “professor in Biology.” In reality, he was supposed to be an undergrad instructor, not a professor, for a lab section at Southern Oregon University. He was fired without pay immediately before completing even a quarter.

In her defamatory articles, tweets, and Quora posts Prause has knowingly and falsely stated that Gary Wilson claimed to be “professor in biology” or a “neuroscientist,” or otherwise “faked” his credentials. These 2 sections have already exposed Prause’s claims as lies:

In short, Gary was an Adjunct Instructor at Southern Oregon University and taught human anatomy, physiology and pathology at other venues. Although careless journalists and websites have assigned him an array of titles in error over the years (including a now-defunct page on a website that pirates many TEDx talks where anyone can describe a speaker without contacting them first) he has always stated that he taught anatomy, pathology and physiology (YBOP About us page). He has never said he had a PhD or was a professor.

More details on this page: Libelous Claim that Gary Wilson Was Fired (March, 2018)

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May, 2019: tweet to porn performers, also acting as an intermediary between porn performers and national publication.

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Prause promotes her interview on EAN (“Europe’s first choice for the erotic trade”):

Screenshot: Prause interview featured on the EAN front page:

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More promotion of the porn industry:

One of the first to retweet was PornHub.

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Prause twitter alias “RealYBOP” retweets pornography producer’s tweet, and tweets emotional support:

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Porn performers ask Prause for assistance and she responds:

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Tweet to one of the most prolific porn producers in LA – Mike Quasar.

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Back ground on Prause tweet: On May 8, 2019 Donald Hilton, MD filed a defamation per se lawsuit against Nicole Prause & Liberos LLC. On July 24, 2019 Donald Hilton amended his defamation complaint to highlight (1) a malicious Texas Board of Medical Examiners complaint, (2) false accusations that Dr. Hilton had falsified his credentials, and (3) affidavits from 9 other Prause victims of similar harassment (John Adler, MD, Gary Wilson, Alexander Rhodes, Staci Sprout, LICSW, Linda Hatch, PhD, Bradley Green, PhD, Stefanie Carnes, PhD, Geoff Goodman, PhD, Laila Haddad.)

It’s important to know that much of Prause’s “justification” for defaming Don Hilton arises from Hilton stating that Prause attended porn-industry awards (which Prause denies). Because Prause and Ley chronically cite Hilton’s religious faith as disqualifying him from commenting on science, Hilton (the author of multiple peer-reviewed papers) felt it was necessary to point out their biases (in hopes of refocusing the debate on the research evidence). While thousands of social media postings substantiate Prause’s pro-porn biases, Hilton chose the time-saving route in his presentations: tweets of Prause attending porn industry awards or indicating she had or would attend in the future (the screenshots are in the next section: Evidence that Nicole Prause attends porn industry awards (XRCO, AVN)).

In Prause’s false account from her Motion to Dismiss the Hilton Lawsuit she claimed that image of her attending 2016 X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) awards ceremony was really taken a year later “at the premier of the documentary film After Porn Ends 2”. Prause is lying, yet she seems to be resting her entire defense on this already falsified fairy tale. In one of her twitter rampages (where she threatened numerous accounts with lawsuits), Prause pinned a tweet announcing all the porn industry groups and individuals that were coming to her aid:

If any bit of evidence shows Prause intimate relationship with the porn industry, the above certainly does. She has all the big porn players at her beck and call.

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1/1/20: Friendly conversation with well-known porn performer/producer Tim Woodman:

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1/26/20: Prause alias twitter account congratulating “Wicked Pictures” on its AVN awards:

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Supporting “sex work” (prostitution, porn, etc.)

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Evidence that Nicole Prause attends porn industry awards/events (XRCO, AVN)

There is no doubt that Prause attended 2016 X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) awards ceremony. According to Wikipedia,

The XRCO Awards are given by the American X-Rated Critics Organization annually to people working in adult entertainment and it is the only adult industry awards show reserved exclusively for industry members.^[1]

You can see photos and read more about the 2016 XRCO awards in this AVN article. From the article:

If there’s one thing the 32nd annual XRCO Awards Show proved, it’s that porn has not forgotten how to party. A major contingent of the industry’s biggest luminaries packed OHM nightclub at the Hollywood & Highland complex to sardine-like capacity for what was easily the organization’s most jubilant gala in years. Harking back to the free-wheeling porn megabashes of the pre-recession era, it was a genuine celebration for the ages and a rousing reminder that the commonwealth of adult is very much alive and vibrantly kicking.

On the XRCO site, the 2016 awards show is described as an “ADULT INDUSTRY ONLY event – no tickets – no fans – admission is based on recognition at the door or via RESERVATIONS”

Another pic of Prause with porn industry buddies:

Good times at the 2016 XRCO:

Prause at a reserved table with porn industry friends:

Watch this 20-minute video of the 2016 XRCO awards (pretty racy). Prause can be seen around the 6:10 mark sitting at a table with porn star buddy Melissa Hill:

UPDATE: Deletion of the above 4-year old XRCO awards video occurred not long after it was placed on this YBOP page. Nothing suspicious about that. We are wondering if Prause asked XRCO officials to remove the video? Did XRCO help her out? After all, Prause attending the 2016 XRCO is a hotly disputed item the Hilton defamation suit. It’s important to note that the XRCO awards video was originally found and tweeted by Diana Davison in response to Prause threatening Davison with a lawsuit (largely because Davison exposed Prause as lying about attending the 2016 XRCO Awards):

That she lied about attending the XRCO event and she's threatening to sue people who say they've seen a picture of her there. Also, falsely accusing people of stalking just for doing research and defending themselves.

— Diana Davison (@d2davison) November 25, 2019

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From her tweets, it appears that Prause has also attended the Adult Video News Awards:

In June, 2015 Prause describes hearing Jeanne Silver’s (a porn star) story “at AVN” (we must assume the Adult Video News Awards, because a Google search for Adult Video News returns mostly the AVN awards; second was the AVN expo).

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Trolling PornHarms, Prause offers free t-shirts to others willing to troll with her. The t-shirts are a tasteless parody of the FTND porn kills love t-shirts. The 3 winners are porn stars!

One of the porn stars (Avalon) is from Australia. She tells Prause that it’s too expensive to ship a t-shirt to her. Prause asks Avalon if she would like to pick up her t-shirt at “the AVN” (we must assume the Adult Video News Awards, because a Google search for Adult Video News returns mostly the AVN awards; second was the AVN expo). The only logical conclusion is that Prause will be attending AVN awards, the AVN EXPO, or both.

Avalon tells Prause to have an amazing time at the AVN.

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And on and on it goes with Nicole Prause and the porn industry.

Is it any surprise that FTND, or anyone else, might wonder if Prause, a former academic with a long history of harassing authors, researchers, therapists, reporters and others who dare to report evidence of harms from internet porn use, who lives in LA, who has obtained study subjects through the FSC, who hangs out with big names in the industry, who attends porn industry award ceremonies, and who has publicly been offered (and accepted) support by the FSC, might be influenced by the porn industry?

Again, no one has claimed Prause receives direct funding from the FSC or the “porn industry”. In fact, it seems most unlikely that the FSC would make any such arrangements directly, let alone make them public, even if they did exist. Nor has anyone stated that Prause is “in the porn industry” or “has, herself appeared in pornography“, as she falsely asserted in her bogus cease and desist letters, and in her response to Don Hilton, MD’s defamation lawsuit against her. Sections documenting these false assertions:

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Update: In her thread supporting pornhub and attacking NoFap, RealYBOP (Prause alias account) tweeted an XBIZ article targeting Julie Bindel. RealYBOP falsely claims that Julie Bindel attended XRCO. This is a bald-faced lie as Bindel attended the XBIZ awards, which is open to the public. Funny that RealYBOP’s tweet exposes her lie as the screenshot says that Bindel attended the XBIZ awards.

Context: Julie Bindel is a prominent anti-porn, anti-prostitution, rad feminist. In her filings in the Don Hilton defamation suit against her, Prause perjures herself on numerous occasions, claiming she has never attended a porn awards show.

It’s important to know that much of Prause’s “justification” for defaming Don Hilton arises from Hilton stating that Prause attended porn-industry awards (which Prause denies). Because Prause and Ley chronically cite Hilton’s religious faith as disqualifying him from commenting on science, Hilton (the author of multiple peer-reviewed papers) felt it was necessary to point out their biases (in hopes of refocusing the debate on the research evidence). While thousands of social media postings substantiate Prause’s pro-porn biases, Hilton chose a time-saving route in his presentations: tweets of Prause attending porn industry awards or indicating she had or would attend in the future (the screenshots were obtained from this page: Evidence that Nicole Prause attends porn industry awards (XRCO, AVN)).

The purpose of RealYBOP’s tweet is to give the impression that anyone (incuding anti-porn feminists) can attend the XRCO awards. RealYBOP is lying as Bindel did attend XRCO, Prause did attend, and the “X-Rated Critics Organization annually to people working in adult entertainment and it is the only adult industry awards show reserved exclusively for industry members”.

Notice how RealYBOP, Ley, and JamesF often work as a defamation team:

Lying comes easy for these guys.

Months later:

Now that Prause’s porn-industry shill Twitter account (@BrainOnPorn) was permanently banned for targeted harassment and abuse. she is forced to tweet the same lies with her personal account. Here she is, gain, this time falsely claiming she was accused of attending XBIZ – when it was really the XRCO.

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SECTION 2: Was Nicole Prause “PornHelps?” (PornHelps website, on Twitter, comments under articles) All accounts deleted once Prause was outed as “PornHelps.”

Nicole Prause created a username called “PornHelps,” which had its own Twitter account (@pornhelps) and a website promoting the porn industry as well as outlier studies reporting the “positive” effects of porn. “PornHelps” chronically badgered the same people and organizations that Prause also often attacked. In fact, Prause would team up with her apparent alias PornHelps to attack individuals on Twitter and elsewhere in tandem with her other identities. Some of the Prause/PornHelps coordinated attacks are documented in these Prause-page sections:

The @pornhelps twitter account and PornHelps website were suddenly deleted when it became apparent to everyone that Prause was behind both. While many of us being attacked knew “PornHelps” was really Nicole Prause, the following @pornhelps tweet left no doubt:

Prause, a Kinsey grad, calls herself a neuroscientist, and appears to have started college about 15 years earlier than the above 2016 tweet. In response to several ad hominem attacks by “PornHelps,” which perfectly mirrored many of Prause’s usual comments, “PornHelps” was confronted in the comments section of Psychology Today with this and other evidence: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/comment/887468#comment-887468

Within a few days of the above Psychology Today comment the PornHelps website and @pornhelps Twitter account vanished without a trace. All that remains of PornHelps are a smattering of comments on various sites and this abandoned disqus account, listing 87 comments. (80-page PDF of numerous aliases Prause used to defame and harass Gary Wilson).

Want more confirmation that PornHelps was really Prause? The following comments, tweets, and coincidences make it apparent. PornHelps disqus account posted 87 times:

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Here Prause and Russell J. Stambaugh simultaneously comment under an article about porn. Prause & Stambaugh are close allies and often comment together in pre-planned assaults in comment sections.

A more recent coordinated attack by Prause, Stambaugh, and 3 other members of Prause’s harassment brigade is documented in this section: May 30, 2018 – Prause falsely accuses FTND of science fraud, and implies that she has reported Gary Wilson to the FBI twice. (Addendum: Gary Wilson filed a freedom of information request with the FBI and the FBI confirmed that Prause was lying. No report has ever been filed on Wilson. See – November, 2018: FBI affirms Nicole Prause’s fraud surrounding defamatory claims)

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Much of this Prause/PornHelps coordinated attack on researchers is chronicled here: June, 2016: Prause and her sock puppet PornHelps claim that respected neuroscientists are members of “anti-porn groups” and “their science is bad.” But let us re-examine the evidence that Prause is “PornHelps.”

Nicole Prause, a Kinsey grad, in a tweet about this study posted for commentary (since published in Neuropsychopharmacology), falsely claimed that its 9 researchers (including top researchers in the addiction neuroscience field) were members of “anti-porn groups,” and that their new study was “bad science.” Prause’s tweet (pictured here) appeared on the same page as the study (Can pornography be addictive? An fMRI study of men seeking treatment for problematic pornography use), but was later deleted.

At the same time that Prause tweeted the above, “PornHelps” began posting in the comments section below the paper. See a few of PornHelps’ comments below. How does PornHelps know so much about research methodology and statistics? (Prause’s PhD was in stats):

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And here’s more confirmation that PornHelps is Prause. The PornHelps comments under an NPR interview of Prause are nearly identical to Prause’s usual spin about the claimed benefits of porn:

Nearly identical in this article quoting Prause – with her usual spin:

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Now a taste of Prause (as PornHelps) attacking Wilson on various websites: promoting porn and misrepresenting the current state of the research. (Note: PornHelps was very busy attacking others on PT and other websites, and of course, via Twitter).

Here’s Pornhelps going after Wilson, mirroring Prause’s language in many comments (“stalker,” “massage therapist,” “fake,” etc.)

Look familiar? Prause is the only commenter who calls Wilson a cyberstalker and a massage therapist (other than her sidekick David Ley):

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Here PornHelps is discussing Prause’s EEG study – Modulation of Late Positive Potentials by Sexual Images in Problem Users and Controls Inconsistent with “Porn Addiction” (Prause et al., 2015)

Pornhelps knows an awful lot for a porn industry hack!

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This comment about Wilson can be found under Prause’s 2016 op-ed – Op-ed: Anti-porn school program misrepresents science.

Again, Prause is the only commenter who calls Wilson a cyberstalker and massage therapist (other chum David Ley). The truth of Prause’s op-ed – Op-ed: Who exactly is misrepresenting the science on pornography? (2016)

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The following are some of the over 20 comments under the Prause op-ed by PornHelps. Prause’s #2 obsession after Gary Wilson is FTND, which Prause posted numerous times. The comments perfectly mirror Prause tweets misrepresenting the research and attacking FTND. PornHelps “discus” account has posted 87 comments

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PornHelps mentions the same Australian study that Prause tweets all the time:

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Here PornHelps mirrors dozens of Prause tweets or comments – both naming the exact same findings from outlier studies.

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Another example of Prause/PornHelps attacking Wilson (while teaming up with David Ley). Many more examples can be found on this page.

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More evidence. We start with a tweet by the author of the TIME cover story, “Porn and the Threat to Virility,” Belinda Luscombe:

This was followed by @pornhelps calling both Alexander and Belinda liars. @NicoleRPrause eventually chimed in to call TIME journalist Luscombe a liar (more in the next section). The back and forth contains too many tweets to post here, but most can be found in these threads: Thread 1, Thread 2, Thread 3. Below is a sampling of @pornhelps’s unstable-sounding tweets falsely claiming that Alexander faked his story of porn-induced sexual problems (all later deleted):

@luscombeland @nytimes “Brave”? Faking a problem to promote his business? You failed to verify any part of his story
@GoodGuypervert @luscombeland exaggerating makes them money, esp in his case. These guys are mostly unemployed, no college…got $$$ somehow
@AlexanderRhodes & @luscombeland are creating fake panic to sell their wares. Disgusting.
@AlexanderRhodes @luscombeland @GoodGuypervert uh-oh, he’s gone full ad-hominem BC he got caught faking to make money off young scared men.
@AlexanderRhodes @luscombeland @GoodGuypervert then I await your proof that any of your claims actually happened to you, fake profiteer.

Alexander answered several times, with no resolution. Eventually Belinda tweeted the following:

Pornhelps responds, seeing if a lie will stick: “I heard you got blackballed for false reporting.” Eventually Prause’s “NicoleRPrause” Twitter account chimes in calling Luscombe a liar (below). Hmm…how did @NicoleRPrause know about this Twitter thread? Another bit of evidence suggesting Nicole Prause masqueraded as @pornhelps.

In this same Twitter thread Pornhelps (who is Prause) tweeted about a just published David Ley interview of Nicole Prause.

In the Ley interview Prause claims to have unpublished data falsifying any connection between “porn addiction” and penile injures (Prause also said she will never publish the data). It’s important to know that both Prause and Pornhelps had been saying that Alexander lied about his masturbation-induced penile injury and porn-induced sexual problems.

Is it any coincidence that 3 days after multiple @pornhelps tweets called Alexander a liar, Ley and Prause publish a Psychology Today blog post directed at one of Alexander’s complaints (that he injured his penis from excessive masturbation)? Interestingly, their own data apparently showed that a fifth of those surveyed had experienced similar injuries. But again, Prause refuses to publish the data, while claiming her data somehow (inexplicably) prove that Alexander must be a liar. In any case Prause’s blog claims remain unsupported as she did not assess “porn addiction” or compulsive porn use in her subjects (read the comments section of Ley’s post).

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Nicole Prause & “PornHelps” falsely accuse TIME editor Belinda Luscombe of lying and misquoting. Luscombe has been with TIME Magazine since 1995, becoming a senior editor in 1999. (See her Wikipedia page and her TIME page.) Luscombe spent a year investigating porn-induced sexual problems in young men, which resulted in the March, 31, 2016 TIME cover story “Porn and the Threat to Virility.” Both Prause and Ley have attacked the TIME article, even though both were featured in it and quoted (minimally).

Unfortunately for the public, usually Prause and Ley are the only “experts” featured in most mainstream porn-addiction articles, while the true addiction neuroscientists and their work are not even acknowledged to exist. Not this time. Two world renowned neuroscientists, who have published fMRI studies on porn users, were interviewed for the TIME article. So was a urologist, as well as several young men who have recovered from porn-induced erectile dysfunction. Put simply, the TIME article was more carefully researched than any other article on this subject, and its content reflected both reality and the (then) current state of the science. Since then, even more support for the possible link between internet porn use and sexual dysfunctions has come out in the peer-reviewed literature.

In response to Belinda’s earlier tweet (pictured above) about working the story for a year, we have @pornhelps, tweeting the following:

Pornhelps is psychic: she knows “for fact” how long Belinda worked on the story. Ten minutes later Prause tweets claiming Belinda misquoted her and “lied about her sources”:

As always, Prause provides no examples and no documentation. Not being tagged, how did Prause know about Belinda’s tweet or @pornhelps’s reply? Maybe Prause is psychic too?

Reality Check: It is Prause and @Pornhelps who are lying. As many can verify, Luscombe contacted Gary Wilson, Gabe Deem, Alexander Rhodes, Noah Church, David Ley, and others, during the year before the TIME cover story was published. In addition, Luscombe and several TIME Magazine fact-checkers contacted each individual several times to corroborate each interviewee’s claims.

We know that Wilson’s former employers were contacted, as were the girlfriends of the men with porn-induced sexual problems. Interviewees were also asked to deny or confirm claims given to TIME by David Ley and Nicole Prause. This was done in writing, often 2-3 times for each claim.

For example, Nicole Prause falsely claimed to TIME magazine that Gabe Deem masqueraded as a medical doctor to write this peer-reviewed critique of Prause & Pfaus 2015 (in fact written by a medical doctor/researcher). Even more astonishingly, Prause told TIME that UCLA had traced the “Richard A. Isenberg MD” critique (Letter to the Editor) to the young man’s computer. This outlandish attempt to defame Deem is all documented above.

In an attempt to end the conversation Belinda tweets the following on July 25:

“PornHelps” tweets two more unstable responses (Update – @pornhelps later deleted their twitter account as it became apparent that Prause often tweeted with this account):

No one responds to feed the troll.

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SECTION 3: Examples of Nicole Prause supporting porn industry interests via misrepresentation of the research & attacking researchers/academic journals

Introduction

While this section is rather large, it’s just the tip of the Prause iceberg when it comes support of the porn industry agenda. Much of Prause’s pro-porn efforts are directed at defaming and harassing those she disagrees with. These extensive pages chronicle some of Prause’s efforts in that arena:

This section concerns itself with Prause’s efforts in another arena – misrepresenting the research, and attacking researchers & academic journals.

As chronicled here and elsewhere Dr. Prause has a long history of misrepresenting her own and others research. In addition, she chronically mischaracterizes the current state of porn research, while repeatedly tweeting a few cherry-picked (and often flawed) outlier studies. If you want to judge for yourself, this page contains links to hundreds of studies and several reviews of the literature: current state of the research on Internet porn addiction and porn’s effects. As you will see below, Prause often states that the effects of viewing pornography (“sex films”) are overwhelmingly positive. As you will see, Prause’s 4 most-often repeated, and blatantly false, talking points are:

“Porn users are more egalitarian”
“Porn has overwhelmingly positive effects on relationships”
“Porn addiction has been falsified”
“Porn viewing is associated with increased sexual response”

Nothing could be further from the truth than these assertions, as nearly every study reports the exact opposite. Moreover, Prause’s only support for these claims are 4 outlier studies (two by her, two by Taylor Kohut) that are not what they appear to be. Let’s examine each Prause assertion, the studies she cites, and what the research actually says.

1) “Porn users are more egalitarian”

Prause cites: Kohut et al., 2017. See Critique of “Is Pornography Really about Making Hate to Women? Pornography Users Hold More Gender Egalitarian Attitudes Than Nonusers in a Representative American Sample” (2016), Taylor Kohut, Jodie L. Baer, Brendan Watts

How did Taylor Kohut manage to achieve his anomalous results? His study framed egalitarianism as: (1) Support for abortion, (2) Feminist identification, (3) Women holding positions of power, (4) Belief that family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job, and oddly enough (5) Holding more negative attitudes toward the traditional family. Secular populations, which tend to be more liberal, have far higher rates of porn use than religious populations. By choosing these criteria and ignoring endless other variables, lead author Taylor Kohut knew he would end up with porn users scoring higher on his study’s carefully chosen criteria of what constitutes “egalitarianism.” Then he chose a title that spun it all.

Reality: nearly every study published links porn use to sexist or “un-egalitarian” views of women. Check out individual studies – over 25 studies link porn use to “un-egalitarian attitudes” toward women and sexist views – or the summary from this 2016 meta-analysis: Media and Sexualization: State of Empirical Research, 1995–2015. Excerpt:

The goal of this review was to synthesize empirical investigations testing effects of media sexualization. The focus was on research published in peer-reviewed, English-language journals between 1995 and 2015. A total of 109 publications that contained 135 studies were reviewed. The findings provided consistent evidence that both laboratory exposure and regular, everyday exposure to this content are directly associated with a range of consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater self-objectification, greater support of sexist beliefs and of adversarial sexual beliefs, and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women. Moreover, experimental exposure to this content leads both women and men to have a diminished view of women’s competence, morality, and humanity.

2) “Porn has overwhelmingly positive effects on relationships”

Prause cites: Kohut et al., 2016. See Critique of “Perceived Effects of Pornography on the Couple Relationship: Initial Findings of Open-Ended, Participant-Informed, Bottom-Up Research” (2017), Taylor Kohut, William A. Fisher, Lorne Campbell.

The three main problems with this study are:

1- Kohut’s study was qualitative, not quantitative: it did not correlate porn use with any variable assessing sexual or relationship satisfaction.

2 – It did not contain a representative sample. Whereas most studies show that a tiny minority of females in long-term relationships use porn, in this study 95% of the women used porn on their own. And 83% of the women had used porn since the beginning of the relationship (in some cases for years). Those rates are higher than in college-aged men in studies around that time! In other words, the researchers appear to have skewed their sample to produce the results they were seeking. The reality? Cross-sectional data from the largest nationally representative US survey (General Social Survey) reported that only 2.6% of married women had visited a “pornographic website” in the last month. Data from 2004 (for more see Pornography and Marriage, 2014). While these rates may seem low, keep in mind that (1) it’s only married women, (2) represents all age groups, (3) it’s “once a month or more”: most studies ask “ever visited” or “visited in the last year.”

3- The study used “open ended” questions where the subject could ramble on and on about porn. Then the researchers read the ramblings and decided, after the fact, which answers were “important,” and how to present (spin?) them in their paper. In other words, the study did not correlate porn use with any variable assessing sexual or relationship satisfaction. Then the researchers had the gall to suggest that all the other studies on porn and relationships, which employed more established, scientific methodology and straightforward questions about porn’s effects were flawed. Is this really science? The lead author’s website and his attempt at fundraising raise a few questions.

Reality: In reality, over 70 studies have linked porn use to poorer sexual and relationship satisfaction (in the list of studies 1 & 2 are meta-analyses, study #3 had porn users attempt to quit using porn for 3 weeks, and studies 4 through 8 are longitudinal). While a few studies have correlated greater porn use in females to slightly greater sexual satisfaction, the vast majority of studies have not (see this list: Porn studies involving female subjects: Negative effects on arousal, sexual satisfaction, and relationships). As far as we know all studies involving males have reported porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.

3) “Porn addiction has been falsified”

Prause cites: Her lone, flawed anomalous EEG study: Prause et al., 2015.

This study compared the 2013 subjects from Steele et al., 2013 to an actual control group (yet it suffered from the same methodological flaws named above). The results: Compared to controls “individuals experiencing problems regulating their porn viewing” had lower brain responses to one-second exposure to photos of vanilla porn. Prause claims these results “debunk porn addiction.” What legitimate scientist would claim that their lone anomalous study has debunked a well established field of study?

In reality, the findings of Prause et al. 2015 align perfectly with Kühn & Gallinat (2014), which found that more porn use correlated with less brain activation in response to pictures of vanilla porn. Prause et al. findings also align with Banca et al. 2015. Lower EEG readings mean that subjects are paying less attention to the pictures. Put simply, frequent porn users were desensitized to static images of vanilla porn. They were bored (habituated or desensitized). See this extensive YBOP critique. Nine peer-reviewed papers agree that this study actually found desensitization/habituation in frequent porn users (consistent with addiction): Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015

Because frequent porn users had lower EEG readings than controls, lead author Nicole Prause claims her anomalous study falsifies the porn addiction model. Prause proclaimed that her EEG readings assessed “cue-reactivity,” rather than habituation. Even if Prause were correct, she conveniently ignores the gaping hole in her “falsification” assertion: Even if Prause et al. 2015 had found less cue-reactivity in frequent porn users, 25 other neurological studies have reported cue-reactivity or cravings (sensitization) in compulsive porn users: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. Science doesn’t go with the lone anomalous study hampered by serious methodological flaws; science goes with the preponderance of evidence

Aside from the many unsupported claims in the press, it’s disturbing that Prause’s 2015 EGG study passed peer-review, as it suffered from serious methodological flaws: 1) subjects were heterogeneous (males, females, non-heterosexuals); 2) subjects were not screened for mental disorders or addictions; 3) questionnaires were not validated for porn use or porn addiction. A valid addiction “brain study” must:

have homogenous subjects and controls,
screen out other mental disorders and other addictions, and
use validated questionnaires and interviews to assure the subjects are actually porn addicts.

Prause’s two EEG studies on porn users did none of these, yet she drew vast conclusions and published them widely.

Reality:

This page lists every neuroscience-based study published on porn users or sex addicts: 54 neuroscience-based studies (MRI, fMRI, EEG, neuropsychological, hormonal). They provide strong support for the addiction model as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies.
The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 29 recent literature reviews & commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.
Signs of addiction and escalation to more extreme material? Over 55 studies reporting findings consistent with escalation of porn use (tolerance), habituation to porn, and even withdrawal symptoms (all signs and symptoms associated with addiction).
An official diagnosis? The world’s most widely used medical diagnostic manual, The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), contains a new diagnosis suitable for porn addiction: “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder.”

Note: In this 2018 presentation Gary Wilson exposes the truth behind 5 questionable and misleading studies, including Prause et al., 2015; Kohut et al., 2016; and Kohut et al., 2017: Porn Research: Fact or Fiction?

4) “Porn viewing is associated with increased sexual response”

Prause cites: Prause & Pfaus 2015. It wasn’t a study on men with ED. It wasn’t a study at all. Instead, Prause claimed to have gathered data from four of her earlier studies, none of which addressed erectile dysfunction. It’s disturbing that this paper by Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus passed peer-review as the data in their paper did not match the data in the underlying four studies on which the paper claimed to be based. The discrepancies are not minor gaps, but gaping holes that cannot be plugged. In addition, the paper made several claims that were false or not supported by their data. Prause & Pfaus 2015 as these 2 critiques expose, it cannot support a single claim it made, including Prause’s claim that they measured sexual response:

In the same journal as the paper: Letter to the editor by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015)
Very extensive lay critique: Nothing Adds Up in Dubious Study: Youthful Subjects’ ED Left Unexplained (2015)

We begin with false claims made by both Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus. Many journalists’ articles about this study claimed that porn use led to better erections, yet that’s not what the paper found. In recorded interviews, both Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus falsely claimed that they had measured erections in the lab, and that the men who used porn had better erections. In the Jim Pfaus TV interview Pfaus states:

We looked at the correlation of their ability to get an erection in the lab.

We found a liner correlation with the amount of porn they viewed at home, and the latencies which for example they get an erection is faster.

In this radio interview Nicole Prause claimed that erections were measured in the lab. The exact quote from the show:

The more people watch erotica at home they have stronger erectile responses in the lab, not reduced.

Yet this paper did not assess erection quality in the lab or “speed of erections.” The paper only claimed to have asked guys to rate their “arousal” after briefly viewing porn (and it’s not clear from the underlying papers that this simple self-report was even asked of all subjects). In any case, an excerpt from the paper itself admitted that:

No physiological genital response data were included to support men’s self-reported experience”

In other words, no actual erections were tested or measured in the lab, which means that no such data or conclusions were peer-reviewed. “Sexual response” was never assessed!

The paper, Prause & Pfaus 2015, claimed to ask subjects to rate their arousal when watching porn – but even this could not have been accurately assessed. Dr. Isenberg’s Letter to the Editor (linked to above), which raised multiple substantive concerns highlighting the flaws in Prause & Pfaus , wondered how it could be possible for Prause & Pfaus to have compared different subjects’ arousal levels when three different types of sexual stimuli were used in the 4 underlying studies. Two studies used a 3-minute film, one study used a 20-second film, and one study used still images. It’s well established that films are far more arousing than photos, so no legitimate research team would group these subjects together to make claims about their responses. What’s shocking is that in their paper authors Prause and Pfaus unaccountably claim that all 4 studies used sexual films:

“The VSS presented in the studies were all films.”

This is false, as clearly revealed in Nicole Prause’s own underlying studies. This is another reason why Prause and Pfaus cannot claim that their paper assessed “arousal.” You must use the same stimulus for each subject to compare all subjects. Dr. Isenberg also asked how Prause & Pfaus 2015 could compare different subjects’ arousal levels when only 1 of the 4 underlying studies used a 1 to 9 scale. One used a 0 to 7 scale, one used a 1 to 7 scale, and one study did not report sexual arousal ratings. Once again Prause and Pfaus inexplicably claim that:

“Men were asked to indicate their level of “sexual arousal” ranging from 1 “not at all” to 9 “extremely.”

This statement, too, is false, as the underlying papers show. This is another reason why Prause and Pfaus cannot claim that their paper assessed “arousal” ratings in men. A study must use the same rating scale for each subject to compare the subjects’ results. In summary, all the Prause-generated headlines and claims about porn use improving erections or arousal, or anything else, are unsupported by her research.

Finally, Jim Pfaus is on the editorial board of The Journal of Sexual Medicine, which is the parent journal for “Sexual Medicine Open Access” – the publisher of Prause & Pfaus, 2015. Jim Pfaus spends considerable effort attacking the concept of porn-induced sexual dysfunctions. Co-author Nicole Prause is obsessed with debunking PIED having waged a 3-year war against this academic paper, while simultaneously harassing and libeling young men who have recovered from porn-induced sexual dysfunctions. Finally, it’s important to note that author Nicole Prause has close relationships with the porn industry and is obsessed with debunking PIED, having waged a 3-year war against this academic paper, while simultaneously harassing & libeling young men who have recovered from porn-induced sexual dysfunctions. See documentation: Gabe Deem #1, Gabe Deem #2, Alexander Rhodes #1, Alexander Rhodes #2, Alexander Rhodes #3, Noah Church, Alexander Rhodes #4, Alexander Rhodes #5, Alexander Rhodes #6, Alexander Rhodes #7, Alexander Rhodes #8, Alexander Rhodes #9, Alexander Rhodes #10, Alex Rhodes #11, Gabe Deem & Alex Rhodes together #12, Alexander Rhodes #13, Alexander Rhodes #14, Gabe Deem #4, Alexander Rhodes #15.

Reality:

This list contains over 40 studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli. The first 7 studies in the list demonstrate causation, as participants eliminated porn use and healed chronic sexual dysfunctions.
In addition to the studies below, this page contains articles and videos involving over 160 experts (urology professors, urologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, sexologists, MDs) who acknowledge and have successfully treated porn-induced ED and porn-induced loss of sexual desire.
Over 80 studies link porn use to lower sexual and relationship satisfaction. ALL studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.
Over 60 studies reporting findings consistent with escalation of porn use (tolerance), habituation to porn: all directly, or indirectly, connecting more porn with decreased sexual response.
Higher levels of porn use are not related to higher sexual desire. Quite the opposite: At least 25 studies falsify the claim that sex & porn addicts “just have high sexual desire.”

Historical ED rates: Erectile dysfunction was first assessed in 1940s when the Kinsey report concluded that the prevalence of ED was less than 1% in men younger than 30 years, less than 3% in those 30–45. While ED studies on young men are relatively sparse, this 2002 meta-analysis of 6 high-quality ED studies reported that 5 of the 6 reported ED rates for men under 40 of approximately 2%.

Nine studies since 2010: Ten studies published since 2010 reveal a tremendous rise in erectile dysfunctions. This is documented in this lay article and in this peer-reviewed paper involving 7 US Navy doctors – Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (2016). In the 9 studies, erectile dysfunction rates for men under 40 ranged from 14% to 37%, while rates for low libido ranged from 16% to 37%. Other than the advent of streaming porn (2006) no variable related to youthful ED has appreciably changed in the last 10-20 years (smoking rates are down, drug use is steady, obesity rates in males 20-40 up only 4% since 1999 – see this study).

Blatant misrepresentation is a long-standing pattern as Prause mislead everyone about the 2013 EEG study that thrust her into the public’s consciousness: Steele et al., 2013.

On March 6th, 2013 David Ley and spokesperson Nicole Prause teamed up to write a Psychology Today blog post about Steele et al., 2013 called “Your Brain on Porn – It’s NOT Addictive.” Its oh-so-catchy title is misleading as it has nothing to do with Your Brain on Porn or the neuroscience presented there. Instead, David Ley’s March, 2013 blog post limits itself to a single flawed EEG study – Steele et al., 2013. Ley’s blog post appeared 5 months before Prause’s EEG study was formally published. Prause’s carefully orchestrated PR campaign resulted in worldwide media coverage with all the headlines claiming that sex addiction had been debunked(!). In TV interviews and in the UCLA press release Nicole Prause made two wholly unsupported claims about her EEG study:

Subjects’ brains did not respond like other addicts.
Hypersexuality (sex addiction) is best understood as “high sexual desire.”

Neither of those findings are actually in Steele et al. 2013. In fact, the study reported the exact opposite of what Nicole Prause claimed. These eight peer-reviewed analyses of Steele et al. describe the truth: Peer-reviewed critiques of Steele et al., 2013

All agree that Steele et al. actually found the following:

Frequent porn users had greater cue-reactivity (higher EEG readings) to sexual images relative to neutral pictures (same as drug addicts do when exposed to cues related their addiction). Their brains looked exactly like addicts!
Individuals with greater cue-reactivity to porn had less desire for sex with a partner (but not lower desire to masturbate to porn). This is a sign of both sensitization and desensitization.

Commenting under the Psychology Today interview of Prause, senior psychology professor emeritus John A. Johnson said:

“My mind still boggles at the Prause claim that her subjects’ brains did not respond to sexual images like drug addicts’ brains respond to their drug, given that she reports higher P300 readings for the sexual images. Just like addicts who show P300 spikes when presented with their drug of choice. How could she draw a conclusion that is the opposite of the actual results?”

The pattern of misrepresentation and false statements began in 2013 and continues to this day.

The below tweets and comments are limited to Prause’s biased representation of the science related to the effects of pornography.

It provides a glimpse into Prause’s unwavering alignment with and support of the porn industry. Note: Prause has yet to tweet a single study reporting negative outcomes related to porn… even though the vast preponderance of pornography studies report negative outcomes (see for yourself – https://twitter.com/NicoleRPrause/with_replies).

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IMPORTANT TO NOTE: Instead of using her own Twitter account to misrepresent the science, Prause almost exclusively used her alias shill account (@BrainOnPorn) during 2019 and 2020. Hundreds of additional examples are on these 3 pages:

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Prause claimed porn addiction doesn’t exist, but 60 papers say otherwise.

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Prause, who has not been affiliated with any academic institution for years, attacks Professor Gail Dines in a Tweet:

This public insult was part of a thread where Prause scathingly assailed a university student in Sweden for endeavoring to study abuse of porn performers (later deleted by Prause).

Another tweet calling both Gail Dines and Fight The New Drug (FTND) liars and “anti-LGBT” and “anti-woman”:

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The same bogus falsification assertion:

Prause cited her lone, anomalous, severely flawed, EEG for her support for “falsification.” See – How to recognize biased articles: They cite Prause et al. 2015 (falsely claiming it debunks porn addiction), while omitting over 3 dozen neurological studies supporting porn addiction (April, 2016).

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This tweet concerns an internet porn study by Korean neuroscientists Seok and Sohn (PubMed indexed studies for Ji-woo Seok) – Gray matter deficits and altered resting-state connectivity in the superior temporal gyrus among individuals with problematic hypersexual behavior (2018). Prause falsely states that there were “no controls for literally any confound”:

Not so, but before we get to the truth it’s worth noting that her claim is very bold indeed, as 3 Prause studies on porn users failed to control for much of anything, including screening to establish that they were, in fact, addicted to porn (Prause et al., 2013, Steele et al., 2013, Prause et al., 2015). In fact, these 3 Prause studies chose to ignore numerous standard exclusion criteria normally employed in addiction studies, such as psychiatric conditions, other addictions, psychotropic medications, drug use, other compulsions, depression, religiosity, age, sexuality, gender, etc.

In reality, Seok & Sohn, 2018 carefully screened subjects for “sex addiction” (PHB). PHB was defined by two qualified clinicians based on clinical interviews using PHB diagnostic criteria set in previous studies, Table S1. Seok & Sohn also controlled for multiple variables. From Seok & Sohn, 2018:

We used the following exclusion criteria for PHB and control participants: age over 35 or under 18; other addictions such as alcoholism or gambling addiction, previous or current psychiatric, neurological, and medical disorders, homosexuality, currently using medication, a history of serious head injury, and general MRI contraindications (i.e., having a metal in the body, severe astigmatism, or claustrophobia).

In addition, Seok & Sohn 2018 assessed (controlled for) multiple psychological variables, including depression. From their study:

To identify comorbid tendencies among subjects with PHB, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) (Beck et al., 1996), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) (Beck and Steer, 1990), and Barrett’s Impulsiveness Scale II (BIS-II), as adapted by Lee (1992) were administered. The score of BIS-II was used as a covariate to remove the effects of impulsivity. The BIS-II consists of 35 questions with dichotomized ‘‘yes” (1) or ‘‘no” (0) answers. The total score ranges from 0 to 35, with higher scores indicating greater levels of impulsivity. Information about the demographic and clinical characteristics of all participants is presented in Table 1.

Put simply, Prause lied outright.

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A tweet about this study posted for commentary (since published in Neuropsychopharmacology), Prause falsely claimed that its 9 researchers (including top researchers in the addiction neuroscience field) were members of “anti-porn groups,” and that their new study was “bad science.” Prause’s tweet (pictured here) appeared on the same page as the study (Can pornography be addictive? An fMRI study of men seeking treatment for problematic pornography use), but was later deleted.

As usual her claims are entirely unfounded. First, it’s an excellent study, now formally published despite all the incomprehensible resistance. Second, its authors received first prize for this very research at the European Society for Sexual Medicine conference in 2016. Third, the authors have no affiliation with Prause’s imaginary “anti-porn groups” (which Prause never names).

For example, the lead author is Dr. Mateusz Gola, who is visiting scholar at UC San Diego, and has 50 or so publications to his name. Another author is Marc Potenza MD, PhD, of Yale University, who is considered by many to be one of the world’s preeminent addiction researchers (way out of Prause’s league). A PubMed search returns over 460 studies by Dr. Potenza.

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Nothing in this tweet is true. The study did not assess “sex films.” It only assessed smokers, which had higher p300 readings for cues. This is exactly what Prause found in her first EEG study on porn users: Peer-reviewed critiques of Steele et al., 2013

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Prause provides AASECT with talking points:

AASECT members don’t seem to know that Prause’s only evidence – her two EEG studies – have been critique 18 times in the peer-reviewed literature:

Steele et al., 2013 (8 critiques): Peer-reviewed critiques of Steele et al., 2013. Also see this extensive YBOP critique.
Prause et al., 2015 (10 critiques): Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015. Also see this extensive YBOP critique.

But there’s more. Prause presented a false picture of the state of the research to AASECT. Being overwhelmingly non-academics, AASECTers fell for it, and coughed up a press release declaring sex and porn addiction as officially debunked (!). Uh, no. First, AASECT is not a scientific organization and cited nothing to support the assertions in its own press release – rendering its support meaningless (not to mention the 55 neurological studies supporting the addiction model).

Most importantly AASECT’s proclamation was pushed through by Michael Aaron and a few other AASECT members using unethical “guerrilla tactics” as Aaron soon admitted in this Psychology Today blog post: Analysis: How the AASECT Sex Addiction Statement Was Created. An excerpt from this analysis Decoding AASECT’s “Position on Sex Addiction, summarized Aaron’s blog post:

Finding AASECT’s tolerance of the “sex addiction model” to be “deeply hypocritical”, in 2014 Dr. Aaron set out to eradicate support for the concept of “sex addiction” from AASECT’s ranks. To accomplish his goal, Dr. Aaron claims to have deliberately sowed controversy among AASECT members in order to expose those with viewpoints that disagreed with his own, and then to have explicitly silenced those viewpoints while steering the organization toward its rejection of the “sex addiction model.” Dr. Aaron justified using these “renegade, guerilla [sic] tactics” by reasoning that he was up against a “lucrative industry” of adherents to the “sex addiction model” whose financial incentives would prevent him from bringing them over to his side with logic and reason. Instead, to effect a “quick change” in AASECT’s “messaging,” he sought to ensure that pro-sex addiction voices were not materially included in the discussion of AASECT’s course change.

Dr. Aaron’s boast comes across as a little unseemly. People rarely take pride in, much less publicize, suppressing academic and scientific debate. And it seems odd that Dr. Aaron spent the time and money to become CST certified by an organization he deemed “deeply hypocritical” barely a year after joining it (if not before). If anything, it is Dr. Aaron who appears hypocritical when he criticizes pro-“sex addiction” therapists for having a financial investment in the “sex addiction model”, when, quite obviously, he has a similar investment in promoting his opposing viewpoint

Several commentaries and critiques expose AASECT’s proclamation for what it truly is:

Alternative Facts: AASECT and the Anti Sex Addiction Rant
The Revealing Backstory to the AASECT Position Statement on Sex/Porn Addiction
Response to AASECT Position Statement
Denial of Sex Addiction Hurts Our Clients
Here’s to Hope for a Change
How does the AASECT discounting of Sex & Porn Addiction affect the 12-step community?
The sex addiction debate

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Another lie. The 2 neuroscientists were Prause and Valerie Voon of Cambridge University. Voon, who has published multiple brain studies on porn addicts, has published multiple reviews/commentaries where she stated that porn/sex addiction exists (see: Is excessive sexual behaviour an addictive disorder? 2017).

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Attacking this Valerie Voon brain scan study on porn addicts:

It didn’t fail to replicate anything as 1) the Kuhn subjects were not porn addicts (Voon’s were), and 2) the two studies looked at different parts of the brain.

What’s most interesting here is Prause’s common tactic of trying to shift the blame of brain changes away from porn use to masturbation. This is Prause’s usual tactic, which was written about here: Sexologists deny porn-induced ED by claiming masturbation is the problem (2016).

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A tweet about ASAP science video: The Science of Pornography Addiction (SFW)

Prause lied: 1) It did not cite “religious scholars,” 2) She does not have a dozen neuro studies, as all 40 neuro studies support the porn addiction model (even Prause’s own EEG study)

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Calls another neurological study on porn/sex addicts bad science, trying to blame anything but porn for the neurological findings:

Note: Prause’s own severely flawed EEG studies have been heavily criticized for controlling for nothing. Her Steele et al., 2013 suffered from serious methodological flaws: 1) subjects were heterogeneous (males, females, non-heterosexuals); 2) subjects were not screened for mental disorders or addictions; 3) study had no control group for comparison; 4) questionnaires were not validated for porn use or porn addiction.

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Tells NBC that writer needs to be removed, even though his article aligns with NIDA’s position and 6 decades of research:

Prause always attacks the concept of addiction, especially behavioral addictions. (Porn addiction is a behavioral addiction.)

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Two falsehoods by Prause:

1) Porn is like other addictions, as 40 neuroscience-based studies reveal.

2) Studies do not find “mostly benefits” from porn use (she cites nothing).

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Falsehoods concerning the Gottman’s article:

1) The neuroscience was up to date.

2) Porn’s effects on couples are overwhelmingly negative.

Almost 60 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction. While a few studies correlated greater porn use in females to better (or neutral) sexual satisfaction, most have not (see this list: Porn studies involving female subjects: Negative effects on arousal, sexual satisfaction, and relationships).

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Nothing would be more damaging to the porn industry than widespread recognition that porn is screwing up men’s sexuality!

Nicole Prause and David Ley are obsessed with debunking porn-induced ED, having waged a 3-year war against this academic paper, while simultaneously harassing and libeling young men who have recovered from porn-induced sexual dysfunctions.Finally, it’s important to note that author Nicole Prause has close relationships with the porn industry and is obsessed with debunking PIED, having waged a 3-year war against this academic paper, while simultaneously harassing & libeling young men who have recovered from porn-induced sexual dysfunctions. See documentation: Gabe Deem #1, Gabe Deem #2, Alexander Rhodes #1, Alexander Rhodes #2, Alexander Rhodes #3, Noah Church, Alexander Rhodes #4, Alexander Rhodes #5, Alexander Rhodes #6, Alexander Rhodes #7, Alexander Rhodes #8, Alexander Rhodes #9, Alexander Rhodes #10, Alex Rhodes #11, Gabe Deem & Alex Rhodes together #12, Alexander Rhodes #13, Alexander Rhodes #14, Gabe Deem #4, Alexander Rhodes #15.

The study Prause linked to had nothing to do with the content of her tweet (in was not about men thinking that internet porn caused their ED):

Reality concerning porn and sexual problems? This list contains 42 studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli. The first 7 studies in the list demonstrate causation, as participants eliminated porn use and healed chronic sexual dysfunctions. Almost 75 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. (As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.) Over 60 studies reporting findings consistent with escalation of porn use (tolerance), habituation to porn, and even withdrawal symptoms (all signs and symptoms associated with addiction). Studies assessing young male sexuality since 2010 report historic levels of sexual dysfunctions, and startling rates of a new scourge: low libido. Documented in this lay article and in this peer-reviewed paper involving 7 US Navy doctors – Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (2016). In addition to the above studies, this page contains articles and videos by over 160 experts (urology professors, urologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, sexologists, MDs) who acknowledge and have successfully treated porn-induced ED and porn-induced loss of sexual desire.

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More instances of Prause attacking porn-induced sexual problems. Prause links to a lay article that quotes her:

Prause and Jim Pfaus cobbled together a weak attempt to debunk porn addiction (Prause & Pfaus, 2015). Prause & Pfaus 2015 wasn’t a study on men with ED. It wasn’t a study at all. Instead, Prause claimed to have gathered data from four of her earlier studies, none of which addressed erectile dysfunction. It’s disturbing that this paper by Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus passed peer-review as the data in their paper did not match the data in the underlying four studies on which the paper claimed to be based. The discrepancies are not minor gaps, but gaping holes that cannot be plugged. In addition, the paper made several claims that were false or not supported by their data.

Prause & Pfaus did not support its claims as these 2 critiques expose:

In the same journal as the paper: Letter to the editor by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015)
Very extensive lay critique: Nothing Adds Up in Dubious Study: Youthful Subjects’ ED Left Unexplained (2015)

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The article does not match Prause’s spin.

Yes, there is an epidemic: Documented in this lay article and in this peer-reviewed paper involving 7 US Navy doctors – Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (2016)

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Martin Daubney tweets an article featuring NHS sex expert who says porn is causing ED in you men: BBC: Easy access to online porn is ‘damaging’ men’s health, says NHS therapist. Psychosexual therapist Angela Gregory (2016).

Prause attacks, tagging porn industry supporter @PornPanic.

Next Prause calls the sex therapists “science illiterate” because they successful treat porn-induced sexual problems by having men stop using porn:

More from Prause, with a falsehood:

Daubney said that he got his material from a 29 page report by clinicians who treat young men. Prause replied that “we” (Prause & Pfaus 2015) also gathered data directly from clinicians who treat patients. That’s a lie. None were patients, and all were recruited via flyers! From Prause & Pfaus, 2015:

Nontreatment-seeking men (N = 280) reported their weekly average VSS viewing in hours.

Participants were solicited by flyers in the community and from psychology courses in Pocatello, Idaho and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

More. We are told that subjects and data for Prause & Pfaus were culled from four other studies, which have already been published:

Two hundred eighty men participated over four different studies conducted by the first author. These data have been published or are under review [33–36],

As noted, none of the four studies (study 1, study 2, study 3, study 4) assessed the relationship between porn use and erectile dysfunction. Only one study reported erectile functioning scores, for only 47 men. Lead author Prause tweeted several times about the study, letting the world know that 280 subjects were involved, and that they had “no problems at home.” However, the four underlying studies contained only 234 male subjects. While 280 appears once in this study’s Table 1 as the number of subjects reporting “intercourse partners last year,” so do the numbers 262, 257, 212 and 127. Yet, none of these numbers match anything reported in the 4 underlying studies, and only 47 men took the erection questionnaire.

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An old Tracy Clark-Flory article

Doesn’t say anything about “unfounded ED panic.”

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Prause calls Paula Hall a “pseudoscientist” and misrepresents Hall’s views on a study:

Known “pseudoscientist”? That’s not even a real word. A month after Prause’s tweet Paula Hall was listed as a coauthor on this Cambridge University brain scan study of porn addicts (published in the journal Human Brain Mapping): Compulsive sexual behavior: Prefrontal and limbic volume and interactions, 2016. Prause doesn’t care for Hall because she has been featured in several articles and TV & radio shows discussing porn and sex addiction. Hall is the author of 3 books on porn/sex addiction.

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Saying that Dan Savage killed Gail Dines (he didn’t, as he knows nothing about the research). Note how Prause goes to the extreme length of blaming masturbation for ED (no urologist agrees).

“Anything but porn” is Prause and Ley’s battle cry. See – Sexologists deny porn-induced ED by claiming masturbation is the problem (2016)

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Prause makes it no secret that she vehemently opposes the concepts of sex and porn addiction. In the summer of 2014 Prause placed the following notice on her SPAN Lab website. You can read for yourself that Prause is encouraging all individuals being treated for sex addiction to report their therapists to the state board (it contains a handy hyperlink):

This is unprofessional, and also unethical as both the DSM and the ICD permit reimbursable diagnoses for the disorder. In case anyone missed this, Prause followed it up with this tweet:

A month later Prause reminds us all again to report our local sex addiction therapist. It’s free and easy!

Prause doesn’t stop with tweets directed at a profession. She ups her game, falsely accusing psychotherapists of fraudulent therapy. Isn’t this rather reckless for a psychologist, especially given that (1) diagnoses of compulsive sexual behavior can be made using the World Health Organization’s ICD-10 and (2) Section F52.8 of the DSM itself recognizes the diagnostic validity of excessive sex drive as a valid, reimbursable disorder? In short, Prause is mistaken and behaving unethically.

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Prause and her expensive PR firm are very successful at placing articles in media outlets. In the Daily Dot article, Prause is the world’s expert on porn-induced ED. Guess what? It doesn’t exist:

YBOP completely dismantles the Daily Dot article: Debunking “Should you be worried about porn-induced erectile dysfunction?” – by The Daily Dot’s Claire Downs. (2018).

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Prause, Ley, and Justin Lehmiller of Playboy magazine, often collaborate to “debunk” porn addiction or porn induced problems. This April, 2018 blog post by Justin Lehmiller, has been tweeted multiple times by Prause and Ley. One example:

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Playboy writer Lehmiller is a close ally of Prause, having featured her in at least ten of his blog posts. These and many other Lehmiller blogs perpetuate the same false narratives: porn use causes no problems and porn addiction/porn-induced sexual dysfunctions do not exist. YBOP exposes the Lehmiller article as a sham: Debunking Justin Lehmiller’s “Is Erectile Dysfunction Really on the Rise in Young Men” (2018)

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The scientists in question are US Navy urologists who presented data at 2017 American Urological Association Conference – Study sees link between porn and sexual dysfunction (2017)

They didn’t hide from anyone (Prause did not attend the conference). Two of the urologists were also on the MDPI paper that Prause has been trying to have retracted: From 2015 through 2018: Prause’s efforts to have Behavioral Sciences review paper (Park et al., 2016) retracted

The story is long, complex and unbelievable – including Prause reporting all 7 doctors on the paper to their medical boards… with fabricated and spurious charges. The medical boards ignored Prause’s malicious harassment.

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Prause is falsely claiming that ED rates for men under 40 have not increased in the last 10-15 years. She does this because widespread internet porn is the only variable that could account for this change. Prause’s motto is “anything but porn”:

Prause is lying. Studies assessing young male sexuality since 2010 report historic levels of sexual dysfunctions, and startling rates of a new scourge: low libido. Documented in this lay article and in this peer-reviewed paper involving 7 US Navy doctors – Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (2016)

Historical ED rates: Erectile dysfunction was first assessed in 1940s when the Kinsey report concluded that the prevalence of ED was less than 1% in men younger than 30 years, less than 3% in those 30–45. While ED studies on young men are relatively sparse, this 2002 meta-analysis of 6 high-quality ED studies reported that 5 of the 6 reported ED rates for men under 40 of approximately 2%. The 6^th study reported figures of 7-9%, but the question used could not be compared to the 5 other studies, and did not assess chronic erectile dysfunction: “Did you have trouble maintaining or achieving an erection any time in the last year?”

At the end of 2006 free, streaming porn tube sites came on line and gained instant popularity. This changed the nature of porn consumption radically. For the first time in history, viewers could escalate with ease during a masturbation session without any wait.

Nine studies since 2010: Nine studies published since 2010 reveal a tremendous rise in erectile dysfunctions. In the 9 studies, erectile dysfunction rates for men under 40 ranged from 14% to 37%, while rates for low libido ranged from 16% to 37%. Other than the advent of streaming porn (2006) no variable related to youthful ED has appreciably changed in the last 10-20 years (smoking rates are down, drug use is steady, obesity rates in males 20-40 up only 4% since 1999 – see this study). The recent jump in sexual problems coincides with the publication of numerous studies linking porn use and “porn addiction” to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli.

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Now she calls the same US Navy urologists who presented data at 2017 American Urological Association Conference “activists” (Study sees link between porn and sexual dysfunction (2017). The same urologists she has harassed and libeled for 3 years running – From 2015 through 2018: Prause’s efforts to have Behavioral Sciences review paper (Park et al., 2016) retracted.

It is normal procedure to present yet-to-be-published data at conferences. Prause has done it several times. Check this out: On March 6th, 2013 David Ley and spokesperson Nicole Prause teamed up to write a Psychology Today blog post about Steele et al., 2013 called “Your Brain on Porn – It’s NOT Addictive.” Its oh-so-catchy title is misleading as it has nothing to do with Your Brain on Porn or the neuroscience presented there. Instead, David Ley’s March, 2013 blog post limits itself to a single flawed EEG study – Steele et al., 2013. Ley’s blog post appeared 5 months before Prause’s EEG study was formally published. A month later (April 10th) Psychology Today editors unpublished Ley’s blog post due to controversies surrounding its unsubstantiated claims and Prause’s refusal to provide her unpublished study to anyone else.

The Ley and Prause PT blog post misrepresented nearly everything about Prause EEG study: Peer-reviewed critiques of Steele et al., 2013

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Prause was so obsessed with the above US Navy conference presentation she fabricated a nonsensical “press release,” attempting to debunk data she hadn’t seen. Her “press release” has nothing to do with the Navy report or its data (yet she “debunked” it):

More of the same:

More of the same:

Once again, we have actual studies to consider, not “press releases” engineered by Prause. This list contains over 40 studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli. The first 7 studies in the list demonstrate causation, as participants eliminated porn use and healed chronic sexual dysfunctions. Over 90 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. (As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.) Over 60 studies reporting findings consistent with escalation of porn use (tolerance), habituation to porn, and even withdrawal symptoms (all signs and symptoms associated with addiction).

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Prause falsely claims that her cobbled together, inconsistent data from 4 earlier studies showed causation (Prause & Pfaus, 2015). Absolute nonsense.

Prause and Jim Pfaus. Prause & Pfaus 2015 wasn’t a study on men with ED. It wasn’t a study at all. Instead, Prause claimed to have gathered data from four of her earlier studies, none of which addressed erectile dysfunction. It’s disturbing that this paper by Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus passed peer-review as the data in their paper did not match the data in the underlying four studies on which the paper claimed to be based. The discrepancies are not minor gaps, but gaping holes that cannot be plugged. In addition, the paper made several claims that were false or not supported by their data. Prause & Pfaus did not support its claims as these 2 critiques expose:

In the same journal as the paper: Letter to the editor by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015)
Very extensive lay critique: Nothing Adds Up in Dubious Study: Youthful Subjects’ ED Left Unexplained (2015)

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Taking on feminist Naomi Wolf. Prause falsely states that there are 3 “experimental” studies debunking porn induced ED. There are none.

In reality, the first 7 studies in this list of 45 demonstrate causation, as participants eliminated porn use and healed chronic sexual dysfunctions. These are the only experimental studies capable of assessing porn-induced ED.

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Prause on Quora – before she was banned for harassing Gary Wilson:

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Once again, Prause falsely states that there are “experimental” studies debunking porn induced ED. She doesn’t cite any, because there are none.

In reality, the first 6 studies in this list of 28 demonstrate causation, as participants eliminated porn use and healed chronic sexual dysfunctions. These are the only existing experimental studies capable of assessing porn-induced ED.

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Prause tweets a Guardian article where she is quoted as saying ED rates in men under 40 have not increased:

Not only does Prause fail to cite any support for her claims, the experts (Prause is not an expert on ED and does not treat patients) believe otherwise. A few excerpts:

Many believe erectile dysfunction (ED), also known as impotence, is becoming more prevalent in young men. A recent study of 2,000 British men found that 50% of those in their 30s reported difficulties in getting and maintaining an erection…..

Medical professionals report that many more young men are coming to them complaining of ED. “I have been treating patients for 30 years, and there’s no doubt that we’re seeing more young men today than we used to,” says Dr Douglas Savage of the Centre for Men’s Health, based in Harley Street and Manchester. “Often, these are men who appear to be super-healthy: they’re slim, they exercise, they’re young, and you think: ‘Why on earth have these people got sexual difficulties?’”……

Reality? Studies assessing young male sexuality since 2010 report historic levels of sexual dysfunctions, and startling rates of a new scourge: low libido. Documented in this lay article and in this peer-reviewed paper involving 7 US Navy doctors – Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (2016)

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Again, there have been NO “experimental” studies debunking porn induced ED. Prause claims that studies prove that porn DOES NOT cause ED or anorgasmia. Not so, as no study can prove a negative.

No, porn viewing is not consistently associated with high sex drive. Here’s a list of studies debunking her unsupported talking point that “high sexual desire” explains away porn or sex addiction: At least 25 studies falsify the claim that sex & porn addicts “just have high sexual desire.”

As for Prause’s link, the following debunks nearly every naysayer talking point and cherry-picked study. It’s YBOP’s extensive critique of this Prause-penned commentary – Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?,” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).

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Trying to smear an upcoming study by Josh Grubbs and Gola.

Again, there have been NO “experimental” studies debunking porn induced ED.

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Prause on Quora supporting pornography and attacking any suggestions of porn causing negative effects (before she was banned for harassing Gary Wilson). Prause falsely asserts that the effects of “sex films” (she’s the only human to use that term instead of “pornography”) are overwhelmingly positive:

Prause cites no studies, no meta-analysis, because she’s telling a fib.

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Two birds with one stone: 1) She claims to have debunked porn addiction; and 2) Anyone who disagrees with her is a misogynist:

Her only evidence of “misogyny” by any person named in the info-graphic is Gary Wilson accidentally typing “Miss” in a reply to Prause asking Wilson about the size of his penis.

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Attacking YBOP and Gary Wilson’s TEDx talk, while saying that porn doesn’t cause ED or addiction.

Prause had another 30 comments about Gary Wilson, before she was banned for defaming him. By the way, here’s comprehensive empirical support for “The Great Porn Experiment” (2012), which is Gary’s TEDx talk.

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On Quora, trying to debunk porn addiction and porn-induced ED (Prause then commented 10 times, posting this answer all over Quora):

Prause cites her response to this peer-reviewed take-down of her Frankenpaper “disproving” porn-induced erectile dysfunction: Peer-reviewed analysis by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015). If you want see the ends that Prause will go to in journals, see her unprofessional response – Dismantling the Prause & Pfaus reply to Richard A. Isenberg (“Red Herring: Hook, Line, and Stinker“)

Full expose on Prause & Pfaus: Nothing Adds Up in Dubious Study: Youthful Subjects’ ED Left Unexplained – by Gabe Deem (2015)

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Another Quora post saying porn-induced ED does not exist, and falsely stating that she has data that PROVE it does not exist (she doesn’t):

What legitimate researcher would troll Quora, answering questions of people who really need help, with nothing but her unsupported propaganda?

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On Quora, supporting the industry’s agenda, while definitively stating that porn use is “overwhelmingly positive” for us all:

Prause links to one of her cherry-picked Aussie studies: A Profile of Pornography Users in Australia: Findings From the Second Australian Study of Health and Relationships (2016). In the past, Prause has claimed that only 2% of participants felt that porn was leading to adverse effects. In reality, 17% of males & females aged 16-30 reported that using pornography had a bad effect on them.

Prause’s claims about porn viewers being more egalitarian were only reported in a solitary study by a Prause collaborator, Taylor Kohut: Critique of “Is Pornography Really about “Making Hate to Women”? Pornography Users Hold More Gender Egalitarian Attitudes Than Nonusers in a Representative American Sample” (2016).

Taylor Kohut framed egalitarianism as: (1) Support for abortion, (2) Feminist identification, (3) Women holding positions of power, (4) Belief that family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job, and oddly enough (5) Holding more negative attitudes toward the traditional family. Secular populations, which tend to be more liberal, have far higher rates of porn use than religious populations. By choosing these criteria and ignoring endless other variables, lead author Taylor Kohut knew he would end up with porn users scoring higher on his study’s strategically chosen criteria for what constitutes “egalitarianism.” Then he chose a title that spun it all.

In reality, Kohut’s findings are contradicted by nearly every other published study (see this list of over 25 studies linking porn use to sexist attitudes, objectification and less egalitarianism). An excerpt from this 2016 review of the literature: Media and Sexualization: State of Empirical Research, 1995–2015.:

Sexually objectifying portrayals of women are a frequent occurrence in mainstream media, raising questions about the potential impact of exposure to this content on others’ impressions of women and on women’s views of themselves. The goal of this review was to synthesize empirical investigations testing effects of media sexualization. The focus was on research published in peer-reviewed, English-language journals between 1995 and 2015. A total of 109 publications that contained 135 studies were reviewed. The findings provided consistent evidence that both laboratory exposure and regular, everyday exposure to this content are directly associated with a range of consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater self-objectification, greater support of sexist beliefs and of adversarial sexual beliefs, and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women. Moreover, experimental exposure to this content leads both women and men to have a diminished view of women’s competence, morality, and humanity.

That’s Prause: trolling social media outlets with a single flawed, cherry-picked study, while omitting every other study published on the subject.

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On Quora, supporting the industry’s agenda, while definitively stating that porn use is “overwhelmingly positive” for us all:

Prause cited 3 papers to support her assertions that porn use has overwhelming positive effects (not true):

1) Ley & her 2014 narrative review (not a genuine review of literature). The following is a very long analysis of paper #3, which goes line-by-line, showing all the shenanigans Ley & Prause incorporated in their “review”: The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Fractured Fairytale Posing As A Review. It completely dismantles the so-called review, and documents dozens of misrepresentations of the research they cited. The most shocking aspect of the Ley review is that it omitted ALL the many studies that reported negative effects related to porn use or found porn addiction! Yes, you read that right. While purporting to write an “objective” review, Ley & Prause justified omitting hundreds of studies on the grounds that these were correlational studies. Guess what? Virtually all studies on porn are correlational, even those they cited, or misused!

2) Taylor Kohut’s “Is Pornography Really about “Making Hate to Women”? Pornography Users Hold More Gender Egalitarian Attitudes Than Nonusers in a Representative American Sample” (2016). Debunked above.

3) Taylor Kohut’s skewed qualitative paper, which is thoroughly dismantled here: Perceived Effects of Pornography on the Couple Relationship: Initial Findings of Open-Ended, Participant-Informed, “Bottom-Up” Research (2016), Taylor Kohut, William A. Fisher, Lorne Campbell. Was the intention behind this Taylor Kohut study to (attempt to) counter the nearly 60 studies linking porn use to negative effects on relationships? The two main problems with this study are:

It does not contain a representative sample. Whereas most studies show that a tiny minority of females in long-term relationships use porn, in this study 95% of the women used porn on their own. And 83% of the women had used porn since the beginning of the relationship (in some cases for years). Those rates are higher than in various studies in college-aged men! In other words, the researchers appear to have skewed their sample to produce the results they were seeking. The reality? Cross-sectional data from the largest nationally representative US survey (General Social Survey) reported that only 2.6% of married women had visited a “pornographic website” in the last month. Data from 2000, 2002, 2004 (for more see Pornography and Marriage, 2014).
The study used “open ended” questions where the subject could ramble on and on about porn. Then the researchers read the ramblings and decided, after the fact, what answers were “important,” and how to present (spin?) them in their paper. In other words, the study did not correlate porn use with any variable assessing sexual or relationship satisfaction. Then the researchers had the gall to suggest that all the other studies on porn and relationships, which employed more established, scientific methodology and straightforward questions about porn’s effects were flawed. Is this really science? The lead author’s website and his attempt at fundraising raise a few questions.

In reality, almost 60 studies have linked porn use to poorer sexual and relationship satisfaction (In the list of studies 1 & 2 are meta-analyses, study #3 had porn users attempt to quit using porn for 3 weeks, and studies 4 through 8 are longitudinal). While a few studies have correlated greater porn use in females to slightly greater sexual satisfaction, the vast majority of studies have not (see this list: Porn studies involving female subjects: Negative effects on arousal, sexual satisfaction, and relationships). As far as we know all studies involving males have reported porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.

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On Quora, porn use is overwhelmingly positive, again:

Citing the same non-quantitative, cherry-picked study debunked in the previous section: Perceived Effects of Pornography on the Couple Relationship: Initial Findings of Open-Ended, Participant-Informed, “Bottom-Up” Research (2016), Taylor Kohut, William A. Fisher, Lorne Campbell.

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On Quora she tells the world that her lone, flawed, 2015 study debunked porn addiction:

Prause falsified nothing in her short response to neuroscientist Matuesz Gola’s critical analysis of their 2015 EEG study (Prause et al., 2015). The YBOP critique dismantles Prause et al. line by line, claim by claim, citation by citations: Critique of: Letter to the editor “Prause et al. (2015) the latest falsification of addiction predictions“ (2016),

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On Quora, attacking porn addiction and porn-induced sexual problems. No studies from labs have shown that “sex films’ are not addictive. All neurological studies support the addiction model.

Reality? 27 studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli. The first 5 studies in the list demonstrate causation, as participants eliminated porn use and healed chronic sexual dysfunctions.

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On Quora, attacking porn-induced sexual problems.

The 3 studies she cited did not find what Prause claims:

1) Prause & Pfaus 2015 (described above). Prause & Pfaus did not support its claims, as these 2 critiques expose:

In the same journal as the paper: Letter to the editor by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015)
Very extensive lay critique: Nothing Adds Up in Dubious Study: Youthful Subjects’ ED Left Unexplained (2015)

2) Prause claimed that Landripet & Štulhofer, 2015 found no relationships between porn use and sexual problems. This is not true, as documented in both this YBOP critique and the review of the literature. Also, Landripet & Štulhofer’s paper omitted three significant correlations they presented to a European conference (excerpts from their abstract):

Reporting a preference for specific pornographic genres were significantly associated with erectile (but not ejaculatory or desire-related) male sexual dysfunction.

Increased pornography use was slightly but significantly associated with decreased interest for partnered sex and more prevalent sexual dysfunction among women.

Like Prause & Pfaus 2015 this paper was criticized in the peer-reviewed literature: Comment on: Is Pornography Use Associated with Sexual Difficulties and Dysfunctions among Younger Heterosexual Men? by Gert Martin Hald, PhD

3) Citing this next paper really exposes Prause for what she is: Sutton, Stratton, Pytyck, Kolla, & Cantor, 2015 was a study on men (average age 41.5) seeking treatment for hypersexuality disorders, such as paraphilias and chronic masturbation or adultery. 27 were classified as “avoidant masturbators,” meaning they masturbated (typically with porn use) one or more hours per day or more than 7 hours per week. 71% of the compulsive porn users reported sexual functioning problems, with 33% reporting delayed ejaculation (often a precursor to porn-induced ED). What sexual dysfunction do 38% of the remaining men have? The study doesn’t say, and the authors have ignored repeated requests for details. Bottom line: Prause is citing a study where 71% of the compulsive porn users reported sexual problems – as evidence that porn use doesn’t cause sexual performance problems!

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On Quora, saying her lone, flawed study debunked porn addiction (Prause et al., 2015):

What legitimate scientist would claim that their lone, anomalous study has debunked a well established field of study? In reality, the findings of Prause et al. 2015 align perfectly with Kühn & Gallinat (2014), which found that more porn use correlated with less brain activation in response to pictures of vanilla porn. Prause et al. findings also align with Banca et al. 2015 which is #13 in this list. Moreover, another EEG study found that greater porn use in women correlated with less brain activation to porn. Lower EEG readings mean that subjects are paying less attention to the pictures. Put simply, frequent porn users were desensitized to static images of vanilla porn. They were bored (habituated or desensitized). See this extensive YBOP critique. Ten peer-reviewed papers agree that this study actually found desensitization/habituation in frequent porn users (consistent with addiction): Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015

Because this paper reported less brain activation to vanilla porn (pictures) related to greater porn use, it is listed as supporting the hypothesis that chronic porn use down regulates sexual arousal. Put simply, chronic porn users were bored by static images of ho-hum porn (its findings parallel Kuhn & Gallinat., 2014). These findings are consistent with tolerance, a sign of addiction. Tolerance is defined as a person’s diminished response to a drug or stimulus that is the result of repeated use.

Because frequent porn users had lower EEG readings than controls, lead author Nicole Prause claims her anomalous study falsifies the porn addiction model. Prause proclaimed that her EEG readings assessed “cue-reactivity,” rather than habituation. Even if Prause were correct she conveniently ignores the gaping hole in her “falsification” assertion: Regardless of her claims about Prause et al. 2015 finding less cue-reactivity in frequent porn users, 26 other neurological studies have reported cue-reactivity or cravings (sensitization) in compulsive porn users: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27. Science doesn’t go with the lone, anomalous study hampered by serious methodological flaws; science goes with the preponderance of evidence (which does not support her claims).

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Tweets an article based on Prause’s lone, flawed, 2015 study she claimed “debunked” porn addiction:

Ten Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015. All agree that Prause actually found desensitization or habituation – consistent with addiction.

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Tweeting Ley’s old book, which falsifies nothing.

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Tries to blames masturbation, instead of porn, for negative effects:

For more, see – Sexologists deny porn-induced ED by claiming masturbation is the problem (2016)

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Prause et al., 2015, again which actually support the porn addiction model!

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Here she claims that believing in porn addiction is analogous to believing vaccines cause autism:

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Doesn’t debunk a thing.

Article’s main argument is that greater porn use has led to fewer rapes. Claim is patently false as documented here: Rape rates are on the rise, so ignore the pro-porn propaganda (2018)

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Another attack on Pamela Anderson by Daily Beast, which has a long history of pumping out counter articles within a day of porn-related news:

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Attacks a study she doesn’t like:

Problem is, the findings match almost 80 studies linking porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. Get this: all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.)

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Attacking and spinning above study:

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This Maxim article was published to counter NHS sex therapists and doctors in these 2 articles:

Article only cites one study to support the claim that porn isn’t bad for you – the most egregious study ever published on porn – using a suspect instrument called the PCES. YBOP thoroughly exposes what the researchers did to get their results: Self-Perceived Effects of Pornography Consumption (2008), Hald GM, Malamuth NM (the PCES)

And here: Critique of the “Pornography Consumption Effect Scale,” by Gary Wilson (7-minute video presentation)

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More unsupported propaganda by a college student:

Reality:

Porn and sexual problems? This list contains 45 studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli.
Porn’s effects on relationships? Almost 80 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction.
Porn use affecting emotional and mental health? Over 55 studies link porn use to poorer mental-emotional health & poorer cognitive outcomes.

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Prause attacking NHS experts, yet she doesn’t treat patients:

Prause upset by these articles:

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Attacking NHS experts, using Taylor Kohut’s skewed qualitative paper, which is thoroughly dismantled here: Perceived Effects of Pornography on the Couple Relationship: Initial Findings of Open-Ended, Participant-Informed, “Bottom-Up” Research (2016), Taylor Kohut, William A. Fisher, Lorne Campbell.

The intention behind Kohut’s study was to counter the over 80 studies linking porn use to negative effects on relationships, with a qualitative study. That’s all Prause has to tweet.

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One of Prause’s most ridiculous claims is that viewing puppies play is neurological and hormonally no different than masturbating internet porn:

No neuroscientist agrees with her assertion that watching puppies is neruologically no diferent than viewing streaming porn. Don Hilton, MD wrote an article debunking this and other baseless talking points: Correcting Misunderstandings About Neuroscience and Problematic Sexual Behaviors. Tweeting to same person that “they” (neuroscientists who publish studies on porn users and sex addicts) use no model. She falsey asserts that “reward = addiction”.

Utterly ridiculous as the four major brain changes induced by addiction are described by George F. Koob and Nora D. Volkow in their landmark review. Koob is the Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), and Volkow is the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Their review was published in The New England Journal of Medicine: Neurobiologic Advances from the Brain Disease Model of Addiction (2016). The paper describes the major brain changes involved with both drug and behavioral addictions, while stating in its opening paragraph that sex addiction exists:

We conclude that neuroscience continues to support the brain disease model of addiction. Neuroscience research in this area not only offers new opportunities for the prevention and treatment of substance addictions and related behavioral addictions (e.g., to food, sex, and gambling)….

The Volkow & Koob paper outlined four fundamental addiction-caused brain changes, which are: 1) Sensitization, 2) Desensitization, 3) Dysfunctional prefrontal circuits (hypofrontality), 4) Malfunctioning stress system. All 4 of these brain changes have been identified among the many neurological studies listed on this page:

Studies reporting sensitization (cue-reactivity & cravings) in porn users/sex addicts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27.
Studies reporting desensitization or habituation (resulting in tolerance) in porn users/sex addicts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Studies reporting poorer executive functioning (hypofrontality) or altered prefrontal activity in porn users/sex addicts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19.
Studies indicating a dysfunctional stress system in porn users/sex addicts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

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One of Prause’s favorite studies that she regularly tweets, and blatantly misrepresents:

Prause links to one her favorite cherry-picked Aussie studies: A Profile of Pornography Users in Australia: Findings From the Second Australian Study of Health and Relationships (2016). In reality, 17% of males & females aged 16-30 reported that using pornography had a bad effect on them. Table from study:

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Attacking a study she does not like – which showed escalation of porn use over time: Deviant Pornography Use: The Role of Early-Onset Adult Pornography Use and Individual Differences” (2016).

Excerpts from study:

Results indicated that adult + deviant pornography users scored significantly higher on openness to experience and reported a significantly younger age of onset for adult pornography use compared to adult-only pornography users.

Finally, the respondents’ self-reported age of onset for adult pornography significantly predicted adult-only vs. adult + deviant pornography use. That is today, adult + deviant pornography users selfreported a younger age of onset for nondeviant (adult-only) pornography compared to the adult-only pornography users. Overall, these findings support the conclusion drawn by Seigfried-Spellar and Rogers (2013) that Internet pornography use may follow a Guttman-like progression in that deviant pornography use is more likely to occur after the use of nondeviant adult pornography.

Many more studies reporting findings consistent with escalation or habituation – Over 30 studies reporting findings consistent with escalation of porn use (tolerance), habituation to porn, and even withdrawal symptoms (all signs and symptoms associated with addiction).

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Retweeting an XBIZ article (which was tweeted by porn producer @MOXXX)

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Attacking the concept of “porn as a public health problem”:

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Prause tweet’s Taylor Kohut’s skewed qualitative paper, which is thoroughly dismantled here: Perceived Effects of Pornography on the Couple Relationship: Initial Findings of Open-Ended, Participant-Informed, “Bottom-Up” Research (2016), Taylor Kohut, William A. Fisher, Lorne Campbell.

Was the intention behind this Taylor Kohut study to (attempt to) counter the nearly 60 studies linking porn use to negative effects on relationships? As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction. While a few studies correlated greater porn use in females to better (or neutral) sexual satisfaction, most have not (see this list – Porn studies involving female subjects: Negative effects on arousal, sexual satisfaction, and relationships).

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Attacking the concept of porn as a public health problem:

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem:

Tries to paint treating porn addiction as no different from “reparative therapy” (trying to turn gay people straight). Prause and Ley have a long history of falsely accusing sex addiction therapists of reparative therapy (including several therapists that they didn’t know were gay!): 2015 & 2016: Prause falsely accuses sex addiction therapists of reparative therapy

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Tweeting an article that featured quotes by Prause, and false claims about her paper: Prause & Pfaus 2015

Prause & Pfaus 2015 did not support its claims, including the above claim of greater arousal with more porn use. See this formal critique – Letter to the editor by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015), and a very extensive lay critique – Nothing Adds Up in Dubious Study: Youthful Subjects’ ED Left Unexplained (2015).

In reality, both Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus were caught lying about their paper (which stole bits and pieces from 4 earlier Prause studies – none of which involved Pfaus). Many journalists’ articles about this study claimed that porn use led to better erections, yet that’s not what the paper found. In recorded interviews, both Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus falsely claimed that they had measured erections in the lab, and that the men who used porn had better erections. In the Jim Pfaus TV interview Pfaus states:

We looked at the correlation of their ability to get an erection in the lab.

We found a liner correlation with the amount of porn they viewed at home, and the latencies which for example they get an erection is faster.

In this radio interview Nicole Prause claimed that erections were measured in the lab. The exact quote from the show:

The more people watch erotica at home they have stronger erectile responses in the lab, not reduced.

Yet this paper did not assess erection quality in the lab or “speed of erections.” The paper only claimed to have asked guys to rate their “arousal” after briefly viewing porn (and it’s not clear from the underlying papers that this simple self-report was even asked of all subjects). In any case, an excerpt from the paper itself admitted that:

No physiological genital response data were included to support men’s self-reported experience.

In other words, no actual erections were tested or measured in the lab, which means that no such data or conclusions were peer-reviewed! The media bought the falsehoods.

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Tweeting friend and Playboy writer, Justin Lehmiller’s 5 facts, which aren’t facts at all

And what studies support Lehmiller’s 5 “facts”? The same 4 studies tweeted over and over by Prause, and described over a dozen times above. Two Prause papers and two Kohut papers:

This is pretty much all Prause has: 4 flawed, dubious outliers, authored by 2 agenda-driven researchers. The vast preponderance of legitimate studies on porn report negative outcomes: https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/research/

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Claiming her short “letter to the editor” has falsified porn addiction:

Prause falsified nothing in her brief response to neuroscientist Matuesz Gola’s critical analysis of their 2015 EEG study (Prause et al., 2015). This YBOP critique dismantles Prause et al. line by line, claim by claim, citation by citation: Critique of: Letter to the editor “Prause et al. (2015) the latest falsification of addiction predictions“ (2016),

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Tweeting a college student’s take:

The student’s article has zero citations to support “global debunking.”

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Her talk “debunking” porn-induced ED

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Prause and Ley have dozens of tweets about the Josh Grubbs “perceived addiction” studies:

The Grubbs studies, and claims about the studies, do not hold up to scrutiny. For much more see:

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More cherry-picking:

Why didn’t Prause tweet any of these 60 studies linking porn use to poorer mental-emotional health & poorer cognitive outcomes?

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Here she misrepresents a study that never identified who was religious or conservative. It was solely based on Google trend searches for each state, for a few selected words (i.e. Porn, XXX, Gay, Sex)

Using statewide aggregate data was deemed useless and found to produce unreliable results in a 2017 study: In Social Desirability Bias in Pornography-Related Self-Reports: The Role of Religion. In it, researchers tested the hypothesis that religious individuals are more likely to lie about their porn use to researchers and in anonymous survey studies.

First, a backward glance. The “lying” hypothesis rested on a few studies analyzing all state-by-state frequency of Google searches for term such as “sex,” “porn,” “XXX,” and the like. These state-level studies reported that conservative or religious (“red”) states search frequently more porn-related terms. The authors of these studies suggested that their findings meant that (1) religious individuals watch more porn than the non-religious, and (2) religious porn users must therefore be lying about their porn use to researchers and in anonymous surveys.

But could “just lying” really explain why nearly every study that employed anonymous surveys had found lower rates of porn use in religious individuals (study 1, study 2, study 3, study 4, study 5, study 6, study 7, study 8, study 9, study 10, study 11, study 12, study 13, study 14, study 15, study 16, study 17, study 18, study 19, study 20, study 21, study 22, study 23, study 24)? Should we believe the many anonymous surveys? Or only the two state-level Google search trend studies (MacInnis & Hodson, 2015; Whitehead & Perry, 2017)?

When researchers tested the hypothesis that, “religious people are lying about their porn use,” they found no evidence supporting that assumption. In fact, their results suggested that religious people may be more honest than secular individuals about porn use. In short, the state-wide comparison approach is clearly a flawed way of researching this topic. It’s not as reliable as anonymous surveys in which each subject’s level of religiosity is identified.

From the abstract:

However, contrary to popular sentiment-and our own hypotheses-we found no evidence for and much evidence against the suggestion that religious individuals have a more pronounced social desirability bias against the reporting of pornography consumption than the irreligious. Interaction terms assessing that possibility were either nonsignificant or significant in the reverse direction.

From the conclusion:

These results do not fit the narrative that religious individuals are underreporting consumption or overstating their opposition to pornography to a degree greater than the less religious and suggest that, if anything, researchers have been underestimating religious opposition to and avoidance of consuming pornography.

Thus, rather than causing a shame-based self-labeling of normative porn use as “porn addiction,” religion appears to be protective against porn use (and thus problematic porn use).

So, what might explain increased searching for sex-related terms in “red states?” It’s highly unlikely that regular porn users enjoying an hour-long session use Google to search for the relatively innocuous terms (“XXX,” “sex,” “porn”) that the researchers investigated. They would head directly to their favorite tube sites (probably bookmarked).

On the other hand, young people who are curious about sex or porn might employ such Google search terms. Guess what? The 15 states with the highest proportion of adolescents are “red states.” For more analysis concerning religion and porn use see this article: Is Utah #1 in Porn Use?

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Prause likes the article because it quotes her and David Ley’s usual spin that porn can’t cause ED:

It’s usual fare for Prause to spin articles, but other than her citing her debunked paper, the article clearly shows that porn is causing problems. Critiques of Prause & Pfaus, 2015:

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Attacks a speaker at a conference:

Spins about other speakers as saying “it’s not the porn” (who knows the truth of what was said?):

Spin about Bonner’s talk:

More spin about Bonner’s talk

Bonner’s actual study: Unusual masturbatory practice as an etiological factor in the diagnosis and treatment of sexual dysfunction in young men (2014) – One of the 4 case studies in this paper reports on a man with porn-induced sexual problems (low libido, fetishes, anorgasmia). The sexual intervention called for a 6-week abstinence from porn and masturbation. After 8 months the man reported increased sexual desire, successful sex and orgasm, and enjoying “good sexual practices. Excerpts from the paper:

“When asked about masturbatory practices, he reported that in the past he had been masturbating vigorously and rapidly while watching pornography since adolescence. The pornography originally consisted mainly of zoophilia, and bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism, but he eventually got habituated to these materials and needed more hardcore pornography scenes, including transgender sex, orgies, and violent sex. He used to buy illegal pornographic movies on violent sex acts and rape and visualized those scenes in his imagination to function sexually with women. He gradually lost his desire and his ability to fantasize and decreased his masturbation frequency.”

In conjunction with weekly sessions with a sex therapist, the patient was instructed to avoid any exposure to sexually explicit material, including videos, newspapers, books, and internet pornography.

After 8 months, the patient reported experiencing successful orgasm and ejaculation. He renewed his relationship with that woman, and they gradually succeeded in enjoying good sexual practices.

Sounds like porn was the problem, in contradiction with Prause’s spin.

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It’s really noteworthy that studies by Taylor Kohut, Nicole Prause, and Alexander Štulhofer never seem to report any problems related to porn use (alternatively any negative effects are buried deep in the in the paper and must fished out), while the preponderance of evidence published by others contradicts their findings.

Here Prause tweets about a Štulhofer talk where he complains about studies not asking about porn’s “positive effects”:

The positive effects of porn would be arousal and getting off – but no adolescent should require porn for that! Studies just ask about effects. The reason most studies aren’t reporting positive effects is because there are so few. Reality: we have over 280 studies on adolescents reporting that porn use is related to such factors as 3+ times higher risk of engaging in problem sexualized behavior, poorer academics, more sexist attitudes, more aggression, poorer health, poorer relationships, lower life satisfaction, viewing people as objects, increased sexual risk taking, less condom use, greater sexual violence, unexplained anxiety, greater sexual coercion, less sexual satisfaction, lower libido, greater permissive attitudes, social maladjustment, lower self-worth, lower health status, sexually aggressive behavior, addiction, greater gender role conflict, more avoidant and anxious attachment styles, antisocial behaviours, heavy drinking, fighting, ADHD symptoms, cognitive deficits, greater acceptance of pre- and extramarital sex, lower evaluation of marriage, promotion of the acceptance of male dominance and female servitude, less gender egalitarianism, more likely to believe rape myths and prostitution myth…. and a whole lot more. See: Pornography and Adolescents Studies

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Attacking the concept of porn as a public health problem. Yet another article by Jesse Singal, with only spin and zero citations:

Judge for yourself. This page contains links to hundreds of studies and several reviews of the literature: current state of the research on Internet porn addiction and porn’s effects.

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem, yet it only discusses the porn industry. Zero citations related to porn’s effects on the user:

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Article with Prause propaganda:

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Article featuring Prause buddies, David Ley & Jim Pfaus, yet not one academic who studies porn addiction or porn’s effects:

The author admits his source of info was a David Ley’s Psychology Today blog post trying to “debunk”:

In my search for answers, my attention was piqued by David Ley’s Psychology Today article, “We Must Rely on Good Science in Porn Debate.”

Ley’s article was an attempt to counter Philip Zimbardo’s Psychology Today blog post “Is Porn Good For Us or Bad For Us?” (2016). YBOP responded with facts and actual studies – Dismantling David Ley’s response to Philip Zimbardo: “We must rely on good science in porn debate” (March, 2016)

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According to Prause porn isn’t addicting:

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Reaches new low by using a man’s suicide to take a swipe at porn addiction:

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College student quotes David Ley:

But no evidence.

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“No evidence for compulsivity model”

That’s not what Prause said in this 2015 Quora answer:

If “porn” viewing problems are not an addiction, those behaviors could still be a problem, of course. Some have suggested it is similar to obsessive compulsive disorder, reflects depression, is an impulse control disorder, or reflects socially-unacceptble high sexual desire. I was partial to the high sex drive explanation, but this LPP study we just published is persuading me to be more open to sexual compulsivity.

Her comments reveal a deep ignorance about addiction, which involves both compulsivity and impulsivity. Regardless, the latest version of the World Health Organization’s medical diagnostic manual, The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), contains a new diagnosis suitable for diagnosing what is commonly referred to as ‘porn addiction’ or ‘sex addiction.’ It’s called “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” (CSBD).

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What legitimate researcher would spends her time constructing graphs like this?

Or this?

Or this?

The data supporting the above graphs are nowhere to be found. They were not “forthcoming.”

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Let me guess…

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem:

Ian Kerner is the spokesperson for AASECT. See this section for more on AASECT’s unsupported proclamation.

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem:

On the same day:

Always uses “pseudoscience,” yet Prause has never once Tweeted a genuine meta-analysis or review of the literature. I wonder why?

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LadBible? There are not 4 studies finding “no relationship.”

The LadBible study? Prause & Pfaus 2015. It did not support a single claim it made, as these 2 critiques expose:

In the same journal as the paper: Letter to the editor by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015)
Very extensive lay critique: Nothing Adds Up in Dubious Study: Youthful Subjects’ ED Left Unexplained (2015)

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Article by Andy Campbell, who has written several articles quoting Prause – including an article for Penthouse, featuring Prause:

Prause misrepresented the article. There was nothing in the article about misrepresentation of data (though Campbell spun a tall tale, and omitted hundreds of studies finding porn use related to all sorts of problems).

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More of the same by the ever eager Daily Dot:

The very short article said nothing about pseudoscience, only that causation couldn’t be inferred in this solitary brain scan study: Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Associated With Pornography Consumption: The Brain on Porn (Kuhn & Gallinat, 2014). In reality, 40 neuroscience-based studies (MRI, fMRI, EEG, neuropsychological, hormonal) provide strong support for the addiction model. The very short article quoted Prause, getting it all wrong about Prause et al., 2015 by saying it was a brain scan (fMRI) study:

In 2015, for instance, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that porn did not “light up” areas of the brain typically associated with addiction. The comparison, according to the study’s authors, may actually be harmful to patients.

Prause’s study was an EEG study assessing electrical activity on the scalp. No matter, 7 peer-reviewed papers agree that Prause et al., 2015 actually support the addiction model:

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Same day as above. More attacks on concept of porn as a public health problem:

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Same day. Prause’s obsession with denying porn as a public health problem continues:

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Prause offers to testify on the side of porn producers, against a proposed Utah bill opening porn producers to lawsuits:

Note: One can be funded (or supported via alternative avenues) without direct funding of research (such as via being given access to subjects willing to engage in sex while being monitored in a lab).

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Randomly attacking porn-induced ED:

Porn-induced ED is mentioned by many experts. See 150 news articles by experts and caregivers warning of porn’s effects on sexual performance at Experts Who Recognize & Treat Porn-induced ED.

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Attacking an article that says internet addiction is a thing (Prause attacks internet addiction because porn addiction is an Internet addiction subtype)

Nothing wrong with the science in the article.

Reality? List of over 380 Internet & Video Game Brain Studies – all support addiction model. Internet Gaming disorder is in the addiction section of the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11)

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Attacking MDs:

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Two false statements: No evidence of withdrawal, and porn use is overwhelmingly positive.

Internet porn research and numerous self-reports demonstrate that some porn users experience withdrawal and/or tolerance – which are also often characteristic of physical dependency. In fact, ex-porn users regularly report surprisingly severe withdrawal symptoms, which are reminiscent of drug withdrawals: insomnia, anxiety, irritability, mood swings, headaches, restlessness, poor concentration, fatigue, depression, and social paralysis, as well as the sudden loss of libido that guys call the ‘flatline’ (apparently unique to porn withdrawal). Another sign of physical dependency reported by porn users is inability to get an erection or to have an orgasm without using porn. As for studies – page with 14 studies reporting withdrawal symptoms in porn users.

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Attacking this study: Till Porn Do Us Part? Longitudinal Effects of Pornography Use on Divorce (2017)

Red herring. Almost 60 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. All studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction. While a few studies correlated greater porn use in females to better (or neutral) sexual satisfaction, most have not (see this list: Porn studies involving female subjects: Negative effects on arousal, sexual satisfaction, and relationship s).

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Two falsehoods in one tweet:

First, it’s well established that meth does shrink the brain. Second, this Max Planck Institute fMRI study reported 3 neurological findings correlating with higher levels of porn use: (1) less reward system grey matter (dorsal striatum), (2) less reward circuit activation while briefly viewing sexual photos, (3) poorer functional connectivity between the dorsal striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The researchers interpreted the 3 findings as an indication of the effects of longer-term porn exposure. Said the study,

This is in line with the hypothesis that intense exposure to pornographic stimuli results in a down-regulation of the natural neural response to sexual stimuli.

Lead author Simone Kühn commenting in the Max Planck press release said:

We assume that subjects with a high porn consumption need increasing stimulation to receive the same amount of reward. That could mean that regular consumption of pornography more or less wears out your reward system. That would fit perfectly the hypothesis that their reward systems need growing stimulation.

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem.

Video – https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/880510

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Prause keeps tweeting her self-generated press release, which debunks nothing:

Who pays for this?

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Prause doesn’t like it that another state passes a resolution:

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Prause falsely states that Prause & Pfaus was a “causal experiment” (it wasn’t even a true study):

Prause & Pfaus 2015 wasn’t a study on men with ED. It wasn’t a study at all. Instead, Prause claimed to have gathered data from four of her earlier studies, none of which addressed erectile dysfunction. It’s disturbing that this paper by Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus passed peer-review as the data in their paper did not match the data in the underlying four studies on which the paper claimed to be based. The discrepancies are not minor gaps, but gaping holes that cannot be plugged. In addition, the paper made several claims that were false or not supported by their data. Prause & Pfaus 2015 as these 2 critiques expose, it cannot support a single claim it made:

In the same journal as the paper: Letter to the editor by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015)
Very extensive lay critique: Nothing Adds Up in Dubious Study: Youthful Subjects’ ED Left Unexplained (2015)

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Prause keeps tweeting her self-generated press release that says it’s anything but porn:

Almost 60 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. All studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction. In the first section of the above list studies 1 & 2 are meta-analyses, study #3 had porn users attempt to quit using porn for 3 weeks, and studies 4 through 9 are longitudinal. Their findings don’t match Prause PR.

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Another incorrect statement:

The above is about one the Josh Grubbs many CPUI-9 studies, which he labels as “perceived addiction.” Ley & Prause have falsely stated that Total CPUI-9 scores are not related to levels of porn use. But they are – robustly. Correlations from Grubbs most famous study show that all CPUI-9 sections are related to porn use:

If Grubbs’s inappropriate emotional distress questions are omitted, hours of use is always the strongest predictor of porn addiction. See much more of the smoke-and-mirrors created by Grubbs and his CPUI-9:

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Article featuring Prause as the expert:

Article featured Steele et al., 2013. This EEG study was touted in the media by Prause as evidence against the existence of porn/sex addiction. Not so. Steele et al. 2013 actually lends support to the existence of both porn addiction and porn use down-regulating sexual desire. How so? The study reported higher EEG readings (relative to neutral pictures) when subjects were briefly exposed to pornographic photos. Studies consistently show that an elevated P300 occurs when addicts are exposed to cues (such as images) related to their addiction.

In line with the Cambridge University brain scan studies, this EEG study also reported greater cue-reactivity to porn correlating with less desire for partnered sex. To put it another way – individuals with greater brain activation to porn would rather masturbate to porn than have sex with a real person. Astonishingly, study spokesperson Prause claimed that porn users merely had “high libido,” yet the results of the study say the exact opposite (subjects’ desire for partnered sex was dropping in relation to their porn use).

Together these two Steele et al. findings indicate greater brain activity to cues (porn images), yet less reactivity to natural rewards (sex with a person). Both are hallmarks of an addiction. 8 peer-reviewed papers explain the truth: Peer-reviewed critiques of Steele et al., 2013. Also see this extensive YBOP critique.

Aside from the many unsupported claims in the press, it’s disturbing that Prause’s 2013 EGG study passed peer-review, as it suffered from serious methodological flaws: 1) subjects were heterogeneous (males, females, non-heterosexuals); 2) subjects were not screened for mental disorders or addictions; 3) study had no control group for comparison; 4) questionnaires were not validated for porn use or porn addiction.

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Again, claiming that her solitary, flawed EEG study (which actually found habituation) has “falsified” the addiction model:

10 peer-reviewed papers say Prause is mistaken: her study actually found desensitization/habituation in frequent porn users (consistent with addiction): Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015.

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Unscientific? This page lists 55 neuroscience-based studies (MRI, fMRI, EEG, neuropsychological, hormonal). They provide strong support for the addiction model as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies. The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 30 recent literature reviews & commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model. Signs of addiction and escalation to more extreme material? Over 60 studies reporting findings consistent with escalation of porn use (tolerance), habituation to porn, and even withdrawal symptoms (all signs and symptoms associated with addiction).

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In support of the porn industry:

For more on “porn and egalitarianism” see over 40 studies link porn use to “un-egalitarian attitudes” toward women and sexist views – or the summary from this 2016 meta-analysis: Media and Sexualization: State of Empirical Research, 1995–2015. Excerpt:

The goal of this review was to synthesize empirical investigations testing effects of media sexualization. The focus was on research published in peer-reviewed, English-language journals between 1995 and 2015. A total of 109 publications that contained 135 studies were reviewed. The findings provided consistent evidence that both laboratory exposure and regular, everyday exposure to this content are directly associated with a range of consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater self-objectification, greater support of sexist beliefs and of adversarial sexual beliefs, and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women. Moreover, experimental exposure to this content leads both women and men to have a diminished view of women’s competence, morality, and humanity.

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Trying anything to dismiss a study she doesn’t like:

A Google Scholar search for ‘pornography’ returns 300,000 items.

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Attacking another study she doesn’t appreciate, with yet another false statement:

Check for yourself – the phrase “may cause” is nowhere to be found in the full paper. Nor is the word “cause.”

Note: Prause has repeatedly and falsely claimed that her cobbled-together paper, Prause & Pfaus, 2015, showed causation! It didn’t.

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Garbage science? The article in question.

Surprising, as usually it’s Prause or Ley claiming that masturbation is really cause of porn-induced sexual problems, never porn: Sexologists deny porn-induced ED by claiming masturbation is the problem (2016).

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The Standard-UK article cited by Prause in this tweet said nothing about porn, let alone “exactly like porn”:

More falsehoods. What the article actually said:

Researchers from the University of Michigan have revealed that cheese contains a chemical found in addictive drugs. Using the Yale Food Addiction Scale, designed to measure a person’s cravings, the study found that cheese is particularly moreish because it contains casein. The chemical, which is found in all dairy products, can trigger the brain’s opioid receptors, producing a feeling of euphoria linked to those of hard drug addiction.

One of Prause’s core claims is that viewing puppies play, or eating cheese/chocolate are neurological & hormonally no different than masturbating internet porn. This talking point is meant to debunk any and all neurological studies on porn users. No actual neuroscientist agrees with Prause’s unsupported claim here. Don Hilton MD wrote an article debunking this and other baseless assertions: Correcting Misunderstandings About Neuroscience and Problematic Sexual Behaviors

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem:

Everyone else misrepresents science (but never a specific example). Yet another example of Prause misrepresenting her own study.

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A talk about her fabricated “anti-science” attacks

Did Prause mention that her best known papers have been critiqued 16 times in the peer-reviewed literature?

Steele et al., 2013: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
Prause et al., 2015: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Prause & Pfaus, 2015. Letter to the editor by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015)

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Attacking the concept of porn as a public health problem (one-sided article quoting only Ley and Prause):

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Attacking the concept of porn as a public health problem – yet another one-sided article quoting only Ley and Prause:

How do Ley & Prause get so many pro-porn industry articles into media outlets? Oh yeah.

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Believe this? Links to her own site – Liberos:

No else believes it, not even her close allies. A recent study, Young Australians’ use of pornography and associations with sexual risk behaviour (2017), on Australians ages 15-29 found that 100% of the men (82% of women) had viewed porn. Also, 69 percent of males and 23 percent of females first viewed porn at age 13 or younger. In addition this study reported that more frequent early pornography viewing correlated with current mental health problems.

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Article featuring only David Ley and Prause’s solitary, flawed EEG study (which actually found habituation) has “falsified” the addiction model:

In response to proliferation of such biased articles in the press YBOP wrote this: How to recognize biased articles: They cite Prause et al. 2015 (falsely claiming it debunks porn addiction), while omitting over 3 dozen neurological studies supporting porn addiction (April, 2016).

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Prause misrepresenting a paper by well respected academics: Should Compulsive Sexual Behavior be Considered an Addiction? (Kraus et al., 2016).

Actually, the paper said CSB (hypersexuality) looked like an addiction:

With the release of DSM-5, gambling disorder was reclassified with substance use disorders. This change challenged beliefs that addiction occurred only by ingesting of mind-altering substances and has significant implications for policy, prevention and treatment strategies. Data suggest that excessive engagement in other behaviors (e.g. gaming, sex, compulsive shopping) may share clinical, genetic, neurobiological and phenomenological parallels with substance addictions.

Another area needing more research involves considering how technological changes may be influencing human sexual behaviors. Given that data suggest that sexual behaviors are facilitated through Internet and smartphone applications, additional research should consider how digital technologies relate to CSB (e.g. compulsive masturbation to Internet pornography or sex chatrooms) and engagement in risky sexual behaviors (e.g. condomless sex, multiple sexual partners on one occasion).

Overlapping features exist between CSB and substance use disorders. Common neurotransmitter systems may contribute to CSB and substance use disorders, and recent neuroimaging studies highlight similarities relating to craving and attentional biases. Similar pharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatments may be applicable to CSB and substance addictions.

One year later the same scientists used stronger language: Is excessive sexual beh aviour an addictive disorder? (Potenza et al., 2017) – Excerpts:

Research into the neurobiology of compulsive sexual behaviour disorder has generated findings relating to attentional biases, incentive salience attributions, and brain-based cue reactivity that suggest substantial similarities with addictions.

Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder seems to fit well with non-substance addictive disorders proposed for ICD-11, consistent with the narrower term of sex addiction currently proposed for compulsive sexual behaviour disorder on the ICD-11 draft website. We believe that classification of compulsive sexual behaviour disorder as an addictive disorder is consistent with recent data and might benefit clinicians, researchers, and individuals suffering from and personally affected by this disorder.

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Another article taking a swipe at Terry Crews:

The only expert quoted: Prause. The only study mentioned: hers. See How to recognize biased articles: They cite Prause et al. 2015 (falsely claiming it debunks porn addiction), while omitting over 3 dozen neurological studies supporting porn addiction (April, 2016).

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Prause gets another gig:

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem:

Judge for yourself. This page contains links to hundreds of studies and several reviews of the literature: current state of the research on Internet porn addiction and porn’s effects.

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Prause gets yet another article, with her as the world’s authority, placed into a major publication:

Does money buy press coverage?

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Cherry-picked support for exaggerated claim:

The truth: over 25 studies link p orn use to “un-egalitarian attitudes” toward women and sexist views. View the summary from this 2016 meta-analysis of 135 studies: Media and Sexualization: State of Empirical Research, 1995–2015.

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Yet another propaganda piece, smearing concept of porn as a public health problem, featuring non-academic Prause as the “expert”:

And of course featuring Prause’s solitary, flawed EEG study (which actually found habituation), while ignoring academics (40 neuroscience-based studies) providing strong support for the addiction model.

If you want to see several comments under the article by Prause (posting as PornHelps), see this page.

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Prause claims all who believe porn can be harmful and addictive are “science-illiterate & misogynistic”

Link to twitter thread (which Prause later deleted)

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Ley & Prause team up to misrepresent article, attack porn-addiction concept:

Nope. As of more than 2 years later, Prause had nothing in the press.

Another attack on the same article. No one fabricated neuroscience (as always Prause fails to provide an example):

Yet another tweet about the same article. Prause successfully bullied the Daily Dot into removing the well known fact that the ICD-11 was to include “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder.”

Sorry Daily Dot – it’s 2018 and The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) now c ontains a new diagnosis suitable for porn addiction or sex addiction: “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder.”

Prior to the release of the “implementation version” a beta draft of the ICD-11 was also put online, and made available for interested parties to comment on. (A simple sign-up is needed to view and participate.) Prause spent the last 3 years obsessively posting on the ICD-11 beta draft site, doing her best to prevent the CSBD diagnosis from making it into the final manual (she failed). Prause posted more comments in the beta-draft comment section than everyone else combined.

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem – article with Prause as the expert, telling fibs:

Excerpt from the article:

Prause submits, it can have actual benefits: “[Porn] lowers stress biomarkers, raises life satisfaction, increases verbal memory kills, improves marriage satisfaction, decreases cancer associated with male prostate because it encourages masturbation, and increases your libido.”

The above is pure nonsense. It is the exact opposite of what the preponderance of the research finds. Porn use is associated with:

Higher stress biomarkers – PA Axis Dysregulation in Men With Hypersexual Disorder (Chatzittofis, 2015), The Role of Neuroinflammation in the Pathophysiology of Hypersexual Disorder (Jokinen et al., 2016)
Lower life satisfaction – Over 55 studies link porn use to poorer mental-emotional health & poorer cognitive outcomes.
Decreased verbal memory skills and poorer cognition – Can porn use affect memory and concentration?
Poorer marriage satisfaction – Almost 60 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. All studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.
Decreased libido – This list contains 27 studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli.

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Trying to counter 9 recent studies revealing historic levels of sexual dysfunctions, and startling rates of a new scourge: low libido, documented in this lay article and in this peer-reviewed paper involving 7 US Navy doctors – Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (2016):

Sometimes Prause & Ley blame masturbation for chronic unexplained ED in young men, other times they blame Viagra. The vital insights is that ‘it’s anything but porn!’

Prause cited nothing as, once again, there is no empirical support for Ley’s claim that the introduction of Viagra led to men finally tell the truth in studies on sexual dysfunction. We are not talking about an increase in men visiting their doctors for ED medication. The ED rates refer only to peer-reviewed studies (usually anonymous surveys) on population-wide rates of sexual dysfunction. To put it another way, Prause is claiming that in every single study published between 1948 and 2010, in countries all over the world, the male participants consistently lied about their erectile functioning. Then in 2010 (13 years after Viagra was introduced) all young men, and only the young men, started to tell the truth in anonymous questionnaires about erectile functioning. That is absurd. Prause’s claim is like saying that the introduction of aspirin caused studies to report a 1000% increase in headaches among one age group that previously seldom had headaches.

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Here, most porn research is bad research:

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Makes claim, but offers no documentation:

Prause has tweeted this many times, yet has never provided one iota of evidence.

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Everything in this tweet to Mark Griffiths is fabricated:

Prause is probably referring to the single paragraph stuffed into her thoroughly debunked “letter to the editor”: Critique of: Letter to the editor “Prause et al. (2015) the latest falsification of addiction predictions“ (2016). Prause claims about “actual sex data” is without support, and nowhere to be found.

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Prause is trying to conflate the concept of porn as a public health problem with homophobia:

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Trolling, name-calling, as we have come to expect:

Hey, this is awkward: Everything in Prause’s 240-word letter to Lancet is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017). Also awkward: The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 20 recent literature reviews & commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.

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Prause posts this 240-word letter to Lancet over and over and over…

No matter how often one posts junk, it’s still junk. Everything in Prause’s 240-word letter to Lancet is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017)

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Yet another tweet that doesn’t reflect the content:

The “expert” is AASECT member and Prause ally, Doug Braun-Harvey. This is all he has:

Crippen engages in premature evaluation, a common malady that is treatable by learning from the hundreds of sexual scientists, educators and therapists who tirelessly study and attempt to apply sexual science to avoid sweeping morally biased positions.

Nothing about “fake science,” and not a single citation to support his claim.

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One of Prause’s primary tactics is to call anyone who disagrees with her a misogynist: this includes individual females and organizations run by females with a majority of female members (SASH and IITAP). Prause has an infographic naming several people as misogynists, which she has tweeted 50 times or so, and posted on Quora another 20 times:

Prause knows the prime directive of propaganda: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”

Her only evidence of “misogyny” is Gary Wilson accidentally typing “Miss” – after Prause inquired about the size of Wilson’s penis.

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Taking on feminist Naomi Wolf, Prause cites Taylor Kohut’s 2 dubious outliers:

Both debunked:

Reality:

Almost 70 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. All studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.
Porn use affecting beliefs, attitudes and behaviors? Check out individual studies – over 40 studies link porn use to “un-egalitarian attitudes” toward women and sexist views – or the summary of 135 studies from this 2016 meta-analysis: Media and Sexualization: State of Empirical Research, 1995–2015.

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Attacking a therapist’s book, then cites Marty Klein, who once boasted his very own webpage on the AVN’s Hall of Fame in recognition of his pro-porn advocacy serving the porn industry’s interests (since removed).

Zimbardo and Wilson dismantle Klein’s propaganda: More on porn: guard your manhood—a response to Marty Klein, by Philip Zimbardo & Gary Wilson (April, 2016)

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Attacks a study she doesn’t like as entirely false and shaming. Tweets her own cute picture of the 4 (not 5) kink organizations that put out proclamations opposing porn and sex addiction.

It was easy to debunk the kink organizations’ sloppy, poorly cited mish-mash: Dismantling the “group position” paper opposing porn and sex addiction (November, 2017)

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Ah yes, “fake news” sites:

How about a fake study? Prause & Pfaus 2015 wasn’t a study on men with ED. It wasn’t a study at all. Instead, Prause claimed to have gathered data from four of her earlier studies, none of which addressed erectile dysfunction. It’s disturbing that this paper by Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus passed peer-review as the data in their paper did not match the data in the underlying four studies on which the paper claimed to be based. The discrepancies are not minor gaps, but gaping holes that cannot be plugged. In addition, the paper made several claims that were false or not supported by their data. Prause & Pfaus 2015 as these 2 critiques expose, it cannot support a single claim it made:

In the same journal as the paper: Letter to the editor by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015)
Very extensive lay critique: Nothing Adds Up in Dubious Study: Youthful Subjects’ ED Left Unexplained (2015)

As described above and here, both Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus were caught lying about their paper (which stole bits and pieces from 4 earlier Prause studies – none of which involved Pfaus).

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Trolling, attacking this article.

Prause cites her 240-word letter to Lancet, which is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017). The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 30 recent literature reviews & commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.

Prause also cites her own paper, which said:

Viewing the erotic films also induced greater reports of negative affect, guilt, and anxiety

Negative affect means negative emotions. Oops.

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A Štulhofer and Hald paper where they misrepresents their own findings:

In reality, the study supports escalation of porn use. See our analysis here: “Sexual Arousal and Sexually Explicit Media (SEM): Comparing Patterns of Sexual Arousal to SEM and Sexual Self-Evaluations and Satisfaction Across Gender and Sexual Orientation” (2017).

Note: Gert Hald is responsible for the most egregious study ever published on porn – the PCES. YBOP thoroughly exposes what the researchers did to get their results: Self-Perceived Effects of Pornography Consumption (2008), Hald GM, Malamuth NM (the PCES).

Note: The Štulhofer paper attempting to debunk porn-related ED actually found a few correlations between ED and porn use, but hid them away. In addition, Štulhofer omitted three significant correlations between porn use and sexual problems that were presented to a European conference.

So it’s no surprise that they spun the results and methodology of their current paper.

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More spin:

The deniers of porn addiction are agitated because the latest version of the World Health Organization’s medical diagnostic manual, The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), contains a new diagnosis suitable for diagnosing what is commonly referred to as ‘porn addiction’ or ‘sex addiction.’ It’s called “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” (CSBD). The first section of this extensive critique expose Prause’s falsehoods surrounding the ICD-11: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).

For an accurate account of the ICD-11, see this recent article by The Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health (SASH): “Compulsive Sexual Behaviour” has been classified by World Health Organization as Mental Health Disorder. It begins with:

Despite a few misleading rumors to the contrary, it is untrue that the WHO has rejected “porn addiction” or “sex addiction.” Compulsive sexual behavior has been called by a variety of names over the years: “hypersexuality”, “porn addiction”, “sex addiction”, “out-of-control sexual behavior” and so forth. In its latest catalogue of diseases the WHO takes a step towards legitimizing the disorder by acknowledging “Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder” (CSBD) as a mental illness. According to WHO expert Geoffrey Reed, the new CSBD diagnosis “lets people know they have “a genuine condition” and can seek treatment.”

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Prause citing a solitary flawed Taylor Kohut study, while ignoring 135 other studies:

The Kohut study, exposed: Critique of “Is Pornography Really about Making Hate to Women? Pornography Users Hold More Gender Egalitarian Attitudes Than Nonusers in a Representative American Sample” (2016), Taylor Kohut, Jodie L. Baer, Brendan Watts.

In reality, Kohut’s findings are contradicted by nearly every other published study. Check out individual studies – over 25 studies link porn use to “un-egalitarian attitudes” toward women and sexist views – or the summary of 135 studies from this 2016 meta-analysis: Media and Sexualization: State of Empirical Research, 1995–2015.

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem:

Again, Prause wants a discussion of porn’s so-called benefits. As documented in this section’s intro the 4 “benefits” she chronically claims, don’t exist.

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Again, with Prause and Ley leading the way, the deniers of porn addiction are agitated because the latest version of the World Health Organization’s medical diagnostic manual, The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), contains a new diagnosis suitable for diagnosing what is commonly referred to as ‘porn addiction’ or ‘sex addiction.’ It’s called “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” (CSBD). Nonetheless, in a bizarre “We lost, but we won” propaganda campaign, the deniers have been pulling out all the stops to spin this new diagnosis as a rejection of both “sex addiction” and “porn addiction.”

In 2018, Prause goes on multiple twitter rants trying futilely to convince the world that porn addiction and sex addiction were deliberately excluded from the ICD-11’s new diagnosis:

On the same day:

On the same day:

What the public may not know is that neither the ICD-11 nor the APA’s DSM-5 ever uses the word “addiction” to describe an addiction – whether it be gambling addiction, heroin addiction, cigarette addiction, or you name it. Both diagnostic manuals use the word “disorder” instead of “addiction” (i.e. “gambling disorder,” “nicotine use disorder,” and so on). Thus, “sex addiction” and “porn addiction” could never have been rejected, because they were never under formal consideration in the major diagnostic manuals. Put simply, there will never be a “porn addiction” diagnosis, just as there will never be a “meth addiction” diagnosis. Yet individuals with the signs and symptoms of consistent with either a “porn addiction” or a “methamphetamine addiction” can be diagnosed using the ICD-11’s provisions.

For a complete debunking of Prause’s claims, see: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?,” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).

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Always spinning:

It was a small committee, not “the House of Commons.” The committee did not state that porn was not a public health hazard. It said that research has not established a causal relationship between porn and negative sexual attitudes and behaviors – as if cause can ever be established using the typical study methodology.

When confronted with hundreds of studies linking porn use to negative outcomes, a common tactic by pro-porn PhDs (and Canadian subcommittees) is to claim that “no causation has been demonstrated.” The reality is that when it comes to psychological and (many) medical studies, very little research reveals causation directly. For example, all studies on the relationship between lung cancer and cigarette smoking are correlative – yet cause and effect are clear to everyone but the tobacco lobby.

Due to ethical restrictions researchers are usually precluded from constructing experimental research designs that would prove whether pornography causes certain harms. Therefore, they use correlational models instead. Over time, when a significant body of correlational studies is amassed in any given research area, there comes a point where the body of evidence can be said to prove a point of theory, despite a lack of experimental studies. Put another way, no single correlation study may ever provide a “smoking gun” in an area of study, but the converging evidence of multiple correlational studies can establish cause and effect. When it comes to porn use, nearly every study published is correlative.

The majority of human studies on various addictions, including internet and porn addiction, are correlational. This page contains a growing list of studies strongly suggesting that internet use (porn, gaming, social media) causes mental/emotional problems, sexual problems, poorer relationships addiction-related brain changes, and other negative effects in some users. The lists of studies are separated into pornography studies and internet use studies. The 25 pornography studies are divided into 3 sections based on methodologies: (1) eliminating porn use, (2) longitudinal, (3) experimental exposure to porn (visual sexual stimuli).

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When Prause’s propaganda is challenged with a link to this page, she hits “block.”

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Upset with another state declaring porn a public health problem, she got Andy Campbell to write a hit piece for Huffpost, and quote her (as mentioned above, Andy Campbell, has written several articles quoting Prause – including an article for Penthouse Magazine, featuring Prause)

In the hit-piece we find Prause’s hilarious assertion that viewing images of puppies has exactly the same effect as watching hard core porn:

It’s true — pornography does that,” Dr. Prause said previously. “It’s also true with images of chocolate and images of puppies. You don’t see puppies being declared a public health hazard. These sex addiction studies are relying on ignorance, claiming that pornography is the same thing as cocaine and hoping you don’t know any different.

One of Prause’s core claims is that viewing puppies play, or eating cheese/chocolate are neurological & hormonally no different than masturbating internet porn. This talking point is meant to debunk any and all neurological studies on porn users. No actual neuroscientist agrees with Prause’s claim here. Don Hilton MD wrote an article debunking this and other silly assertions: Correcting Misunderstandings About Neuroscience and Problematic Sexual Behaviors.

Prause contradicts herself when she tweets as RealYBOP (August, 2018):

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Trolling a NY Times article with false claims:

Linking to no studies, she tweets the same falsehoods to the author:

At other times Prause has trotted out her <2% claim, she cited this cherry-picked Aussie studies: A Profile of Pornography Users in Australia: Findings From the Second Australian Study of Health and Relationships (2016). In reality, 17% of males & females aged 16-30 reported that using pornography had a bad effect on them.

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Prause tweets a David Ley opinion piece, published in pro-porn Porn Studies Journal (see – ‘Porn Studies Journal’, Fiona Atwood and Clarissa Smith, 2013)

Ley pretty much “did a Prause,” misrepresenting the current state of the research science, while leading the reader to believe that a handful of cherry-picked/flawed studies represents the preponderance of evidence. Another tweet promoting David Ley’s masterpiece:

The above image is yet another info-graphic that Prause has tweeted or posted (on Quora) maybe 40 times. It lives on Prause’s Amazon page: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/liberos.media/EvaluatingInformationAboutSexFilms.png. The info-graphic names multiple websites as “bad sources of information,” including YBOP, FTND, rebootnation and IITAP – basically most of Prause’s targets.

However, it only mentions 2 “good websites” for information: 1) Justin Lehmiller, who is employed by Playboy and has written 10 articles flattering Dr. Prause, and 2) AASECT, an non-academic organization that openly campaigns against porn addiction and porn-induced ED.

Oh yeah, Prause mentions a single article from 2014, where she is heavily quoted, as the third legitimate source of information on the effects of porn (“sex films”).

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem, with the cute little infographic:

“Pseudoscience” is when you can’t post a single meta-analysis or review of the literature. Prause has never done so when attacking the concept of porn as a public health problem. Never.

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Attacking Florida’s attempt to pass a resolution, saying papers show “sex films” are overwhelmingly a positive influence on health:

Here’s what Prause cited:

1) Prause’s 240-word letter to Lancet, which cited nothing to support Prause’s claims, and never said that “sex films” are overwhelmingly positive. Prause’s letter is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017). The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 20 recent literature reviews & commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.

2) A 5-year old narrative review, that certainly did not state that “sex films” are overwhelmingly positive. The Jon Grant paper, which Prause regularly misrepresents with a doctored picture of Grant’s paper, offers zero support for her claims.

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Prause tweets her misrepresentation of a 2014 Jon Grant paper:

More on Prause misrepresenting Jon Grant’s paper. The following screenshot, circulating on pro-porn propagandist’s social media accounts (apparently created by Nicole Prause), features the core piece of purported “evidence” that the ICD-11 “rejected sex addiction and porn addiction.” Excerpting a 2014 Jon Grant commentary, and counting on short attention-spans, the propagandist expects you to read only what’s in the red boxes, hoping you will overlook what the paragraph actually states:

If you fell for the red-box illusion, you misread the above excerpt as:

…pornography viewing… questionable whether there is enough scientific evidence at this time to justify its inclusion as a disorder. Based on the limited current data, it would therefore seem premature to include it in the ICD-11.

Yet that’s pure deception. Here’s the Jon Grant 2014 paper: Impulse control disorders and “behavioural addictions” in the ICD-11. Read the entire paragraph and you will see that Jon Grant is talking about “Internet gaming disorder” not pornography. Grant believed it was questionable whether there was enough scientific evidence at that time to justify Internet Gaming Disorder’s inclusion as a disorder:

A third key controversy in the field is whether problematic Internet use is an independent disorder. The Working Group noted that this is a heterogeneous condition, and that use of the Internet may in fact constitute a delivery system for various forms of impulse control dysfunction (e.g., pathological game playing or pornography viewing). Importantly, the descriptions of pathological gambling and of compulsive sexual behaviour disorder should note that such behaviours are increasingly seen using Internet forums, either in addition to more traditional settings, or exclusively 22,23. The DSM-5 has included Internet gaming disorder in the section “Conditions for further study.” Although potentially an important behaviour to understand, and one certainly with a high profile in some countries 12, it is questionable whether there is enough scientific evidence at this time to justify its inclusion as a disorder. Based on the limited current data, it would therefore seem premature to include it in the ICD-11.

Without reading only the red squares, the above excerpt reveals that Jon Grant believes that internet pornography viewing can be an impulse control disorder, and it falls under the umbrella diagnosis of “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” (CSBD). This is the exact opposite of the “red square” illusion tweeted by the propagandists.

Even if Jon Grant had actually said that compulsive porn use could not be classified under Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorders, it would be irrelevant as (1) the paper is over 4 years old, and (2) it’s just Grant’s two cents, not an official position paper by the World Health Organization. Moreover, a lot has changed in the intervening 4.5 years. By the way, Internet Gaming Disorder is now in WHO’s ICD-11, under addictive behaviors.

First, 33 of the 40 neurological studies on CSB subjects listed on this page were published after the 2014 Jon Grant paper. Second, Jon Grant was a co-author on this 2018 paper announcing (and agreeing with) the inclusion of CSBD in the upcoming ICD-11: Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder in the ICD‐11. Third, in his 2018 paper, “Compulsive sexual behavior: A nonjudgmental approach,” Jon Grant himself says that Compulsive Sexual Behavior is also called “sex addiction.”

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem, with the cute little infographic:

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem. Linking to yet another one-sided article where Prause is “the” expert:

Prause, the accomplished cherry-picker, selects only a single adolescent study referenced in the legislation and claims it was cherry-picked. The truth about the porn use and adolescents? Check out this list of over 200 adolescent studies, or this 2012 review of the research – The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents: A Review of the Research (2012). From the conclusion:

Increased access to the Internet by adolescents has created unprecedented opportunities for sexual education, learning, and growth. Conversely, the risk of harm that is evident in the literature has led researchers to investigate adolescent exposure to online pornography in an effort to elucidate these relationships. Collectively, these studies suggest that youth who consume pornography may develop unrealistic sexual values and beliefs. Among the findings, higher levels of permissive sexual attitudes, sexual preoccupation, and earlier sexual experimentation have been correlated with more frequent consumption of pornography…. Nevertheless, consistent findings have emerged linking adolescent use of pornography that depicts violence with increased degrees of sexually aggressive behavior. The literature does indicate some correlation between adolescents’ use of pornography and self-concept. Girls report feeling physically inferior to the women they view in pornographic material, while boys fear they may not be as virile or able to perform as the men in these media. Adolescents also report that their use of pornography decreased as their self-confidence and social development increase. Additionally, research suggests that adolescents who use pornography, especially that found on the Internet, have lower degrees of social integration, increases in conduct problems, higher levels of delinquent behavior, higher incidence of depressive symptoms, and decreased emotional bonding with caregivers.

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Harasses the author of an LA Times opinion piece that mentions porn & sex addiction:

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Goes after Dr. Jordan Peterson for suggesting that porn may not be all that great for young men;

As for Prause’s claims #1) with respect to her phrase “Not superstimuli,” only a handful of people would know that Prause is attempting to discredit the concept of internet pornography as a supernormal stimulus. As Prause uses the term “superstimuli,” it’s clear she has no idea what Nobel laureate Nikolaas Tinbergen meant when he coined the actual term ‘supernormal stimulus’ (sometimes written as ‘supranormal’). We address Prause’s failed refutation in this section of YBOP’s critique of her 240-word letter: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017)

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Attacking concept of porn as a public health problem and cyber-stalking Senator Weiler:

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Prause is just making stuff up as: 1) she never assessed drug use in her lab, 2) she only uses an EEG, which tells us nothing about how orgasm affects the reward system as it only assesses electrical activity on scalp, 3) all animal and fMRI studies find similarities between drug use (heroin, cocaine) and sexual/arousal orgasm.

Reality: Sexual arousal and addictive drugs activate the exact same reward circuit nerve cells. In contrast, there’s only a small percentage of nerve-cell activation overlap between addictive drugs and other natural rewards such as food or water. Turning on the same nerve cells that make sexual stimulation so compelling helps explain why meth, cocaine, and heroin can be so addictive.

Interestingly, heroin addicts often claim that shooting up “feels like an orgasm.” Supporting their experience, ejaculation mimics the effects of heroin addiction on the same reward circuit nerve cells. Specifically, ejaculation shrinks the same dopamine producing nerve cells that shrink with chronic heroin use. This doesn’t mean sex is bad. It simply informs us that addictive drugs hijack the exact same mechanisms that urge us back into the bedroom for a romp.

Unlike other non-drug rewards (inviting food or sugar), but similar to drugs of abuse, sexual experience leads to a long-lasting changes in the numbers and types of reward-center glutamate receptors. Glutamate is the main neurotransmitter relaying information from key brain regions to the reward center.

In addition, both sex and drug use lead to the accumulation of DeltaFosB, a protein that activates genes involved with addiction. The molecular changes it generates are nearly identical for both sexual conditioning and chronic use of drugs. Whether it’s sex or drugs of abuse, high levels of DeltaFosB rewire the brain to crave “IT,” whatever “IT” is. Addictive drugs not only hijack the precise nerve cells activated during sexual arousal, they co-opt the same learning mechanisms that evolved to make us desire sexual activity.

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Prause is challenged to take on the substance of critics and avoid to ad hominem…so, predictably, Prause goes ad hominem:

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Putting her stats degree to good use, Prause tags Josh Grubbs with her ad hominem attacks on anyone who believes in porn addiction:

Prause has never released the source of her data.

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Any excuse to assert that porn addiction doesn’t exist:

Prause doesn’t understand dopamine. PS – The results of 55 neurological studies on porn users/addicts are consistent with 370+ Internet addiction “brain studies,” some of which also include internet porn use.

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Random tweet about a 7 year-old paper, trying to connect it withporn/sex addiction:

Reality: “food addiction” wasn’t rejected. An opinion piece in a journal cannot be construed as rejection (Prause acts as if there’s some official Office of Hypothesis Rejections). Fact: hundreds of neurological studies support the addiction model.

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Guess Prause is trying to say that withdrawal doesn’t occur with porn addicts.

YBOP exposes Prause’s falsehoods in this section of YBOP’s critique of her 240-word letter: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017). More evidence of withdrawal in porn users: Prevalence, Patterns and Self-Perceived Effects of Pornography Consumption in Polish University Students: A Cross-Sectional Study.

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Trolling IITAP with easily debunked assertion about cue-reactivity:

The core addiction brain change, sensitization, is assessed experimentally via cue-reactivity brain studies or strong cravings to use when exposed to cues. Studies reporting sensitization (cue-reactivity or strong cravings) in porn users/sex addicts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27.

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Multiple false statements:

1- Brain changes in sex and porn addiction look nearly identical to those reported in drug addiction. This list contains 20 recent literature reviews and commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.

2 – Sex and porn addiction were not removed: Propagandists misrepresent peer-reviewed papers and ICD-11 search features to fuel false claim that WHO’s ICD-11 “rejected porn addiction and sex addiction” (2018)”; Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?,” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).

3 – Prause only cites her 240-word letter: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017)

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‘Overwhelmingly positive’, again…yet she never cites one of the many reviews of literature or meta-analysis. Because they don’t support her claims.

Tracy Clark-Flory has a long history of writing pro-porn propaganda pieces featuring Ley & Prause.

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Reaches back to David Ley and her 2014 propaganda piece (not a genuine review of literature), which was written in 2013:

The following is a very long analysis of this paper, which goes line-by-line, showing all the shenanigans Ley & Prause incorporated in their “review”: The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Fractured Fairytale Posing As A Review. It completely dismantles the so-called review, and documents dozens of misrepresentations of the research they cited. The most astonishing aspect of their review is that it omitted all of the many studies that reported negative effects related to porn use or found porn addiction! Yes, you read that right. While purporting to write an “objective” review, Ley & Prause justified omitting hundreds of studies on the grounds that these were correlational studies. Guess what? Virtually all studies on porn are correlational, even those they cited, ormisrepresented.

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Prause & Ley have been on a 3-year campaign to associate YBOP and men in recovery with neo-Nazis. Just another attempt:

Just the tip of the iceberg. For more:

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In a pre-planned attacked, Prause and four of her usual side-kicks posted one star “reviews” on the Fight The New Drug Facebook page (reviews by her troupe of flying monkeys were all posted within a few hours each other: Tammy Johnson Ellis, Anthony Xavier Diaz, Russell Stambaugh, Patrick Powers).

This image with a rant says that she reported Gary Wilson. For the record, Gary has never received notice of any of Prause’s fictitious FBI or police reports, or done anything to merit them, and FTND relies on an array of respected academic scientists and peer-reviewed research. Wilson filed a freedom of information act (FOIA) request with the FBI and the FBI confirmed that Prause was lying; no report has ever been filed on Wilson. See – November, 2018: FBI affirms Nicole Prause’s fraud surrounding defamatory claims)

As for Prause’s assertion that Wilson is a misogynist, her only bit of proof is that Wilson accidentally wrote “Miss Prause” in his reply to a comment on YourBrainRebalanced where Prause (as RealScience) asks Wilson: “How small IS your penis Gary?”

Prause’s claim that “their neuroscience is simply false” is just more fiction from a practiced liar. Prause provides no examples of “false neuroscience,” while a reading of a FTND article such as “How Porn Can Become Addictive,” reveals peer-reviewed studies supporting every claim. Another example, found in the FTND FAQs (Is Porn Addiction Even A Real Thing?), contains links to about 200 supporting peer-reviewed papers.

Prause’s falsehoods concerning FTND are exposed in her Salt Lake Tribune Op-Ed attacking FTND. On the surface it appears legitimate as 7 PhD buddies of Prause signed off on it. However, upon closer examination we find that:

It provides no examples of misrepresentation by “Fight The New Drug,” or anyone else.
None of the claims are supported by citations.
The 8 neuroscientists cited zero neuroscience-based studies.
None of the researchers has ever published a study involving verified “porn addicts.”
Some who signed the Op-Ed have histories of feverishly attacking the concept of porn and sex addiction (thus demonstrating stark bias).
Most had collaborated earlier with the lead author of the Op-Ed (Prause) or her colleague (Pfaus).

In short, this 600-word Op-Ed is chock full of unsupported assertions meant to fool the lay public. It fails to support a single assertion as it cites only 4 papers – none of which have anything to do with porn addiction, porn’s effects on relationships, or porn-induced sexual problems.

Several experts in this field and I debunked its assertions and empty rhetoric in this relatively short response – Op-ed: Who exactly is misrepresenting the science on pornography? (2016). Unlike the “neuroscientists of the Op-Ed,” we cited several hundred studies and multiple reviews of the literature.

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Prause attacks renowned psychologist Philip Zimbardo:

Prause attacked Zimbardo for multiple reasons:

The Demise of Guys?: Philip Zimbardo: Excellent TED talk on (as the title says) the “demise” of young men. Zimbardo speaks of excessive Internet use (porn and video games) as “arousal addiction.” Note: in May 2019 the World Health Organization adopted “Gaming Disorder” and “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” as part of its latest diagnostic manual (the ICD-11), thus entirely vindicating Zimbardo and his warning.
Philip Zimbardo’s Psychology Today blog post “Is Porn Good For Us or Bad For Us?” (2016).
This book – Man, Interrupted: Why Young Men are Struggling & What We Can Do About It.
Two articles co-authored by Phil Zimbardo and Gary Wilson:

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Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, calls out an article about Zimbardo’s famous “Stanford Prison experiment” as a fraud. Prause trolls him, lying about Zimbardo “misrepresenting the science”:

Note – Prause has never provided a single example of Zimbardo misrepresenting science or research. She can’t, because he hasn’t. In fact, the concerns Zimbardo raised about the ill effects of problematic internet porn use and excessive internet gaming have both since been codified as disorders in the upcoming ICD-11, which is the diagnostic manual of the World Health Organization.

The only “source” attempting to discredit Zimbardo came through a David Ley blog post, which was pure spin, and completely debunked here: Dismantling David Ley’s response to Philip Zimbardo: “We must rely on good science in porn debate” (March, 2016).

Shermer posted several defenses of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Tellingly, Prause says nothing in response:

Zimbardo responds to critics – What’s the scientific value of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Zimbardo responds to the new allegations against his work.

More Prause & Ley attacks, with childish memes and falsehoods:

No Nicole, Zimbardo was aligned with the preponderance of research, but not with the 5 cherry-picked studies you tweet over and over and over….

More falsehoods from Prause:

Unlike Prause, Zimbardo backed up his claims with citations. What’s missing from all the above tweets? A single example of a Zimbardo misrepresentation. Nada.

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Who are these experts? The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) contains a new diagnosis suitable for diagnosing what is commonly referred to as ‘porn addiction’ or ‘sex addiction.’ It’s called “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” (CSBD).

Nonetheless, in a bizarre “We lost, but we won” propaganda campaign, the deniers have been pulling out all the stops to spin this new diagnosis as a an outright rejection of both “sex addiction” and “porn addiction.” Here’s the CSBD diagnosis in its entirety taken directly from the ICD-11 manual. Fits sufferers of both “porn addiction” and “sex addiction.”

Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder is characterized by a persistent pattern of failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or urges resulting in repetitive sexual behaviour. Symptoms may include repetitive sexual activities becoming a central focus of the person’s life to the point of neglecting health and personal care or other interests, activities and responsibilities; numerous unsuccessful efforts to significantly reduce repetitive sexual behaviour; and continued repetitive sexual behaviour despite adverse consequences or deriving little or no satisfaction from it. The pattern of failure to control intense, sexual impulses or urges and resulting repetitive sexual behaviour is manifested over an extended period of time (e.g., 6 months or more), and causes marked distress or significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. Distress that is entirely related to moral judgments and disapproval about sexual impulses, urges, or behaviours is not sufficient to meet this requirement.

Be aware that neither the ICD-11 nor the DSM5 ever uses the word “addiction” to describe an addiction – whether it be gambling addiction, heroin addiction, cigarette addiction or you name it. Both diagnostic manuals use the word “disorder” instead of “addiction” (i.e. “gambling disorder” “nicotine use disorder,” and so on). Thus, “sex addiction” and “porn addiction” could never have been “rejected,” because they were never under formal consideration in the major diagnostic manuals. Put simply, there will never be a “porn addiction” diagnosis, just as there will never be a “meth addiction” diagnosis. Yet both pathologies can be diagnosed using the ICD-11’s provisions.

“Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder” (CSB or CSBD) functions as an umbrella term for “sex addiction” and “porn addiction,” and any other term you have seen used to describe compulsive sexual behavior, such as “hypersexuality,” “cybersex addiction,” “out of control sexual behavior,” etc. – provided patients/clients meet the criteria for CSBD.

Below we provide more examples of Prause’s falsehoods and spin related WHO’s inclusion of “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” (CSBD) in the new ICD-11. A few points to keep is mind as your read Prause’s repetitive tweets:

WHO did not reject porn or sex addiction, because neither was up for inclusion – only “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” was under formal consideration.
Neither the ICD-11 nor the DSM5 ever uses the word “addiction” to describe any addiction: all addictions are called “disorders.”
Prause chronically tweets her misrepresentation (and doctored picture) of Jon Grant’s 2014 paper – it offers zero support for her claims.
Prause chronically tweets her 240-word letter to Lancet, which cited nothing to support Prause’s claims. Prause’s letter is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017).

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Cyberstalking Rob Weiss, who has published several peer-reviewed papers and multiple books:

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All the following tweets & comments contain Prause’s blatant misrepresentations of the 2014 Jon Grant paper:

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Copied and tweeted by one of her followers:

Again, all the above tweets are untrue, as exposed here: Propagandists misrepresent peer-reviewed papers and ICD-11 search features to fuel false claim that WHO’s ICD-11 “rejected porn addiction and sex addiction.” Here’s the Jon Grant 2014 paper: Impulse control disorders and “behavioural addictions” in the ICD-11. Read the entire paragraph and you will see that Jon Grant is talking about “Internet gaming disorder” not pornography. Grant believed it was questionable whether there was enough scientific evidence at that time to justify Internet Gaming Disorder’s inclusion as a disorder:

5 years and hundreds of studies later, Internet Gaming Disorder is now in WHO’s ICD-11, under addictive behaviors.

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On to more obsessive tweeting & comments about the ICD-11 and CSBD… and the same falsehoods:

Tweeting David Ley’s article:

Commenting under David Ley’s article, making threats:

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Trolling ATSAC:

Trolling ATSAC again:

Trolling another article about CSBD in ICD-11, with a new infographic she made for the occasion:

Slate article:

Afraid not – Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn? by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018)

Prause keeps promising her Orgasmic Meditation data will debunk everything (it won’t).

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Prause cites her Lancet letter with only 5 references – none of which have anything to do with the letter’s unsupported assertions:

Everything in Prause’s 240-word letter to Lancet is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017). The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 20 recent literature reviews & commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.

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With WHO announcing that “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” (CSBD) is in the upcoming ICD-11, Prause trolls Twitter providing her unique brand of unsupported spin:

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Trolling. So proud of her 240-word letter to Lancet:

Completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017).

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Prause finds a year-old Naomi Wolf tweet she doesn’t like:

Prause, Ley and Klein have grossly misrepresented the current state of the research for the last few years. Now, they’ve conveniently bundled all the outlying, cherry-picked studies they regularly cite into the above article. YBOP goes line by line, claim by claim, citation by citation, debunking the entire Prause-Kohut-Klein magnum opus. Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).

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Trolling an article that describes porn-induced ED:

Prause cites Justin Lehmiller of Playboy to “debunk” porn induced problems. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Playboy writer Lehmiller is a close ally of Prause, having featured her in at least ten of his blog posts. These and many other Lehmiller blogs perpetuate the same false narratives: porn use causes no problems and porn addiction/porn-induced sexual dysfunctions do not exist. YBOP exposes the above Lehmiller article as irresponsible: Debunking Justin Lehmiller’s “Is Erectile Dysfunction Really on the Rise in Young Men” (2018).

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Citing her magnum opus wherever she can, this time throwing in “church data,” “rejection of porn addiction,” “pseudoscience,” etc.

Thanks Dr. Prause for gathering all your debunking eggs into one basket, to be cracked here: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).

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Doesn’t like an upcoming study by Gola and Grubbs that may have correlated porn addiction with ED:

Prause says that viewing porn is way different neurally than masturbation or sex (citing her own letter to the editor – not even a study). It’s really irrelevant to PIED, but even her close ally, Janniko Georgiadis, says Prause is dead wrong. In a Georgiadis review of the literature (Functional Neuroanatomy of Human Cortex Cerebri in Relation to Wanting Sex and Having It) he says that watching porn is neurologically equivalent to having sex:

In the current conceptual framework, where sexual arousal is part of sexual consummation, having sex does not require physical genital contact either with another individual or masturbatory. Take the example of pornography. Thinking about ways to gain access to it, or actively searching for it, and perhaps experiencing desire during the process, is considered sexual wanting. Watching selected pornographic material, even without masturbation, can be considered “having sex” when there is genital arousal.

Oops.

Yes, one can condition to porn, as 0ver 30 studies reporting findings consistent with escalation of porn use (tolerance) & habituation to porn.

More on the upcoming study by Gola and Grubbs that may have correlated porn addiction with ED:

For the 30th time there are only 5 experimental studies on men with sexual problems: the first 5 list contains 27 studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli. These 5 studies demonstrate causation, as participants eliminated porn use and healed chronic sexual dysfunctions.

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Typical deception by Prause. She excerpts half of a single sentence from a 2 year-old review of the literature, to misrepresent what top neuroscientists believe: Should Compulsive Sexual Behavior be Considered an Addiction? (Kraus et al., 2016).

Actually, the 2016 paper said CSB (hypersexuality) looked like an addiction:

With the release of DSM-5, gambling disorder was reclassified with substance use disorders. This change challenged beliefs that addiction occurred only by ingesting of mind-altering substances and has significant implications for policy, prevention and treatment strategies. Data suggest that excessive engagement in other behaviors (e.g. gaming, sex, compulsive shopping) may share clinical, genetic, neurobiological and phenomenological parallels with substance addictions.

Another area needing more research involves considering how technological changes may be influencing human sexual behaviors. Given that data suggest that sexual behaviors are facilitated through Internet and smartphone applications, additional research should consider how digital technologies relate to CSB (e.g. compulsive masturbation to Internet pornography or sex chatrooms) and engagement in risky sexual behaviors (e.g. condomless sex, multiple sexual partners on one occasion).

Overlapping features exist between CSB and substance use disorders. Common neurotransmitter systems may contribute to CSB and substance use disorders, and recent neuroimaging studies highlight similarities relating to craving and attentional biases. Similar pharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatments may be applicable to CSB and substance addictions.

One year later the same scientists used stronger language: Is excessive sexual beh aviour an addictive disorder? (Potenza et al., 2017) – Excerpts:

Research into the neurobiology of compulsive sexual behaviour disorder has generated findings relating to attentional biases, incentive salience attributions, and brain-based cue reactivity that suggest substantial similarities with addictions.

Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder seems to fit well with non-substance addictive disorders proposed for ICD-11, consistent with the narrower term of sex addiction currently proposed for compulsive sexual behaviour disorder on the ICD-11 draft website. We believe that classification of compulsive sexual behaviour disorder as an addictive disorder is consistent with recent data and might benefit clinicians, researchers, and individuals suffering from and personally affected by this disorder.

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The model is addiction, and it is being tested and validated:

This page lists all 40 neuroscience-based studies that have been published on porn/sex addiction (MRI, fMRI, EEG, neuropsychological, hormonal). They provide strong support for the addiction model as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies.

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Here we have Prause, a non-academic, trolling a renowned researcher (Mark Griffiths), author of more publications on behavioral addictions than any other researcher (including a few on sex and porn addiction):

While Prause, in contrast, was hired to do research to bolster the commercial interests of the heavily tainted, but apparently lucrative, “Orgasmic Meditation” company.

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Trolling another researcher, trying to discredit her study (guess that makes Prause a misogynist herself):

Study findings:

Conclusions: GBMSM who were exposed to SEM earlier in their lives report more sexual risk behavior as adults. SEM exposure in GBMSM is an important sexual development milestone deserving further research

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Prause tries to counter all the many studies linking porn use to poorer relationship satisfaction with a cherry-picked paper from Taylor Kohut’s lab:

First, it’s absurd to claim that a solitary experimental study can demonstrate whether porn viewing really causes negative relationship effects. Experiments where college-aged guys view a few Playboy centerfolds (as in the study linked to by the authors) can tell you nothing about the effects of your husband masturbating to hard-core videos clips day after day for years on end. The only relationship studies that can “demonstrate if porn viewing really causes negative relationship effects” are longitudinal studies that control for variables or studies where subjects abstain from porn. To date, seven longitudinal relationship studies have been published that reveal the real-life consequences of ongoing porn use. All reported that porn use relates to poorer relationship/sexual outcomes.

On to the 2017 study Prause/Klein/Kohut linked to, and its easily dismissed results: Does exposure to erotica reduce attraction and love for romantic partners in men? Independent replications of Kenrick, Gutierres, and Goldberg (1989).

The 2017 study attempted to replicate a 1989 study that exposed men and women in committed relationships to erotic images of the opposite sex. The 1989 study found that men who were exposed to the nude Playboy centerfolds then rated their partners as less attractive and reported less love for their partner. As the 2017 study failed to replicate the 1989 findings, we are told that the 1989 study got it wrong, and that porn use cannot diminish love or desire. Whoa! Not so fast.

The replication “failed” because our cultural environment has become “pornified.” The 2017 researchers didn’t recruit 1989 college students who grew up watching MTV after school. Instead the new subjects grew up surfing PornHub for gang bang and orgy video clips.

In 1989 how many college students had seen an X-rated video? Not too many. How many 1989 college students spent possibly every masturbation session, from puberty on, masturbating to multiple hard-core clips in one session? None. The reason for the 2017 results is evident: brief exposure to a still image of a Playboy centerfold is a big yawn compared to what college men in 2017 have been watching for years. Even the authors admitted the generational differences with their first caveat:

1) First, it is important to point out that the original study was published in 1989. At the time, exposure to sexual content may not have been as available, whereas today, exposure to nude images is relatively more pervasive, and thus being exposed to a nude centerfold may not be enough to elicit the contrast effect originally reported. Therefore, the results for the current replication studies may differ from the original study due to differences in exposure, access, and even acceptance of erotica then versus now.

In a rare instance of unbiased prose even David Ley felt compelled to point out the obvious:

It may be that the culture, men, and sexuality have substantially changed since 1989. Few adult men these days haven’t seen pornography or nude women—nudity and graphic sexuality are common in popular media, from Game of Thrones to perfume advertisements, and in many states, women are permitted to go topless. So it’s possible that men in the more recent study have learned to integrate the nudity and sexuality they see in porn and everyday media in a manner which doesn’t affect their attraction or love for their partners. Perhaps the men in the 1989 study had been less exposed to sexuality, nudity, and pornography.

Keep in mind that this experiment doesn’t mean internet porn use hasn’t detracted from men’s attraction for their lovers. It just means that looking at “centerfolds” has no immediate impact these days. Many men report radical increases in attraction to partners after giving up internet porn. And, of course, there is also the longitudinal evidence cited above demonstrating the deleterious effects of porn viewing on relationships.

Finally, it’s important to note that the authors of the paper linked to are colleagues of Taylor Kohut at the University of Western Ontario. This group of researchers, headed by William Fisher, has been publishing dubious porn studies. They consistently produce results that on the surface appear to counter the vast literature linking porn use to myriad negative outcomes.

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Cites her Lancet letter with only 5 references – none of which have anything to do with the letter’s unsupported assertions:

Everything in Prause’s 240-word letter to Lancet is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017). The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 20 recent literature reviews and commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.

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Here Prause is peeved that a new study reports sex/porn addiction rates of 7-10%

The Ley & Prause 2014 paper claimed that sex/porn addiction rates were about 0.5%. The paper they cited took its data from 2004, and did didn’t assess “addiction.” The study actually said:

Nearly 13% of men and 7% of women reported out of control sexual experiences (OCSE) in the past year. Few believed that OCSE had interfered with their lives (3.8% of all men and 1.7% of all women in the cohort).

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Random shaming of her own:

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Prause tweeting her SLATE article to Dan Rather. Yes, the Dan Rather

Dan didn’t get back to Nikky.

YBOP goes line by line, claim by claim, citation by citation, debunking the entire Prause-Kohut-Klein magnum opus. Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).

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More attacks on the Gottman Institute – all because the Gottmans published an article suggesting that “pornography can hurt a couple’s relationship.”

“Many in my field are not amused” – sounds a bit threatening. Inconsistent with data” – Oh really: 60 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. All studies we know of involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.

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Writes a “chapter” covering all her favorite talking points:

Question: where does she find the time to fabricate propaganda pieces for publication?

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Attacks Dr. Katehakis book

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Trying to discredit a study she doesn’t like – Experimental effects of degrading versus erotic pornography exposure in men on reactions toward women: objectification, sexism, discrimination (2018)

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Again, claiming “falsifications” when there are none:

As usual, Prause cites her 240-word letter to Lancet, which is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017), and her SLATE article – Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018)

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Trolling PornHarms twitter account:

Prause is saying that porn increases desire for current partner, but all her study study found was that watching porn makes you horny. Prause didn’t mention that her study also reported that watching porn had immediate negative effects (oops):

“Viewing the erotic films also induced greater reports of negative affect, guilt, and anxiety”

She also omitted what’s really important – the long term effects of using porn: Over 60 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction, including all longitudinal studies – and every study we know of involving males has reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction. Oops #2.

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Trolling PornHarms, again: Offering free t-shirts to others willing to troll with her.

Follows up with free t-shirts to the other Twitter trolls:

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Responding to a year-old thread, with same cherry-picked papers debunked above:

David Ley joins in to support Prause:

More trolling of porn-addiction Twitter account:

She cites 2014 paper by Leyand her, which is full of misrepresentations and purposely omitted every study that reported porn use related to negative outcomes (not kidding). Completely debunked here: The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Review of the ‘Pornography Addiction’ Model (2014), David Ley, Nicole Prause & Peter Finn

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“Pornaddiction recovery” tweets two YBOP lists, which causes Prause to tweet a paper by Gary Wilson and Navy doctors. Prause falsely claims that she badgered COPE into suggesting a retraction. See this page for more on this plot: From 2015 through 2018: Prause’s efforts to have Behavioral Sciences review paper (Park et al., 2016) retracted

As explained elsewhere, Prause is obsessed with MDPI because (1) Behavioral Sciences published two articles that Prause disagrees with (because they discussed papers by her, among hundreds of papers by other authors), and (2) Gary Wilson is a co-author of Park et al., 2016. Prause has a long history of cyberstalking and defaming Wilson, chronicled in this very extensive page. The two papers:

Neuroscience of Internet Pornography Addiction: A Review and Update (Love et al., 2015)
Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (Park et al., 2016)

Prause immediately insisted that MDPI retract Park et al., 2016. The professional response to scholarly articles one disapproves of is to publish a comment outlining any objections. Behavioral Sciences’s parent company, MDPI, invited Prause to do this. She declined. Instead of publishing a formal comment, she unprofessionally turned to threats and social media (and most recently the Retraction Watch blog) to bully MDPI into retracting Park et al., of which I am a co-author with 7 US Navy physicians (including two urologists, two psychiatrists and a neuroscientist). In addition, she informed MDPI that she had filed complaints with the American Psychological Association. She then filed complaints with all the doctors’ medical boards. She also pressured the doctors’ medical center and Institutional Review Board, causing a lengthy, thorough investigation, which found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the paper’s authors. Prause also complained repeatedly to COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics). COPE finally wrote MDPI with a hypothetical inquiry about retraction, based on Prause’s narrative that the “patients weren’t consented.” MDPI thoroughly re-investigated the consents obtained by the doctors who authored the paper, as well as US Navy policy around obtaining consents. On and on Prause went, including employing multiple aliases to edit MDPI Wikipedia pages inserting falsehoods about Wilson, his coauthors. and the paper. For much more, see: From 2015 through 2019: Prause’s efforts to have Behavioral Sciences review paper (Park et al., 2016) retracted.

Below are examples of Prause (as Sciencearousal) inserting her usual drivel. First, she tried to insert a mistake by the Norwegian Register, who accidentally downgraded MDPI’s rating from the normal “1” to a “0”.

The downgraded rating was a clerical error, and had long been resolved on the MDPI Wikipedia page. Prause knows the zero rating was a clerical error,

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Prause continues her defense of porn, ending with defamation and harassment of Gary Wilson, falsely claiming that her name appears 82,000 times on YBOP (in addition to lying about reporting Wilson to the FBI and LAPD):

As for the 82,000 instances of “Prause” on www.yourbrainonporn.com, this is false. As explained in this section, Prause cleverly employed improper syntax to achieve 82,000. The proper syntax for such a Google search is to not have a space between “site:” and a URL, so “site:www.yourbrainonporn.com” is fine, but “site: wwwyourbrainonporn.com” would search across the internet for either wwwyourbrainonporn.com or the or Prause or both. Put simply, a proper search for “YBOP” – “Prause” site:www.yourbrainonporn.com – returns only 871 instances. Most instances of “Prause” are found on the pages chronicling her obsessive, unrelenting cyber-harassment:

As for the other claims, Dr. Prause never reported me to the FBI or UCLAPD, as documented in these 2 sections. She is lying and has been for years. No did the LAPD ever contact me in connection with her bogus LAPD report:

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Falsely claims that “sex and porn are not diagnosable as addictions,” yet she knows that The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) contains a new diagnosis suitable for porn or sex addiction: “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder.” An article where Prause is the world’s authority on everything sexual:

She makes the following false statement in the article:

“Our own neuroscience data shows that the more sexual partners you have, the more responsive your brain is to sexual cues (images) with no upper bound. That is, the brain does not become numb, habituate, or start to show ill effects, even for individuals with higher numbers of partners,” she explains.

In her two EEG studies on frequent porn users she actually found habituation – the opposite of her claim:

1) Sexual Desire, not Hypersexuality, is Related to Neurophysiological Responses Elicited by Sexual Images (Steele et al., 2013) – [greater cue-reactivity correlated with less sexual desire: sensitization and habituation] – This EEG study was touted in the media as evidence against the existence of porn/sex addiction. Not so. Steele et al. 2013 actually lends support to the existence of both porn addiction and porn use down-regulating sexual desire. How so? The study reported higher EEG readings (relative to neutral pictures) when subjects were briefly exposed to pornographic photos. Studies consistently show that an elevated P300 occurs when addicts are exposed to cues (such as images) related to their addiction.

In line with the Cambridge University brain scan studies, this EEG study also reported greater cue-reactivity to porn correlating with less desire for partnered sex. To put it another way – individuals with greater brain activation to porn would rather masturbate to porn than have sex with a real person. Shockingly, study spokesperson Nicole Prause claimed that porn users merely had “high libido,” yet the results of the study say the exact opposite (subjects’ desire for partnered sex was dropping in relation to their porn use).

2) Modulation of Late Positive Potentials by Sexual Images in Problem Users and Controls Inconsistent with “Porn Addiction” (Prause et al., 2015) – A second EEG study from Nicole Prause’s team. This study compared the 2013 subjects from Steele et al., 2013 to an actual control group (yet it suffered from the same methodological flaws named above). The results: Compared to controls “individuals experiencing problems regulating their porn viewing” had lower brain responses to one-second exposure to photos of vanilla porn. The lead author claims these results “debunk porn addiction.” What legitimate scientist would claim that their lone anomalous study has debunked a well established field of study?

In reality, the findings of Prause et al. 2015 align perfectly with Kühn & Gallinat (2014), which found that more porn use correlated with less brain activation in response to pictures of vanilla porn. Prause et al. findings also align with Banca et al. 2015. Moreover, another EEG study found that greater porn use in women correlated with less brain activation to porn. Lower EEG readings mean that subjects are paying less attention to the pictures. Put simply, frequent porn users were desensitized to static images of vanilla porn. They were bored (habituated or desensitized). See this extensive YBOP critique. Ten peer-reviewed papers agree that this study actually found desensitization/habituation in frequent porn users (consistent with addiction): Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015

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To dismiss studies she doesn’t like her favorite tactic is to claim the studies did not “control for” X, Y, or Z.

While controlling for certain variables may be important, it also used by researchers to achieve desired results. The irony: Prause’s two most famous studies (see above) failed to control for even the basics. Her two EEG studies did not employ standard methodology:

Sexual Desire, not Hypersexuality, is Related to Neurophysiological Responses Elicited by Sexual Images (Steele et al., 2013) – Aside from the many unsupported claims in the press, it’s disturbing that Prause’s 2013 EGG study passed peer-review, as it suffered from serious methodological flaws: 1) subjects were heterogeneous (males, females, non-heterosexuals); 2) subjects were not screened for mental disorders or addictions; 3) study had no control group for comparison; 4) questionnaires were not validated for porn use or porn addiction. Steele at al. is so badly flawed that only 3 of the 20 literature reviews & commentaries bother to mention it: one critiquing it as unacceptable, while two cite it as correlating cue-reactivity with less desire for sex with a partner (signs of addiction).
Modulation of Late Positive Potentials by Sexual Images in Problem Users and Controls Inconsistent with “Porn Addiction” (Prause et al., 2015) – A second EEG study from Prause’s team. This study compared the 2013 subjects from Steele et al., 2013 to an actual control group (yet it suffered from the same methodological flaws named above).

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Same false claims about WHO’s ICD-11 “rejecting sex and porn addiction”:

The first section of this extensive critique exposes Prause’s falsehoods surrounding the ICD-11: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).

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Out of the blue, Prause tweets a 1996 study that produced an obvious finding: Masturbating to porn was more arousing than masturbating to fantasy.

Never misses a chance to promote the porn industry’s agenda.

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Giving up porn destroyed a man’s marriage?

Once again, Prause falsely states that porn addiction was “rejected,” when in fact the ICD-11 just created a new diagnosis suitable for porn and sex addiction. See: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?“ by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018)

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Out of nowhere, Prause enters a thread to cite her two favorite cherry-picked papers from Taylor Kohut’s lab:

The 2 papers Prause cited were previously debunked:

As described in the intro, Taylor Kohut’s skewed qualitative paper, which is thoroughly dismantled here: Perceived Effects of Pornography on the Couple Relationship: Initial Findings of Open-Ended, Participant-Informed, “Bottom-Up” Research (2016), Taylor Kohut, William A. Fisher, Lorne Campbell.
Does exposure to erotica reduce attraction and love for romantic partners in men? Independent replications of Kenrick, Gutierres, and Goldberg (1989) study 2

Porn’s actual effects on relationships? Over 60 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.

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Promoting her propaganda piece that asserts porn addiction doesn’t exist:

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Retweeting David Ley’s junk-science paper in which he attempts to discredit porn as a public health problem:

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Trolling Twitter, looking for an excuse to post her two debunked articles:

Prause’s two articles are thoroughly discredited in the following critiques:

Slate magazine: For a debunking of nearly every talking point and cherry-picked study see this extensive critique: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).
Lancet letter: Everything in Prause’s 240-word letter to Lancet is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017). Also awkward: The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 21 recent literature reviews & commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.

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February 16, 2016. Tweeting her Lancet letter…. again:

Everything in Prause’s 240-word letter to Lancet is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017).

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More tweets on the same day: February 16, 2019.

Some background. Prause is obsessed with MDPI because (1) Behavioral Sciences published two articles that Prause disagrees with (because they discussed papers by her, among hundreds of papers by other authors), and (2) Gary Wilson is a co-author of Park et al., 2016. Prause has a long history of cyberstalking and defaming Wilson, chronicled in this very extensive page. The two papers:

Neuroscience of Internet Pornography Addiction: A Review and Update (Love et al., 2015)
Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (Park et al., 2016)

The second paper (Park et al.) didn’t analyze Prause’s research. It cited findings in 3 of her papers. At the request of a reviewer during the peer-review process, it addressed the third, a 2015 paper by Prause & Pfaus, by citing a scholarly piece in a journal that heavily, accurately criticized the paper. (There was not enough space in Park et al. to address all the weaknesses and unsupported claims in Prause & Pfaus, 2015).

Prause immediately insisted that MDPI retract Park et al., 2016. The professional response to scholarly articles one disapproves of is to publish a comment outlining any objections. Behavioral Sciences’s parent company, MDPI, invited Prause to do this. She declined. It must be noted that Prause attacks Wilson and his website constantly and publicly.

Instead of publishing a formal comment, she unprofessionally turned to threats and social media (and then her chums at Retraction Watch blog) to bully MDPI so they would consider retracting Park et al., of which I am a co-author with 7 US Navy physicians (including two urologists, two psychiatrists and a neuroscientist). In addition, she informed MDPI that she had filed complaints with the American Psychological Association. She then filed complaints with the doctors’ medical boards. She also pressured the doctors’ medical center and Institutional Review Board, causing a lengthy, thorough investigation, which found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the paper’s authors. Prause also harassed and cyber-stalked MDPI and researchers who publish studies at the many MDPI journals. The breadth and intensity of Prause harassment and defamation forced Wilson to create an entire page devoted to Prause’s never ending campaign: From 2015 through 2018: Prause’s efforts to have Behavioral Sciences review paper (Park et al., 2016) retracted.

Prause tuning up again when she found a tweet mentioning Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports. (everything Prause says in the following tweets are lies, as documented in the above page). Prause is challenged, and responds with her lone biased study that purportedly found that porn stars have better psychological health than the general population:

More of the same thread:

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Randomly attacking the concept of porn addiction in a bizarre tweet:

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Joining Ley in Attacking a conference featuring speakers she has previously defamed and harassed:

We have seen her “data”: 5 cherry-picked studies that fail to support her assertions (see intro). A few sections of the Prause pages chronicling her harassment and defamation of the speakers:

More tweets about the conference, calling the speakers and anyone attending “flat-earthers”:

Again, falsely states that WHO rejected addiction model, when they only formally considered “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder.”

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Trolling a random thread by someone she doesn’t know, she cites her Lancet & Slate articles, telling us that neuroscientists disagree:

Prause’s two articles are thoroughly dismantled in the following critiques:

Slate magazine: For a debunking of nearly every talking point and cherry-picked study see this extensive critique: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).
Lancet letter: Everything in Prause’s 240-word letter to Lancet is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017). Also awkward: The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 21 recent literature reviews & commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.

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Prause trolling a PhD, citing a dubious cherry-picked paper:

The paper claimed that masturbation was the main variable related to poorer relationships. What Prause is not telling us is that

Porn was also related to poorer relationships
The researcher did not have an accurate of masturbation frequency – he just guessed. So the paper is worthless.

More of the same drivel:

Debunked in this article. Always defending porn… always.

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This appears to start with Prause trolling the Twitter thread of anti-sex trafficking, radical feminist Laila Mickelwait, who is associated with Exodus Cry. Prause informs the Twitter-sphere that her new orgasmic meditation study debunks anything and everything one might claim about porn’s negative effects:

The irony is that it appears that Prause may have obtained porn performers as subjects through the most prominent porn industry interest group, the Free Speech Coalition. FSC-obtained subjects were allegedly used for the study, which she was hired to perform in order to bolster the commercial interests of the heavily tainted, but apparently lucrative, “Orgasmic Meditation” company. Moreover, its likely that none of Prause’s subjects (all females) were actual porn addicts. In addition, and self reported strength of orgasm while being masturbated by a guy (that’s “orgasmic meditation”) tells us nothing about porn addiction.

The next day Prause attacks anti-sex trafficking non-profit Exodus Cry. Prause lies about the CEO’s salary calling it “six-figure,” when what she tweeted shows it’s really a five-figure salary. This from a person who claims to be an expert statistician.

Prause ask her followers “to contact the attorney general for fraud.” As always Prause never describes the so-called “fraud” perpetuated on the public. In fact, Prause has never provided one iota of documentation to support her chronic allegations of fraud by the many victims she harasses and defames. It is Prause who is engaging in fraud.

Prause then asks her followers to file spurious complaints against Exodus Cry. Even providing a link for convenience.

The next day she tweets again. Funny how Prause supports the multi-billion dollar porn industry while attacking an anti-sex trafficking organization for paying their CEO a modest salary.

You have ask yourself why 80% of the tweets by a “researcher” consist of libelous attacks on those who suggest that porn may have negative effects.

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On the same thread as the above tweets attacking Exodus Cry, Prause, David Ley, and Brian Watson openly conspire to produce a hit piece about the National Center on Sexual Exploitation

Brain Watson is associated with the Kinsey Institute, and published “Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad” which according to its blurb – “reveals, for the first time, exactly how pornography went from being beautiful to being bad.”

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Prause and David Ley teaming up for more attacks on the Gottman Institute – all because the Gottman’s published an article suggesting that “pornography can hurt a couple’s relationship.”

They can only engage in ad hominem attacks, because nearly every published study supports the Gottmans’ thesis that porn is not all that great for relationships.

Over studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. All studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.

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Prause tweets her new commentary on another paper. As expected, she claims that porn use is great and never causes problem. Porn is even OK for children! An excerpt from Prause’s paper (VSS = porn):

Curiously, Leonhardt et al. presumed the effects of VSS on children must be negative and require familial mitigation (“[family] can mitigate the influence of sexual media,”

Besides the bits about porn being just fine for kids, its just a rehash of bits and pieces from these two Prause articles which YBOP thoroughly debunked:

For a debunking of nearly every talking point and cherry-picked study see this extensive critique of SLATE article: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).
Everything in Prause’s 240-word letter to Lancet is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017).

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Nicole Prause & David Ley go on a cyber-harrasment & defamation rampage in response to this article in The Guardian: Is porn making young men impotent?

Prause and Ley were upset because The Guardian article accurately portrayed porn-induced ED. As explained on these pages, Prause & Ley are obsessed with debunking PIED, having waged a 3-year war against this academic paper, while simultaneously harassing and libeling young men who have recovered from porn-induced sexual dysfunctions. See documentation: Gabe Deem #1, Gabe Deem #2, Alexander Rhodes #1, Alexander Rhodes #2, Alexander Rhodes #3, Noah Church, Alexander Rhodes #4, Alexander Rhodes #5, Alexander Rhodes #6, Alexander Rhodes #7, Alexander Rhodes #8, Alexander Rhodes #9, Alexander Rhodes #10, Alex Rhodes #11, Gabe Deem & Alex Rhodes together #12, Alexander Rhodes #13, Alexander Rhodes #14, Gabe Deem #4, Alexander Rhodes #15.

Prause tweets 3 papers (not actual studies) while defaming Alexander Rhodes of Nofap:

Prause tweets exact same nonsense to the author of the article, Amy Fleming. (Fleming eventually makes her Twitter account private due to ongoing harassment from Prause and her fellow bullies, such as Brain Watson and David Ley)

Prause tweets again, adding her usual pack of lies about Rhodes, including her lie that she has reported Rhodes to the FBI (see – December, 2018: FBI confirms that Nicole Prause lied about filing a report on Alexander Rhodes):

Another tweet by Prause, harassing journalist Amy Fleming:

All the above is fiction, and a disgusting attempt at misinforming the public. The follwing sections chronicle Prause and ally David Ley’s long history of cyberstalking Alexander Rhodes, including Prause lying about filing FBI reports on Wilson and Rhodes (and David Ley retweeting these lies):

In her tweets, Prause linked to 3 dubious papers (not actual studies). Two papers are Prause’s own propaganda, which have already been extensively dismantled. The third paper is a hit piece on Nofap by a grad student from NZ. Prause’s links, followed by the debunking:

1 – https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/sm2.58 (Prause & Pfaus, 2015). Described above in multiple places. The critiques:

2 – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-1397-6 – “Porn is for masturbation,” by Prause. Debunked here: Critique of Nicole Prause’s “Porn Is for Masturbation” (2019)

3 – https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363460717740248 – “‘I want that power back’: Discourses of masculinity within an online pornography abstinence forum.” This link goes to a back and forth argument about the paper between ‘bart’ and Prause, on Psychology Today, where Prause defamed Alexander Rhodes. It reveals that Prause is misrepresenting the paper – https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/comment/1038506#comment-1038506

Reality:

This list contains 35 studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli. The first 6 studies in the list demonstrate causation, as participants eliminated porn use and healed chronic sexual dysfunctions.
In addition to the studies below, this page contains articles and videos by over 140 experts (urology professors, urologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, sexologists, MDs) who acknowledge and have successfully treated porn-induced ED and porn-induced loss of sexual desire.

David Ley joins Prause in the harassment of the journalist and unprofessional comments.

Brian Watson (Kinsey grad) joins Ley & Prause in the direct harassment of Guardian reporter Amy Fleming. Kinsey grad Brian Watson lies about the article citing NCOSE (it didn’t). In this tweet, Watson features his harassment.

In reality, Fleming quoted from Alexander Rhodes’s talk given at a NCOSE event (hundreds of individuals have given talks at NCOSE). Watson is feebly attempting ad hominem by association (Rhodes is an atheist and politically literal), because Watson is incapable of addressing the content of the article.

More harassment by Watson, who is obsessed with a NCOSE talk given by Rhodes:

Nope, The Guardian article didn’t “cite” NCOSE. It quoted one sentence from a NCOSE talk by Rhodes who has been featured at conferences, on TV & radio, podcasts, and in over a hundred different media outlets.

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David Ley and Nicole Prause teaming up to misrepresent the science. Prause mentions her upcoming “Orgasmic Meditation” study: adult performer Ruby the Big Rubousky, who is vice president of the Adult Performers Actors Guild, has stated that Prause obtained porn performers as study subjects through the most prominent porn industry interest group, the Free Speech Coalition.

For more see – The Free Speech Coalition allegedly provided subjects for a Prause study that “debunks” porn addiction.

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Trolling the BBC with an irrelevant excerpt form her pro-porn commentary:

In response to BBC citing a study about the level of aggression in porn, Prause cites her commentary, posting a section that has nothing to do with the level of aggression in pornography videos. Her commentary is debunked here (including the section she posted): Critique of Nicole Prause’s “Porn Is for Masturbation” (2019)

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Prause, David Ley and Geoffrey Miller tweet togther as trolls, mispresenting the ICD-11, and the state of the research:

As usual Prause posts her already debunked SLATE article: – Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018)

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Ley and Prause troll an NPR podcast, telling the world that there are well-funded religious anti-porn groups, while ignoring the multi-billion dollar porn industry.

Prause omits a few details such as a porn performer union officer saying she obtained porn performers as subjects via the most prominent porn industry interest group, the Free Speech Coalition. Or the documented fact that in 2015 the Free Speech Coalition offered Prause “assistance.” Prause then immediately attacks Prop 60 (condoms in porn).

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Trolling a well known feminist with her debunked Lancet commentary. Probably because someone tweeted Wilson’s TEDx talk:

Everything in Prause’s 240-word letter to Lancet is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017). The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 21 recent literature reviews & commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.

Not surprisingly, David Ley joins Prause on the same thread to spread his verion of reality (which doesn’t match the preponderance of the research)

Dman Climicus doesn’t buy Ley’s propaganda. He shoudn’t, as over 25 studies link porn use to “un-egalitarian attitudes” toward women and sexist views. A summary from this 2016 meta-analysis exposes Ley as a liar – Media and Sexualization: State of Empirical Research, 1995–2015:

The goal of this review was to synthesize empirical investigations testing effects of media sexualization. The focus was on research published in peer-reviewed, English-language journals between 1995 and 2015. A total of 109 publications that contained 135 studies were reviewed. The findings provided consistent evidence that both laboratory exposure and regular, everyday exposure to this content are directly associated with a range of consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater self-objectification, greater support of sexist beliefs and of adversarial sexual beliefs, and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women. Moreover, experimental exposure to this content leads both women and men to have a diminished view of women’s competence, morality, and humanity.

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Trolling again, falsely stating the WE found that more porn use, in a few selected countries, was related to fewer reported rapes:

But that’s not really true. See – Rape rates are on the rise, so ignore the pro-porn propaganda (2018)

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Once again, attacking the concept of “porn as a public health problem”:

Cites nothing. Falsely claims “fake science.” Offers her help.

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Two lies in one tweet: 1) No, treating porn addiction is not analogous to conversion therapy. 2) Wrong – the world’s most widely used medical diagnostic manual, The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), contains a new diagnosis suitable for porn addiction: “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder.”

Close friend Joe Kort joins in:

In the same thread, Prause posts her 240-word letter to Lancet, which is completely debunked in this extensive critique: Analysis of “Data do not support sex as addictive” (Prause et al., 2017):

The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 21 recent literature reviews & commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model.

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April, 2019 tweet misrepresents a new study:

The study says nothing about “sex films” (“Sex films” is Prause’s phrase for porn. She never says porn). Excerpt from methodolgy section of the study:

“The goal of the current study was to evaluate sexual consent and refusal depictions portrayed in mainstream films that are readily consumed by young adults.”

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Trolling a thread to cite a cherry-picked study and her own debunked opinion piece. First tweet claims that masturbation, not porn, is the problem (great talking point for the porn industry!):

After sophisticated statistical “modeling” the above Samuel Perry study proposed that masturbation, not porn use, is the real culprit in relationship problems. The gaping hole in Perry’s claim:

Perry’s new analysis of his old data contains no specific, reliable data on masturbation frequency. Without that, his claim is little more than a hypothetical.
Perry’s assertions are countered by over 70 studies linking porn use to lower sexual and relationship satisfaction (including 7 longitudinal studies). As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.

Prause continues, citing her own propaganda:

Her letter to the editor, with same-old unsupported assertions and cherry-picked papers, is debunked here: Critique of Nicole Prause’s “Porn Is for Masturbation” (2019)

In this back & forth on the same thread, she continues to say that porn can’t be the cause of any problems:

Prause makes 2 unsupported suggestions:

1) Men who view porn have higher sexual desire. Nope – At least 25 studies falsify the claim that sex & porn addicts “just have high sexual desire.” Even her own study debunked this claim: (Steele et al., 2013) – This EEG study was touted in the media as evidence against the existence of porn/sex addiction. Not so. Steele et al. 2013 actually lends support to the existence of both porn addiction and porn use down-regulating sexual desire. How so? The study reported higher EEG readings (relative to neutral pictures) when subjects were briefly exposed to pornographic photos. Studies consistently show that an elevated P300 occurs when addicts are exposed to cues (such as images) related to their addiction. In line with the Cambridge University brain scan studies, this EEG study also reported greater cue-reactivity to porn correlating with less desire for partnered sex. To put it another way – individuals with greater brain activation to porn would rather masturbate to porn than have sex with a real person. Shockingly, study spokesperson Prause claimed that porn users merely had “high libido,” yet the results of the study say the exact opposite (subjects’ desire for partnered sex was dropping in relation to their porn use).

2) “Not aware of any data that higher use of porn would cause men to be less likely to seek partners.” Really? Porn’s effects on relationships – Over 80 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.

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Prause tweets an article that defends porn stars who violate social media terms of use. The article, by pro-porn journalist Tracy Clark-Flory, outs a Twitter user who has been reporting porn stars for violating Instagram terms of use: posting porn and sexually explicit language.

Don’t be fooled by Prause’s fake outrage and spin. Prause may not like it, but Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have no probelm with the Twitter user reporting violations.

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Fabricating irrelevant nonsense in an attempt to discredit state resolutions proclaiming porn as a public health issue:

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Since she’s been using the RealYBOP Twitter as her primary account, few tweets have appeared from @NicoleRPrause. But she decided to retweet an attack on state resolutions:

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May 10, 2019: another attack on state resolutions:

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Onec again, disparaging state resolutions:

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May 18, 2019. Going out her way to disparage state resolutions:

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Promoting porn use for masturbation (Prause never tweets a study reporting negative effects of porn, even though such studies are in the majority):

Prause cherry-picked. Excerpts not shared:

Having mixed feelings towards porn. Participants reflected on the negative ways porn has treated their identities, specifically as bisexual and queer women. Participants struggled with how to enjoy and feel comfortable in their use of porn during their masturbation, while understanding the larger societal impacts of the messages within porn. Joan
shared:

I think there’s a real big stigma for women, much less queer women to look at porn, you know? It’s demeaning to women, it’s only made for men, especially if you’re a queer woman, you hear that one a lot

Joan went on to describe how she has started giving herself permission to look at porn and go against some of these messages. Gloria experienced guilt for looking at porn because “porn really informs a lot of straight people’s ideas about gay and lesbian sex, and I feel guilty for looking it up and getting o on it.” The conflicted feelings towards porn would result in feelings of guilt or decreased pleasure during masturbation for the women interviewed.

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Tweets article quoting her, citing Prause et al., 2015, all to disparage porn addiction:

Problem: Prause et al., 2015, isn’t what it appears to be. While Prause boldly asserted that her lone, deeply flawed EEG study had debunked porn addiction, 10 peer-reviewed papers disagree. All eight papers do agree that Prause et al., 2015 actually found desensitization or habituation in the more frequent porn users (a phenomenon consistent with addiction): Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015

Reality: This page lists 55 neuroscience-based studies (MRI, fMRI, EEG, neuropsychological, hormonal). They provide strong support for the addiction model as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies. The real experts’ opinions on porn/sex addiction? This list contains 31 recent literature reviews and commentaries by some of the top neuroscientists in the world. All support the addiction model. Signs of addiction and escalation to more extreme material? Over 60 studies reporting findings consistent with escalation of porn use (tolerance), habituation to porn, and even withdrawal symptoms (all signs and symptoms associated with addiction).

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Prause and the deniers of porn addiction are agitated because the latest version of the World Health Organization’s medical diagnostic manual, The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), contains a new diagnosis suitable for diagnosing what is commonly referred to as ‘porn addiction’ or ‘sex addiction.’ It’s called “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” (CSBD). Nonetheless, in a bizarre “We lost, but we won” propaganda campaign, Prause continues spin this new diagnosis as a rejection of both “sex addiction” and “porn addiction.” Linking to RealYBOP:

More drivel, linking to RealYBOP:

What the public may not know is that neither the ICD-11 nor the APA’s DSM-5 ever uses the word “addiction” to describe an addiction – whether it be gambling addiction, heroin addiction, cigarette addiction, or you name it. Both diagnostic manuals use the word “disorder” instead of “addiction” (i.e. “gambling disorder,” “nicotine use disorder,” and so on). Thus, “sex addiction” and “porn addiction” could never have been rejected, because they were never under formal consideration in the major diagnostic manuals. Put simply, there will never be a “porn addiction” diagnosis, just as there will never be a “meth addiction” diagnosis. Yet individuals with the signs and symptoms of consistent with either a “porn addiction” or a “methamphetamine addiction” can be diagnosed using the ICD-11’s provisions.

For a complete debunking of Prause’s absurd claims, see: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).

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Employing a logical fallacy to spread propaganda.

A is claimed to be related to B.
B is said to be related to C.
C must therefore lead to D (but it doesn’t in this case)

Reality? Over 75 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.

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July, 2019. Prause even trolls ally Emily Rothman (who is a member of RealYBOP “expert” team). Prause attempts to cunter a study, with irrelevant drivel:

Claims exposure is causal language. What? No one claimed that kids have no developing interests. The convo continues:

Prause is NOT referring to studies on porn use. She is referring to a couple of her own studies assessing whether anal contractions coincided with self-reported orgasm. This as nothing to do with the subject at hand. Incoherent drivel.

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Misrepresenting a study. She doesn’t care the concept of the Coolidge effect because it was in Wilson’s TEDx talk.

However, the study she linked to supports the Coolidge effect.

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Arguing with a gay Medical Doctor about sex and porn addiction (CSBD)

Prause claims that CSBD is really just OCD, but several studies have debunked her unsupported talking point.

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Claims are countered by over 10 studies:

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Immediately attackS a study she doesn’t like: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-09/tfg-sih091619.php

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Disparages NCOSE for wanting school and public libraries to block porn sites:

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Whines about a paper from British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), concerning age verification:

Is she upset that people under 18 will have trouble accessing porn?

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Prause and Ley promote AVN hit-piece:

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Promoting Cindy Gallop, owner of a porn site:

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Same propaganda about ICD-11

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Says her 2015 study (Prause et al., 2015) has been replicated, when it has not (her “replication” link to goes to her letter to the editor (which is debunked here), not to a study (because none exist):

Prause et al., 2015, isn’t what it appears to be. While Prause boldly asserted that her lone, deeply flawed EEG study had debunked porn addiction, 9 peer-reviewed papers disagree. All 9 papers do agree that Prause et al., 2015 actually found desensitization or habituation in the more frequent porn users (a phenomenon consistent with addiction): Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015

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Disparages Valerie Voon, brain scan studies on porn users, and sex addiction therapists:

Do tell us how EEG’s are ‘better” than fMRI. I’m holding my breath.

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A TEDx talk that cites zero studies:

RE: Cameron Staley’s TEDx Talk. He was a grad student of Prause when he gathered data for Steele et al. 2013. Just a few his falsehoods in his TEDx talk where he cited zero studies to support his propaganda:

Staley says his “mentor was a renowned sex researcher!” What? No one had heard of Prause before Steele et al. was published in July of 2013 (Prause misrepresented its findings).
Staley lies about about the actual results of Steele et al, 2013. He states that “the subjects brains didn’t look like brains of addicts” – but he never tells us how their brains differed from addicts (because they did not). 8 peer-reviewed papers disagree with Staley, and point out that the subjects brains looked exactly like an addict- Peer-reviewed critiques of Steele et al., 2013 (greater cue reactivity correlated with less desire for sex with a partner). Note: Steele et al., did NOT have a control group!
Staley gets into Grubbs “perceived porn addiction” study, falsely stating that Grubbs assessed belief in addiction.
Staley says porn related problems do not constituean epidemic: nly our belief that viewing porn is a problem, is a problem.
He says porn cannot cause PIED, even though 7 peer-reviewed papers report cases of men recovering by quitting porn. And 40 more studies link porn to sexual problems/lower arousal – including his own – Steele et al., 2013 (greater cue reactivity related to less desire to have sex with a partner).
He says porn is not a problem for relationships, yet 80 studies link porn use to poorer sexual and relationship satisfaction.

Bottom line according to Staley – believe porn use is just fine and you will be just fine using porn. Unsupported propaganda refuted by hundreds of studies.

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Trolling a sex expert’s thread to support the porn industry:

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Tweeting about Prause et al., 2015. Nope, it was not replicated (notice she cannot link to the “replication”):

It wasn’t “angry” rants, but 10 peer-reviewed papers all saying that Prause’s flawed study supports addiction model. In truth, the findings of Prause et al. (lower EEG readings to vanilla porn) mean that subjects are paying less attention to the pictures. Put simply, frequent porn users were desensitized to static images of vanilla porn. They were bored (habituated or desensitized). See this extensive YBOP critique. 10 peer-reviewed papers agree that this study actually found desensitization/habituation in frequent porn users (consistent with addiction): Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015

Prause proclaimed that her EEG readings assessed “cue-reactivity” (sensitization), rather than habituation. Even if Prause were correct she conveniently ignores the gaping hole in her “falsification” assertion: Even if Prause et al. 2015 had found less cue-reactivity in frequent porn users, 26 other neurological studies have reported cue-reactivity or cravings (sensitization) in compulsive porn users: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27. Science doesn’t go with the lone anomalous study hampered by serious methodological flaws; science goes with the preponderance of evidence.

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Prause closely monitors many of us. I tweeted this new rebooting study at 8pm – https://twitter.com/YourBrainOnPorn/status/1347027361175257089 – and she immediately tweets this lie-filled tweet:

I guess she meant “objective research” instead of “objective search”.She claims that other studies have assessed the effects of eliminating porn, and found nothing. This is a lie, as the first 10 studies on this page (section #1) report on participants who eliminated porn use: Over 90 Studies demonstrating internet use & porn use causing negative outcomes & symptoms, and brain changes. All 10 studies revealed benefits, such as healing chronic sexual dysfunctions, greater commitment to partners, better cognitive parameters.

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Claiming that giving up porn is harmful.

The paper she linked to does not says what she claims (it was only an opinion paper, not quantative).

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Lying that Laila was involved in claimed death threats. Why is Prause harassing Kristof, who exposed Pornhub’s illegal and vile activities?

How disgusting is it that Prause tweets lies under a video by a victim of Pornhub?

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Trolling threads to support porn industry agenda:

Not so. None of Prause’s studies addressed the above PET scans. Also – No study has yet attempted to replicate the PET scans (pictured below). She keeps trolling same thread:

No again. There are other “empirically supported” interventions, such as CBT.

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More trolling to support porn industry agenda:

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Just like @BrainOnPorn Prause is asserting that masturbation, not porn, is the real problem… citing nothing.

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LOL. Tweets a 2005 opinion paper to “debunk” brain scan study findings on porn users and sex addicts.

Her followers are unaware that 55 neuroscience-based studies (MRI, fMRI, EEG, neuropsychological, hormonal) have been publsihed on porn users or sex addicts. All provide strong support for the addiction model as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies.

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Lies about the research while attacking a study about pornhub. Links to a new site that is exact replica of RealYBOP

Ah yes, “correlation doesn’t equal causation” for all the studies we don’t like. But this wasn’t a “correlative” study.

Upset at the unflattering study on Ponrhub, Prause puts in extra work in a weak attempt to counter the results:

Then she trolls the author of the study, posting her lie-filled Medium rant:

More trolling, same lie-filled Medium rant.

Why is she so obsessed with this one study? Oh yeah, it’s about Pornhub.

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Working with XBIZ to attack Laila Mickelwait:

See over 100 additional tweets by Prause defaming Mickelwait in a campaign to support Pornhub:

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Tweets podcast with VICE’s Samantha Cole, author of the hit-piece. Pornhub was exposed for complicity in mass child sexual abuse & trafficking. Visa, Mastercard & Discover cut off card processing. Grant Thornton, Heinz/Unilever & PayPal cut ties. Pornhub deleted 80% of its site (10 million videos) 5 lawsuits filed. Brought before the Canadian Parliament – and yet we have Prause tweeting in support PornHub’s executives!

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Again – Instead of using her own account to misrepresent the science, Prause almost exclusively used her alias shill account @BrainOnPorn during 2019 and 2020. Hundreds of additional examples are on these 3 pages:

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SECTION 4: “RealYBOP”: Prause, Daniel Burgess & associates create a biased website and social media accounts to support the porn industry agenda and to defame & harass anyone who says anything negative about porn (beginning April, 2019)

Introduction

RealYBOP twitter (@BrainOnPorn) and realyourbrainonporn.com were developed as a tool by Nicole Prause and Daniel Burgess to attack Your Brain on Porn, Gary Wilson, and anyone else who critiques the porn industry or points out the negative effects of porn use.

Due to ongoing legal actions, YBOP was forced to collect what @BrainOnPorn tweets. This page documents the first year of RealYBOP tweets, and contains an extensive introduction providing context and events that have transpired, such as legal actions, RealYBOP Twitter being implicated in defamation lawsuits, and RealYBOP experts being paid by the porn industry: RealYourBrainOnPorn (@BrainOnPorn) tweets: Daniel Burgess, Nicole Prause & pro-porn allies collaborate on a biased website and social media accounts to support the porn industry agenda (beginning in April, 2019).

A second page documents @BrainOnPorn’s 2nd year of pro-porn industry tweets (beginning April 17, 2020): RealYourBrainOnPorn (@BrainOnPorn) tweets, page 2: Daniel Burgess, Nicole Prause & pro-porn allies collaborate on a twitter account to support the porn industry and to harass & defame anyone who speaks about porn’s negative effects.

A third page documents the unbelievable story of Prause, Burgess and David Ley magically “discovering” fake porn URLS inserted into the Wayback Machine archive of YBOP. These pages never existed on YBOP (as we prove). Anyone can manually insert URLs into the archives for any website on the net: Realyourbrainonporn (Daniel Burgess, Nicole Prause) defamation/harassment of Gary Wilson: They “discover” fake porn URLs in the Internet Wayback Archive (August, 2019)

While Daniel Burgess was the last known owner of the RealYBOP URL (www.RealYourBrainOnPorn.com), the most credible evidence points towards Nicole Prause creating and operating the RealYBOP website and Twitter account. @BrainOnPorn’s 18-month reign of terror ended with Twitter permanently banning it for targeted harassment and posting its victims personal information.

RealYBOP constantly engaged in harassment and defamation of those who speak about porn’s negative effects (maybe 1,500 such tweets in its 18 months of existence). We wonder who’s legally responsible for @BrainOnPorn‘s defamation and harassment? Is it only Nicole Prause, or only Daniel Burgess, or maybe both? Or could all of the RealYBOP “experts” be held legally and financially responsible?

This question is not trivial as Prause and the RealYBOP Twitter are now implicated in two defamation lawsuits (Donald Hilton, MD & Nofap founder Alexander Rhodes), a trademark infringement case, and a trademark squatting case. In fact, several of the RealYBOP tweets have been included in filings for the two defamation lawsuits, and in associated affidavits filed by other victims of Prause and RealYBOP Twitter (affidavit #1, affidavit #2, affidavit #3, affidavit #4, affidavit #5, affidavit #6, affidavit #7, affidavit #8, affidavit #9, affidavit #10, affidavit #11, affidavit #12, affidavit #13, affidavit #14, affidavit #15, affidavit #16).

While nearly every “RealYBOP” tweet supports the porn industry agenda, the tweets below this intro leave no doubt concerning RealYBOP’s true allegiance – directly supporting the porn industry – especially PornHub (Mindgeek).

Attempted trademark grab by Prause

In January 2019, Nicole Prause applied for YBOP’s well established trademarks, including Wilson’s actual URL (“YourBrainOnPorn.com”), with a view to displacing YBOP with her own version of his site. This was an outright censorship effort by Prause, who has been obsessively harassing and defaming Wilson for over 8 years.

Wilson challenged her application, which eventually failed, and the trademarks were registered in Wilson’s name in 2020.

Meanwhile, on March 13, 2019 (just a couple of months after the attempted trademark grab) Daniel A. Burgess registered the trademark-infringing domain name RealYourBrainOnPorn.com. The RealYBOP site announced its birth in a press release, which deceptively claimed to have been issued in Ashland, Oregon where Gary Wilson, host of YBOP, lives, and misinformed the public about the state of the research on problematic porn use.

Take a moment to imagine the chutzpah and malice it took to register a domain name that encompassed an existing, long established domain name (YourBrainOnPorn) and then to add “Real” to it as if the new creation were the genuine website…and then to begin tweeting and engaging in other social media under this deceptive name!

The organizers of the imposter site employed many tactics calculated to confuse the public. For example, the new site attempted to trick visitors, with the center of each page declaring “Welcome to the REAL Your Brain On Porn,” while the tab falsely proclaimed “Your Brain On Porn.” Also, to advertise their illegitimate site, the “experts” created a Twitter account (https://twitter.com/BrainOnPorn), YouTube channel, Facebook page, all employing the words “Your Brain On Porn.”

In addition, the “experts” created a reddit account (user/sciencearousal) to spam porn recovery forums reddit/pornfree and reddit/NoFap with promotional drivel, claiming porn use is harmless, and disparaging YourBrainOnPorn.com and Wilson. It’s important to note that Prause has a long documented history of employing numerous aliases to post on porn recovery forums. Her easily recognizable comments promote her studies, attack the concept of porn addiction, disparage Wilson and YBOP, belittle men in recovery, and defame porn skeptics.

In a further attempt to confuse the public, the press release announcing the infringing site falsely claims to originate from Wilson’s hometown – Ashland, Oregon. (None of the “experts” named at the new site live in Oregon, let alone in Ashland.) PDF of Cease & Desist letter to Nicole Prause – May 1, 2019

A closer look at the alliance

Regardless of its ultimate name, let’s look briefly at the site’s cast of characters. The new site’s faction of sexologists and their chums is not representative of the views of the preponderance of researchers doing research on the effects of today’s porn. (Nicole Prause, Marty Klein, Lynn Comella, David J. Ley, Emily F. Rothman, Samuel Perry, Taylor Kohut, William Fisher, Peter Finn, Janniko Georgiadis, Erick Janssen, Aleksandar Štulhofer, Joshua Grubbs, James Cantor, Michael Seto, Justin Lehmiller, Victoria Hartmann, Julia Velten, Roger Libby, Doug Braun-Harvey, David Hersh, Jennifer Valli, Joe Kort, Charles Moser)

Upon closer examination, almost half of the new site’s “experts” are non-academics, not employed by any university. Not one of the listed “experts” has ever published a neurological study on a group of porn addicted subjects (Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder subjects).

Who’s missing and why? Ask yourself: why are the researchers who authored the preponderance of the relevant evidence on porn’s effects excluded from the “experts” in this alliance?

How does the new site further the interests of the porn industry?

Next, let’s take a closer look at some of the ways the new website + related social media campaign further the interests of the porn (and sexual-enhancement drug?) industries.

The new site’s collection of cherry-picked, often irrelevant, papers misrepresent the preponderance of the research on porn’s effects. For example, these 55 neurological studies on porn users and CSBD subjects are missing from the “experts’” research list. So are studies revealing a link between porn overuse and a range of sexual dysfunctions. For details see Porn Science Deniers Alliance.

The fact is, the deniers are out of step with the experts who drafted the world’s most widely used medical diagnostic manual, The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). The porn industry is well served by a group of purported “experts” who boldly misrepresent the balance of existing research and ignore the preponderance of the research. The latter undercuts the new site’s agenda by pointing to measurable harms associated with porn overuse.

Prause denies involvement in these trademark-infringing social media accounts. However, simple observation, RealYBOP experts’ correspondence, WIPO’s report, and considerable evidence point to her management of these accounts

While Daniel A. Burgess registered www.RealYourBrainOnPorn.com, Prause’s numerous victims believe she orchestrated the content on RealYBOP and operated its social media accounts (especially the very active Twitter account which, before it was banned for harassment, obsessively harassed and defamed those who suggested porn might cause harms or that the porn industry has problems).

RealYBOP went live April 16, 2019, yet it wasn’t until Wilson’s attorneys filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that we learned that Daniel A. Burgess owned the URL (July 8, 2019). Incidentally, Wilson’s attorneys requested the WIPO administrative review of the apparent misuse of his trademark in the RealYBOP URL as a possible route to having www.realyourbrainonporn.com transferred to Wilson as swiftly and economically as possible. Surprisingly, WIPO declined to rectify the situation, so Wilson had wait until his trademark registrations were official before at last gaining control of the infringing URL.

In the meantime, Prause “weaponized” the WIPO decision. She issued a misleading press release and constantly mischaracterized WIPO’s decision on Twitter. She portrayed Wilson as trying unsuccessfully to steal “their website” (The irony!) This propaganda campaign became part of her mythology that he, and others, wanted to silence “them” because we were afraid of “their science.” For his attempt to defend his trademarks from blatant infringement Prause smeared Wilson as “vicious to scientists.” Finally, Prause repeatedly referred to the administrative WIPO proceeding as a “lawsuit.” It was not a lawsuit. In fact, it was an attempt to make further legal proceedings unnecessary.

The RealYBOP “experts” said Prause ran the website

As initially no one knew Burgess was the official owner of the RealYBOP URL, Wilson’s attorneys were obliged to send cease and desist letters to all the “experts” listed on his infringing website (May 1, 2019). A handful of the “experts” replied, and a few named Prause as the operator of RealYBOP. Here, for example, is RealYBOP erstwhile “expert” Alan McKee replying our C&D letter:

Here’s former Indiana University colleague and co-author Peter Finn replying to our attorney’s C&D letter:

In fact, not one of the RealYBOP experts stated, or seemed to have any clue, that Daniel Burgess was involved when they responded to the cease & desist letters they received. Clearly, her “experts” thought they were dealing solely with Prause. (Prause’s merry band of RealYBOP “experts”: Marty Klein, Lynn Comella, David J. Ley, Emily F. Rothman, Samuel Perry, Taylor Kohut, William Fisher, Peter Finn, Janniko Georgiadis, Erick Janssen, Aleksandar Štulhofer, Joshua Grubbs, James Cantor, Michael Seto, Justin Lehmiller, Anna Randall, Victoria Hartmann, Julia Velten, Michael Vigorito, Doug Braun-Harvey, David Hersh, Jennifer Valli and Nicole Prause herself.)

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) found substantial evidence of Prause’s involvement with RealYBOP

The WIPO decision caused an unexpected delay in the transfer of the URL to Wilson (until the trademarks were formally registered in his name). The important point here is that the WIPO panelist also viewed Prause as a leading controller of the site: “Panel finds substantial evidence that Mr. Burgess, Dr. Prause, and Liberos LLC share involvement in the control of the website.” Excerpt from the WIPO opinion:

The Amended Complaint also names Dr. Nicole Prause and Liberos LLC [her company] as Respondents. They do not appear in the Registrar’s WhoIs database in relation to the Domain Name, but there are reasons to believe that Dr. Prause is a leading person in the “group of psychologists and scientists” that is responsible for the Respondent’s website, according to the Response. She is the second-listed expert on the site, with her affiliation shown as “Liberos”. Two of the experts who replied to the Complainant’s demand letter said they participated at her invitation. The law firm that responded on her behalf to the Complainant’s demand letter is the same law firm that represents the Respondent in this proceeding. Dr. Prause “DBA Liberos LLC” applied for United States trademark registration of YOUR BRAIN ON PORN. The online database of the California Secretary of State shows that Liberos LLC is a California limited liability company, for which Nicole Prause is the registered agent.

The Panel finds substantial evidence that Mr. Burgess, Dr. Prause, and Liberos LLC share involvement in the control of the website associated with the Domain Name, as well as common interests in this proceeding, and there has been no showing of material prejudice to them in the event that the proceeding continues with Dr. Prause and Liberos LLC as named Respondents. See WIPO Overview of WIPO Panel Views on Selected UDRP Questions, Third Edition (“WIPO Overview 3.0”), section 4.11.2.

Accordingly, the Panel allows the Complaint against multiple respondents as styled in the caption above and refers to these parties collectively hereafter as the “Respondent.”

As the arbitrator noted, both Prause and Daniel Burgess were indeed represented by Prause’s lawyer Wayne B. Giampietro of Poltrock & Giampietro. If Prause had no involvement in RealYBOP, why did her attorneys (who continued to represent her in connection with her infringement on Wilson’s trademarks) also represent Daniel Burgess?

Update (January, 2021): Gary Wilson now owns the RealYBOP URL. See press release – ATTENTION: YBOP acquires www.RealYourBrainOnPorn.com in trademark infringement settlement.

The RealYourBrainOnPorn Facebook page listed Prause’s phone number as the contact

Before the RealYBOP Facebook page vanished, Nicole Prause’s phone number was listed as the contact number. We have blacked out her phone number below to protect her privacy, but Prause has listed this same number on various other pages she controls online, including Twitter. (Unredacted copies can be provided to journalists.) In addition, the Facebook page below describes the owner as a “scientist” (singular) rather than “scientists.” The latter would be expected if RealYBOP were a true group effort, as Prause (as its manager) has claimed.

“RealYourBrainOnPorn” YouTube channel initially identified itself as Nicole Prause (thereby also identifying Prause as sockpuppet TruthShallSetSetYouFree)

Upset by a less than flattering Rebecca Watson video covering the Rhodes defamation lawsuit, Prause used her own account and the RealYBOP YouTube account to argue with commenters under the Watson video. The RealYBOP comment reads as if it was written by Prause, in the first person (“my license”, “I won”), when describing her so-called victories in the WIPO hearing, UCLA complaints, and complaints against her psychology license. The RealYBOP comment also links to 2 court documents Prause forced Reason.com to add to this article about Hilton v. Prause. (The court ignored Prause lie-filled documents and refused to dismiss the case.)

Prause claims of victimhood are pure fabrications. She is the perpetrator, not the victim.

Soon after her onslaught against Watson on YouTube and Twitter, the RealYBOP YouTube channel changed its name to “TruthShallSetYouFree,” which resulted in the above comment changing usernames:

Prause still uses her amended YouTube alias (TruthShallSetYouFree) to disparage and defame her usual targets, while spreading claims of her victimhood.

PornHub was the first account to retweet this, suggesting a coordinated effort between PornHub and the RealYBOP account!

We start with the very first tweet by the new RealYBOP. Notice that about half of the retweets were by accounts associated with the porn industry. As the RealYBOP account had no followers yet, this means these fans were likely notified via email.

It appears that PornHub was the very first twitter account to retweet RealYBOP’s initial tweet:

Is this evidence that RealYBOP’s Twitter and website are cozy with the porn industry?

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RealYourBrainOnPorn (@BrainOnPorn) tweets DIRECTLY supporting the porn industry, especially Pornhub

As stated above, two main pages document most, but not all, of RealYBOP’s Tweets supporting the porn industry:

While nearly every “RealYBOP” tweet supports the porn industry agenda, the tweets below leave no doubt concerning RealYBOP’s true allegiance – directly supporting the porn industry – especially PornHub (Mindgeek).

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RealYBOP being very cozy with porn producer (https://www.provillain.com/):

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More propaganda serving the porn industry’s agenda:

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RealYBOP links to the Xhamster thread where (in December, 2018) Prause defamed Alexander Rhodes of NoFap. (For details, see December, 2018: Prause joins Xhamster to smear NoFap & Alexander Rhodes; induces Fatherly.com to publish a hit-piece where Prause is the “expert”.)

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RealYBOP re-tweets porn performer, once again confirming its pro-porn industry agenda (while taking a swipe at “activists”):

If the illegitimate website (RealYBOP) is suppose to be about porn’s possible effects on users, why does RealYBOP regularly tweet propaganda for the porn industry?

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Is RealYBOP supporting sex trafficking (via their support for BackPage)? What does BackPage have to do with the effects of porn on the user?

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RealYBOP promoting a paid porn site, implying we should get our sex education from streaming tube sites

Continues, pimping a paid porn site as the cure for ED and other troubles:

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RealYBOP member Hartmann & RealYBOP twitter disparaging feminist Julie Bindel and her article, promoting an XBIZ article:

They no longer hide their intimate relationships with the porn industry.

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Direct promotion of porn industry: chummy with well known porn start and director Tommy Pistol

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RealYBOP promoting a strip club:

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Context: RealYBOP trolls yet another account it has blocked (Laila Mickelwait) to defend pornhub (Laila Mickelwait has also filed an affidavit in Rhodes v. Prause). Here’s Laila’s very popular tweet, posted 1/31/20:

Laila continues the next day with facts and concerns

Who would be against age verification? Who would be for porn vids featuring young females who look and act like they are 13-14? RealYBOP, it appears.

RealYBOP spends its Saturday night gathering “evidence” and tweeting a defense of Pornhub and other adult sites.

Daniel A Burgess LMFT owns realyourbrainonporn.com

As always, RealYBOP misrepresents what we say, while evading key points. The point of the Tweet is Pornhub has no age verification. Which RealYBOP confirmed and then confirmed she also found the girls most viewed video. It is completely irrelevant that other sites might have some form of ID check (which is questionable). So everything is A-ok because you can hunt around the internet trying to find these thousands of underage appearing girls and try to verify their age that way?

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RealYBOP retweeting article (i.e. propaganda) by XBIZ (calls everyone anti-porn extremists):

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Lies about Fight The New Drug, linking to AVN as its trusted source

Prause chronically defames and harasses FTND.

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RealYBOP (Prause) retweeting the most prominent porn industry interest group, the Free Speech Coalition.

Prause has a cozy history with the FSC:

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Porn industry shill RealYBOP tweeting propaganda by porn industry representative XBIZ (while attacking FTND):

Original news segment: https://wset.com/news/local/pornography-the-new-gateway-drug

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RealYBOP tweets RealYBOP member Taylor Kohut’s support for Pornhub:

While PornHub is being exposed as having videos of sex trafficking victims, RealYBOP is out there defending MindGeek:

Daniel A Burgess LMFT owns realyourbrainonporn.com

More love for PornHub:

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Tweeting about the AVN convention in Las Vegas

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Retweeting XBIZ hit-piece, in support of the porn industry:

XBIZ article is a convoluted mess trying to discredit theguardian.org. But what XBIZ neglects to mention is that the nefarious theguardian.org is not only supported by Humanity United but a host of other players including none other than the Open Society Foundation. I doubt if any entity on the plant has done more to normalize commercial sexual exploitation than OSF/Soros. So the article is built on a house of cards.

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Complaining that porn industry and prostitution are exempt:

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Promoting pornhub, who has been monetizing rape and sex trafficking videos on its platform:

Pornhub was the first account to tweet about RealYBOP!

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Promoting pornhub, even when it is under investigation for regularly hosting child porn and rape videos! The ever loyal RealYBOP.

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RealYBOP trolling a feminist who is critical of Pornhub for monetizing sex trafficking videos:

RealYBOP is lying, when she claims porn sites don’t contain rape and sex trafficking vids. Scroll through this account, and be prepared to be sick to your stomach. https://twitter.com/LailaMickelwait RealYBOP is defending pornhub!!

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Tweets XBIZ propaganda by XBIZ news editor Gustavo Turner

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Tweets a “sex worker’s” propaganda in support of PornHub:

Uhh, nope, there are now ~50 neuroscience-based studies providing strong support for the addiction model, as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies.

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Continued support for Pornhub (which is being outed as hosting numerous child-porn videos):

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Promotes article by a prostitute, “blasting the anti-sex-trafficking pimps”. Sure.

No surprise that Prause and Daniel Burgess’s legal counsel is Wayne B. Giampietro, who was one of the primary lawyers defending backpage.com. Backpage was shut down by the federal government “for its willful facilitation of human trafficking and prostitution.” (see this USA Today article: 93-count indictment on sex trafficking charges revealed against Backpage founders).

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Retweets propaganda by XBIZ (which is defending PornHub)

Reality check about pornhub:

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WOW. RealYBOP no longer hides the fact that she is a porn-industry shill. She attacks the petition to hold Pornhub accountable for hosting child porn and sex trafficking videos

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Retweets “The adult industry support network”:

Again, why is a site claiming to be about the effects of porn on users tweeting about the porn industry and performers?

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Re-tweets a porn producer:

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RealYBOP trolls a thread to provide direct support for Pornhub. RealYBOP also lies about Exodus Cry, and tries to diminish their campaign to educate the world that pornhub hosts videos of child porn and actual rape:

RealYBOP is supporting pornhub, which hosts child porn and sex trafficking videos. Nice.

In same thread, RealYBOP defends pornhub while defaming FTND:

RealYBOP tweets her joke of an op-ed for the 100th time. The 600-word Op-Ed is chock full of unsupported assertions meant to fool the lay public. It fails to support a single assertion as it cites only 4 papers – none of which have anything to do with porn addiction, porn’s effects on relationships, or porn-induced sexual problems. Several experts in this field debunked its assertions and empty rhetoric in this relatively short response – Op-ed: Who exactly is misrepresenting the science on pornography? (2016). Unlike the “neuroscientists of the Op-Ed,” they cited several hundred studies and multiple reviews of the literature.

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July 13, 2020: RealYBOP trolling 6-week-old thread to defame Exodus Cry and to support Pornhub. RealYBOP once again tweeting the comment by an anonymous troll (and not a Nofap member), that was removed by nofap mods. One deleted comment, by an unknown troll – that is all RealYBOP has – which means she will tweet it over and over again.

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RealYBOP just making stuff up, attacking Terry Crews (while disparaging FTND) for tweeting that PornHub needs to be defunded for hosting child porn and sex trafficking videos. RealYBOP is directly supporting Pornhub!

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RealYBOP retweets Gustavo Turner of XBIZ:

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July 25, 2020: RealYBOP retweets porn industry ally comments under RealYBOP attack on Nofap:

RealYBOP and porn industry twitter account @fyfriendlyfire often collaborate to troll RealYBOP’s usual victims.

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RealYBOP retweets sex worker “advocate” take on one of my tweets:

RealYBOP = supporter of the porn industry and of prostitution.

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RealYourBrainOnPorn (Pornhub’s BFF) is targeting Lala Mickelwait again with an insane tweet trying to connect Exodus Cry to outlandish conspiracy theories. The melmagazine says nothing about Exodus Cry. RealYBOP will stop at nothing to defend Pornhub, including defamation & harassment.

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Promoting Cindy Gallop’s porn site

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Not studies, but commentaries by advocates of porn use (including a few by PhD’s being paid by big porn):

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Retweeting its close ally, XBIZ:

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RealYBOP attacks TraffickingHub, the the campaign to hold Pornhub responsible for hosting child porn and sexual abuse videos (initiated by Laila Mickelwait).

A few months after RealYBOP/Prause’s online cyberstalking and defamation of Laila and Exodus Cry, the NY Times published an investigative articles fully supporting the claims put forth by TraffickingHub & Laila: The Children of Pornhub – Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?. This was only the beginning for @BrainOnPorn, as it escalated into full on cyberstalking, lies and defamation – all in support of PornHub’s agenda. A few more examples:

Below, RealYBOP directly supports Mindgeek, owner of PornHub by targeting the following tweet by Laila Mickelwait. (Mickelwait’s petition to hold PornHub accountable for unconscionable and illegal content posted to its site has garnered over a million signatures.)

Here is RealYBOP attacking Laila, while defending Mindgeek’s CEO. Note: RealYBOP lies when asserting the account isn’t that of Mindgeek’s CEO.

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Here RealYBOP goes complete wacko to disparage Exodus Cry:

RealYBOP trolls traffickinghub supporter:

More support of Pornhub (no comments about how much money Mindgeek takes in):

Trolling threads of traffickinghub supporters, posting EC budget, as if that has anything to do with pornhub.

RealYBOP tweeted that Laila did not attend USC. Merritt calls out RealYBOP for her lie:

RealYBOP posts financials, falsely implying something shady is occurring. RealYBOP says the trafficking hub petition does noting. Boy was RealYBOP wrong: https://traffickinghub.com/

Merritt post protest against pornhub, RealYBOP goes on the attack:

RealYBOP engages in defamation per se, falsely stating Laila asks men to threaten and stalk females. The 4 screenshots says nothing about anyone being stalked, let alone being told so by Laila.

More defamation, falsely claims Laila threatened numerous female scholars. The screenshots are of anonymous internet comments. Nothing related to Laila.

RealYBOP goes absolutely bonkers, with multiple instances of defamation per se:

RealYBOP says the petition will do nothing, yet it caused Pornhub to delete over half of its videos, put new regulations in place, and caused lawmakers to initiate bills and investigations. What happened to RealYBOP? The website was taken down for trademark infringement, while the twitter was permanently banned for harassment!

More insane assertions. No wonder Prause is being sued by multiple parties.

RealYBOP keeps doing Pornhub’s bidding:

Obsessive cyberstalking continues:

After 10 tweets targeting Laila and traffickinghub campaign on September 30, RealYBOP starts up gain on October 1 with more lies:

More defamation per se:

More lies by RealYBOP. In the tweet RealYBOP links to WIPO, which was about the trademark infringement of YBOP. News flash – WIPO doesn’t matter as I now own the URL for RealYBOP: ATTENTION: YBOP acquires www.RealYourBrainOnPorn.com in trademark infringement settlement.

RealYBOP’s insanity continues:

Same, more lies. Screenshots have nothing to do with anyone, just random internet comments.

No wonder Prause is being sued for defamation:

More lies and cyberstalking: Laila is not fundraising for other groups (Prause is being sued for libeling NoFap)

LOL – Now RealYBOP is falsely stating I committed perjury. Funny how her screenshots contain no examples, yet I have documented dozen of example of Prause perjuring herself: Nicole Prause & David Ley commit perjury in defamation lawsuit (September, 2019). Hmm.. how did RealYBOP obtain screenshots of Prause FBI online complaints – that named no one, including me? Oh yeah, RealYBOP is Prause.

My twitter thread debunking Prause’s lies:

Hilarious – @BrainOnPorn (Nicole Prause) has tweeted 20 times today that I lied when I said an FOIA request to the FBI proved she lied about filing an FBI report on me and Alex Rhodes
The FBI caught Nikky in a lie. All FBI docs in this section: https://t.co/3R4uJMd1WQ

— Gary Wilson (@YourBrainOnPorn) October 7, 2020

Just gets nuttier:

More Prause perjury exposed in my legal victory, where the courts ruled that I was not a stalker, and that Prause was the perpetrator – Prause’s efforts to silence Wilson foiled; her restraining order denied as frivolous & she owes substantial attorney fees in a SLAPP ruling.

RealYBOP (now “Anti-YBOP”, but still @BrainOnPorn) questioning a victim of Pornhub, Avri Sapir

Avri Sapir responds to RealYBOP’s disgusting smear:

RealYBOP tries again to incite her followers to report Exodus Cry to the state of Missouri (just as Prause did a year earlier – February, 2019: Prause falsely accuses Exodus Cry of fraud. Asks Twitter followers to report the non-profit to the Missouri attorney general (for spurious reasons), Appears to have edited the CEO’s Wikipedia page.). No one knows, including RealYBOP, what violation Exodus Cry committed.

Direct support of PornHub:

Finally, Prause no longer hides behind her alias account:

She immediately goes back to her alias, pointing out obvious: EC wants to end sex trafficking.

More hit-pieces loaded with falsehoods:

More cyberstalking in support of Pornhub:

More cyberstalking of Traffickinghub supporters:

Entering threads of traffickinghub supporters, spreading misinformation

RealYBOP assaults on traffickinghub and Laila end here as RealYBOP twitter was permanently banned for harassment:

It looks like Nicole Prause's porn-industry shill account @BrainOnPorn has been suspended for hateful abuse and targeted harassment.
Wonder if this is permanent? Should be.
Also gone is its trademark infringing website – https://t.co/WfgWlKA1JL pic.twitter.com/577LfflIzq

— Gary Wilson (@YourBrainOnPorn) October 24, 2020

Epilogue: a 2021 Op-ed in Washington Times by Laila Mickelwait describing the disgusting activities of Pornhub and its operatives (such as RealYBOP) – The end of Pornhub’s campaign of intimidation.

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RealYBOP “expert” David Ley said in his March, 2021 PT blog post (The Cancel Mob Is Coming) that holding Pornhub accountable for child porn and sex trafficking videos was nothing more than cancel culture at work.

The Canadian Parliament might disagree

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For much more related to the RealYBOP website and Twitter

Critique of “Is Pornography Use Related to Erectile Functioning? Results From Cross-Sectional and Latent Growth Curve Analyses” (2019)

February 6, 2019/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by psadmin

Introduction: His correlations say one thing, but Joshua Grubbs says another

The researcher who saddled humankind with “perceived pornography addiction” and claimed it somehow “functions very differently from other addictions,” has now turned his dexterity to porn-induced ED. Joshua Grubbs’s new paper claims there’s no epidemic of youthful ED, boldly concluding its abstract with:

In conjunction with prior literature, we conclude that there is little or no evidence of an association between mere pornography use and ED.

This two-part assertion is disturbingly inaccurate:

In reality, this new Grubbs study actually found that both problematic porn use (porn addiction) and higher levels of porn use were related to poorer erectile functioning in all 3 samples.
As for “prior literature,” over 30 studies link porn use or porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli. In fact, the first 6 studies in that list demonstrate causation, as participants eliminated porn use and healed chronic sexual dysfunctions.

Equally disturbing is the fact that this paper:

largely excluded men with severe erectile dysfunction
excluded sexually inactive men, and
excluded virgins.

In short, most of the young men who constitute the “ED epidemic” (which these authors deny) were omitted from this study. It’s easier to claim you have established that porn use isn’t associated with an ED epidemic, if you refuse to study those who are suffering so severely from porn-induced ED that they aren’t having sex!

As RebootNation founder Gabe Deem said about a similar study: “Using men with healthy erections to study the links between porn and ED is akin to using cancer-free subjects to study the links between smoking and lung cancer.” (Gabe recovered from severe PIED, and now helps other men porn-induced sexual problems.)

Even though this Grubbs-penned study found correlations between poorer sexual functioning and both porn addiction and porn use (while excluding sexually inactive men and thus many men with ED), the paper reads as if it has completely debunked porn-induced ED (PIED). This maneuver comes as no surprise to those who have followed the earlier dubious claims of Dr. Grubbs in relation to his “perceived pornography addiction” campaign.

Note: While the study lists both Joshua Grubbs and Mateusz Gola as authors, Grubbs was responsible for “Acquisition of Data,” “Analysis and Interpretation of Data,” and “Drafting the Article.” Gola jumped in after the fact, helping only with “Revising It for Intellectual Content.” This is Josh Grubbs’s baby.

UPDATE 2019: Joshua Grubbs confirmed his extreme agenda-driven bias when he joined their allies Nicole Prause, Marty Klein and David Ley in trying to silence YourBrainOnPorn.com. Grubbs and other pro-porn “experts” at www.realyourbrainonporn.com are engaged in illegal trademark infringement and squatting. Grubbs was sent a cease and desist letter, which were ignored. Legal actions continue to be pursued.

Let’s examine the problems in the methodology and reported findings:

Red Flag: The 3 groups of sexually active men reported good sexual functioning

Note the average age of each group. Sample 3 contains the age range most affected by porn as it’s rare for 19-year olds (sample 1) to develop PIED, while men in their late 40s to early 60s (sample 2) didn’t grow up using streaming internet porn.

Sample 1: Psychology students: average age 19.8 (N=147)
Sample 2: Online survey: average age 46.5 (N=297)
Sample 3: Online survey: average age 33.5 (N=433)

As the study reported, all 3 groups scored fairly high on erectile functioning (using the IIEF-5) :

In 3 samples of sexually active men who also consume pornography, we found very high levels of erectile functioning. (emphasis supplied)

Again, this constitutes a huge confound as the study omitted virgins, sexually inactive men, and most anyone with severe ED: the very men who have the most porn-related sexual problems. The men excluded from the study represent a significant portion of the population, as there has been a tremendous rise in sexually inactive young men and men men under 40 with ED or problematic low libido.

It’s important to note that the IIEF-5 (pictured above) is intended to assess only men who are engaging in sexual intercourse (sexually active men). In fact, a sexual medicine physician said the IIEF is only validated with respect to men who have had sex in the last 4 weeks.

If complete porn-induced ED is a porn user’s current destination, many recognizable steps often preceded it, sometimes by years. As such, many porn-related sexual problems (and the men who have them), would be ineligible for assessment using the IIEF-5. Here are common issues reported on porn recovery forums:

Difficulty reaching orgasm with a partner (delayed ejaculation)
Needing to recall porn to maintain erection or interest in sexual partner
Greater sexual excitement using porn than with a partner
Earlier genres of porn are no longer “exciting”
Declining sexual arousal with a sexual partner(s)
Can’t maintain erection or ejaculate with oral sex

This grim reality is supported by at least 6 studies demonstrating porn use apparently causing an array of sexual dysfunctions. Three of the five studies involved men who recovered from porn-induced anorgasmia and low libido, rather than ED. The other two studies contained a mix of patients who healed porn-induced delayed ejaculation and PIED. In addition, a study on treatment-seeking men who compulsively masturbated to porn reported that 71% of them had sexual problems, with 33% reporting delayed ejaculation.

Bottom line: In addition to likely omitting many (or even most) of the young men who constitute the “ED epidemic,” the study did not catch other porn-related sexual problems reported in the literature and by many chronic porn users.

**Contrary to Grubbs’s study analysis (and his tweets), both porn addiction and higher levels of porn use were related to poorer erectile functioning**

Tips for understanding the numbers in the study’s tables:

Zero means no correlation between two variables; 1.00 means a complete correlation between two variables. The bigger the number the stronger the correlation between the 2 variables. If a number has a minus sign, it means there’s a negative correlation between two things. (For example, there’s a negative correlation between exercise and heart disease. Thus, in normal language, exercise reduces the chances of heart disease. In contrast, obesity has a positive correlation with heart disease.)

Part 1: Porn addiction and erectile functioning

The 4 questions Grubbs used to measure levels of problematic porn use (porn addiction) were:

I believe I am addicted to Internet pornography
I feel unable to stop my use of online pornography
Even when I do not want to view pornography online, I feel drawn to it
I have put off things I needed to do in order to view pornography

A reader of the paper’s Introduction or Discussion sections would likely miss the fact, but both levels of porn use and levels of problematic porn use (porn addiction) were related to lower scores on IIEF-5 (the International Index of Erectile Function), which indicates reduced erectile functioning. Yet, even the authors do admit that porn addiction was related to poorer erectile functioning:

Similarly, there were consistent negative relationships between erectile functioning and problematic pornography use in all 3 samples, although this relationship was of only small to moderate magnitude (r = –0.20 to –0.33) and did not maintain statistical significance in sample 1 after application of the Holm correction.

Remember, a negative signs means lower scores on the IIEF, which means poorer erectile functioning. The results reveal that even in subjects with relatively healthy erectile functioning, porn addiction was significantly related to poorer erections.

Wait a minute you ask, how dare I say significantly related? Doesn’t the the study excerpt above confidently declare that the relationship (–0.20 to –0.33) was only “small to moderate,” meaning it’s no big deal?

As we will explore in greater detail below, Grubb’s use of descriptors varies remarkably, depending upon which Grubbs study you read. If the Grubbs study is about porn use causing ED, then the above numbers represent a meager correlation, tossed aside in his spin-laden write-up.

However, if it’s Grubbs’s most famous study (“Transgression as Addiction: Religiosity and Moral Disapproval as Predictors of Perceived Addiction to Pornography“), where he proclaimed that being religious was the real cause of “porn addiction,” then numbers smaller than these constitute a “robust relationship.” In fact, Grubbs’s “robust” correlation between religiosity and “perceived pornography addiction” was only 0.30! Yet he audaciously used it to usher in a completely new, and questionable, model of porn addiction. The tables, correlations and details referred to here are found in this section of a longer YBOP analysis.

In the current ED study, it’s vital to note that the strongest correlation between porn addiction and poorer erections (–0.33) occurred in Grubbs’s largest sample. This was the only sample of an average age most likely to report porn induced ED: sample 3, average age: 33.5 (433 subjects).

Part 2: Pornography use and erectile functioning

While the paper consistently downplays the correlations between higher pornography use and poorer erections, correlations were reported in all 3 groups – especially for sample 3, which was the most relevant sample as just explained. Excerpt from study:

However, with the exception of sample 3, there was little evidence of a link between pornography use itself and erectile functioning. In samples 1 and 2, the links between pornography use and erectile functioning were consistently weak and insignificant

Below are the 3 groups, with their average daily minutes of porn viewing and the correlations between erectile functioning amount of use (a negative sign means poorer erections linked to greater porn use):

Sample 1 (147 men): average age 19.8 – Averaged 22 minutes of porn/day. (–0.18)
Sample 2 (297 men): average age 46.5 – Averaged 13 minutes of porn/day. (–0.05)
Sample 3 (433 men): average age 33.5 – Averaged 45 minutes of porn/day. (–0.37)

Fairly straightforward results: the sample that used the most porn (#3) had the strongest correlation between greater porn use and poorer erections, while the group that use the least (#2) had the weakest correlation between greater porn use and poorer erections. Why didn’t Grubbs emphasize this pattern in his write-up, instead of using statistical manipulations to try to make it disappear?

To summarize:

Sample #1: Average age 19.8 – Note that 19-year old porn users rarely report chronic porn-induced (especially when only using 22 minutes a day). The vast majority of porn-induced ED recovery stories YBOP has gathered are by men aged 20-40. It generally takes time to develop PIED.
Sample #2: Average age 46.5 – They averaged only 13 minutes per day! With a standard deviation of 15.3 years, some portion of these men were fifty-something. These older men did not start out using internet porn during adolescence (making them less vulnerable to conditioning their sexual arousal solely to internet porn). Indeed, just as Grubbs found, the sexual health of slightly older men has always been better and more resilient over all, than users who began using digital porn during adolescence (such as those with an average age of 33 in sample 3).
Sample #3: Average age 33.5 – As already mentioned, sample 3 was the largest sample and averaged higher levels of porn use. Most importantly, this age range is the most likely to report PIED. Not surprisingly, sample 3 had the strongest correlation between higher levels of porn use and poorer erectile functioning (–0.37).

Considering the above links between poorer erections and both greater porn use and porn addiction, it’s shocking how this Grubbs paper reads as if widespread internet porn cannot be related to the documented rise in ED in men under 40. Also, why did Grubbs disregard the robust correlations in the age group most affected by PIED and who reported the greatest porn use? Was he unaware of the age ranges most affected by porn induced sexual problems?

Put simply, if this study had only addressed sample #3 (which was apparently the first sample Grubbs gathered), Grubbs would have been obliged (we hope) to acknowledge porn’s relationship to sexual dysfunction. Instead, two samples outside the target age range, were added after the baseline scores for sample #3 were gathered. This watered down the initial and most relevant findings (sample #3).

Grubbs: If it’s religion causing porn addiction, 0.30 is “robust.” If it’s porn causing ED, 0.37 is “limited evidence.”

As mentioned above, Grubbs has in the past unhesitatingly used weaker correlations than those reported in the current ED study to make very strong and questionable claims in his most highly publicized studies. Grubbs’s claim to fame is his series of “perceived porn addiction” studies, which spawned the scientifically inadequately supported meme that “religion causes porn addiction.” Too intricate to unpack here, YBOP (and actual researchers) have dismantled Grubbs’s unsupported claims elsewhere: article 1, article 2, article 3.

However, before leaving this point, check out the data from Grubbs’s most widely cited paper: “Transgression as Addiction: Religiosity and Moral Disapproval as Predictors of Perceived Addiction to Pornography.” Table 2 below contains data from 2 separate samples. Highlighted below are the correlations between Grubbs’s porn use questionnaire, the CPUI-9 (#1), and Religiosity (#6).

Here’s something to keep in mind when reading all of Grubbs’s perceived-addiction studies: he re-labeled the total CPUI-9 score as “perceived pornography addiction” – even though it was not a perception-of-addiction test. This is confusing, yet highly strategic, as his studies and comments on social media read as if he assessed “belief in porn addiction,” although he did not. So when Grubbs states that religiosity is robustly related to “perceived porn addiction,” he really means that religiosity is merely related to total score on his CPUI-9, an unsound questionnaire that assesses neither actual porn addiction nor believing oneself to be a porn addict.

The correlations between total CPUI-9 scores and religiosity: Study 1: 0.25, Study 2: 0.35

Average: 0.30

What did Dr. Grubbs say about the 0.30 relationship between “perceived pornography addiction” and religiosity? Why, he claimed it was “robust!”

Results from two studies in undergraduate samples (Study 1, N=331; Study 2, N=97) indicated that there was a robust positive relationship between religiosity and perceived addiction to pornography.

Grubbs considers 0.30 “robust” when it supports his artfully crafted meme that religious folks only “perceive” they are addicted to porn and no one else really has a problem with it.

In the current ED study, how has Grubbs described the correlations between greater porn use and poorer erections, including sample 3 – which had a larger correlation (0.37), than his “religion = porn addiction” study just described?

“Across the 3 samples, we found only very limited support for the notion that mere pornography use itself is related to diminished erectile functioning, which is inconsistent with another popular narrative claiming that such use is likely to drive sexual dysfunction.” (emphasis supplied)

In 2019, Grubbs considers 0.37 as “very limited support” for a link between porn use and poorer erectile functioning. Have Grubbs’s views on statistics evolved in the intervening 4 years or could it be something else?

We suspect bias, and now revisit the above table from Grubbs “Transgression as Addiction“ study to support our assertion. Above we highlighted the correlations between CPUI-9 scores (perceived porn addiction) and religiosity. Below we highlighted the correlations between CPUI-9 scores (perceived porn addiction) and “hours of porn use”:

The correlations between total CPUI-9 scores (perceived porn addiction) and “hours of porn use”: Study 1: 0.30, Study 2: 0.32

Average 0.31

Notice that CPUI-9 scores have a slightly stronger relationship to “hours of porn use” (0.31) than to religiosity (0.30). Put simply, hours of porn is a better predictor “perceived porn addiction” than is religiosity. It’s “porn overuse = porn addiction,” not “religiosity = porn addiction.” Even in Grubbs’s own work.

Yet Grubbs assures us that religiosity is “robustly related to perceived porn addiction” (CPUI-9 scores). If this is the case, then “hours of porn use” are evidently also “robustly related” to scores on the CPUI-9. But that’s not what you glean from reading the Grubbs’s analysis, or from his comments in the press or his Twitter feed.

Indeed, Grubbs sums up his campaign in this extraordinary biased 2016 Psychology Today article, where he falsely asserts that CPUI-9 scores (perceived porn addiction) are not related to the amount of porn used, but only related to religiosity:

Being labeled “porn addict” by a partner, or even by oneself, has nothing to do with the amount of porn a man views, says Joshua Grubbs, assistant professor of psychology at Bowling Green University. Instead, it has everything to do with religiosity…

… Grubbs calls it “perceived pornography addiction.” “It functions very differently from other addictions.” (emphasis supplied)

These are astonishing statements made in direct opposition to his findings. As the tables show, CPUI-9 scores (“perceived porn addiction”) were in fact more related to “hours of use” than to religiosity! Such unsupported assertions led YBOP to publish extensive critiques of Dr. Grubbs’s perceived porn addiction studies.

Now, we must do so again with this current ED paper, where he produced a write-up that dismisses significant correlations (especially in the most at-risk group), omits the numerous studies linking porn to sexual problems, and misrepresents the literature on sexual problems in young men. The picture this paper has painted matches neither his data nor the current state of the literature. Sadly, Grubbs even resorted to mischaracterizing his correlations on twitter:

In the Dr. Grubbs bizzaro-stats world view, 0.37 is not detectable (correlation between porn use & poorer erectile functioning), while 0.30 is robust (correlation between religiosity & perceived porn addiction).

Sample shell game?

To return to the matter of Grubbs’s samples, it’s common knowledge on porn recovery forums that the age group of men currently reporting the most porn-induced sexual problems hovers around late 20s and early 30s. In other words, of Grubbs’s three samples, the sample most suitable for investigating a possible phenomenon of porn-induced sexual dysfunction was sample 3.

Sample 3 (average age 33.5) is not only the closest sample to the ideal age group, but also by far the largest, and therefore most reliable, of his samples.

Interestingly, sample 3 was apparently the earliest of the samples Grubbs collected (spring of 2017). Predictably, sample 3 showed a robust correlation between impaired erectile health and porn use (0.37) and porn addiction (0.33) at baseline – even though many sexually inactive men had been (strategically?) excluded by use of the IIEF.

This raises awkward questions. Why didn’t Grubbs write up his results only about this sample 3, the most at-risk group? Had he done so, this would have been a very different paper…offering solid support for the existence of porn-induced erectile health problems (we would hope).

Was it because Grubbs didn’t like the robust correlations between poorer erectile health and both porn use and porn addiction, which his most relevant, most reliable sample revealed? Why did he obscure his most pertinent results by adding 2 more samples of men from less at-risk age groups?

Longitudinal group saw little change in erectile function, but problematic users may have dropped out

The study claims that in the longitudinal sample (#3) links between porn use/porn addiction didn’t have an impact on erectile functioning over 1 year’s time

In short, self-reported problematic use of pornography was not associated with changes in erectile functioning over a 1-year period, likely due to the lack of change in erectile functioning in the sample overall.

Let’s examine this finding. First, it’s important to know that of the 433 participants in group #3 at baseline, a mere 117 participants had complete data for the entire year (4 data points and 4 intervals). That’s a scant 27% of the original participants, on which Grubbs basis this claim.

Second, it appears likely that the subjects who used the most porn, and had the most problems (addiction), were the ones who tended to drop out of the study. Table 3 reveals a drop in average “hours of porn use” and porn addiction scores occurring with each successful check-in. Either all the men cut down on porn use and felt less addicted, or many of the heavier users with the worst problems dropped out. The latter seems most likely.

For both of these reasons we need to take this study’s longitudinal data with a boulder of salt.

Grubbs uses specious reasoning to suggest that “Moral incongruence”might explain poorer erectile functioning

Grubbs asserts that “Moral Incongruence” may play a role in ED, but he is playing games:

In addition, we note that in the 1 sample (sample 3) in which pornography use itself was related to diminished erectile functioning cross-sectionally, both self-reported problematic use and moral incongruenceregarding pornography use were similarly related to diminished erectile functioning, both of which in addition to the relationship between reported use and diminished erectile functioning. When these findings are considered along with the results from our other 2 samples demonstrating no clear relationship between pornography use and erectile functioning, we urge caution in placing credence on statements of pornography use itself as a causal mechanism in driving ED. (emphasis supplied)

MI (moral incongruence) is always correlated with porn addiction (Grubbs’s 4 questions listed earlier), because people with porn addiction usually want to stop due to negative consequences. Since MI is always related to porn addiction, and poorer erectile functioning always related to porn addiction, MI scores are related to poorer erectile functioning. So, Grubbs’s assertion is an artifact, not a meaningful correlation.

Note: Grubbs has been striving to convince the scientific community for 8 years that porn addiction is really nothing more than so-called “moral incongruence” (or religiosity). That is, disapproval of one’s own own compulsive porn use is the actual problem – not the porn use itself. His crusade rests on the unsupported premise that morally disapproving of one’s compulsive use is unique to porn addicts.

However, this review of the literature points out the obvious. Addicts typically disapprove of their addictions. Here drug addicts cite moral reasons as core motivation for quitting:

Grubbs should ask himself, “Why isn’t there a ‘moral disapproval model’ of meth addiction, or gambling addiction, or cigarette addiction?” The ‘moral disapproval model of porn addiction’ is a red herring spawned by Grubbs himself. It’s created and supported by his own repetitive studies correlating moral disapproval with porn addiction (and those of his fan club), while he ignores dozens of other important variables that better explain problematic porn use (such as inability to quit despite negative consequences).

The reality is that 41 neurological studies show that porn addiction functions very much like other addictions. And even Grubbs’s own studies consistently reveal that “perceived pornography addiction” scores have a lot to do with the amount of porn a man views.

Josh Grubbs allies himself with radical pro-porn, anti-PIED propagandists Nicole Prause & David Ley

Finally, Dr. Grubbs appears to be closely allied with ardent pro-porners Dr. Nicole Prause and Dr. David Ley. All three often like and retweet each other comments, entering into jovial Twitter convos ridiculing harms associated with internet porn overuse. All three campaign against the concept of “porn addiction.” Ley and Grubbs have co-authored peer-reviewed papers, and Ley and Prause have vocally championed Grubbs’s “perceived addiction” studies since the first one appeared.

So it’s no surprise that Ley and Prause adore this current Grubbs study (at least his write-up, if not the actual correlations). In this Twitter thread, Prause suggests, without sound basis, that the “moral disapproval” correlation might mean that erection troubles are really porn-induced….via shame. Grubbs seems to agree with his ally:

Ley and Prause are not objective observers. Both have engaged in multiple documented incidents of harassment and defamation as part of an ongoing “astroturf” campaign to persuade people that anyone who disagrees with their conclusions deserves to be defamed. Prause appears to be quite cozy with the pornography industry, as can be seen from this image of her (far right) on the red carpet of the X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) awards ceremony. According to Wikipedia the XRCO Awards are given by the American X-Rated Critics Organization annually to people working in adult entertainment. It is the only adult industry awards show reserved exclusively for industry members.^[1] (emphasis supplied)

David Ley is not only involved with several of the preceding incidents, he has also published multiple articles attacking porn recovery forums and the concept of porn induced ED, disparaging men who run porn-recovery forums and using social media to harass men recovering from PIED. In addition, Ley makes money selling two books which deny sex and porn addiction (“The Myth of Sex Addiction,” 2012 and “Ethical Porn for Dicks,” 2016). Is that a conflict of interest? Pornhub is one of the four back-cover endorsements for the book on Amazon.com.

And now we have Grubbs, who has co-authored journal articles with buddy David Ley, joining Ley in making fun of porn-induced ED:

This Grubbs tweet is from May, 2017 – over 18 months before he published his current paper “debunking” porn-induced ED. Bias anyone?

Nicole Prause continues to be obsessed with debunking PIED, having spent the last 5 years harassing and libeling young men who have recovered from porn-induced sexual dysfunctions and are trying to warn others. See: Gabe Deem #1, Gabe Deem #2, Alexander Rhodes #1, Alexander Rhodes #2, Alexander Rhodes #3, Noah Church, Alexander Rhodes #4, Alexander Rhodes #5, Alexander Rhodes #6, Alexander Rhodes #7, Alexander Rhodes #8, Alexander Rhodes #9.

In addition, Prause (with Ley’s help) has waged a 4-year war against this review involving 7 US Navy physicians and Gary Wilson (published in the journal Behavioral Sciences): Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (Park et al., 2016). (For much much more see: Prause’s efforts to have Behavioral Sciences review paper (Park et al., 2016) retracted.) Joshua Grubbs has recently joined Prause and Ley in this unprofessional and unethical campaign against Park et al. 2016 and MDPI, engaging in ad hominem attacks, falsehoods, and cyber-harassment.

First example: on February 16, 2019, a sexual medicine specialist presented a talk at the 21st Congress of the European Society for Sexual Medicine on the Internet’s impact on sexuality. A few slides describing porn-induced sexual problems, citing Park et al., 2016, were tweeted. The tweets caused Nicole Prause, David Ley, Joshua Grubbs and their allies to direct a Twitter-rage at Park et al., 2016. In this thread Grubbs joins Prause in her usual set of falsehoods and ad hominem attacks:

All of the above is empty defamation as revealed here. Notice that in all of the Prause, Ley, and Grubbs tweets they never provide a single example of the paper’s “fraud” or “false claims.” Only ad hominen attacks and falsehoods. Since Prause was one of the six reviewers of Park et al., you would think she could excerpt a section and explain how it constitutes “fraud.” Never happens….and never will because the paper contains no fraud and all Navy rules were complied with in its compilation.

Grubbs not only attacked Park et al. with Prause-like empty drivel, he also groundlessly attacked the parent journal MDPI (just as Prause has repeatedly done). A two-tweet smear from January, 2019:

Additional tweets smearing MDPI. This time in the guise of a “poll.”

Here he goes again, attacking MDPI:

The Grubbs attacks on MDPI and Park et al. started about the time he published the very paper critiqued on this page. Coincidence? Most unlikely. Grubbs has always worn his agenda on his sleeve – dismissing porn addiction, internet addiction, while asserting that almost all problems with porn arise from religious morality (recklessly leaving his readers with the false impression that atheists can use porn and not experience negative effects). Now he is now upping his social media game to match that of his mentors – Prause & Ley. He must make them proud.

UPDATE 2019: Joshua Grubbs confirmed his extreme agenda-driven bias when he joined their allies Nicole Prause, Marty Klein and David Ley in trying to silence YourBrainOnPorn.com. Grubbs and other pro-porn “experts” at www.realyourbrainonporn.com are engaged in illegal trademark infringement and squatting. Grubbs was sent a cease and desist letter, which were ignored. Legal actions continue to be pursued.

Empty claims that a PIED epidemic doesn’t exist

This paper claims several times that there’s not an epidemic of ED, and that porn use is not related to claimed epidemic of ED:

Despite evidence to the contrary, a number of advocacy and self-help groups persist in claiming that internet pornography use is driving an epidemic of erectile dysfunction (ED).

We’ll begin with the first words of the above excerpt: there is no persuasive “evidence to the contrary.” Let’s examine this purported contrary evidence.

1) Prause and Pfaus, 2015: Prause and Pfaus did not support its claims. See a formal critique by researcher Richard Isenberg, MD and a very extensive lay critique:

In the same journal as the paper: Letter to the editor by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015)
Extensive lay critique: Nothing Adds Up in Dubious Study: Youthful Subjects’ ED Left Unexplained (2015)

Prause and Pfaus 2015 wasn’t a study on men with ED. It wasn’t a study at all. Instead, Prause claimed to have gathered data from four of her earlier studies, none of which addressed erectile dysfunction. It’s disturbing that this paper by Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus passed peer-review as the data in their paper did not match the data in the underlying four studies on which the paper claimed to be based. The discrepancies are not minor gaps, but gaping holes that cannot be plugged. In addition, the paper made several claims that were false or not supported by their data. In addition, both Nicole Prause and Jim Pfaus made false statements to the media about their methodology and findings.

2) Landripet and Štulhofer, 2015 was designated as a “brief communication” by the journal that published it, and the two authors selected only certain data to share, while omitting other pertinent data. As with Prause and Pfaus, the journal later published a critique addressing the weaknesses of Landripet and Štulhofer: Comment on: Is Pornography Use Associated with Sexual Difficulties and Dysfunctions among Younger Heterosexual Men? by Gert Martin Hald, PhD

As for the claim that Landripet and Štulhofer, 2015 found no relationships between porn use and sexual problems, this is not true, as documented in both this YBOP critique and this review of the literature, co-authored by multiple Navy physicians. Furthermore, Landripet and Štulhofer’s paper omitted three significant correlations, which one of the authors had earlier presented at a European conference.

Equally importantly, in his write-up, why did Grubbs ignore the 27 peer-reviewed studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal – especially the 5 case studies where men healed problems by quitting porn?

Here’s a similar excerpt where he attempts to press home his same flawed talking point about the state of the literature:

In general, among sexually active pornography-using men, serious erectile problems seem rare, a finding that runs counter to a popular narrative suggesting that pornography use is driving an epidemic of ED.

In fact, as noted above, the 3 samples here were men who are sexually active and whose IIEF (sexual health) scores were pretty good. Put simply, this paper largely excluded men with ED, didn’t include sexually inactive men, and didn’t include virgins. Thus, many of the the men who constitute the “ED epidemic” (which these authors deny) were omitted from this study. And yet, even in this paper both porn addiction and higher levels of porn use were related to poorer erectile functioning. Why go to such pains to deny the truth?

The position of the “medical community”?

Citing nothing to support their assertion, Grubbs and his co-author mistakenly claim that the “medical community” has not conclusively found evidence of an epidemic of ED:

Moreover, given that the medical community has not conclusively found evidence of an increasing rate of ED in young men in recent years, the present work provides additional evidence against the notion that pornography use is driving an epidemic of ED.

The reality?

Historical ED rates: Erectile dysfunction was first assessed in 1940s when the Kinsey report concluded that the prevalence of ED was less than 1% in men younger than 30 years, less than 3% in those 30–45. While ED studies on young men are relatively sparse, this 2002 meta-analysis of 6 high-quality ED studies reported that 5 of the 6 reported ED rates for men under 40 of approximately 2%. The 6^th study reported figures of 7-9%, but the question used could not be compared to the 5 other studies, and did not assess chronic erectile dysfunction as had the others. Instead it asked, “Did you have trouble maintaining or achieving an erection any time in the last year?”

At the end of 2006, free, streaming porn tube sites came on line and gained instant popularity. This changed the nature of porn consumption radically. For the first time in history, viewers could escalate with ease during a masturbation session without any wait. What happened to ED rates?

Ten studies since 2010: Ten studies published since 2010 reveal a tremendous rise in erectile dysfunction. This is documented in this lay article and in this peer-reviewed paper co-authored by 7 US Navy physicians – Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (2016). In the 10 studies, erectile dysfunction rates for men under 40 ranged from 14% to 37%, while rates for low libido ranged from 16% to 37%.

Other than the advent of streaming porn (2006) no variable related to youthful ED has appreciably changed in the last 10-20 years (smoking rates are down, drug use is steady, obesity rates in males 20-40 up only 4% since 1999 – see this study).

The recent jump in sexual problems coincides with the publication of 30 studies linking porn use and “porn addiction” to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli. In addition to the studies listed, this page contains articles and videos by over 130 experts (urology professors, urologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, sexologists, MDs) who acknowledge, and have successfully treated, porn-induced ED and porn-induced loss of sexual desire.

Current hours of porn use is just one of many variables that may predict porn-induced sexual dysfunctions

Additional variables likely also need to be investigated. This 2016 review highlighted the weakness in correlating only “current hours of use” to predict porn-induced sexual dysfunctions. The amount of porn currently viewed is likely just one of many variables related to the development of porn-induced ED. Others may include:

Ratio of masturbation to porn versus masturbation without porn
Ratio of sexual activity with a person versus masturbation to porn
Gaps in partnered sex (where one relies only on porn)
Virgin or not
Total hours of use
Years of continued use
Age started using porn voluntarily
Escalation to new genres
Development of porn-induced fetishes (from escalating to new genres of porn)
Level of novelty per session (i.e. compilation videos, multiple tabs)
Addiction-related brain changes or not
Presence of hypersexuality/porn addiction (which was robustly related in sample #3)
It might also be fruitful to ask about edging, the harmful practice of masturbating to porn while avoiding climax.

The better way to research this phenomenon, is to remove the variable of internet porn use and observe the outcome, which was done in multiple case studies in which men removed internet porn use and healed. Such research suggests causation instead of correlations based on possibly faulty recall – and open to agenda-driven interpretations like those in the present study. YBOP has documented self-reports of a few thousand men who removed porn and recovered from chronic sexual dysfunctions.

Additional flaws, also present in earlier papers on the subject

Some of the following points come from this earlier critique of Prause and Pfaus 2015. The current paper suffers from most of the same flaws.

Did not assess individuals complaining of erectile dysfunction
Did not ask men to attempt masturbation without porn (the way to test for porn-induced ED)
Did not have men remove porn to see if erectile functioning eventually improved (the only way to know if ED was porn-induced)
Did not ask about years or porn use, age guys started using porn, type of porn, or escalation of use.
Did not ask about delayed ejaculation or anorgasmia (precursors to PIED)
Study only included men who were sexually active (which means they probably didn’t have full blown ED), which would exclude those with such severe ED that they are avoiding sex
Study omitted virgins (including so called “porn virgins” – who can’t manage sex with real partners) and thus all who have not had sex in the last year.

Conclusion

A genuine investigation of porn use and sexual dysfunctions needs to ask subjects to eliminate digital porn use and assess any changes over the subsequent months.

Meanwhile, it is evident that the scientific community can do a more conscientious job of investigating the unfortunate phenomenon of young men in their prime struggling with unprecedented levels of sexual dysfunctions (which often heal simply by giving up today’s ubiquitous digital porn). Researchers can also do a far more responsible job of describing their findings and the state of the literature rather than misleading their readers.

Nicole Prause’s efforts to have Behavioral Sciences review paper (Park et al., 2016) retracted

September 17, 2018/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by psadmin

The paper in question: Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (Park et al., 2016). [As of early 2019, Park et al. has been cited by over 40 other peer-reviewed papers, and is the most viewed paper in the history of the journal Behavioral Sciences]

CONTENTS:

**“Who’s watching Retraction Watch?”**

(This section was created after sections 2-9 were created.)

I was under the impression that people looked to Retraction Watch for responsible, thoroughly vetted articles about research. After my recent experience however, I can only ask, “Who’s watching Retraction Watch?” To whom or what is Retraction Watch accountable for oversight when it engages in irresponsible journalism?

On June 13, Retraction Watch (RW) published an inaccurate and biased account of events surrounding Behavioral Sciences paper Park et al., 2016. Among other distortions, the piece omitted material details about Nicole Prause’s unsuccessful (and unseemly) 3-year campaign to have the paper retracted (documented in the next 8 sections).

Prause, a former academic, apparently contacted RW personnel and fed them the particulars she wanted in print – and RW apparently swallowed them whole and duly published them. My response appears underneath the Retraction Watch article. However, RW edited my comment substantially before it would post it. Here I supply various missing details.

First, my comment is a redacted version of an email I sent to Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky of RW shortly after the piece appeared. After 3 days of back-and-forth emails, RW eventually posted some of the proposed content (from my email), but demanded that I remove content that revealed the ways in which RW had not performed its journalistic duties.

Here is more of the story.

1) Senior author, and Naval officer, Andrew Doan MD PhD requested that Adam Marcus speak to me for clarification on details surrounding the paper (after Marcus contacted him). Doan did this because he and my other 6 co-authors are Active Duty in the US Navy and “cannot speak about the paper in detail without permission from the public affairs office US Navy.” Marcus chose not to contact me. Instead he ran with everything Prause fed him. From my original email:

I’ve read your piece, “Journal corrects, but will not retract, controversial paper on internet porn.” As the prime objective of Retraction Watch is integrity in publishing, I believe you will want to correct this article in numerous important respects. In its current form it contains many errors and much defamatory misinformation. I regret that you didn’t contact me as Dr. Doan suggested, so that these errors could have been avoided.

2) RW principals Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky were copied on the May, 2018 MDPI-Prause email exchanges. As I said in one of my emails to RW:

I am deeply concerned about Retraction Watch’s selective use of bits of the MDPI emails that Dr. Prause copied you on. As I was also sent those emails, I know there was a lot of other information in them. The omitted bits included lies and unprofessional attacks on others by Dr. Prause. While Dr. Lin’s metaphor was unfortunate (English is not his first or second language), I think his remark needs to be ‘heard’ in light of the fact that Dr. Prause has been badgering his company directly, and indirectly via COPE, for almost two straight years. His exasperation is easily understood. Giving Dr. Prause a “pass” on her offensive behavior while highlighting his was unkind and, more important, leaves your readers with a very skewed perspective.

It must be noted that RW was not copied on the endless stream of emails, from the previous 3 years, where Prause harassed MDPI, the US Navy, the 7 Navy doctors, The Reward Foundation, the publisher of my book, etc., etc. Nor is anyone privy to her many private emails to COPE and its officers.

3) In the May, 2018 MDPI-Prause email exchanges, Marcus and Oransky were twice given this extensive page documenting Prause’s long history of harassing researchers, authors, medical doctors, therapists, psychologists, a former UCLA colleague, a UK charity, men in recovery, a senior TIME magazine editor, several professors, IITAP, SASH, Fight The New Drug, MDPI, and the head of the academic journal CUREUS. In essence, RW ignored Prause’s documented misbehavior to publish its Prause-inspired hit piece.

4) In a follow-up email asking why RW had failed to post my (redacted) comment, I mentioned to Marcus and Oransky that the core assertion of RW’s hit piece was mistaken:

As things stand, even the premise of your article is false. My affiliation with The Reward Foundation (TRF) was always clearly stated, both in the initial Behavioral Sciences article and in the recent correction (the original PubMed version). The purpose of the newly published correction was to counter Dr. Prause’s incessant defamatory claims that I receive money from TRF, and that I make money from my book (my proceeds for which, in fact, go to the charity).

5) In both my emails to RW, I clearly addressed the second primary assertion in their article:

It is also important to clarify that Dr. Prause’s “77 unaddressed points” claim is untrue. I have the documentation of these points and our team’s responses (and the documentation that 25 of the 77 “points” had nothing to do with the Behavioral Sciences paper).

See this section for more details surrounding Prause’s so-called “77 points,” and her unprofessional involvement with an earlier, much different version of our paper, submitted to Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine.

6) In both my emails to RW, I clearly stated that Prause was lying about the California investigation:

Next, it is crucial to correct Dr. Prause’s false assertion that California’s investigation of her behavior is over and that she has prevailed. It is not over; an investigator has invited me to testify in the coming months (date TBD).

It’s quite telling that Marcus and Oransky

(1) did not correct the RW article’s false assertions and misleading statements,

(2) redacted evidence in my proposed post that they were very aware of Prause’s defamatory statements and long history of harassment and proceeded anyway,

(3) chose not communicate with me prior to publication, even though the paper’s senior author requested they do so,

(4) subtly suggested I was the harasser by falsely stating that the California investigation was complete and decided in Prause’s favor, and by linking to a Daily Beast account of events, and

(5) have not corrected or unpublished their hit piece as irresponsible journalism, nor publicly apologized to the authors and journal whose reputations they smeared without cause.

A few more points about the RW article not covered in my comment. The first paragraph states:

“After publication, critics asked COPE to look at the paper.”

“Critics” plural? It was only one “critic” who emailed either MDPI or COPE: Prause. She emailed the US Navy multiple times, reported the 7 doctors on the paper to their medical boards, and turned to social media to harass me, MDPI, and researchers who publish in MDPI – as part of a long campaign to avoid writing a formal scholarly reply to the paper and instead to try to have it retracted via behind-the-scenes maneuvering and public misinformation.

The article said:

“COPE, which has no enforcement authority, said in an email to the publisher that it would have recommended retraction of the article.”

COPE was only concerned about one issue (based on the “facts” fed to it): consent. COPE said the following:

“should this case have been raised at one of our COPE forums, we feel the recommendation would have been to consider the retraction of the article on the basis of consent requirements not following expectations”…..

While COPE’s answer is hypothetical, based on whatever “facts” Prause apparently supplied it, the authors and MDPI are truly puzzled by the response. In reality, the US Navy doctors more than complied with their Naval Medical Center – San Diego’s IRB consent rules. The Naval Medical Center San Diego’s IRB policy does not consider case reports of less than four patients in a single article to be human subject research and does not require the patients to consent to inclusion in an article. Although the researchers were not required to obtain consent, for two cases, verbal and written consents were obtained. In the third case where anonymity was unlikely to be compromised, no written consent was obtained.

Incidentally, at Dr. Prause’s insistence, after the paper was published, the actions of the Navy co-authors with respect to this paper were thoroughly reviewed in an independent Navy investigation. Result? I have a copy of the official report by a Navy lawyer affirming that the co-authors complied with all the IRB’s rules.

The RW article also said:

“Among the the [sic] claims is that one of the authors, Gary Wilson, failed to adequately disclose his work with The Reward Foundation,”

This is false. As explained earlier, my affiliation with The Reward Foundation (TRF) was always clearly stated, both in the initial Behavioral Sciences article and in the recent correction (the original PubMed version). The purpose of the newly published correction was to counter Dr. Prause’s incessant defamatory claims that I receive money from TRF, and that I make money from my book (my proceeds for which, in fact, go to the charity).

In the absence of adequate oversight, RW readers may want to be skeptical about ingesting RW’s blog posts without independent investigation. RW seems to be willing to allow itself to be used by agenda-driven forces even when alerted that further investigation is needed.

Background

MDPI is the Swiss parent company of numerous academic journals, including Behavioral Sciences. MDPI does not publish predatory journals. In fact, it was investigated years ago after it was mistakenly placed on a predatory list, and formally determined to be a legitimate publisher. See: http://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/534. The man (Jeffrey Beall) who made the error eventually deleted his entire operation.

Prause is obsessed with MDPI because (1) Behavioral Sciences published two articles that Prause disagrees with (because they discussed papers by her, among hundreds of papers by other authors), and (2) Gary Wilson is a co-author of Park et al., 2016. Prause has a long history of cyberstalking and defaming Wilson, chronicled in this very extensive page. The two papers:

Neuroscience of Internet Pornography Addiction: A Review and Update (Love et al., 2015)
Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (Park et al., 2016)

The second paper (Park et al.) didn’t analyze Prause’s research. It cited findings in 3 of her papers. At the request of a reviewer during the peer-review process, it addressed the third, a 2015 paper by Prause & Pfaus, by citing a scholarly piece in a journal that heavily, accurately criticized the paper. (There was not enough space in Park et al. to address all the weaknesses and unsupported claims in Prause & Pfaus, 2015).

Prause immediately insisted that MDPI retract Park et al., 2016. The professional response to scholarly articles one disapproves of is to publish a comment outlining any objections. Behavioral Sciences’s parent company, MDPI, invited Prause to do this. She declined. It must be noted that Prause attacks Wilson and his website constantly and publicly.

Instead of publishing a formal comment, she unprofessionally turned to threats and social media (and most recently the Retraction Watch blog) to bully MDPI into retracting Park et al., of which I am a co-author with 7 US Navy physicians (including two urologists, two psychiatrists and a neuroscientist). In addition, she informed MDPI that she had filed complaints with the American Psychological Association. She then filed complaints with all the doctors’ medical boards. She also pressured the doctors’ medical center and Institutional Review Board, causing a lengthy, thorough investigation, which found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the paper’s authors.

Prause also complained repeatedly to COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics). COPE finally wrote MDPI with a hypothetical inquiry about retraction, based on Prause’s narrative that the “patients weren’t consented.” MDPI thoroughly re-investigated the consents obtained by the doctors who authored the paper, as well as US Navy policy around obtaining consents.

Please note that the Naval Medical Center San Diego’s IRB does not consider case reports of less than four patients in a single article to be human subject research and does not require the patients to consent to inclusion in an article. Although the researchers were not required to obtain consent, for two cases, verbal and written consents were obtained. In the third case where anonymity was unlikely to be compromised, no written consent was obtained.

Incidentally, at Dr. Prause’s insistence, after the paper was published, the actions of the Navy co-authors with respect to this paper were thoroughly reviewed in an independent Navy investigation. Result? I have a copy of the official report by a Navy lawyer affirming that the co-authors complied with all the IRB’s rules.

Accordingly, MDPI declined to retract the paper. This was explained to COPE, without further objection from COPE. As long as researchers comply with their institution’s IRB consent rules (which was the case here), there is no problem. Yet Prause continues to claim falsely that this issue was unresolved and that “the patients were not consented” and retraction is appropriate.

Prause also complained to COPE that I had an undisclosed conflict of interest. Background: I disclosed my affiliation with The Reward Foundation in the paper from the start. This is not a conflict of interest. In 2018, the journal issued a correction that changed the language describing my affiliation to make it crystal clear (even to Prause) that no conflict of interest existed. It mentions my book, the fact that my proceeds from the book go to The Reward Foundation, and the fact that my affiliation is an unremunerated position. Prause has continued to claim (falsely) that I have been accepting thousands of pounds from the charity. Proof that she is mistaken is documented elsewhere on this page.

Pre-MDPI history: The Yale Journal of Biology & Medicine, and “Janey Wilson”

The story of Prause’s efforts relating to the paper that was ultimately published as Park et al. actually begins before the involvement of MDPI and Behavioral Sciences. An earlier, much shorter version of the paper, with the same authors and author affiliations as it had when later submitted to Behavioral Sciences, was first submitted to Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine (YJBM). It’s worth reviewing certain conduct in connection with this paper when it was under consideration by YJBM.

One of the 2 reviewers of the paper gave it a scathing review with 70+ criticisms, and it was duly rejected. Around the time that YJBM rejected the paper, a “Janey Wilson” began harassing my book publisher, Commonwealth Publishing, and the registered charity to which I donate my share of my book’s proceeds. (I am the author of Your Brain On Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction.) A detailed account of “Janey’s” extensive, groundless harassment is set forth at the bottom of this page.

Note: The submission to YJBM was the only place my affiliation with the charity, The Reward Foundation (TRF), could be found, as it was nowhere public. In other words, apart from the Board of TRF and myself, only the YJBM editor and its two reviewers knew about this affiliation. And yet, “Janey” claimed to have evidence of this affiliation, and used my affiliation to fabricate various allegations of wrongdoing by TRF and me. She even filed a nuisance report with the Scottish Charity Regulator, to no avail.

Later, Dr. Prause submitted her scathing YJBM review with 70+ criticisms to a regulatory board (as part of an effort to have the published paper retracted), thus confirming she had indeed provided the YJBM with an unfavorable review of the paper. (Further evidence that she was a YJBM reviewer turned up during the Behavioral Sciences submission process, as recounted below.) Incidentally, Prause’s actions are a clear violation of COPE’s rules for peer reviewers (Section 5 of the “Guidelines on Good Publication Practice”), which require reviewers to keep confidential anything they learn through the review process.

YJBM was informed of (1) the harassing behavior engaged in by “Janey,” (2) “Janey’s” possible true identity, and (3) the fact that “Janey” may have violated COPE’s rules for peer reviewers by making public confidential information about me.

The paper was promptly accepted by YJBM…and then not published in that journal after all, due to the journal’s decision that it was too late to make the requested revisions and still meet the print deadline for YJBM’s special “Addiction” issue.

***Behavioral Sciences* version of *Park et al.***

A revised and updated version of the paper was then submitted to the journal Behavioral Sciences. After a few rounds of reviews and further restructuring it was accepted as a review of the literature, with case studies. Its final form was quite different from the original YJBM submission.

During this process, the paper was reviewed by no fewer than 6 reviewers. Five passed it, some with some suggested revisions, and one harshly rejected it (guess who?).

Phase one of this process unfolded as follows: The paper was reviewed twice, one of them the harsh rejection, one favorable. Puzzled by the harsh rejection, Behavioral Sciences sent the paper out for review to 2 other reviewers. These reviewers passed the paper. Behavioral Sciences cautiously rejected the paper but allowed the authors to “revise and resubmit.” As part of this process, the authors were given all of the comments by the reviewers (but not their identities). The reviewers’ concerns were thoroughly addressed, point by point (available upon request).

From these comments, it became evident that the “harsh reviewer” of the Behavioral Sciences paper had also reviewed the paper at YJBM. About a third of the 77 points raised did not relate to the Behavioral Sciences submission at all. They referred to material that was only present in the earlier version of the paper, the one that had been submitted to YJBM.

In other words, the harsh reviewer had cut and pasted dozens of criticisms from a review done at another journal (YJBM), which no longer had any relevance to the paper submitted to Behavioral Sciences. This is highly unprofessional. Moreover, Prause eventually revealed herself as the author of these criticisms in her complaint to the regulatory boards (see above), in which she shared her YJBM review of the obsolete version of the paper.

Incidentally, when Prause was asked to review the paper at Behavioral Sciences she apparently did not reveal that she had already reviewed the paper at another journal. It would have been standard reviewer etiquette to reveal the earlier review.

Let me summarize Prause’s multiple objections to our paper. Again, 25 or so of them had nothing whatsoever to do with the Behavioral Sciences paper Prause had been asked by Behavioral Sciences to review. They referred to its first submission at YJBM. This alone should disqualify the entire review from further consideration.

Yet, we carefully combed through each comment looking for any useful insights, and wrote a comprehensive response to all comments for Behavioral Sciences and its editors. Almost all of the remaining 50 critical comments were either scientifically inaccurate, groundless, or were simply false statements. Some were repetitive. Several complained about the presence of quotations from the 3 patients, even though the paper was submitted as “a review with clinical reports.” Some made claims about some of the sources we cited, but the claims were simply not supported by the papers themselves. More than 10 comments insisted that the doctors were not competent to examine their patients for the case studies(!).

In short, while reviewers’ comments always improve any paper to some degree, there really wasn’t the need to “fix” much of the paper itself in light of Prause’s comments. What we did do was strengthen the paper itself with 50 more citations, lest other readers make any of the same errors.

The paper was rewritten and revised. Next, two more reviewers and a supervisory editor reviewed and passed it with various suggestions, including a suggestion to restructure it as a “review with case studies.” Satisfied that all legitimate concerns had been addressed, Behavioral Sciences published the paper.

Retraction efforts

Immediately Prause began demanding that the paper be retracted. Among other efforts, she sent this unprofessional private email message threatening MDPI with bad press if they refused to retract the paper:

“This was filed August 24, 2016. It is now November 12, 2016….. If I do not hear anything within the next two weeks, we will begin by writing the board of that journal with the facts of the case. Multiple retraction watchdogs are already aware and waiting to hear that retraction is occurring, but will instead publish about the failure to retract if necessary.”

Here’s another of her private threats to MDPI on Mon, Nov 14, 2016:

“Behavioral Sciences is the definition of a predatory journal and was recognized on Beall’s predatory journal list until you threatened him to remove it. The first media coverage of this should appear late this week in a national outlet. We gave you every chance to retract this fake paper.”

MDPI disagreed with Prause’s concerns or assessment of the paper, and did not retract the it, pending further investigation of her assertions. The saga continues, and a summary of it appears at the very end of this page.

In any event, after her dubious retraction demands, Prause began defaming MDPI (and its journal Behavioral Sciences) as “predatory” on social media.

**Prause uses social media to harass MDPI, researchers who publish in MDPI journals, and anyone citing Park et al., 2016**

Out of nowhere Prause attacks MDPI in November, 2017, tweeting an article that has nothing to do with MDPI:

MDPI responds:

This causes Prause to go on a Twitter rampage (a few of her tweets below):

MDPI responds to Prause:

CEO of MDPI Franck Vazquez, Ph.D, also responds, as does Prause:

Prause keeps going (MDPI ignores her Twitter tagging):

Has Prause been trying to have MDPI thrown out of PubMed and other indices based on her untruths? Three tweets from August, 2016 – just a few weeks after Park et al., 2016 was published:

Second tweet:

Third tweet:

Another tweet from November, 2017 suggesting Prause is still harassing regulatory agencies about MDPI (https://twitter.com/NicoleRPrause/status/935983476775387136):

From a hit piece containing several false statements by Prause: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/mormontherapist/2016/12/op-ed.html. One article referred to is the review by 7 Navy doctors and me, the other is co-authored by other experts, including Todd Love PsyD – whom Prause has also harassed. Again, MDPI was formally exonerated and removed even before Beall took his list down.

Prause has also tried to interfere with other MDPI journal issues by defaming MDPI:

———-

Here are examples of Prause unprofessionally shaming others for collaborating/publishing with/receiving awards from MDPI:

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———-

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Here Prause plays her favorite card – accusing others of misogyny – without a shred of evidence (just as she has done with me and countless others).

More unfounded accusations of misogyny:

Prause falsely claims the Behavioral Sciences paper she attacked was retracted. This is both defamatory and unprofessional.

The Twitter conversation continues:

“Pornaddiction recovery” tweets two YBOP lists, which causes Prause to tweet a paper by Gary Wilson and Navy doctors. Prause falsely claims that she badgered COPE into suggesting a retraction. It’s all bullshit.

After a lengthy, thorough, time-consuming investigation, MDPI decided not to retract the paper, and circulated a draft editorial criticizing Prause’s unprofessional behavior. As soon as Prause was informed, she initiated an unprofessional, untruthful email exchange with MDPI, copying various bloggers she hoped would take her word for things and publish defamatory articles. Retraction Watch has already complied with her demand.

It’s 2019 and Prause continues to search twitter for unrelated material so she has an excuse to tweet her falsehoods and the bogus Retraction Watch article:

Tweet in response to two lists of studies from YBOP. Neither list contained Park et al., 2016.

January 29, 2019:

On February 16, 2019, a sexual medicine specialist presented a talk at the 21st Congress of the European Society for Sexual Medicine on the Internet’s impact on sexuality. A few slides describing porn-induced sexual problems, citing Park et al., 2016, were tweeted. The tweets caused Nicole Prause, David Ley, Joshua Grubbs and their allies to Twitter-rage on Park et al., 2016.

Several of Prause’s tweets allude to a keynote address by Gary Wilson scheduled for the 2018 ISSM conference. Suddenly and without explanation my talk was mysteriously cancelled. It seems likely that Dr. Prause was behind the cancellation as she is the only one to report (boast about?) the cancellation (repeatedly) on social media. She has a long history of making false reports to organizations and governing bodies.

It’s likely that Prause fed the ISSM conference organizers her usual collection of falsehoods. For example, I suspect she pointed out that I had been reported to the Oregon Board of Psychology (without cause) for “practicing psychology without a license.” I say this because, not long after the conference, I received a letter from the Board exonerating me of doing so (they could not reveal who had filed the malicious complaint).

Dr. Prause also regularly claims to people, including perhaps the conference organizers, that I hold myself out as a professor. This is also untrue. (See this link for details: Ongoing – Prause falsely claims that Wilson has misrepresented his credentials.) She may also have told the organizers her oft-repeated lies that I have a restraining order against me for her safety, and that I have been reported to the FBI. There is no such “no contact” order, and I have already made public a report from the FBI clearing me and confirming Prause as lying. Below are examples of Prause’s February 16, 2019 Twitter-rage related to Park et al., 2016:

Josh Grubbs often supports ally Prause in her cyber-attacks and misrepresentations of the science (or his own studies):

The same day, NatureReviewsUrology (NRU) quoted from the talk, not from our paper. This NRU tweet is the one that drew the most Twitter rage from Pause and her followers attacking our paper, even though our paper did not say the following, and really said nothing about porn addiction. As an aside, Prause’s claims about “falsified data” are untrue and unsupported.

There is no documentation of anything, other than Prause’s endless string of unsupported, defamatory claims, chronicled on these 3 pages:

The truth is, I was most likely uninvited as a keynote speaker by the ISSM due to the behind-the-scenes efforts of Prause and her chum and co-author Jim Pfaus (ISSM member), who used his long-time influence to put the screws to the ISSM committee. As I engaged in none of the accused wrongdoings, Prause clearly fabricated some crazy lies to scare the ISSM off (in keeping with her pattern of behavior documented on this page). A screenshot of Gary Wilson’s scheduled talk at the 2018 ISSM conference held in Portugal:

The committee asked me to speak because: (1) I was on Park et al., 2016, and, (2) I had given a very popular TEDx talk, which touched on porn-induced ED. A screenshot of the formal invitation:

On social media, Prause has stated that she got my talk cancelled because I presented “fake credentials.” For example, Prause’s tweet attacking the ESSM talk, and her claiming that Gary Wilson was uninvited because he “gave false credentials”:

Proof that Prause is lying: in back and forth emails, I reminded the ISSM committee that I did not have a PhD or MD (see below). Still, the committee insisted I present and even paid for my flight to Portugal despite the cancellation (which was not normally done).

While it may be shocking that Prause would engage in such skulduggery, we must keep in mind that this is the same person who reported the 7 medical doctors on Park et al. to their state medical boards (the boards ignored Prause’s targeted harassment). She’s the same person who has falsely stated for 6 years that she has reported Gary Wilson to the FBI. The same person who repeatedly, falsely tweets that Fight The New Drug told its followers that “Dr. Prause should be raped”. The same person who attacked and libeled former UCLA colleague Rory C. Reid PhD. The same person who published an article on a porn site, falsely claiming that Gary Wilson was fired from Southern Oregon University. And on and on it goes.

More tweets attacking the 2019 ESSM talk and Park et al., 2016:

No, COPE did not suggest retraction, even though Prause harassed them for 3 straight years. As soon as COPE understood that all Navy consent rules had been complied with, all talk of retraction ended.

Another falsehood about “addiction being ruled out.” Diagnostic manuals such as the DSM and ICD do not use the word “addiction” to describe any addiction: they use “disorder.” In reality, the latest version of the World Health Organization’s medical diagnostic manual, The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), contains a new diagnosis suitable for diagnosing what is commonly referred to as ‘porn addiction’ or ‘sex addiction.’ It’s called “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” (CSBD).

The first section of this extensive critique expose Prause’s falsehoods surrounding the ICD-11: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?”, by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018). For an accurate account of the ICD-11’s new diagnosis, see this recent article by The Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health (SASH): “Compulsive Sexual Behaviour” has been classified by World Health Organization as Mental Health Disorder.

More trolling of the 2019ESSM talk:

Prause and Ley – as always, loudly defending porn and the porn industry.

For no particular reason, Prause tweets the bogus RetractionWatch article again (3-1-19):

Prause continues, defaming the journal Behavioral Sciences:

Cyber- harassment.

Out of the blue, Prause tweets an attack on MDPI: The following downgraded rating by Norwegian Register was a clerical error, that was later corrected. See the explanation of the MDPI Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:MDPI#Reply_1-APR-2019

Prause knows the truth as several of her fake aliases have edited the MDPI Wikipedia page, inserting her usual set of lies.

A link to the corrected version showing that MDPI was not downgraded. That’s why Prause did not link to the page in her tweet. Screenshot below:

Two days later Prause trolls an old twitter thread were Gary Wilson was correcting Josh Grubbs spin. She tweets the same debunked screenshot:

This marks 4 years of obsessive cyber-harassment and defamation.

April, 2019, David Ley joins Nikky in disparaging Park et al., 2016:

Ley never responds with substance to back up his falsehoods.

April 27, 2019. Trolling a random thread for an excuse to spread usual falsehoods:

As stated there was only one ‘scientist”, Prause. And no, there are not 8 dis-confirming studies.

————

July, 2019 – She tunes up again tweeting, as a Wikipedia likely Prause sockpuppet inserts this same information into the MDPI Wikipedia.

A link to the corrected version showing that MDPI was not downgraded in 2019 (it was clerical error that was eventually corrected). While the 2020 rating may also be an error, the Norwegian register does show “0’ – but it’s “not again”. Notice that Prause is attempting to fool the public by tweeting 2 screenshots of the ratings; one with only 2020, and a screenshot of the 2019 error that was later corrected. Prause’s screenshots:

First showing only 2020

Second showing the uncorrected error:

Prause is lying about MDPI’s 2019 rating, as seen in a screenshot of the recent ratings:

Concurrently with Prause’s deceptive tweet a “new” Wikipedia alias inserts the 2020 rating into the Wikipedia page.

Franck Vazquez, Ph.D. (Chief Scientific Officer of MDPI) calls Prause out for lying:

It appears that the 2020 rating will be adjusted at the beginning of the year.

In response, Prause trolls a 3-month old Frank Vasquez tweet:

————————

August, 2019: Prause and David Ley team up to lie about Park et al., 2016. The paper is posted in a thread were Ley misrepresents the state research, claiming porn addiction doesn’t exist. Immediately Ley responds with defamation – claiming the authors paid to have Park et al., 2016 published:

Gary Wilson corrects Ley’s falsehoods:

Nicole Prause tweets her falsehoods , claiming the 8 authors were “paid to call it an addiction”.

Here she goes again, under the same tweet:

As the CEO of MDPI explained, the actual ratings occur in 2020.

——————

May 24-27, 2018 – Prause creates multiple sock-puppets to edit the MDPI Wikipedia page (and is banned for sock-puppetry & defamation)

In an earlier section we recounted Prause’s harassment of MDPI and its journal Behavioral Sciences. We also chronicled Prause’s long history of employing multiple fake usernames on Wikipedia (which violates its rules) to harass many of the individuals or organizations listed on this page. For example:

Prause’s latest Wikipedia barrage occurred from May 24th to the 27th and involved at least 6 fake usernames (called “sock-puppets” in Wikipedia jargon). The following links take you to all the edits by these particular usernames (“user contributions”):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Suuperon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/NeuroSex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Defender1984
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/23.243.51.114
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/185.51.228.243
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/209.194.90.6

The first four usernames edited the MDPI Wikipedia page, while 3 of the 6 edited the Nofap Wikipedia page, the Sex Addiction page and the Pornography Addiction page. All 3 pages are obsessions of Prause. Even Wikipedia recognized the usernames as belonging to the same person because all the names were banned for “sock-puppetry.” We can be sure it was Prause editing the MDPI page because:

1) The most recent batch of emails between MDPI and Nicole Prause started on May 22, with MDPI notifying all involved that one minor technical correction and an editorial would be forthcoming. This enraged Prause who responded with a string of demands and threats, followed by false accusations and personal attacks.

2) The edits began with user NeuroSex whose only edit before May 24th was an unsuccessful attempt to have other Wikipedia pages link to the Nicole Prause Wikipedia page (February, 2018). From the NeuroSex talk page:

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page Nicole Prause has been reverted.

3) The Wikipedia content revolves around one of Prause’s ongoing obsessions: discrediting and attempting retraction of the paper co-authored by Gary Wilson and US Navy doctors: Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (Park et al., 2016)

4) All the Wikipedia edits mirror concurrent Prause tweets and her emails to MDPI (many of which Wilson has seen).

5) The sock-puppets claimed to possess private MDPI emails – which they wanted to post to the MDPI Wikipedia page. Here’s what NeuroSex said in her comment. (Note: In her concurrent emails to MDPI, Prause cc’d RetractionWatch, apparently to threaten MDPI with public retaliation.):

I have images that verify each of the claims (e.g., email from the publisher, email from the listed editor, etc.). RetractionWatch and other outlets are considering writing reviews of it as well, but I cannot be sure those will materialize. How is best to provide such evidence that verifies the claims? As embedded image? Written elsewhere with images and linked?

Let’s provide a few examples of the “NeuroSex” edits (lies) related to Gary Wilson and to Park et al., 2016 – followed by Wilson’s comments:

NeuroSex edit #1: Gary Wilson was by <ref>{{cite web|title=paid over 9000 pounds|url=https://www.oscr.org.uk/downloadfile.aspx?id=160223&type=5&charityid=SC044948&arid=236451}}</ref> The Reward Foundation to lobby in the US on behalf of anti-pornography state declarations.

Wilson comment: NeuroSex linked to a redacted document, claiming that Gary Wilson was paid 9,000 pounds by Scotish charity The Reward Foundation. Two days earlier Prause falsely claimed to journal publisher MDPI (and others) that, based on the charity’s recent public filing (with a name redacted, as is standard), expense reimbursements paid to a charity officer were in fact paid to Wilson. Prause has not checked her facts, and she is mistaken (again). Wilson has never received any money from The Reward Foundation. Gary Wilson forwarded Prause’s claim to Darryl Mead, Chair of The Reward Foundation. His response is above:

From: Foundation Reward <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2018 8:17 AM
To: gary wilson
Subject: Re: Concerns raised to the attention of COPE by Nicole Prause. Manuscript ID behavsci-133116

Dear Gary:

I have looked into this. Prause said:

On 22/05/2018 20:48, Nicole Prause wrote:
> It appears Wilson did receive money from The Reward Foundation. Attached is The Reward Foundation Annual Report. Per item C6 referring to travel that describes Gary Wilson’s travel totaling 9,027 pounds.
>
> I request that any correction include this financial COI, or time be allotted to properly demonstrate that this was not a financial conflict of interest.
>
> Nicole Prause, Ph.D. Liberos <http://www.liberoscenter.com>

This is a reference to our 2016-17 Annual Accounts. A version of the accounts with identity redaction was published by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator and can be downloaded at https://www.oscr.org.uk/search/charity-details?number=SC044948#results, copy attached. This redaction process is done by OSCR without input from the named charity.

The relevant section with redaction reads as per this screen shot.

The individual referred to in C6 is Darryl Mead, the Chair of the Reward Foundation. I am that person and I made the claim for reimbursement of travel and other costs.

The original document reads as follows:

There is no reference to Gary Wilson in any part of the expenditure for the Reward Foundation because there were no payments to him.

With best wishes,

Darryl Mead

In summary, Prause falsely accused Wilson of receiving funds from The Reward Foundation. She then publicized her lie to MDPI, COPE, RetractionWatch, and others, using the redacted document she submitted (just as NeuroSex lied to Wikipedia in her failed attempt to have her related edits accepted).

Update, 6-7-18: For no reason in particular given that I had not posted and no one cited my work or mentioned me, Prause posted a comment on the ICD-11 about Gary Wilson (must create a username to view comments). In this comment Prause repeats the above lie she stated in an email exchange with MDPI, RetractionWatch, and COPE (and on Wikipedia):

Over the next few days Nicole Prause posted 4 more libelous comments on the ICD-11 attacking Gary Wilson and continuing to falsely assert that he is a paid employee of The Reward Foundation. Darryl Mead, the Chair of The Reward Foundation, eventually responded:

As Expected, Prause responded with several more lies and personal attacks.

Update, 6-18-18: Prause created another Wikipedia username to edit the MDPI wikipedia page – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/185.51.228.245 – and added the following:

In 2016, another MDPI journal, Behavioral Sciences, published a review paper claiming pornography caused erectile dysfunction. Six scientists independently contacted MDPI concerned about fraud and other issues in the article, initiating an independent review by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). COPE recommended retracting the article.^[31] The listed paper editor, Scott Lane, denied having served as the editor. Thus, the paper appears not to have undergone peer-review. Further, two authors had undisclosed conflicts of interest. Gary Wilson’s association with The Reward Foundation did not properly identify it as an activist, anti-pornography organization. Wilson also had posted extensively in social media that the study was “by the US Navy”, although the original paper stated that it did not reflect the views of the US Navy. The other author, Dr. Andrew Doan, was an ophthalmologist who ran an anti-pornography ministry Real Battlefield Ministries, soliciting donations for their speaking.^[32] Further, the Committee on Publication Ethics determined that the cases were not properly, ethically consented for inclusion. MDPI issued a correction for some of these issues,^[33] but has refused to post corrections for others to date as described by Retraction Watch.^[31]

Several of the above lies debunked:

There were not 6 scientists – only Prause contacted MDPI.
My association with The Reward Foundation was fully disclosed from the beginning. As explained earlier, my affiliation with The Reward Foundation (TRF) was always clearly stated, both in the initial Behavioral Sciences article and in the recent correction (the original PubMed version). The purpose of the newly published correction was to counter Dr. Prause’s incessant defamatory claims that I receive money from TRF, and that I make money from my book (my proceeds for which, in fact, go to the charity)
I posted that the paper involved 7 US Navy doctors. The Navy had no problems with my comments.
Dr. Andrew Doan is both an MD and a PhD (Neuroscience – Johns Hopkins), is the former of Head of “Addictions and Resilience Research” in the Department of Mental Health at the Naval Medical Center. (He has since been transferred and promoted, and has different responsibilities.) Doan has authored multiple papers on behavioral addiction/pathologies relating to technologies (in some cases with a co-author of the paper you have written about here). In short, he is a qualified senior author. Those other papers can be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=doan+klam. His non-profit, Real Battlefield Ministries (RBM), did not discuss pornography prior to publication of the paper. Even if RBM had presented on pornography it would not have been a conflict of interest.
As described above, COPE’s decision was hypothetical and did not apply to our paper as the US Navy doctors more than complied with their Naval Medical Center – San Diego’s IRB consent rules. The Naval Medical Center San Diego’s IRB policy does not consider case reports of less than four patients in a single article to be human subject research and does not require the patients to consent to inclusion in an article. Although the researchers were not required to obtain consent, for two cases, verbal and written consents were obtained. In the third case where anonymity was unlikely to be compromised, no written consent was obtained. Incidentally, at Dr. Prause’s insistence, after the paper was published, the actions of the Navy co-authors with respect to this paper were thoroughly reviewed in an independent Navy investigation. Result? I have a copy of the official report by a Navy lawyer affirming that the co-authors complied with all the IRB’s rules.

In a sworn affidavit filed in Federal Court, Gary Wilson stated that Prause (1) used a false identity (Janey Wilson) to defame and harass Wilson, his publisher, and The Reward Foundation, (2) lied in emails, on Wikipedia, and in public comments when stating that Gary Wilson received financial compensation from The Reward Foundation

Prause’s lies and harassment has finally caught up with her.

As thoroughly explained in the previous section Gary Wilson donates the proceeds of his book to The Reward Foundation. Wilson accepts no money, and has never received a dime for any of his efforts. YBOP accepts no ads and Wilson has accepted no fees for speaking. As documented in these sections, Prause has constructed a libelous fairy tale that Wilson is being paid by the same charity he donates his book proceeds to:

In fact, this is not true. The above two sections are addressed in Gary Wilson’s sworn affidavit, which is part of the Dr. Hilton’s defamation lawsuit filed against Dr. Prause.

In a sworn affidavit filed in Federal Court, Gary Wilson stated (under penalty of perjury) that (1) Nicole Prause used a false identity (Janey Wilson) to defame and harass Wilson, his publisher, and The Reward Foundation, (2) that Prause lied in emails, on Wikipedia and in public comments when stating that Gary Wilson received financial compensation from The Reward Foundation.

See full affidavit: July, 2019: Gary Wilson affidavit: Donald Hilton defamation lawsuit against Nicole R Prause & Liberos LLC. Relevant excerpts from Gary Wilson’s sworn affidavit, which is part of the Dr. Hilton’s defamation lawsuit filed against Dr. Prause.

Put simply, Nicole Prause has engaged in provable defamation against Wilson and Dr. Hilton. In addition to Wilson, 8 other victims of Prause have filed sworn affidavits with the court describing defamation, harassment, and malicious reporting to governing bodies and agencies (just the tip of the Prause iceberg).

**Prause lies about Gary Wilson in emails to MDPI, David Ley, Neuro Skeptic, Adam Marcus of Retraction Watch, and COPE (May, 2018)**

In the May, 2018 email exchanges with MDPI & COPE, Prause copied bloggers who are positioned to damage the reputations of MDPI in the media, if they choose. Ley blogs on Psychology Today and has often served as the Mouth of Prause. Neuro Skeptic has a popular blog that disparages legitimate (and sometimes dubious) research. Adam Marcus writes for Retraction Watch. Prause also copied Iratxe Puebla, who works for COPE, an organization that addresses publication ethics. Already, Adam Marcus of Retraction Watch has taken the bait without adequate investigation.

In her defamatory articles, tweets, and Quora posts Prause has knowingly and falsely stated that I (Gary Wilson) claimed to be “professor in biology” “doctor” or a “neuroscientist.” I was an Adjunct Instructor at Southern Oregon University and taught human anatomy, physiology & pathology at other venues. Although careless journalists and websites have assigned me an array of titles in error over the years (including a now-defunct page on a website that pirates many TEDx talks and describes the speakers carelessly without contacting them) I have always stated that I taught anatomy & physiology. I have never said I had a PhD or was a professor. Prause told the same lie to the email recipients:

PRAUSE EMAIL #1 (5-1-2018)

On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 10:11 PM, Nicole Prause >

Additionally, Mr. Wilson is now using this publication to claim to be a doctor online to unsuspecting patients (attached).

NP

Nicole Prause, Ph.D. Liberos LLC: www.liberoscenter.com

Below is the screenshot Prause uses to “prove” that I have misrepresented my credentials (again, this Gary Wilson page no longer exists). Note: Until Prause produced her “proof,” I had never seen this site and had never communicated with its hosts, never uploaded the page in question and never removed it. Thus I certainly never provided a bio, or claims of “professorship.”

I taught at Southern Oregon University on two occasions. I also taught anatomy, physiology and pathology at a number of other schools over a period of two decades, and was certified to teach these subjects by the education departments of both Oregon and California. I do not seek speaking engagements and have never accepted fees for speaking. Moreover, YBOP accepts no ads, and the proceeds from my book go to a registered charity.

On the “about” page the Keynotes.org website said that it is not an agency and that anyone could upload a video and speaker bio: Keynotes.org is not an agency, but rather, a media site…. Keynotes.org is crowdsourced and fueled by TrendHunter.com, the world’s largest trend spotting website. Again, I’ve never uploaded anything to the site, and I have no idea who uploaded this page (or ordered it removed).

Thus, it is even possible that Prause uploaded this page, with my TEDx talk and a purposely inaccurate bio, in order to fabricate her desired “proof” of misrepresentation – and then removed it. After 5 years of continuous harassment and cyber-stalking, faked documents, libelous assertions, hundreds of tweets, and dozens of usernames with hundreds of comments, nothing would surprise us.

The above screen-shot was part of a larger article by Prause where she falsely claimed that I was fired from Southern Oregon University: March, 2018 – Libelous Claim that Gary Wilson Was Fired. In her article, which was posted on a pornography-related site and Quora, Prause published redacted versions of my Southern Oregon University employment records, falsely stating I was fired and had never before taught at SOU. As with her claims surrounding The Reward Foundation, Prause lied about the true content of what’s in the redacted documents. By the way, David Ley also tweeted the Prause article several times, saying I was fired from SOU (screenshots on the page).

In the end, Prause was permanently banned from Quora for harassing me and the porn-blog site removed Prause’s libelous article.

——————

In an email to MDPI, COPE, Ley, Neuroskeptic, Adam Marcus of Retraction Watch and others Prause falsely claimed that I had received money from The Reward Foundation.

PRAUSE EMAIL #2 (5-22-2018)

Liberos <http://www.liberoscenter.com> On 22/05/2018 20:48, Nicole Prause wrote:

It appears Wilson did receive money from The Reward Foundation. Attached is The Reward Foundation Annual Report. Per item C6 referring to travel that describes Gary Wilson’s travel totaling 9,027 pounds.

I request that any correction include this financial COI, or time be allotted to properly demonstrate that this was not a financial conflict of interest.

Nicole Prause, Ph.D. Liberos

Prause has not checked her facts, and she is mistaken. I have never received any money from The Reward Foundation. I forwarded Prause’s claim to Darryl Mead, Chair of The Reward Foundation, who debunked Prause’s claims: See Above For Documentation.

——————

PRAUSE EMAIL #3 (5-22-2018)

In many of her emails to MDPI (and others), Prause mentioned her “77 criticisms” and falsely claimed that they had not been addressed. This was just the latest:

On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 9:36 AM, Nicole Prause>

I provided a 77 point critique prior to publication that was, true to the predatory journal lists MDPI appeared on, was ignored.

Nicole Prause, Ph.D. Liberos LLC: www.liberoscenter.com

This means Prause was one of two reviewers of the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine submission – and thus “Janey Wilson.” As explained, many of the 77 so-called problems were carelessly copied and pasted from Prause’s review of the YJBM submission; 25 of them had nothing to do with the Behavioral Sciences submission. In other words, the only reviewer to condemn the paper had cut and pasted dozens of criticisms from a review done at another journal (YJBM), which no longer had any relevance to the paper submitted to Behavioral Sciences. This is highly unprofessional.

Even apart from that glaring irregularity, few of the 77 problems could be considered legitimate. Yet, we carefully combed through each comment mining for useful insights, and wrote a comprehensive response to all comments for Behavioral Sciences and its editors. Almost all of the remaining 50 critical comments were either scientifically inaccurate, groundless, or were simply false statements. Some were repetitive. The authors provided MDPI with a point by point response to each so-called problem.

The exploits of “Janey Wilson” (Prause)

See copies of actual emails below this summary.

Shortly after my book was published in 2015, Prause wrote to my publisher for information, using an alias (“Janey Wilson”). Presuming “Janey” was legitimate, Dan Hind of Commonwealth Publishing advised her that my share of book proceeds went to The Reward Foundation, a registered Scottish charity.

“Janey Wilson” immediately informed the charity that Wilson was “falsely holding himself out publicly as being affiliated with The Reward Foundation,” and saying she had proof. The only way she could have “proof” of this not-yet-public affiliation was if she had seen the academic paper I had co-authored. It’s a violation of publication ethics rules to disclose or misuse information learned through the review process.

“Janey’s” information failed to elicit the desired outrage from The Reward Foundation (as I was indeed affiliated with the Foundation, serving in an unremunerated position as “Honorary Science Officer”). Undaunted, “Janey” then reported The Reward Foundation to the Scottish Charity Regulator for imagined financial and other alleged misdeeds.

The charity was so new that no financial filings had been required yet, so it was not even legally possible for the Reward Foundation to have committed the financial reporting transgressions that “Janey” alleged.

Around the time that “Janey” (1) wrote The Reward Foundation to tell it about my “false” claim of affiliation, and (2) reported the charity itself to the Scottish Charity Regulator, “Janey” also wrote the Edinburgh organization where the charity is domiciled with false claims about me and The Reward Foundation (see below). The Edinburgh entity is called “The Melting Pot.” It’s an umbrella organization that hosts various small enterprises. “Janey” apparently simultaneously posted about this on the redddit/pornfree porn recovery forum – Gary Wilson is profiting from YBOP:

The above is hardly surprising as Prause has employed many sock-puppet identities to post, primarily on porn-recovery forums, about Wilson. For exmaple hundreds of comments by Prause’s apparent avatars can be found at the links below. And, they are but an incomplete collection:

Another reddit/pornfree post that appeared about the same time (Prause deleted her sockpuppet’s username, as she often did after posting):

Janey/Prause made the irrational claim that I was “paying off” The Reward Foundation for a TEDx talk opportunity that occurred years earlier, in 2012. It had been arranged in 2011, years before the charity was conceived of or organized. Obviously, no such subterfuge was needed. I had the right to give my book proceeds to anyone at any point, or put them in my pocket. I chose the Reward Foundation because I respect its balanced, educational objective.

Neither organization (the Scottish Charity Regulator nor the Melting Pot) responded to “Janey,” as she offered no evidence, and wouldn’t identify herself, claiming “whistleblower status” (although, of course, she wasn’t an employee of either, and was not under threat). Had the charity not had a strong, respected relationship with the Melting Pot, and had it already been required to file financial statements with the Scottish Charity Regulator, “Janey’s” malicious claims might have done a lot of damage to the charity’s reputation and initiated a time-consuming, costly audit, etc.

In late 2016, Prause outed herself as “Janey Wilson” when she demanded (repeatedly and unsuccessfully) that Dan Hind of Commonwealth Publishing confirm my connection with the Scottish charity called The Reward Foundation to Prause in writing. Copying both MDPI (the ultimate publisher of the paper discussed earlier) and a publication ethics organization (COPE), Prause told Commonwealth’s Hind that he had already written her to this effect.

However, the only correspondence Hind had with anyone on the subject of Wilson and The Reward Foundation was with “Janey,” and he has stated this in writing (below). Thus, Prause has now outed herself as the former “Janey.” When Hind didn’t respond to Prause’s repeated demands, she then demanded the information via Commonwealth’s web designer – accompanied, as usual, by defamation and threat:

You may wish to encourage the site content owner that you designed to clarify that his author was caught claiming to “donate” proceeds from a book that actually went into his own pocket. Mr. Hind has failed to respond to inquiries with the Committee on Publication Ethics. I assume you would not want your name entangled in fraud like this in any way.

Prause seems to believe that the fact that my share of book proceeds goes to a Scottish registered charity, which I listed as my affiliation for purposes of two academic papers published in 2016, means that I am somehow pocketing the proceeds (from my own book) – and thus have a conflict of interest, which is purportedly grounds, in her mind, for my paper being retracted. Does any of this make any sense in light of the facts?

In fact, I am not on the Board of the charity, and certainly have no say over the book proceeds it receives as a consequence of my irrevocable donation. Incidentally, my affiliation is now public, as it is mentioned in both papers I published in 2016. In short, there is nothing hidden or improper going on, and no conflict of interest whatsoever – despite Prause’s claims behind the scenes and publicly.

Within days of Nicole Prause (as herself) emailing MDPI to demand that they retract Park et al., 2016, Twitter account “pornhelps” attacked Mary Sharpe of The Reward Foundation. In the tweet @pornhelps all but admits she is Prause:

Prause, a Kinsey grad and former academic, calls herself a neuroscientist, and appears to have started college about 15 years earlier. Not long after this revealing tweet “pornhelps” deleted both its Twitter account and website (pornhelps.com) – as it became apparent to others that Prause often tweeted with this account and helped with the website.

The following sections of Prause page provide examples of Prause and “pornhelps” simultaneously attacking and defaming some of Prause’s favorites targets (men who run porn-recovery forums, porn addiction researchers, TIME editor Belinda Luscombe, who wrote a cover story Prause didn’t approve of):

Update: In May, 2018 Prause falsely claimed to journal publisher MDPI (and others) that, based on the charity’s recent public filing (with a name redacted, as is standard), expense reimbursements paid to a charity officer were in fact paid to me. I forwarded Prause’s claim to Darryl Mead, Chair of The Reward Foundation, who debunked Prause’s claims: See Above For Documentation.

———-

A few of the other emails referred in the “Janey” story:

2015

[“Janey’s” exchange with my publisher]

From: Daniel Hind <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 10:15 AM
Subject: RE: Concern about for-profit posing as non-profit at Melting Pot

I was contacted by someone called Janey Wilson on Saturday. The full exchange between us is cut and pasted below. As you can see I told her that the author’s revenues are paid to the Reward Foundation.

I should have checked with you, I guess. I am sorry if I have created unnecessary complications for anyone.

Dan

——————————–

Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2015 16:59:12 +0000
Subject: Fwd: Wilson text
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Dan Hind <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 9:33 AM
Subject: Re: Wilson text
To: Janey Wilson <[email protected]>
The Charity Commission is a register of charities in England and Wales. The Reward Foundation is registered in Scotland.

Here is its listing on the Scottish Charity Register –

https://www.oscr.org.uk//charities/search-scottish-charity-register/charity-details?charitynumber=sc044948

In the UK many responsibilities are devolved to the Scottish Parliament, including the registration of charities, it seems.

I hope this clears up any confusion,

Yours sincerely,

Dan Hind

—–

On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 7:15 AM, Janey Wilson <[email protected]> wrote:

Dear Dan Hind,

Thank you for the information. I would not normally check, but I’m glad I did. That organization actually is not registered in the UK:
http://apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfCharities/registerhomepage.aspx

This is the government registry, so I am not sure where else it could be. You might want to alert your author that they might be contributing to a scam. I cannot buy based on this, and I don’t think anyone else should either.

J

——-

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 4:42 AM, Dan Hind <[email protected]> wrote:

Dear Ms Wilson,

The author’s income supports the Reward Foundation, a registered charity in the UK.

http://www.rewardfoundation.org/

Yours sincerely,

Dan Hind

—-

On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 6:17 AM, Janey Wilson <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi,

I saw the proceeds from this book are all going to research. Which organization is benefiting? I would like to see if I can list it on my taxes as a deduction.

———

[“Janey’s” exchange with The Melting Pot]

On 25 March 2015 at 12:08 Mohammad Abushaaban <[email protected]> wrote:

Mary – hope you are keeping strong.

I’ve received this strangely out of the blue email from a Janey Wilson…

Do you know this person?

Give it a read and let me know your thoughts.

Thanks

Mo.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Janey Wilson <[email protected]>
Date: 25 March 2015 at 04:09
Subject: Concern about for-profit posing as non-profit at Melting Pot
To: [email protected]

Dear Mohammad Abushaaban,

I write out of concern for The Reward Foundation housed at The Melting Pot, which is posing as a non-profit. In 2012, Mary Sharpe was responsible for selecting TEDX speakers in Glasgow. She made the extremely odd decision to have a massage therapist with no neuroscience background, Gary Wilson, rave about the neuroscience of “porn addiction”. The talk was so poor it is currently under investigation for its pseudoscience by TEDX. Now, Mr. Wilson appears to be paying Mary Sharpe for this opportunity.

Specifically, he is selling a book and all the proceeds of the book are said to be going to The Reward Foundation for “research”:

www.therewardfoundation.org
Yet, Mary Sharpe is not a researcher, has no neuroscience background, and the charity lists no way for any real scientist to apply for these funds. The money appears to be going directly in to her pocket, likely in exchange for her earlier TEDX favor. The charity further has chosen not to openly provide links to their financials.

I have filed this complaint with the Scottish Charity Register as well. I suggest you consider investigating how else Ms. Sharpe might be using pseudo-science to fleece concerned individuals. That hardly seems in line with any of the aspirational goals listed on the Melting Pot website.

J

—

Mohammad Abushaaban, Business Coordinator

Dynamic resources for social change makers
5 Rose Street, Edinburgh, EH2 2PR
Tel: +44 (0)131 243 2626/3

www.TheMeltingPotEdinburgh.org.uk
Company No: SC291663

From: Janey Wilson <[email protected]>
Date: 22 April 2015 at 17:21
Subject: Re: Concern about for-profit posing as non-profit at Melting Pot
To: Mohammad Abushaaban <[email protected]>

I now have documentation that Gary Wilson himself is claiming to be a member of the Reward Foundation. While he is not listed on the new website page (http://www.rewardfoundation.org/who-we-are.html), this represents a rather worse transgression. He claims to “donate” the proceeds of his book to research, which is now going to a charity that has no research plans and of which he is a part. Mary Sharpe may not even be aware he is making these claims, I am not sure, but he has now made them publicly.

——–

As explained above, an earlier and substantially different version of the paper I co-authored with 7 US Navy doctors, Park, et al., was first submitted in March, 2015 to the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine as part of its “Addiction” issue. This paper was the only place my affiliation with the Reward Foundation could be found at the time of “Janey’s” exchanges, as it was nowhere public. So “Janey” had to have seen the paper sent to YJBM for review.

——-

2016

Prause contacting my publisher, Dan Hind, eventually outing herself as “Janey Wilson”

From: Nikky [email protected]

Sent: 03 November 2016 21:27
To: Dan Hind; [email protected]
Cc: Dr. Franck Vazquez | CEO | MDPI; Iratxe Puebla; [email protected]; Martyn Rittman; Dr. Shu-Kun Lin; Jim Pfaus
Subject: Re: Book financial beneficiary

Mr. Hind,

We already have a previous email from you verifying that Gary Wilson has sent all the proceeds of his book to the organization he actually is employed by, The Reward Foundation. You may choose not to verify this information for the Committee on Publication Ethics, but the previous email can be supplied to them as well.

Your author failed to disclose his financial conflict of interest in numerous publications now to profit himself while claiming to “donate” the proceeds to the public (and to you). This already is public knowledge that you either can be on record to help expose or profiteer, as you please.

NP

Nicole Prause, Ph.D.

Research: www.span-lab.com

Liberos LLC: www.liberoscenter.com

323.919.0783

———————-

Email to Dan Hind’s web designer:

From: Jamie Kendall <[email protected]>
Sent: 04 November 2016 11:32
To: Daniel Hind
Subject: Fwd: Book financial beneficiary

Hi Dan,

Told them I’d forward whatever this is on to you.

Jamie

Jamie Kendall MA (RCA)

www.jamiekendall.com

Begin forwarded message:

From: Nikky <[email protected]>

Subject: Fwd: Book financial beneficiary

Date: 3 November 2016 at 21:31:24 GMT

To: [email protected]

Dear Mr. Kendall,

You may wish to encourage the site content owner that you designed to clarify that his author was caught claiming to “donate” proceeds from a book that actually went into his own pocket. Mr. Hind has failed to respond to inquiries with the Committee on Publication Ethics. I assume you would not want your name entangled in fraud like this in any way.

NP
Nicole Prause, Ph.D.
Research: www.span-lab.com
Liberos LLC: www.liberoscenter.com
323.919.0783

Summary:

March, 2015 an earlier version of Park et al. was submitted to the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. The submission to YJBM was the only place my affiliation with the charity The Reward Foundation (TRF), could be found, as it was nowhere public.
Between March 21^stand April 22^nd of 2015, “Janey Wilson” sent several emails to Dan Hind of Commonwealth Publishing, Mohammad Abushaaban of The Melting Pot Edinburgh (which houses The Reward Foundation), and the Scottish Charity Regulator. All contain unsupported claims of wrongdoing. It seemed likely from the content and distinctive style that “Janey” was actually Nicole Prause – which was later confirmed.
The YJBM was informed of the harassing behavior (engaged in by one of their two reviewers posing at “Janey Wilson”). When it was suggested that Dr. Prause might be behind these bizarre emails and the paper’s initial rejection, the paper was promptly accepted…and then not published after all, based on a claim that it was too late to meet the print deadline for the YJBM’s “Addiction” issue.
An updated version of the paper was then submitted to the journal Behavioral Sciences. Four individuals reviewed the paper with 3 accepting and Prause (as we later discovered) rejecting it with her list of “77 problems”.
Many of her 77 so-called problems were carelessly copied and pasted from Prause’s review of the YJBM submission, as 25 of them had nothing to do with the Behavioral Sciences paper.
Few of the 77 problems could be considered legitimate. The authors provided MDPI with a point by point response to each so-called problem.
Park et al. was revised and re-reviewed by two more reviewers.
As soon as Park et al., 2016 was published, Prause began her campaign to have the paper retracted, sending countless of messages to MDPI, COPE, the Navy, the doctors’ medical boards, and my publisher (and possibly PubMed, the FTC and who knows where else).
MDPI offered Prause the opportunity to publish a formal comment on Park et al, in Behavioral Sciences. Prause declined. If the paper were truly inadequate, it would be a simple matter to discredit it with a formal comment.
In late 2016, Prause outed herself as “Janey Wilson” when she demanded (repeatedly and unsuccessfully) that my publisher confirm my connection with the Scottish charity called The Reward Foundation to Prause in writing. Copying both MDPI (the ultimate publisher of the paper mentioned above) and a publication ethics organization, Prause told Commonwealth’s Dan Hind that he had already written her to this effect. Yet he had only corresponded about the connection with “Janey.”
While vicious in her attacks, and often lying about me and the paper’s content, Prause ultimately came up with only 2 issues that COPE would consider (1) Gary Wilson’s unremunerated position with The Reward Foundation, (2) Consents by the three individuals featured in the case studies.
Although I very much sympathize with COPE, and can easily envision the battering their Committee must have endured, in my view, neither is valid reason for retraction or even for a correction (although such superficial corrections are no big deal), as
1. My unremunerated connection with The Reward Foundation was plainly not a conflict of interest and my affiliation had already been revealed in the original paper, and
2. The Navy followed its guidelines for consent (which actually don’t require any written consents for case studies with fewer than 4 patients). Even so, in an abundance of physician-ly caution, full written prior consent was obtained for two individuals. For the third, not enough details to require consent were deemed given in the paper. A US Navy investigation confirmed that the doctors complied with all the IRB’s rules.

Even if some might disagree with me, it is evident that neither of these points involves “fraud” or misconduct, as Prause continues to insist.

What’s going on here?

For years both Prause and Ley have teamed up to defame, harass and cyber-stalk individuals and organizations that have warned of porn’s harms or published research reporting porn’s harms. Recently, Prause and Ley escalated their unethical and often illegal activities in support of a porn industry agenda. For example, 0n January 29, 2019, Prause filed a trademark application to obtain YOURBRAINONPORN and YOURBRAINONPORN.COM. In April 2019, a group headed by Prause and Ley engaged in unlawful trademark infringement of YourBrainOnPorn.com by creating “RealYourBrainOnPorn.com.

To advertise their illegitimate site, the self-proclaimed “experts” created a Twitter account (https://twitter.com/BrainOnPorn), YouTube channel, Facebook page, and published a press release. In a further attempt to confuse the public, the press release falsely claims to originate from Gary Wilson’s home town – Ashland, Oregon (none of the “experts” live in Oregon, let alone Ashland). Judge for yourself whether the “experts” further the interests of the porn industry or the authentic search scientific truth by perusing this collection of RealYBOP tweets. Written in Dr. Prause’s distinctive misleading style, the tweets extol the benefits of porn, misrepresent the current state of the research, and troll individuals and organizations Prause has previously harassed.

In addition, the “experts” created a Reddit account (user/sciencearousal) to spam porn recovery forums reddit/pornfree and reddit/NoFap with promotional drivel, claiming porn use is harmless and disparaging YourBrainOnPorn.com and Gary Wilson. It’s important to note that Prause, a former academic, has a long documented history of employing numerous aliases to post on porn recovery forums. (YBOP is now engaged in legal action with Prause and her pro-porn allies).

In July of 2019, David Ley and two of the better known RealYBOP “experts” (Justin Lehmiller and Chris Donaghue) began openly collaborating with the porn industry. All 3 are on the advisory board of the fledgling Sexual Health Alliance (SHA). In a blatant financial conflict of interest, David Ley and the SHA are being compensated by porn industry giant xHamster to promote its websites (i.e. StripChat) and to convince users that porn addiction and sex addiction are myths!

More on Nicole Prause

In 2013 former UCLA researcher Nicole Prause began openly harassing, libeling and cyberstalking Gary Wilson. (Prause has not been employed by an academic institution since January, 2015.) Within a short time she also began targeting others, including researchers, medical doctors, therapists, psychologists, a former UCLA colleague, a UK charity, men in recovery, a TIME magazine editor, several professors, IITAP, SASH, Fight The New Drug, Exodus Cry, NoFap.com, RebootNation, YourBrainRebalanced, the academic journal Behavioral Sciences, its parent company MDPI, US Navy medical doctors, the head of the academic journal CUREUS, and the journal Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity.

While spending her waking hours harassing others, Prause cleverly cultivated – with zero verifiable evidence – a myth that she was “the victim” of most anyone who dared to disagree with her irresponsible assertions surrounding porn’s effects or the current state of porn research. To counter the ongoing harassment and false claims, YBOP was compelled to document some of Prause’s activities. Consider the following pages. (Additional incidents have occurred that we are not at liberty to divulge – as Prause’s victims fear further retribution.)

In the beginning Prause employed dozens of fake usernames to post on porn recovery forums, Quora, Wikipedia, and in the comment sections under articles. Prause rarely used her real name or her own social media accounts. That all changed after UCLA chose not to renew Prause’s contract (around January, 2015).

Freed from any oversight and now self-employed, Prause added two media managers/promoters from Media 2×3 to her company’s tiny stable of “Collaborators.” (erstwhile Media 2×3 president Jess Ponce describes himself as a Hollywood media coach and personal branding expert.) Their job is to place articles in the press featuring Prause, and find her speaking engagements in pro-porn and mainstream venues. Odd tactics for a supposedly impartial scientist.

Prause began to put her name to falsehoods, openly cyber-harassing multiple individuals and organizations on social media and elsewhere. Since Prause’s primary target was Gary Wilson (hundreds of social media comments along with behind the scenes email campaigns), it became necessary to monitor and document Prause’s tweets and posts. This was done for her victims’ protection, and crucial for any future legal actions.

It soon became apparent that Prause’s tweets and comments were rarely about sex research, neuroscience, or any other subject related to her claimed expertise. In fact, the vast majority of Prause’s posts could be divided into two overlapping categories:

Indirect support of the porn industry: Defamatory & ad hominem comments targeting individuals and organizations that she labeled as “anti-porn activists” (often claiming to be a victim of these individuals and organizations). Documented here: page 1, page 2.
Direct support of the porn industry:
- especially the FSC (Free Speech Coalition), AVN (Adult Video News), porn producers, performers, and their agendas
- countless misrepresentations of the state of pornography research and attacks on porn studies or porn researchers.

The following pages contain a sampling of tweets and comments related to #2 – her vigorous support of the porn industry and its chosen positions. YBOP is of the view that Prause’s unilateral aggression has escalated to such frequent and reckless defamation (falsely accusing her many victims of “physically stalking her,” “misogyny,” “encouraging others to rape her,” and “being neo-Nazis”), that we are compelled to examine her possible motives. This material is divided into 4 main sections:

Please note: There is unequivocal evidence that the porn industry funded the sexology profession for decades. Sexology’s agenda still appears to serve the porn industry. Thus, the evidence on this page should be viewed in a larger context. See Hugh Hefner, the International Academy of Sex Research, and Its Founding President to understand how porn-industry friendly sexologists influenced the Kinsey Institute. Prause is a Kinsey grad.

More on David Ley

David Ley’s financial conflicts of interest (COI) seem evident.

COI #1: In a blatant financial conflict of interest, David Ley is being compensated by porn industry giant X-hamster to promote their websites and to convince users that porn addiction and sex addiction are myths! Specifically, David Ley and the newly formed Sexual Health Alliance (SHA) have partnered with a X-Hamster website (Strip-Chat). See “Stripchat aligns with Sexual Health Alliance to stroke your anxious porn-centric brain“:

The fledgling Sexual health Alliance (SHA) advisory board includes David Ley and two other RealYourBrainOnPorn.com “experts” (Justin Lehmiller & Chris Donahue). RealYBOP is a group of openly pro-porn, self-proclaimed “experts” headed by Nicole Prause. This is also the group currently engaged in illegal trademark infringement and squatting directed toward the legitimate YBOP. Put simply, those trying to silence YBOP are also being paid by the porn industry to promote its/their businesses, and assure users that porn and cam sites cause no problems (note: Nicole Prause has close, public ties to the porn industry as documented on this page).

In this article, Ley dismisses his compensated promotion of the porn industry:

Granted, sexual health professionals partnering directly with commercial porn platforms face some potential downsides, particularly for those who’d like to present themselves as completely unbiased. “I fully anticipate [anti-porn advocates] to all scream, ‘Oh, look, see, David Ley is working for porn,’” says Ley, whose name is routinely mentioned with disdain in anti-masturbation communities like NoFap.

But even if his work with Stripchat will undoubtedly provide fodder to anyone eager to write him off as biased or in the pocket of the porn lobby, for Ley, that tradeoff is worth it. “If we want to help [anxious porn consumers], we have to go to them,” he says. “And this is how we do that.”

Biased? Ley reminds us of the infamous tobacco doctors, and the Sexual health Alliance remind us of the Tobacco Institute.

COI #2 David Ley is being paid to debunk porn and sex addiction. At the end of this Psychology Today blog post Ley states:

“Disclosure: David Ley has provided testimony in legal cases involving claims of sex addiction.”

In 2019 David Ley’s new website offered his well-compensated “debunking” services:

David J. Ley, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and AASECT-certified supervisor of sex therapy, based in Albuquerque, NM. He has provided expert witness and forensic testimony in a number of cases around the United States. Dr. Ley is regarded as an expert in debunking claims of sexual addiction, and has been certified as an expert witness on this topic. He has testified in state and federal courts.

Contact him to obtain his fee schedule and arrange an appointment to discuss your interest.

COI #3: Ley makes money selling two books that deny sex and porn addiction (“The Myth of Sex Addiction,” 2012 and “Ethical Porn for Dicks,” 2016). Pornhub (which is owned by porn giant MindGeek) is one of the five back-cover endorsements listed for Ley’s 2016 book about porn:

Note: PornHub was the second Twitter account to retweet RealYBOP’s initial tweet announcing its “expert” website, suggesting a coordinated effort between PornHub and the RealYBOP experts. Wow!

COI #4: Finally, David Ley makes money via CEU seminars, where he promotes the addiction-deniers’ ideology set forth in his two books (which recklessly(?) ignores dozens of studies and the significance of the new Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder diagnosis in the World Health Organization’s diagnostic manual). Ley is compensated for his many talks featuring his biased views of porn. In this 2019 presentation Ley appears to support and promote adolescent porn use: Developing Positive Sexuality and Responsible Pornography Use in Adolescents.

June, 2019: MDPI (the parent company of the journal Behavioral Sciences) publishes an editorial about Nicole Prause’s unethical behavior surrounding her unsuccessful attempts to have Park et al., 2016 retracted

The MDPI comment on Prause’s behavior (which has been documented above):

21 June 2019

Comment on Park, B., et al. Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports Behav. Sci. 2016, 6, 17

In August 2017, Behavioral Sciences published the article [1], which includes a case study of three individuals in the US Navy. The paper underwent our usual editorial process, including peer review, and was accepted for publication. Since then, we have received a number of complaints from a single individual claiming that the paper is seriously flawed and calling for withdrawal of the article. In this comment we wish to reiterate that the correct procedures were followed in the handling of the manuscript and to publicly counter some of the claims. The Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE) considered some of these issues and we are grateful for their advice and cooperation. We also wish to thank the authors for their cooperation.

One serious claim leveled against the paper was that the required consent was not sought from the three individuals featured in the case studies presented. According to the instructions for authors posted on the Behavioral Sciences website, informed consent should be obtained for case studies where there is any risk that individuals could be identified. When asked to confirm this point, the authors verified that consent had been obtained for two individuals and that for the third not enough details were shared in the paper to require consent. The editorial office has seen redacted copies of the consent form used and is satisfied with the authors’ explanation.

Another issue was that the academic editor of the article was not aware that he was making a final decision to accept article [1] for publication. Behavioral Sciences uses a standard template to invite editors to make the final decision to accept manuscripts, which was also done in this case. Since the complaint, the original academic editor has informed us that he was not aware that this was his role for the paper. We re-evaluated the peer review process with the (now former) Editor-in-Chief John Coverdale and made the decision that the manuscript should not be removed for this reason. In the published Correction [2], the academic editor information has been amended.

Numerous claims about conflicts of interest of the authors were made in relation to [1]. Only one non-financial conflict of interest was found to be substantiated and the paper has been updated [2].

Consequently, MDPI has updated its instructions for authors to provide more clarity about informed consent issues and to better guide authors in this area. Our requirements and policies have not changed and we continue to follow the guidelines provided by COPE.

We believe that the dispute surrounding this paper arose from a difference of opinion in terms of the treatment of individuals using high levels of pornography, and was not motivated by genuine concerns about the editorial work around the paper [3]. Our view is that the correct way to deal with such a dispute is by presenting arguments and counter-arguments in a peer-reviewed, scientific context where all conflicts of interest from both parties are properly disclosed. Personal criticism does not have a place in this context and attempts to shut down those with opposing views by removing their work from the literature is not the correct approach. We know that the majority of authors and readers approach research in a constructive and engaged way and we wish to advocate this approach for the benefit of the research community as a whole.

References

[1] Park, B.Y.; Wilson, G.; Berger, J.; Christman, M.; Reina, B.; Bishop, F.; Klam, W.P.; Doan, A.P. Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports. Sci. 2016, 6, 17.

[2] Park, B.Y. et al.; Correction: Park, B.Y., et al. Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports Sci. 2016, 6, 17. Behav. Sci. 2018, 8, 55.

[3] Marcus, A. “Journal corrects, but will not retract, controversial paper on internet porn”. Retraction Watch. Available online: https://retractionwatch.com/2018/06/13/journal-corrects-but-will-not-retract-controversial-paper-on-internet-porn/ (accessed on 13 June 2018) and https://web.archive.org/web/20180913124808/https://retractionwatch.com/2018/06/13/journal-corrects-but-will-not-retract-controversial-paper-on-internet-porn/ (archived on 13 September 2018).

Gary Wilson’s comments on the following sentence:

Only one non-financial conflict of interest was found to be substantiated and the paper has been updated [2].

As I explained in my Retraction Watch comment (which was partially censored by Retraction Watch!), my association with The Reward Foundation was on the original paper, and on an earlier version submitted to The Yale Journal of Biology & Medicine in early 2015. My comment:

What’s not clear in this article is that my (Wilson’s) affiliation with The Reward Foundation was disclosed from the start (see the original PubMed version, published in August, 2016 – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5039517/). The correction was published for my protection, in an attempt to stop Dr. Prause from continuing to claim that I was being paid by The Reward Foundation as a lobbyist, or just being “paid off.” (She has publicly advanced several baseless theories about my imagined corruption.) In the journal’s correction, only the title of my book (“Your Brain On Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction”) and a clear indication of my unremunerated role at The Reward Foundation were added. Again, this was to prevent further assertions of any possible financial conflict of interest. Corrected version: http://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/8/6/55/htm

Put simply, the correction was meant to protect me from Prause and her littany of falsehoods surrounding this paper.

June, 2019: MDPI official response to the MDPI Wikipedia page (which has been edited by several Nicole Prause sockpuppets)

Not long after Park et al., 2016 was published Prause went on the warpath against MDPI, Behavioral Sciences, and the authors of Park et al., employing multiple avenues of overt and covert attack (documented on this extensive page – Prause’s efforts to have Behavioral Sciences review paper (Park et al., 2016) retracted ). One avenue of attack was to edit the MDPI Wikipedia page using multiple aliases (sockpuppets), which violates Wikipedia rules. To date we have identified at least 30 likely Prause sockpuppets.

Let’s begin with Wikipedia user NeuroSex, who had a least 8 other aliases – all of which were banned as Wikipedia sockpuppets of NeuroSex. Neurosex, her sockpuppets, and other Prause sockpuppets have edited Wikipedia, inserting false information about Gary Wilson, Park et al. and MDPI.

For example, NeuroSex inserted information mirroring Prause tweets and taking content directly from Prause’s email exchanges with MDPI (many of which Wilson has seen). NeuroSex claimed to possess private MDPI emails – which they wanted to post to the MDPI Wikipedia page. Here’s what NeuroSex said in her comment. (Note: In her concurrent emails to MDPI, Prause cc’d RetractionWatch, apparently to threaten MDPI with public retaliation.):

I have images that verify each of the claims (e.g., email from the publisher, email from the listed editor, etc.). RetractionWatch and other outlets are considering writing reviews of it as well, but I cannot be sure those will materialize. How is best to provide such evidence that verifies the claims? As embedded image? Written elsewhere with images and linked?

Let’s provide a few examples of the “NeuroSex” edits (lies) related to Gary Wilson and to Park et al., 2016 – followed by Wilson’s comments:

NeuroSex edit #1: Gary Wilson was by <ref>{{cite web|title=paid over 9000 pounds|url=https://www.oscr.org.uk/downloadfile.aspx?id=160223&type=5&charityid=SC044948&arid=236451}}</ref> The Reward Foundation to lobby in the US on behalf of anti-pornography state declarations.

Gary Wilson comment: NeuroSex linked to a redacted document, claiming that Gary Wilson was paid 9,000 pounds by Scottish charity The Reward Foundation. Two days earlier Prause falsely claimed to journal publisher MDPI (and others) that, based on the charity’s recent public filing (with a name redacted, as is standard), expense reimbursements paid to a charity officer were in fact paid to Wilson. Prause has not checked her facts, and she is mistaken (again). Wilson has never received any money from The Reward Foundation. Prause has repeated this same lie elsewhere.

Three sockpuppets of NeuroSex who edited the MDPI Wikpedia page (links show list of edits for each sockpuppet):

Other likely sockpuppets of NeuroSex (Prause) who have also edited MDPI (there are probably more):

Numerous other sockpuppets are listed at the end of this section: April-May, 2019: Two “NeuroSex” sockpuppets (SecondaryEd2020 & Sciencearousal) edit Wikipedia, inserting RealYourBrainOnporn.com links and Prause-like propaganda

On to the MDPI announcement:

Announcements from MDPI 19 June 2019

Response to MDPI Wikipedia Article

Wikipedia is an important source of community-based knowledge and MDPI supports the endeavor to openly disseminate knowledge, which closely matches the goals of MDPI. Unfortunately, some editors of the Wikipedia page about MDPI lack objectivity. This leaves the article heavily biased and uninformative about the majority of MDPI’s activities. Any potential improvements added to the page are quickly removed. We have made a number of attempts to discuss with Wikipedia editors to improve the quality of the article, but without success. Thus, for the time being, we do not recommend Wikipedia as a reliable source of information about MDPI.

For a comprehensive history of MDPI, see https://www.mdpi.com/about/history. In addition, there are third party sources of information about MDPI journals such as http://qoam.eu/journals, and Publons (https://publons.com/journal/?order_by=num_reviews_last_one_year).

Almost three quarters of the Wikipedia article covers controversial topics, mentioning 4 out of over 200,000 published papers, one instance where 10 editorial board members resigned (in 2018 we had over 43,000 Editorial Board Members and Guest Editors), and inclusion on Jeffrey Beall’s list, known as a source biased against open access and from which MDPI was removed (see our response here). While we do not object to these topics being mentioned, the way in which they are presented is misleading.

Responses to some of the topics covered can be found at:

Australian Paradox (Nutrients): https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/4/4/258/htm.

Andrulis paper (Life): https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/1/213/htm.

Editorial board resignation (Nutrients): https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1389.

Comment on Park, B., et al. Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports Behav. Sci. 2016, 6, 17: https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1616.

A large parent company posting two official statements related to the unethical behavior by a rogue PhD may be without precedent.

Studies linking porn use/sex addiction to sexual problems, lower arousal to sexual stimuli, and less sexual & relationship satisfaction

April 10, 2016/13 Comments/in Uncategorized /by psadmin

Reality Check about Porn Addiction and sexual satisfaction

Regardless of what you may read in some journalistic accounts, multiple studies reveal a link between porn use and sexual performance problems, relationship and sexual dissatisfaction, and reduced brain activation to sexual stimuli. Sexual satisfaction is so important in our lives.

Let’s start with sexual dysfunctions. Studies assessing young male sexuality since 2010 report historic levels of sexual dysfunctions. They report startling rates of a new scourge: low libido. Documented in this lay article and in this peer-reviewed paper involving 7 US Navy doctors – Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (2016)

Historical ED rates

Erectile dysfunction was first assessed in 1940s when the Kinsey report concluded that the prevalence of ED was less than 1% in men younger than 30 years, less than 3% in those 30–45. While ED studies on young men are relatively sparse, this 2002 meta-analysis of 6 high-quality ED studies reported that 5 of the 6 reported ED rates for men under 40 of approximately 2%. The 6^th study reported figures of 7-9%. However, the question used could not be compared to the 5 other studies. It did not assess chronic erectile dysfunction. “Did you have trouble maintaining or achieving an erection any time in the last year?”.

At the end of 2006 free, streaming porn tube sites came on line and gained instant popularity. This changed the nature of porn consumption radically. For the first time in history, viewers could escalate with ease during a masturbation session without any wait.

Ten studies since 2010

Ten studies published since 2010 reveal a tremendous rise in sexual dysfunctions. In the 10 studies, erectile dysfunction rates for men under 40 ranged from 14% to 37%. Rates for low libido ranged from 16% to 37%. Other than the advent of streaming porn (2006) no variable related to youthful ED has appreciably changed in the last 10-20 years (smoking rates are down, drug use is steady, obesity rates in males 20-40 up only 4% since 1999 – see this review of the literature). The recent jump in sexual problems coincides with the publication of numerous studies. These studies link porn use and “porn addiction” to sexual problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli.

Below are two lists:

List one: Over 40 studies linking porn use or porn addiction to sexual problems and lower arousal in response to sexual stimuli or partnered sex. The first 7 studies in the list demonstrate causation.
List two: Over 75 studies linking porn use to lower relationship or sexual satisfaction. As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.

List #1: Studies linking porn use or porn addiction to sexual dysfunctions and lower arousal

In addition to the studies below, this page contains articles and interviews involving over 150 experts (urology professors, urologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, sexologists, MDs) who acknowledge and have successfully treated porn-induced sexual dysfunctions. The first 7 studies demonstrate causation as participants eliminated porn use and healed chronic sexual dysfunctions:

1) Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (2016)

An extensive review of the literature related to porn-induced sexual problems. Involving 7 US Navy doctors, the review provides the latest data revealing a tremendous rise in youthful sexual problems. It also reviews the neurological studies related to porn addiction and sexual conditioning via Internet porn. The doctors provide 3 clinical reports of men who developed porn-induced sexual dysfunctions. Two of the three men healed their sexual dysfunctions by eliminating porn use. The third man experienced little improvement as he was unable to abstain from porn use.

Excerpt:

Traditional factors that once explained men’s sexual difficulties appear insufficient to account for the sharp rise in erectile dysfunction, delayed ejaculation, decreased sexual satisfaction, and diminished libido during partnered sex in men under 40. This review (1) considers data from multiple domains, e.g., clinical, biological (addiction/urology), psychological (sexual conditioning), sociological; and (2) presents a series of clinical reports, all with the aim of proposing a possible direction for future research of this phenomenon. Alterations to the brain’s motivational system are explored as a possible etiology underlying pornography-related sexual dysfunctions.

This review also considers evidence that Internet pornography’s unique properties (limitless novelty, potential for easy escalation to more extreme material, video format, etc.) may be potent enough to condition sexual arousal to aspects of Internet pornography use that do not readily transition to real-life partners, such that sex with desired partners may not register as meeting expectations and arousal declines. Clinical reports suggest that terminating Internet pornography use is sometimes sufficient to reverse negative effects, underscoring the need for extensive investigation using methodologies that have subjects remove the variable of Internet pornography use.

2) Male masturbation habits and sexual dysfunctions (2016)

It’s by a French psychiatrist who is the current president of the European Federation of Sexology. While the abstract shifts back and forth between Internet pornography use and masturbation, it’s clear that he’s mostly referring to porn-induced sexual dysfunctions (erectile dysfunction and anorgasmia). The paper revolves around his clinical experience with 35 men who developed erectile dysfunction and/or anorgasmia, and his therapeutic approaches to help them. The author states that most of his patients used porn, with several being addicted to porn. The abstract points to internet porn as the primary cause of the problems (keep in mind that masturbation does not cause chronic ED, and it is never given as a cause of ED). 19 of the 35 men saw significant improvements in sexual functioning. The other men either dropped out of treatment or are still trying to recover.

Excerpts:

Intro: Harmless and even helpful in his usual form widely practiced, masturbation in its excessive and pre-eminent form, generally associated today to pornographic addiction, is too often overlooked in the clinical assessment of sexual dysfunction it can induce.

Results: Initial results for these patients, after treatment to “unlearn” their masturbatory habits and their often associated addiction to pornography, are encouraging and promising. A reduction in symptoms was obtained in 19 patients out of 35. The dysfunctions regressed and these patients were able to enjoy satisfactory sexual activity.

Conclusion: Addictive masturbation, often accompanied by a dependency on cyber-pornography, has been seen to play a role in the etiology of certain types of erectile dysfunction or coital anejaculation. It is important to systematically identify the presence of these habits rather than conduct a diagnosis by elimination, in order to include habit-breaking deconditioning techniques in managing these dysfunctions.

3) Unusual masturbatory practice as an etiological factor in the diagnosis and treatment of sexual dysfunction in young men (2014)

One of the 4 case studies in this paper reports on a man with porn-induced sexual problems (low libido, fetishes, anorgasmia). The sexual intervention called for a 6-week abstinence from porn and masturbation. After 8 months the man reported increased sexual desire, successful sex and orgasm, and enjoying “good sexual practices. This is the first peer-reviewed chronicling of a recovery from porn-induced sexual dysfunctions. Excerpts from the paper:

“When asked about masturbatory practices, he reported that in the past he had been masturbating vigorously and rapidly while watching pornography since adolescence. The pornography originally consisted mainly of zoophilia, and bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism, but he eventually got habituated to these materials and needed more hardcore pornography scenes, including transgender sex, orgies, and violent sex. He used to buy illegal pornographic movies on violent sex acts and rape and visualized those scenes in his imagination to function sexually with women. He gradually lost his desire and his ability to fantasize and decreased his masturbation frequency.”

In conjunction with weekly sessions with a sex therapist, the patient was instructed to avoid any exposure to sexually explicit material, including videos, newspapers, books, and internet pornography.

After 8 months, the patient reported experiencing successful orgasm and ejaculation. He renewed his relationship with that woman, and they gradually succeeded in enjoying good sexual practices.

4) How difficult is it to treat delayed ejaculation within a short-term psychosexual model? A case study comparison (2017)

A report on two “composite cases” illustrating the causes and treatments for delayed ejaculation (anorgasmia). “Patient B” represented several young men treated by the therapist. Interestingly, the paper states that Patient B’s “porn use had escalated into harder material”, “as is often the case”. The paper says that porn-related delayed ejaculation is not uncommon, and on the rise. The author calls for more research on porn’s effects of sexual functioning. Patient B’s delayed ejaculation was healed after 10 weeks of no porn. Excerpts:

The cases are composite cases taken from my work within the National Health Service in Croydon University Hospital, London. With the latter case (Patient B), it is important to note that the presentation reflects a number of young males who have been referred by their GPs with a similar diagnosis. Patient B is a 19-year-old who presented because he was unable to ejaculate via penetration. When he was 13, he was regularly accessing pornography sites either on his own through internet searches or via links that his friends sent him. He began masturbating every night while searching his phone for image…If he did not masturbate he was unable to sleep. The pornography he was using had escalated, as is often the case (see Hudson-Allez, 2010), into harder material (nothing illegal)…

Escalation

Patient B was exposed to sexual imagery via pornography from the age of 12 and the pornography he was using had escalated to bondage and dominance by the age of 15.

We agreed that he would no longer use pornography to masturbate. This meant leaving his phone in a different room at night. We agreed that he would masturbate in a different way….

Patient B was able to achieve orgasm via penetration by the fifth session; the sessions are offered fortnightly in Croydon University Hospital so session five equates to approximately 10 weeks from consultation. He was happy and greatly relieved. In a three-month follow-up with Patient B, things were still going well.

Patient B is not an isolated case within the National Health Service (NHS) and in fact young men in general accessing psychosexual therapy, without their partners, speaks in itself to the stirrings of change.

This article therefore supports previous research that has linked masturbation style to sexual dysfunction and pornography to masturbation style. The article concludes by suggesting that the successes of psychosexual therapists in working with DE are rarely recorded in the academic literature, which has allowed the view of DE as a difficult disorder to treat remain largely unchallenged. The article calls for research into pornography usage and its effect on masturbation and genital desensitisation.

5) Situational Psychogenic Anejaculation: A Case Study (2014)

The details reveal a case of porn-induced anejaculation. The husband’s only sexual experience prior to marriage was frequent masturbation to pornography – where he was able to ejaculate. He also reported sexual intercourse as less arousing than masturbation to porn. The key piece of information is that “re-training” and psychotherapy failed to heal his anejaculation. When those interventions failed, therapists suggested a complete ban on masturbation to porn. Eventually this ban resulted in successful sexual intercourse and ejaculation with a partner for the first time in his life. A few excerpts:

A is a 33-year-old married male with heterosexual orientation, a professional from a middle socio-economic urban background. He has had no premarital sexual contacts. He watched pornography and masturbated frequently. His knowledge about sex and sexuality was adequate. Following his marriage, Mr. A described his libido as initially normal, but later reduced secondary to his ejaculatory difficulties. Despite thrusting movements for 30-45 minutes, he had never been able to ejaculate or achieve orgasm during penetrative sex with his wife.

What didn’t work:

Mr. A’s medications were rationalized; clomipramine and bupropion were discontinued, and sertraline was maintained at a dose of 150 mg per day. Therapy sessions with the couple were held weekly for the initial few months, following which they were spaced to fortnightly and later monthly. Specific suggestions including focusing on sexual sensations and concentrating on the sexual experience rather than ejaculation were used to help reduce performance anxiety and spectatoring. Since problems persisted despite these interventions, intensive sex therapy was considered.

Eventually they instituted a complete ban on masturbation (which means he continued to masturbate to porn during the above failed interventions):

A ban on any form of sexual activity was suggested. Progressive sensate focus exercises (initially non-genital and later genital) were initiated. Mr. A described an inability to experience the same degree of stimulation during penetrative sex as compared to that which he experienced during masturbation. Once the ban on masturbation was enforced, he reported an increased desire for sexual activity with his partner.

After an unspecified amount of time, the ban on masturbation to porn lead to success:

Meanwhile, Mr. A and his wife decided to go ahead with Assisted Reproductive Techniques (ART) and underwent two cycles of intrauterine insemination. During a practice session, Mr. A ejaculated for the first time, following which he has been able to ejaculate satisfactorily during a majority of the couple’s sexual interactions.

6) Pornography Induced Erectile Dysfunction Among Young Men (2019)

Abstract:

This paper explores the phenomenon of pornography induced erectile dysfunction (PIED), meaning sexual potency problems in men due to Internet pornography consumption. Empirical data from men who suffer from this condition have been collected. A combination of topical life history method (with qualitative asynchronous online narrative interviews) and personal online diaries has been employed. The data have been analyzed using theoretical interpretative analysis (according to McLuhan’s media theory), based on analytic induction. The empirical investigation indicates that there is a correlation between pornography consumption and erectile dysfunction that suggests causation.

The findings are based on 11 interviews along with two video diaries and three text diaries. The men are between the ages of 16 and 52; they report that an early introduction to pornography (usually during adolescence) is followed by daily consumption until a point is reached where extreme content (involving, for example, elements of violence) is needed to maintain arousal. A critical stage is reached when sexual arousal is exclusively associated with extreme and fast-paced pornography, rendering physical intercourse bland and uninteresting. This results in an inability to maintain an erection with a real-life partner, at which point the men embark on a “re-boot” process, giving up pornography. This has helped some of the men to regain their ability to achieve and sustain an erection.

Introduction to the results section:

Having processed the data, I have noticed certain patterns and recurring themes, following a chronological narrative in all of the interviews. These are: Introduction. One is first introduced to pornography, usually before puberty. Building a habit. One begins to consume pornography regularly. Escalation. One turns to more “extreme” forms of pornography, content-wise, in order to achieve the same effects previously achieved through less “extreme” forms of pornography. Realization. One notices sexual potency problems believed to be caused by pornography use. “Re-boot” process. One tries to regulate pornography use or eliminate it completely in order to regain one’s sexual potency. The data from the interviews are presented based on the above outline.

7) Hidden in Shame: Heterosexual Men’s Experiences of Self-Perceived Problematic Pornography Use (2019)

Interviews of 15 male porn users. Several of the men reported porn addiction, escalation of use, and porn-induced sexual problems. Excerpts relevant to porn-induced sexual dysfunctions, including Michael – who significantly improve his erectile function during sexual encounters by severely limiting his porn use:

Some men talked about seeking professional help to address their problematic pornography use. Such attempts at help-seeking had not been productive for the men, and at times even exacerbated feelings of shame. Michael, a university student who used pornography primarily as a coping mechanism for study-related stress, was having issues with erectile dysfunction during sexual encounters with women and sought help from his General Practitioner Doctor (GP):

Michael: When I went to the doctor at 19 [. . .], he prescribed Viagra and said [my issue] was just performance anxiety. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. It was personal research and reading that showed me the issue was porn [. . .] If I go to the doctor as a young kid and he prescribes me the blue pill, then I feel like no one is really talking about it. He should be asking about my porn use, not giving me Viagra. (23, Middle-Eastern, Student)

Online research

As a result of his experience, Michael never went back to that GP and started doing his own research online. He eventually found an article discussing a man approximately his age describing a similar type of sexual dysfunction, which caused him to consider pornography as a potential contributor. After making a concerted effort to lower his pornography use, his erectile dysfunction issues began to improve. He reported that even though his total frequency of masturbation did not reduce, he only watched pornography for about half of those instances. By halving the amount of times he combined masturbation with pornography, Michael said he was able to significantly improve his erectile function during sexual encounters with women.

Reduced sex drive

Phillip, like Michael, sought help for another sexual issue related to his pornography use. In his case, the problem was a noticeably reduced sex drive. When he approached his GP about his issue and its links to his pornography use, the GP reportedly had nothing to offer and instead referred him to a male fertility specialist:

Phillip: I went to a GP and he referred me to specialist who I didn’t believe was particularly helpful. They didn’t really offer me a solution and weren’t really taking me seriously. I ended up paying him for six weeks of testosterone shots, and it was $100 a shot, and it really didn’t do anything. That was their way to treat my sexual dysfunction. I just do not feel the dialogue or situation was adequate. (29, Asian, Student)

Interviewer: [To clarify a previous point you mentioned, is this the experience] that prevented you from seeking help thereafter?

Phillip: Yup.

Only offered biomedical solutions

The GPs and specialists sought by the participants seemed to offer only biomedical solutions, an approach that has been criticized within literature (Tiefer, 1996). Hence, the service and treatment these men were able to receive from their GPs was not only deemed inadequate, but also alienated them from further accessing professional help. Although biomedical responses seem to be the most popular answer for doctors (Potts, Grace, Gavey, & Vares, 2004), a more holistic and client-centered approach is needed, as the issues highlighted by men are likely psychological and possibly created by pornography use.

Sexual dysfunctions

Lastly, men reported the impacts pornography had had on their sexual function, something that has only recently been examined within the literature. For example, Park and colleagues (2016) found that Internet pornography viewing might be associated with erectile dysfunction, decreased sexual satisfaction, and diminished sexual libido. Participants in our study reported similar sexual dysfunctions, which they attributed to pornography use. Daniel reflected on his past relationships in which he was not able to get and keep an erection. He associated his erectile dysfunction with his girlfriends’ bodies not comparing to what he had become attracted to when watching pornography:

Daniel: My previous two girlfriends, I stopped finding them arousing in a way that wouldn’t have happened to someone who was not watching porn. I had seen so many naked female bodies, that I knew the particular things that I liked and you just start forming a very clear ideal about what you want in a woman, and real women aren’t like that. And my girlfriends didn’t have perfect bodies and I think that’s fine, but I think that got in the way of finding them arousing. And that caused problems in the relationships. There are times I couldn’t sexually perform because I was not aroused. (27, Pasifika, Student)

The remaining studies are listed by date of publication:

8) Male psychogenic sexual dysfunction: the role of masturbation (2003)

Relatively old study on men with so-called ‘psychogenic’ sexual problems (ED, DE, inability to be aroused by real partners). While the data is even older than 2003, interviews revealed tolerance and escalation related to “erotica” use:

Participants themselves had begun to question whether there may be a link between masturbation and the difficulties they were experiencing. Jim wonders whether reliance on masturbation and erotica during the 2 year period of celibacy preceding the onset of his problem has contributed to its cause:

J: . . . that two year period I was masturbating while I wasn’t in a regular relationship, umm and perhaps there were more images on television, so it wasn’t you had to buy a magazine – or – its just more available.

Additional excerpts:

Although inspiration could develop from their own experience, most participants used visual or literary erotica to enhance their fantasies and increase arousal. Jim, who is ‘not good at mental visualizations’, explains how his arousal is enhanced by erotica during masturbation:

J: I mean quite often there are times when I’m stimulating myself there’s some sort of aid; watching a TV programme, reading a magazine, something like that.

B: Sometimes the excitement of being with other people is enough, but as the years go by you need a book, or you see a film, or you have one of those dirty magazines, so you close your eyes and you fantasize about these things.

More excerpts:

The effectiveness of erotic stimuli in creating sexual arousal has been noted by Gillan (1977). The use of erotica by these participants was restricted to masturbation in the main. Jim is aware of a heightened level of arousal during masturbation as compared to sex with his partner.

During sex with his partner, Jim fails to achieve levels of erotic arousal sufficient to trigger orgasm, during masturbation the use of erotica significantly increases levels of erotic arousal and orgasm is achieved. Fantasy and erotica increased erotic arousal and were used freely during masturbation but its use was restricted during sex with a partner.

Paper continues:

Many participants ‘could not imagine’ masturbating without the use of fantasy or erotica, and many recognized the need progressively to extend fantasies (Slosarz, 1992) in an attempt to maintain levels of arousal and prevent ‘boredom’. Jack describes how he has become desensitized to his own fantasies:

J: Latterly in the last five, ten years, I, I, I’d be hard pushed to get stimulated enough by any fantasy that I might create myself.

Based on erotica, Jack’s fantasies have become highly stylised; scenarios involving women with a specific ‘body type’ in particular forms of stimulation. The reality of Jack’s situation and partners is very different, and fails to match his ideal created on the basis of porno perception (Slosarz, 1992); the real partner may not be erotically arousing enough.

Paul compares the progressive extension of his fantasies to his need for progressively ‘stronger’ erotica to produce the same response:

P: You get bored, it’s like those blue movies; you’ve got to get stronger and stronger stuff all the time, to cheer yourself up.

By changing the content, Paul’s fantasies retain their erotic impact; despite masturbating several times a day, he explains:

P: You can’t keep doing the same thing, you get bored with one scenario and so you’ve got to (change) – which I was always good at ’cause . . . I always lived in a land of dreams.

From the summary sections of the paper:

This critical analysis of participants’ experiences during both masturbation and partner sex has demonstrated the presence of a dysfunctional sexual response during sex with a partner, and a functional sexual response during masturbation. Two interrelated theories emerged and are summarized here… During partner sex, dysfunctional participants focus on non-relevant cognitions; cognitive interference distracts from the ability to focus on erotic cues. Sensate awareness is impaired and the sexual response cycle is interrupted resulting in sexual dysfunction.

In the absence of functional partner sex, these participants have become masturbation dependant. Sexual response has become conditional; learning theory does not postulate specific conditions, it merely identifies conditions of acquisition of the behaviour. This study has highlighted frequency and technique of masturbation, and the ability to focus on task relevant cognitions (supported by the use of fantasy and erotica during masturbation), as such conditional factors.

This study has highlighted the relevance of detailed questioning in two main areas; behaviour and cognitions. Firstly details of the specific nature of masturbatory frequency, technique and accompanying erotica and fantasy provided an understanding of how the individual’s sexual response has become conditional on a narrow set of stimuli; such conditioning appears to exacerbate difficulties during sex with a partner. It is acknowledged that as part of their formulation, practitioners routinely ask whether an individual masturbates: this study suggests that also asking precisely how the individual’s idiosyncratic masturbatory style has developed provides relevant information

9) The Dual Control Model – The Role Of Sexual Inhibition & Excitation In Sexual Arousal And Behavior (2007)

Recently rediscovered and very convincing. In an experiment employing video porn, 50% of the young men couldn’t become aroused or achieve erections with porn (average age was 29). The shocked researchers discovered that the men’s erectile dysfunction was,

“related to high levels of exposure to and experience with sexually explicit materials.“

The men experiencing erectile dysfunction had spent a considerable amount of time in bars and bathhouses where porn was “omnipresent,” and “continuously playing“. The researchers stated:

“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.”

10) Clinical encounters with internet pornography (2008)

Comprehensive paper, with four clinical cases, written by a psychiatrist who became aware of the negative effects internet porn was having on some of his male patients. The excerpt below describes a 31 year old man who escalated into extreme porn and developed porn-induced sexual tastes and sexual problems. This is one of the first peer-reviewed papers to depict porn use leading to tolerance, escalation, and sexual dysfunctions:

A 31-year-old male in analytic psychotherapy for mixed anxiety problems reported that he was experiencing difficulty becoming sexually aroused by his current partner. After much discussion about the woman, their relationship, possible latent conflicts or repressed emotional content (without arriving at a satisfactory explanation for his complaint), he provided the detail that he was relying on a particular fantasy to become aroused. Somewhat chagrined, he described a “scene” of an orgy involving several men and women that he had found on an Internet pornography site that had caught his fancy and become one of his favorites. Over the course of several sessions, he elaborated upon his use of Internet pornography, an activity in which he had engaged sporadically since his mid-20s.

Relying on porn

Relevant details about his use and the effects over time included clear descriptions of an increasing reliance on viewing and then recalling pornographic images in order to become sexually aroused. He also described the development of a “tolerance” to the arousing effects of any particular material after a period of time, which was followed by a search for new material with which he could achieve the prior, desired level of sexual arousal.

As we reviewed his use of pornography, it became evident that the arousal problems with his current partner coincided with use of pornography, whereas his “tolerance” to the stimulating effects of particular material occurred whether or not he was involved with a partner at the time or was simply using pornography for masturbation. His anxiety about sexual performance contributed to his reliance on viewing pornography. Unaware that the use itself had become problematic, he had interpreted his waning sexual interest in a partner to mean that she was not right for him, and had not had a relationship of greater than two months’ duration in over seven years, exchanging one partner for another just as he might change websites.

Escalation

He also noted that he now could be aroused by pornographic material that he once had no interest in using. For example, he noted that five years ago he had little interest in viewing images of anal intercourse but now found such material stimulating. Similarly, material that he described as “edgier,” by which he meant “almost violent or coercive,” was something that now elicited a sexual response from him, whereas such material had been of no interest and was even off-putting. With some of these new subjects, he found himself anxious and uncomfortable even as he would become aroused.

11) Exploring the Relationship Between Erotic Disruption During the Latency Period and the Use of Sexually Explicit Material, Online Sexual Behaviors, and Sexual Dysfunctions in Young Adulthood (2009)

Study examined correlations between current porn use (sexually explicit material – SEM) and sexual dysfunctions, and porn use during “latency period” (ages 6-12) and sexual dysfunctions. The average age of participants was 22. While current porn use correlated with sexual dysfunctions, porn use during latency (ages 6-12) had an even stronger correlation with sexual dysfunctions. A few excerpts:

Findings suggested that latency erotic disruption by way of sexually explicit material (SEM) and/or child sexual abuse may be associated to adult online sexual behaviors.

Furthermore, results demonstrated that latency SEM exposure was a significant predictor of adult sexual dysfunctions.

We hypothesized that exposure to latency SEM exposure would predict adult use of SEM. Study findings supported our hypothesis, and demonstrated that latency SEM exposure was a statistically significant predictor of adult SEM use. This suggested that individuals who were exposed to SEM during latency, may continue this behavior into adulthood. Study findings also indicated that latency SEM exposure was a significant predictor of adult online sexual behaviors.

12) Use of pornography in a random sample of Norwegian heterosexual couples (2009)

Porn use was correlated with more sexual dysfunctions in the man and negative self perception in the female. The couples who did not use porn had no sexual dysfunctions. A few excerpts from the study:

In couples where only one partner used pornography, we found more problems related to arousal (male) and negative (female) self-perception.

In those couples where one partner used pornography there was a permissive erotic climate. At the same time, these couples seemed to have more dysfunctions.

The couples who did not use pornography... may be considered more traditional in relation to the theory of sexual scripts. At the same time, they did not seem to have any dysfunctions.

Couples who both reported pornography use grouped to the positive pole on the ‘‘Erotic climate’’ function and somewhat to the negative pole on the ‘‘Dysfunctions’’ function.

13) Cyber-porn dependence: voices of distress in an Italian internet self-help community (2009)

This study reports on a narrative analysis of two thousand messages written by 302 members of an Italian self-help group for cyberdependents (noallapornodipendenza). It sampled 400 messages from each year (2003–2007). Excerpts relevant to porn-induced sexual dysfunctions:

For many their condition is reminiscent of an addicted escalation with new levels of tolerance. Many of them in fact search for increasingly more explicit, bizarre and violent images, bestiality included….

Many members complain about increased impotence and lack of ejaculation, feeling in their real life like “a dead man walking” (“vivalavita” #5014). The following example concretizes their perceptions (“sul” #4411)….

Many participants stated that they usually spend hours looking at and collecting pictures and movies holding their erect penis in their hand, unable to ejaculate, waiting for the ultimate, extreme image to release the tension. For many the final ejaculation puts an end to their torture (supplizio) (“incercadiliberta” #5026)…

Lack of interest

Problems in heterosexual relations are more than frequent. People complain they have erection problems, lack of sexual relations with their spouses, lack of interest in sexual intercourse, feeling like a person who has eaten hot, spicy food, and consequently cannot eat ordinary food. In many cases, as also reported by spouses of cyber dependents, there are indications of male orgasmic disorder with the inability to ejaculate during intercourse. This sense of desensitization in sexual relationships is well expressed in the following passage (“vivaleiene” #6019):

Last week I had an intimate relation with my girlfriend; nothing bad at all, despite the fact after the first kiss I didn’t feel any sensation. We didn’t finish the copulation because I didn’t want to.

Many participants expressed their real interest in “chatting on line” or “telematic contact” instead of physical touch, and a pervasive and unpleasant presence of pornographic flashbacks in their mind, during sleep and during sexual intercourse.

As stressed, the claim of a real sexual dysfunction is echoed by many testimonials from female partners. But also forms of collusion and contamination appear in these narratives. Here are a few of the most striking comments of these female partners…

Most of the messages sent to the Italian self help group do indicate the presence of pathology by those participants, according to the model of salience (in real life), mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms and interpersonal conflict, a diagnostic model developed by Griffiths (2004)….

14) Sexual Desire, not Hypersexuality, is Related to Neurophysiological Responses Elicited by Sexual Images (2013)

This EEG study was touted in the media as evidence against the existence of porn/sex addiction. Not so. Steele et al. 2013 actually lends support to the existence of both porn addiction and porn use down-regulating sexual desire. How so? The study reported higher EEG readings (relative to neutral pictures) when subjects were briefly exposed to pornographic photos. Studies consistently show that an elevated P300 occurs when addicts are exposed to cues (such as images) related to their addiction.

In line with the Cambridge University brain scan studies, this EEG study also reported greater cue-reactivity to porn correlating with less desire for partnered sex. To put it another way – individuals with greater brain activation to porn would rather masturbate to porn than have sex with a real person. Shockingly, study spokesperson Nicole Prause claimed that porn users merely had “high libido,” yet the results of the study say the exact opposite (subjects’ desire for partnered sex was dropping in relation to their porn use).

Together these two Steele et al. findings indicate greater brain activity to cues (porn images), yet less reactivity to natural rewards (sex with a person). That”s sensitization & desensitization, which are hallmarks of an addiction. Eight peer-reviewed papers explain the truth: Also see this extensive YBOP critique.

15) Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Associated With Pornography Consumption: The Brain on Porn (2014)

A Max Planck study which found 3 significant addiction-related brain changes correlating with the amount of porn consumed. It also found that the more porn consumed the less reward circuit activity in response to brief exposure (.530 second) to vanilla porn. In a 2014 article lead author Simone Kühn said:

“We assume that subjects with a high porn consumption need increasing stimulation to receive the same amount of reward. That could mean that regular consumption of pornography more or less wears out your reward system. That would fit perfectly the hypothesis that their reward systems need growing stimulation.”

A more technical description of this study from a review of the literature by Kuhn & Gallinat – Neurobiological Basis of Hypersexuality (2016).

“The more hours participants reported consuming pornography, the smaller the BOLD response in left putamen in response to sexual images. Moreover, we found that more hours spent watching pornography was associated with smaller gray matter volume in the striatum, more precisely in the right caudate reaching into the ventral putamen. We speculate that the brain structural volume deficit may reflect the results of tolerance after desensitization to sexual stimuli.”

16) Neural Correlates of Sexual Cue Reactivity in Individuals with and without Compulsive Sexual Behaviours (2014)

This fMRI study by Cambridge University found sensitization in porn addicts which mirrored sensitization in drug addicts. It also found that porn addicts fit the accepted addiction model of wanting “it” more, but not liking “it” more. The researchers also reported that 60% of subjects (average age: 25) had difficulty achieving erections/arousal with real partners as a result of using porn, yet could achieve erections with porn. From the study (“CSB” is compulsive sexual behaviours):

“CSB subjects reported that as a result of excessive use of sexually explicit materials…..[they] experienced diminished libido or erectile function specifically in physical relationships with women (although not in relationship to the sexually explicit material)”

“Compared to healthy volunteers, CSB subjects had greater subjective sexual desire or wanting to explicit cues and had greater liking scores to erotic cues, thus demonstrating a dissociation between wanting and liking. CSB subjects also had greater impairments of sexual arousal and erectile difficulties in intimate relationships but not with sexually explicit materials highlighting that the enhanced desire scores were specific to the explicit cues and not generalized heightened sexual desire.”

17) Modulation of Late Positive Potentials by Sexual Images in Problem Users and Controls Inconsistent with “Porn Addiction” (2015)

A second EEG study from Nicole Prause’s team. This study compared the 2013 subjects from Steele et al., 2013 to an actual control group (yet it suffered from the same methodological flaws named above). The results: Compared to controls “individuals experiencing problems regulating their porn viewing” had lower brain responses to one-second exposure to photos of vanilla porn. The lead author claims these results “debunk porn addiction.” What legitimate scientist would claim that their lone anomalous study has debunked a well established field of study?

In reality, the findings of Prause et al. 2015 align perfectly with Kühn & Gallinat (2014), which found that more porn use correlated with less brain activation in response to pictures of vanilla porn. Prause et al. findings also align with Banca et al. 2015. Moreover, another EEG study found that greater porn use in women correlated with less brain activation to porn. Lower EEG readings mean that subjects are paying less attention to the pictures. Put simply, frequent porn users were desensitized to static images of vanilla porn. They were bored (habituated or desensitized). See this extensive YBOP critique. Nine peer-reviewed papers agree that this study actually found desensitization/habituation in frequent porn users (consistent with addiction): Peer-reviewed critiques of Prause et al., 2015

18) Adolescents and web porn: a new era of sexuality (2015)

This Italian study analyzed the effects of Internet porn on high school seniors, co-authored by urology professor Carlo Foresta, president of the Italian Society of Reproductive Pathophysiology. The most interesting finding is that 16% of those who consume porn more than once a week report abnormally low sexual desire compared with 0% in non-consumers (and 6% for those who consume less than once a week). From the study:

“21.9% define it as habitual, 10% report that it reduces sexual interest towards potential real-life partners, and the remaining, 9.1% report a kind of addiction. In addition, 19% of overall pornography consumers report an abnormal sexual response, while the percentage rose to 25.1% among regular consumers.“

19) Patient Characteristics by Type of Hypersexuality Referral: A Quantitative Chart Review of 115 Consecutive Male Cases (2015)

A study on men (average age 41.5) with hypersexuality disorders, such as paraphilias, chronic masturbation or adultery. 27 of the men were classified as “avoidant masturbators,” meaning they masturbated (typically with porn use) one or more hours per day, or more than 7 hours per week. 71% of the men who chronically masturbated to porn reported sexual functioning problems, with 33% reporting delayed ejaculation (a precursor to porn-induced ED).

What sexual dysfunction do 38% of the remaining men have? The study doesn’t say, and the authors have ignored repeated requests for details. Two primary choices for male sexual dysfunction are erectile dysfunction and low libido. It should be noted that the men were not asked about their erectile functioning without porn. This, if all their sexual activity involved masturbating to porn, and not sex with a partner, they might never realize they had porn-induced ED. (For reasons known only to her, Prause cites this paper as debunking the existence of porn-induced sexual dysfunctions.)

20) Men’s Sexual Life and Repeated Exposure to Pornography. A New Issue? (2015)

Excerpts:

Mental health specialists should take in consideration the possible effects of pornography consumption on men sexual behaviors, men sexual difficulties and other attitudes related to sexuality. In the long term pornography seems to create sexual dysfunctions, especially the individual’s inability to reach an orgasm with his partner. Someone who spends most of his sexual life masturbating while watching porn engages his brain in rewiring its natural sexual sets (Doidge, 2007) so that it will soon need visual stimulation to achieve an orgasm.

Many different symptoms of porn consumption, such as the need to involve a partner in watching porn, the difficulty in reaching orgasm, the need for porn images in order to ejaculate turn into sexual problems. These sexual behaviors may go on for months or years and it may be mentally and bodily associated with the erectile dysfunction, although it is not an organic dysfunction. Because of this confusion, which generates embarrassment, shame and denial, lots of men refuse to encounter a specialist

Pornography offers a very simple alternative to obtain pleasure without implying other factors that were involved in human’s sexuality along the history of mankind. The brain develops an alternative path for sexuality which excludes “the other real person” from the equation. Furthermore, pornography consumption in a long term makes men more prone to difficulties in obtaining an erection in a presence of their partners.

21) Masturbation and Pornography Use Among Coupled Heterosexual Men With Decreased Sexual Desire: How Many Roles of Masturbation? (2015)

Masturbating to porn was related with decreased sexual desire and low relationship intimacy. Excerpts:

Among men who masturbated frequently, 70% used pornography at least once a week. A multivariate assessment showed that sexual boredom, frequent pornography use, and low relationship intimacy significantly increased the odds of reporting frequent masturbation among coupled men with decreased sexual desire.

Among men [with decreased sexual desire] who used pornography at least once a week [in 2011], 26.1% reported that they were unable to control their pornography use. In addition, 26.7% of men reported that their use of pornography negatively affected their partnered sex and 21.1% claimed to have attempted to stop using pornography.

22) Erectile Dysfunction, Boredom, and Hypersexuality among Coupled Men from Two European Countries (2015)

Survey reported a strong correlation between erectile dysfunction and measures of hypersexuality. The study omitted correlation data between erectile functioning and pornography use, but noted a significant correlation. An excerpt:

Among Croatian and German men, hypersexuality was significantly correlated with proneness to sexual boredom and more problems with erectile function.

23) An Online Assessment of Personality, Psychological, and Sexuality Trait Variables Associated with Self-Reported Hypersexual Behavior (2015)

Survey reported a common theme found in several other studies listed here: Porn/sex addicts report greater arousabilty (cravings related to their addiction) combined with poorer sexual function (fear of experiencing erectile dysfunction).

Hypersexual” behavior represents a perceived inability to control one’s sexual behavior. To investigate hypersexual behavior, an international sample of 510 self-identified heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual men and women completed an anonymous online self-report questionnaire battery.

Thus, the data indicated that hypersexual behavior is more common for males, and those who report being younger in age, more easily sexually excited, more sexually inhibited due to the threat of performance failure, less sexually inhibited due to the threat of performance consequences, and more impulsive, anxious, and depressed

24) Online sexual activities: An exploratory study of problematic and non-problematic usage patterns in a sample of men (2016)

This Belgian study from a leading research university found problematic Internet porn use was associated with reduced erectile function and reduced overall sexual satisfaction. Yet problematic porn users experienced greater cravings. The study appears to report escalation, as 49% of the men viewed porn that “was not previously interesting to them or that they considered disgusting.” (See studies reporting habituation/desensitization to porn and escalation of porn use) Excerpts:

“This study is the first to directly investigate the relationships between sexual dysfunctions and problematic involvement in OSAs. Results indicated that higher sexual desire, lower overall sexual satisfaction, and lower erectile function were associated with problematic OSAs (online sexual activities). These results can be linked to those of previous studies reporting a high level of arousability in association with sexual addiction symptoms (Bancroft & Vukadinovic, 2004; Laier et al., 2013; Muise et al., 2013).”

Asking porn users about escalation

In addition, we finally have a study that asks porn users about possible escalation to new or disturbing porn genres. Guess what it found?

“Forty-nine percent mentioned at least sometimes searching for sexual content or being involved in OSAs that were not previously interesting to them or that they considered disgusting, and 61.7% reported that at least sometimes OSAs were associated with shame or guilty feelings.”

Note – This is the first study to directly investigate the relationships between sexual dysfunctions and problematic porn use. Two other studies claiming to have investigated correlations between porn use and erectile functioning cobbled together data from earlier studies in an unsuccessful attempt to debunk porn-induced ED. Both were criticized in the peer-reviewed literature: paper #1 was not an authentic study, and has been thoroughly discredited; paper #2 actually found correlations that support porn-induced sexual dysfunction. Moreover, paper 2 was only a “brief communication” that did not report important data which the authors reported at a sexology conference.

25) The effects of sexually explicit material use on romantic relationship dynamics (2016)

As with many other studies, solitary porn users report poorer relationship and sexual satisfaction. An excerpt:

More specifically, couples, where no one used, reported more relationship satisfaction than those couples that had individual users. This is consistent with the previous research (Cooper et al., 1999; Manning, 2006), demonstrating that the solitary use of SEM results in negative consequences.

Employing the Pornography Consumption Effect Scale (PCES), the study found that higher porn use was related to poorer sexual function, more sexual problems, and a “worse sex life”. An excerpt describing the correlation between the PCES “Negative Effects” on “Sex Life” questions and frequency of porn use:

There were no significant differences for the Negative Effect Dimension PCES across the frequency of sexually explicit material use; however, there were significant differences on the Sex Life subscale where High Frequency Porn Users reported greater negative effects than Low Frequency Porn Users.

26) Altered Appetitive Conditioning and Neural Connectivity in Subjects With Compulsive Sexual Behavior (2016)

“Compulsive Sexual Behaviors” (CSB) means the men were porn addicts, because CSB subjects averaged nearly 20 hours of porn use per week. The controls averaged 29 minutes per week. Interestingly, 3 of the 20 CSB subjects mentioned to interviewers that they suffered from “orgasmic-erection disorder,” while none of the control subjects reported sexual problems.

27) Associative pathways between pornography consumption and reduced sexual satisfaction (2017)

This study is found in both lists. While it links porn use to lower sexual satisfaction, it also reported that frequency of porn use was related to a preference (or need?) for porn over people to achieve sexual arousal. An excerpt:

Finally, we found that frequency of pornography consumption was also directly related to a relative preference for pornographic rather than partnered sexual excitement. Participants in the present study primarily consumed pornography for masturbation. Thus, this finding could be indicative of a masturbatory conditioning effect (Cline, 1994; Malamuth, 1981; Wright, 2011). The more frequently pornography is used as an arousal tool for masturbation, the more an individual may become conditioned to pornographic as opposed to other sources of sexual arousal.

28) “I think it has been a negative influence in many ways but at the same time I can’t stop using it”: Self-identified problematic pornography use among a sample of young Australians (2017)

Online survey of Australians, aged 15-29. Those who had ever viewed pornography (n=856) were asked in an open-ended question: ‘How has pornography influenced your life?’.

Among participants who responded to the open-ended question (n=718), problematic usage was self-identified by 88 respondents. Male participants who reported problematic usage of pornography highlighted effects in three areas: on sexual function, arousal and relationships. Responses included “I think it has been a negative influence in many ways but at the same time I can’t stop using it” (Male, Aged 18–19). Some female participants also reported problematic usage, with many of these reporting negative feelings like guilt and shame, impact on sexual desire and compulsions relating to their use of pornography. For example as one female participant suggested; “It makes me feel guilty, and I’m trying to stop. I don’t like how I feel that I need it to get myself going, it’s not healthy.” (Female, Aged 18–19)

29) Organic and psychogenic causes of sexual dysfunction in young men (2017)

A narrative review, with a section called “Role of Pornography in Delayed Ejaculation (DE)”. An excerpt from this section:

Role of Pornography in DE

Over the last decade, a large increase in the prevalence and accessibility of Internet pornography has provided increased causes of DE associated with Althof’s second and third theory. Reports from 2008 found on average 14.4% of boys were exposed to pornography before the age of 13 and 5.2% of people viewed pornography at least daily. A 2016 study revealed that these values had both increased to 48.7% and 13.2%, respectively. An earlier age of first pornographic exposure contributes to DE through its relationship with patients exhibiting CSB.

Voon et al. found that young men with CSB had viewed sexually explicit material at an earlier age than their age-controlled healthy peers. As previously mentioned, young men with CSB can fall victim to Althof’s third theory of DE and preferentially choose masturbation over partnered sex due to a lack of arousal in relationships. An increased number of men watching pornographic material daily also contributes to DE through Althof’s third theory.

Fake vagina

In a study of 487 male college students, Sun et al. found associations between the use of pornography and a decreased self-reported enjoyment of sexually intimate behaviors with real-life partners. These individuals are at an elevated risk of preferentially choosing masturbation over sexual encounters, as demonstrated in a case report by Park et al. A 20-year-old enlisted male presented with difficulty achieving orgasm with his fiancée for the previous six months. A detailed sexual history revealed that the patient relied on Internet pornography and use of a sex toy described as a “fake vagina” to masturbate while deployed. Over time, he required content of an increasingly graphic or fetish nature to orgasm. He admitted that he found his fiancée attractive but preferred the feeling of his toy because he found it more stimulating that real intercourse.

Case report

An increase in the accessibility of Internet pornography places younger men at risk of developing DE through Althof’s second theory, as demonstrated in the following case report: Bronner et al. interviewed a 35-year-old healthy man presenting with complaints of no desire to have sex with his girlfriend despite being mentally and sexually attracted to her. A detailed sexual history revealed that this scenario had happened with the past 20 women he tried to date. He reported extensive use of pornography since adolescence that initially consisted of zoophilia, bondage, sadism, and masochism, but eventually progressed to transgender sex, orgies, and violent sex. He would visualize the pornographic scenes in his imagination to function sexually with women, but that gradually stopped working. The gap between the patient’s pornographic fantasies and real life became too large, causing a loss of desire.

According to Althof, this will present as DE in some patients. This recurring theme of requiring pornographic content of an increasingly graphic or fetish nature to orgasm is defined by Park et al. as hyperactivity. As a man sensitizes his sexual arousal to pornography, sex in real life no longer activates the proper neurological pathways to ejaculate (or produce sustained erections in the case of ED).

30) Pornography increasingly damaging health and relationships says Brno’s University Hospital study (2018)

It’s in Czech. This YBOP page contains a short press release in English. It also has a choppy Google translation of the longer press release from the hospital website. A few excerpts from the press release:

Increased use of and exposure to pornography are increasingly damaging normal relations and even the health of young men, according to a study released Monday by Brno’s University Hospital.

It said many young men were simply not prepared for normal relationships because of the myths created by the pornography they were watching. Many men turned on by pornography could not physically get stimulated in a relationship, the study added. Psychological and even medical treatment was required, the report said.

In the Sexological department of the Faculty Hospital in Brno, we also record more and more frequent cases of young men who are not able to have a normal sex life as a result of pornography, or to establish a relationship.

Negative impact

The fact that pornography is not merely a “diversification” of sex life but often has a negative impact on the quality of partner sexuality is evidenced by the increasing number of patients in the Sexual Section of Brno University Hospital who, due to excessive monitoring of inappropriate sexual content, are getting into health and relationship problems.

In middle age, male partners are replacing partner sex with pornography (masturbation is available anytime, faster, without psychological, physical or material investment). At the same time, sensitivity to normal (real) sexual stimuli accompanied by the risk of having sex-related dysfunctions associated only with a partner is significantly reduced by the monitoring of pornography. This is a risk of intimacy and proximity in the relationship, ie the psychological separation of partners, the need for masturbation on the Internet is gradually increasing – the risk of addiction increases and, last but not least, sexuality can change in its intensity but also in the quality of normal pornography is not enough, and these people resort to perversion (eg, sado-masochistic or zoophilous).

As a result, excessive monitoring of pornography may result in addiction, which is manifested by sexual dysfunction, disorder of relationships leading to social isolation, disrupted concentration, or neglect of work responsibilities, where only sex plays a dominant role in life.

31) Sexual Dysfunctions in the Internet Era (2018)

Excerpts:

Low sexual desire, reduced satisfaction in sexual intercourse, and erectile dysfunction (ED) are increasingly common in young population. In an Italian study from 2013, up to 25% of subjects suffering from ED were under the age of 40, and in a similar study published in 2014, more than half of Canadian sexually experienced men between the age of 16 and 21 suffered from some kind of sexual disorder. At the same time, prevalence of unhealthy lifestyles associated with organic ED has not changed significantly or has decreased in the last decades, suggesting that psychogenic ED is on the rise.

The DSM-IV-TR defines some behaviors with hedonic qualities, such as gambling, shopping, sexual behaviors, Internet use, and video game use, as “impulse control disorders not elsewhere classified”—although these are often described as behavioral addictions. Recent investigation has suggested the role of behavioral addiction in sexual dysfunctions: alterations in neurobiological pathways involved in sexual response might be a consequence of repeated, supernormal stimuli of various origins.

Risk factors

Among behavioral addictions, problematic Internet use and online pornography consumption are often cited as possible risk factors for sexual dysfunction, often with no definite boundary between the two phenomena. Online users are attracted to Internet pornography because of its anonymity, affordability, and accessibility, and in many cases its usage could lead users through a cybersex addiction: in these cases, users are more likely to forget the “evolutionary” role of sex, finding more excitement in self-selected sexually explicit material than in intercourse.

In literature, researchers are discordant about positive and negative function of online pornography. From the negative perspective, it represents the principal cause of compulsive masturbatory behavior, cybersex addiction, and even erectile dysfunction.

32) Gender Differences in the Relationship of Sexual Functioning With Implicit and Explicit Sex Liking and Sex Wanting: A Community Sample Study (2018)

Note: The study did not assess levels of porn use or porn addiction. However, it reported that better sexual functioning was related to lower cue-reactivity (“Implicit Liking”):

In male participants, higher levels of sexual functioning co-occurred with lower implicit liking of erotic stimuli

The authors hypothesized that porn use may have played a part:

The initially counterintuitive link in men between low implicit sex liking and higher level of sexual functioning, which was found both in the present study and the two previous ST-IAT investigations in clinical samples (van Lankveld, de Jong, et al., 2018; van Lankveld et al., 2015), provokes speculation….. The erotic stimuli in the ST-IAT depicted anonymous porn actors. A possible explanation might be that men with a history of unsuccessful and disappointing sexual encounters do not experience their own partner as a positive sexual stimulus even though they have a strong positive appreciation of sexual stimuli in general.

Sexual learning

A strong, positive implicit association with this type of stimuli in men with lower levels of sexual functioning might be the end stage of a learning process (Georgiadis et al., 2012). Such an end stage might result from frequent exposure to explicit pornography and the linkage of these stimuli with the rewards procured by orgasm through masturbation, as opposed to unrewarding sexual experiences with their partners.

Alternatively, the associations of sexual stimuli with positive valence, such as in men with low levels of sexual functioning, might represent a strong desire for the sexual interactions as were displayed in the erotic pictures. The discrepancy between this desire and their actual sexual interactions might, in fact, be one of the driving forces of their dysfunctional sexual experiences

33) Is Pornography Use Related to Erectile Functioning? Results From Cross-Sectional and Latent Growth Curve Analyses” (2019)

The researcher who saddled humankind with “perceived pornography addiction” and claimed it somehow “functions very differently from other addictions,” has now turned his dexterity to porn-induced ED. Even though this Joshua Grubbs-penned study found correlations between poorer sexual functioning and both porn addiction and porn use (while excluding sexually inactive men and thus many men with ED), the paper reads as if it has completely debunked porn-induced ED (PIED). This man-oeuvre comes as no surprise to those who have followed the earlier dubious claims of Dr. Grubbs in relation to his “perceived pornography addiction” campaign. See this extensive analysis for the facts.

Choosing the right sample

While the Grubbs paper consistently downplays the correlations between higher pornography use and poorer erections, correlations were reported in all 3 groups – especially for sample 3, which was the most relevant sample as it was the largest sample and averaged higher levels of porn use. Most importantly, this sample’s age range is the most likely to report PIED. Not surprisingly, sample 3 had the strongest correlation between higher levels of porn use and poorer erectile functioning (–0.37). Below are the 3 groups, with their average daily minutes of porn viewing and the correlations between erectile functioning amount of use (a negative sign means poorer erections linked to greater porn use):

Sample 1 (147 men): average age 19.8 – Averaged 22 minutes of porn/day. (–0.18)
Sample 2 (297 men): average age 46.5 – Averaged 13 minutes of porn/day. (–0.05)
Sample 3 (433 men): average age 33.5 – Averaged 45 minutes of porn/day. (–0.37)

Fairly straightforward results: the sample that used the most porn (#3) had the strongest correlation between greater porn use and poorer erections, while the group that use the least (#2) had the weakest correlation between greater porn use and poorer erections. Why didn’t Grubbs emphasize this pattern in his write-up, instead of using statistical manipulations to try to make it disappear?

To summarize:

Sample #1: Average age 19.8 – Note that 19-year old porn users rarely report chronic porn-induced (especially when only using 22 minutes a day). The vast majority of porn-induced ED recovery stories YBOP has gathered are by men aged 20-40. It generally takes time to develop PIED.
Sample #2: Average age 46.5 – They averaged only 13 minutes per day! With a standard deviation of 15.3 years, some portion of these men were fifty-something. These older men did not start out using internet porn during adolescence (making them less vulnerable to conditioning their sexual arousal solely to internet porn). Indeed, just as Grubbs found, the sexual health of slightly older men has always been better and more resilient over all, than users who began using digital porn during adolescence (such as those with an average age of 33 in sample 3).
Sample #3: Average age 33.5 – As already mentioned, sample 3 was the largest sample and averaged higher levels of porn use. Most importantly, this age range is the most likely to report PIED. Not surprisingly, sample 3 had the strongest correlation between higher levels of porn use and poorer erectile functioning (–0.37).

Porn addiction and poorer erectile functioning

Grubbs also correlated porn addiction scores with erectile functioning. The results reveal that even in subjects with relatively healthy erectile functioning, porn addiction was significantly related to poorer erections. The scores were –0.20 to –0.33. As before, the strongest correlation between porn addiction and poorer erections (–0.33) occurred in Grubbs’s largest sample. This was the sample of an average age most likely to report porn-induced ED: sample 3, average age: 33.5 (433 subjects).

Wait a minute you ask, how dare I say significantly related? Doesn’t the Grubbs study confidently declare that the relationship was only “small to moderate,” meaning it’s no big deal? As we explored in the critique, Grubbs’s use of descriptors varies remarkably, depending upon which Grubbs study you read. If the Grubbs study is about porn use causing ED, then the above numbers represent a meager correlation, tossed aside in his spin-laden write-up.

However, if it’s Grubbs’s most famous study (“Transgression as Addiction: Religiosity and Moral Disapproval as Predictors of Perceived Addiction to Pornography“), where he proclaimed that being religious was the real cause of “porn addiction,” then numbers smaller than these constitute a “robust relationship.” In fact, Grubbs’s “robust” correlation between religiosity and “perceived pornography addiction” was only 0.30! Yet he audaciously used it to usher in a completely new, and questionable, model of porn addiction.

Bias?

In the Dr. Grubbs bizzaro-stats world view, 0.37 is not detectable (correlation between porn use & poorer erectile functioning), while 0.30 is robust (correlation between religiosity & perceived porn addiction).

The tables, correlations and details referred to here are found in this section of a longer YBOP analysis.

34) Survey of Sexual Function and Pornography (2019)

In this study, researchers looked for a link between ED and indices of pornography addiction using a “craving” questionnaire. While no such link turned up, some other interesting correlations appeared in their results. The null result may be because users don’t accurately assess their degree of “craving” until they attempt to quit using. Excerpts:

Rates of erectile dysfunction were lowest in those [men] preferring partnered sex without pornography (22.3%) and increased significantly when pornography was preferred over partnered sex (78%).

…Pornography and sexual dysfunction are common among young people.

…Those [men] who used on an almost daily basis or more had ED rates of 44% (12/27) compared to 22% (47/213) for those more “casual” users (≤5x/week), reaching significance on univariate analysis (p=0.017). It may be that volume does play a role to some extent.

Physiology of PIED

…The proposed pathophysiology of PIED seems plausible and is based on a variety of researchers work and not a small collection of researchers that might be swayed by an ethical bias. Also supporting the “causation” side of the argument are reports of men regaining normal sexual function after discontinuation of excessive pornography use.

…Only prospective studies will be able to definitively solve the question of causation or association, including interventional studies evaluating the success of abstention in treating ED in heavy pornography users. Additional populations that warrant special consideration include adolescents. There has been concern raised that early exposure to graphic sexual material may affect normal development. The rate of teenagers being exposed to pornography before the age of 13 has gone up three fold over the last decade, and now hovers around 50%.

More excerpts

The above study was presented at the American Urological Association’s 2017 meeting. A few excerpts from this article about it – Study sees link between porn and sexual dysfunction (2017):

Young men who prefer pornography to real-world sexual encounters might find themselves caught in a trap, unable to perform sexually with other people when the opportunity presents itself, a new study reports. Porn-addicted men are more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction and are less likely to be satisfied with sexual intercourse, according to survey findings presented Friday at the American Urological Association’s annual meeting, in Boston.

“The rates of organic causes of erectile dysfunction in this age cohort are extremely low, so the increase in erectile dysfunction that we have seen over time for this group needs to be explained,” Christman said. “We believe that pornography use may be one piece to that puzzle”.

35) Sexual Dysfunction in the New Father: Sexual Intimacy Issues (2018)

This chapter from a new medical textbook entitled Paternal Postnatal Psychiatric Illnesses addresses porn’s impact on the sexual function of a new father, citing a paper co-authored by this website’s host, “Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports.” This page contains screenshots of relevant excerpts from the chapter.

36) Prevalence, Patterns and Self-Perceived Effects of Pornography Consumption in Polish University Students: A Cross-Sectional Study (2019)

Large study (n = 6463) on male & female college students (median age 22) reports relatively high levels of porn addiction (15%), escalation of porn use (tolerance), withdrawal symptoms, and porn-related sexual & relationship problems. Relevant excerpts:

The most common self-perceived adverse effects of pornography use included: the need for longer stimulation (12.0%) and more sexual stimuli (17.6%) to reach orgasm, and a decrease in sexual satisfaction (24.5%)…

The present study also suggests that earlier exposure may be associated with potential desensitization to sexual stimuli as indicated by a need for longer stimulation and more sexual stimuli required to reach orgasm when consuming explicit material, and overall decrease in sexual satisfaction…

Various changes of pattern of pornography use occurring in the course of the exposure period were reported: switching to a novel genre of explicit material (46.0%), use of materials that do not match sexual orientation (60.9%) and need to use more extreme (violent) material (32.0%)…

37) Sexual and reproductive health and rights in Sweden 2017 (2019)

A 2017 survey by The Swedish Public Health Authority contains a section discussing their findings on pornography. Relevant here, greater pornography use was related to poorer sexual health and decreased sexual dissatisfaction. Excerpts:

Forty-one percent of men aged 16 to 29 are frequent users of pornography, i.e. they consume pornography on a daily basis or almost on a daily basis. The corresponding percent among women is 3 percent. Our results also show an association between frequent pornography consumption and poorer sexual health, and an association with transactional sex, too high expectations of one’s sexual performance, and dissatisfaction with one’s sex life. Almost half of the population state that their pornography consumption does not affect their sex life, while a third do not know if it affects it or not. A small percentage of both women and men say their pornography use has a negative effect on their sex life. It was more common among men with higher education to regularly use pornography compared to men with lower education.

There is a need for more knowledge on the link between pornography consumption and health. An important preventive piece is to discuss the negative consequences of pornography with boys and young men, and school is a natural place to do this.

38) Internet Pornography: Addiction or Sexual Dysfunction? (2019)

Link to PDF of the chapter in Introduction to Psychosexual Medicine (2019) – White, Catherine. “Internet Pornography: Addiction or Sexual Dysfunction. Introduction to Psychosexual Medicine?” (2019)

39) Abstinence or Acceptance? A Case Series of Men’s Experiences With an Intervention Addressing Self-Perceived Problematic Pornography Use (2019)

The paper reports on six cases of men with porn addiction as they underwent a mindfulness-based intervention program (meditation, daily logs & weekly check-ins). All 6 subjects seemed to benefit from meditation. Relevant to this list of studies, 2 of 6 reported porn-induced ED. A few report escalation of use (habituation). One describes withdrawal symptoms. Excerpts from the cases reporting PIED:

Pedro (age 35):

Pedro self-reported as being a virgin. He talked about the feelings of shame he experienced with his past attempts at sexual intimacy with women. His most recent potential sexual encounter ended when his fear and anxiety prevented him from getting an erection. He attributed his sexual dysfunction to pornography use…

Pedro reported a significant decrease in pornography viewing by the end of the study and an overall improvement in mood and mental health symptoms. Despite increasing the dosage of one of his anti-anxiety medications during the study due work stress, he said he would continue meditating because of the self-reported benefits of calmness, focus, and relaxation he experienced after each session.

Pablo (age 29):

Pablo felt he had little to no control over his pornography use. He spent several hours each day ruminating on pornography, either while actively engaged in watching pornographic content or by thinking about watching pornography at the next possible opportunity when he was busy doing something else. Pablo went to a doctor with concerns about sexual dysfunctions he was experiencing, and though he disclosed concerns about his pornography use to his doctor, Pablo was instead referred to a male fertility specialist where he was given shots of testosterone. Pablo reported the testosterone intervention as having no benefit or usefulness to his sexual dysfunction, and the negative experience prevented him from reaching out for any further help with regards to his pornography use. The pre-study interview was the first time Pablo was able to converse openly with anybody regarding his pornography use…

40) Can time to ejaculation be affected by pornography? (2020)

Large study reporting a robust correlation between greater porn use and “delayed ejaculation” (difficulty orgasming with a partner). Excerpts & table from the study:

With the ubiquitous Internet accessibility cyberpornography has never been easier to access. Research findings may support potential side effects of porn on male sexual health. The aim of this study was to investigate whether prolonged time to ejaculation was associated with porn consumption.

Men, that had been sexual active in the last four weeks, were asked about the feeling of prolonged time to ejaculation with partner and could choose from the following answers; never, less than half of times, half of times, most of times or all of times. We calculated the time in minutes per week masturbating to porn and analysed if the time masturbating to porn was different in the response categories. 3,033 men completed the questionnaire of which 687 (22.7%) where excluded as they did not have sexual activity for the last four weeks and 15 men had missing data. In total, 2,331 men (76.9%), median age 31, was used for statistical analysis regarding ejaculation with partner during the last four weeks. The differences in means and medians of time masturbating to porn between men with different responses are shown in table 1.

Significant differences

The Kruksal-Wallis H test showed significant differences between the response categories with significantly more time masturbating to porn in those always having an ejaculation problem compared to those who had this feeling never, less- and half of times. A clear trend was seen in men frequently having the feeling of prolonged time to ejaculation and weekly time masturbating to porn. Men who always had the feeling of prolonged time to ejaculations with partner masturbate significantly more time to porn per week than men having this feeling; never, less- or half of times.

41) Exploring the Lived Experience of Problematic Users of Internet Pornography: A Qualitative Study (2020)

A few relevant excerpts:

The participants reported experiencing symptoms of feeling “addicted” to IP. The language of dependency, i.e., “cravings,” being “sucked in,” and “habit,” was used often. Participants also reported symptoms and experiences consistent with addictive disorders such as; an inability to reduce use of IP, increased use of IP over time or needing to use more extreme forms of IP to get the same effect…

Escalation was often described as either spending more time on IP or finding it necessary to view more extreme content in order to experience the same “high” over time, as this participant disclosed, “At first, I watched relatively soft porn, and as years passed by, I moved towards more brutal and degrading kinds of porn.”

Escalation of porn use was also linked to erectile dysfunction in some of the participants, as they found that after a time, no amount or genre of porn was able to cause them to have an erection, as described in the next subtheme.

Symptoms such as erectile dysfunction- conceptualized as an inability to gain an erection without porn or with a real-life partner- were often described: “I couldn’t get an erection with women I found attractive. And even when I did, it didn’t last long at all.” These symptoms were often lamented by the participants, with one participant declaring, “It has kept me from having sex! Lots of times! Because I can’t stay erect. Enough said.”

42) EAU 2020: More Porn, Worse Erectile Function (2020)

Conference abstract describing upcoming study. A few excerpts:

Researchers from Belgium, Denmark and the UK established an online questionnaire www.malesexualhealth.be, which was advertised mainly to men in Belgium and Denmark through social media, posters and flyers. 3267 men replied to the 118 questions, answering questions about masturbation, frequency of porn watching, and sexual activity with partners. The questionnaire concentrated on men who had had sex within the previous 4 weeks, which allowed the team to relate the effect of porn watching on sexual activity. The questionnaire incorporated questions from standard erectile function and sexual health surveys (see notes).

Head researcher, Professor Gunter de Win (University of Antwerp and University Hospital Antwerp) said:

“We found that there was a big range of responses. In our sample, men watch quite a lot of porn, on average around 70 minutes per week, normally for between 5 and 15 minutes per time, with obviously some watching very little and some watching much, much more”.

They also found that around 23% of men under-35 who responded to the survey had some level of erectile dysfunction when having sex with a partner.

Professor de Win commented:

“This figure was higher than we expected. We found that there was a highly significant relationship between time spent watching porn and increasing difficulty with erectile function with a partner, as indicated by the erectile function and sexual health scores. People who watch more porn also scored high on porn addiction scales.

We need to keep understand what this work means and doesn’t mean. It is a questionnaire rather than a clinical trial, and it could be that the people who have responded are not completely representative of the whole male population. However, the work was designed to unpick any relationship between porn and erectile dysfunction, and given the large sample size, we can be pretty confident about the findings.

We found that 90% of men fast-forward to watch the most arousing pornographic scenes. There’s no doubt that porn conditions the way we view sex; in our survey, only 65% of men felt that sex with a partner was more exciting than watching porn. In addition, 20% felt that they needed to watch more extreme porn to get the same level of arousal as previously. We believe that the erectile dysfunction problems associated with porn stem from this lack of arousal.

Our next step in this research to identify which factors lead to erectile dysfunction, and to conduct a similar study on the effects of porn on women. In the meantime, we believe that doctors dealing with erectile dysfunction should also be asking about watching pornography”.

Commenting, Professor Maarten Albersen (University of Leuven, Belgium) said:

“This is an interesting study by Prof. De Win and colleagues. The sample consisted mainly of younger men recruited via (social) media and posters, which may result in a sample biased towards higher online porn consumption rates. All-in-all, the study raises interesting insights in the fact that porn consumption by men may lead to impaired erectile function and/or sexual satisfaction or confidence during partner-sex.

As Professor De Win says, the running hypothesis is that the type of porn watched may come more explicit over time and partner-sex may not lead to the same level of arousal as the pornographic material does. The study contributes to an ongoing debate on the topic; experts have highlighted that porn may have both positive and negative effects, and could, for example, be used as an aid in the treatment of sexual dysfunctions, so this is a controversial area and the last words have not been said on this topic”.

Professor Albersen was not involved in this work, this is an independent comment.

43) The Pornography “Rebooting” Experience: A Qualitative Analysis of Abstinence Journals on an Online Pornography Abstinence Forum (2021)

Excellent paper analyzes more than 100 rebooting experiences and highlights what people are undergoing on recovery forums. Contradicts much of the propaganda about recovery forums (such as the nonsense that they’re all religious, or strict semen-retention extremists, etc.). Paper reports tolerance, habituation, withdrawal symptoms and porn-induced sexual problems in men attempting to quit porn. Relevant excerpts:

One primary self-perceived problem related to pornography use concerns addiction-related symptomatology. These symptoms generally include impaired control, preoccupation, craving, use as a dysfunctional coping mechanism, withdrawal, tolerance, distress about use, functional impairment, and continued use despite negative consequences (e.g., Bőthe et al., 2018; Kor et al., 2014).

Tolerance/Habituation:

It is interesting to note that paradoxically, close to one-third of members reported that instead of experiencing increased sexual desire, they experienced diminished sexual desire during abstinence, which they called the “flatline.” The “flatline” is a term that members used to describe a significant decrease or loss of libido during abstinence (although some appeared to have a broader definition for this to also include accompanying low mood and a sense of disengagement in general: (e.g., “I feel like I’m probably in a flatline right now as the desire to engage in any sort of sexual activity is almost nonexistent” [056, 30s]).

Sexual Problems:

Although potential associations between pornography use and sexual dysfunctions are generally inconclusive (see Dwulit & Rzymski, 2019b), self-perceived negative effects on sexual functioning have also been reported by some pornography users, including erectile difficulties, decreased desire for partnered sexual activity, decreased sexual satisfaction, and reliance on pornographic fantasies during sex with a partner (e.g., Dwulit & Rzymski, 2019a; Kohut, Fisher, & Campbell, 2017; Sniewski & Farvid, 2020). Some researchers have used terms such as “pornography-induced erectile dysfunction” (PIED) and “pornography-induced abnormally low libido” to describe specific sexual difficulties attributed to excessive pornography use (Park et al., 2016).

Second, for some members (n = 44), abstinence was motivated by a desire to relieve their sexual difficulties, based on the belief that these difficulties (erectile difficulties [n = 39]; diminished desire for partnered sex [n = 8]) were (possibly) pornography-induced. Some members believed that their problems with sexual functioning were a result of a conditioning of their sexual response predominantly to pornography-related content and activity (e.g., “I notice how I lacked enthusiasm for the body of the other…I have conditioned myself to enjoy sex with the laptop” [083, 45 years]). Of the 39 members who reported erectile difficulties as a reason for initiating abstinence, 31 were relatively certain that they were suffering from “pornography-induced erectile dysfunction” (PIED). Others (n = 8) were less certain of definitively labeling their erectile difficulties as being “pornography-induced” due to wanting to rule out other possible explanations (e.g., performance anxiety, age-related factors, etc.), but decided to initiate abstinence in case they were indeed pornography-related.

Increased sexual sensitivity and responsiveness were reported by some members. Of the 42 members who reported erectile difficulties at the outset of the abstinence attempt, half (n = 21) reported at least some improvements in erectile function after abstaining for a period of time. Some members reported partial return of erectile function (e.g., “It was only about a 60% erection, but what was important is that it was there” [076, 52 years]), while others reported a complete return of erectile function (e.g., “I had sex with my wife both Friday night and last night, and both times were 10/10 erections that lasted quite a long time” [069, 30 years]). Some members also reported that sex was more pleasurable and satisfying than before (e.g., “I had two times (Saturday and Wednesday) the best sex in four years” [062, 37 years]).

Members who persisted with abstinence typically found abstinence to be a rewarding experience and reported a range of perceived benefits which they attributed to abstaining from pornography. Perceived effects resembling pornography abstinence self-efficacy (Kraus, Rosenberg, Martino, Nich, & Potenza, 2017) or an increased sense of self-control in general (Muraven, 2010) were described by some members after successful periods of abstinence. Perceived improvements in psychological and social functioning (e.g., improved mood, increased motivation, improved relationships) and sexual functioning (e.g., increased sexual sensitivity and improved erectile function) were also described.

44) Lecture describing upcoming studies – by Urology professor Carlo Foresta, president of the Italian Society of Reproductive Pathophysiology

The lecture contains the results of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies. One study involved a survey of high school teens (pages 52-53). The study reported that sexual dysfunction doubled between 2005 and 2013, with low sexual desire increasing 600%.

The percentage of teens that experienced alterations of their sexuality: 2004/05: 7.2%, 2012/13: 14.5%
The percentage of teens with low sexual desire: 2004/05: 1.7%, 2012/13: 10.3% (that’s a 600% increase in 8 years)

Foresta also describes his upcoming study. It was “Sexuality media and new forms of sexual pathology sample 125 young males, 19-25 years” Its Italian name is “Sessualità mediatica e nuove forme di patologia sessuale Campione 125 giovani maschi“. The results from the study (pages 77-78), which used the International Index of Erectile Function Questionnaire, found that regular porn users scored 50% lower on sexual desire domain and 30% lower of the erectile functioning domain.

45) MedHelp article

(not peer-reviewed) Here’s an article about an extensive analysis of comments and questions posted on MedHelp concerning erectile dysfunction. What’s shocking is that 58% of the men asking for help were 24 or younger. Many suspected that internet porn could be involved as described in the results from the study –

The most common phrase is “erectile dysfunction” – which is mentioned more than three times as often as any other phrase – followed by “internet porn,” “performance anxiety,” and “watching porn.”

Clearly, porn is a frequently discussed subject: “I have been viewing internet pornography frequently (4 to 5 times a week) for the past 6 years,” one man writes. “I am in my mid-20s and have had a problem getting and maintaining an erection with sexual partners since my late teens when I first started looking at internet porn.”

Article about the latest spin campaign: Sexologists Deny Porn-induced ED by Claiming Masturbation Is the Problem (2016)

List #2: Studies reporting links between porn use and poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction

According to researchers, those who indicate a “good performance in mating,” experience more positive emotions. They also report fewer negative emotions, and are more satisfied with their lives. Yet according to a 2018 study, one in two now face difficulties starting or keeping an intimate relationship.

As of 2020, over 80 studies have linked porn use to poorer sexual and relationship satisfaction. While a few studies correlated greater porn use in females to better (or neutral) sexual satisfaction, most have not (see this list: Porn studies involving female subjects: Negative effects on arousal, sexual satisfaction, and relationships). As far as we know all studies involving males reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction. Below are two sections.

In the first section, papers 1, 2 & 3 are meta-analyses/reviews, study #4 had porn users attempt to quit using porn for 3 weeks, and studies 5 through 10 are longitudinal.
In the second section studies are listed in chronological order.

1) Pornography Consumption and Satisfaction: A Meta-Analysis (2017)

This meta-analysis of various other studies assessing sexual and relationship satisfaction reported that porn use was consistently related to lower sexual and relationship satisfaction (interpersonal satisfaction). While some studies report little negative effect of porn use on sexual and relationship satisfaction in women, it’s important to know that a relatively small percentage of coupled females (across the population) regularly consume internet porn. Nationally representative data from the largest US survey (General Social Survey) found that only 2.6% of women had visited a “pornographic website” in the last month (2002-2004). An excerpt:

However, pornography consumption was associated with lower interpersonal satisfaction outcomes in cross-sectional surveys, longitudinal surveys, and experiments. Associations between pornography consumption and reduced interpersonal satisfaction outcomes were not moderated by their year of release or their publication status. But analyses by sex indicted significant results for men only.

2) Women’s perceptions of their male partners’ pornography consumption and relational, sexual, self, and body satisfaction: toward a theoretical model (2017)

Excerpts:

This paper’s meta-analysis of quantitative studies conducted to date primarily supports the hypothesis that the majority of women are negatively impacted by the perception that their partner is a pornography consumer. In main analyses including all of the available studies, perceiving partners as pornography consumers was significantly associated with less relational, sexual, and body satisfaction. The association for self satisfaction was also negative. The results also suggested that women’s satisfaction will generally decrease in correspondence with the perception that their partners are consuming pornography more frequently.

Perceiving male partners as more frequent consumers of pornography was significantly associated with less relational and sexual satisfaction.

Finally, the possibility of a publication bias was also explored. Taken in totality, the results did not suggest that publication bias is a significant concern in this literature.

3) Pornography and Relationship Quality: Establishing the Dominant Pattern by Examining Pornography Use and 31 Measures of Relationship Quality across 30 National Surveys (2019)

Review on only 4 national surveys, including the highly suspect General Social Survey which assessed porn use with an out-of-date either/or question: “have you viewed an X-rated film this year”. Important to note: the author’s write-up was designed to give the impression that porn use is not all that bad, or that poor relationships might lead to porn use. This is not surprising as author Samuel Perry is a proud “expert” of the pro-porn website – www.realyourbrainonporn.com. RealYBOP is engaged in illegal trademark infringement and squatting, has “experts” who are being paid by the porn industry, and uses its twitter account to defame and harass those who speak about porn’s harms. Nevertheless, Perry couldn’t fully disguise the fact that poorer relationship quality is nearly always associated with porn use.

Excerpts:

Data were taken from 30 nationally-representative surveys, which together included 31 measures of relationship quality: 1973-2018 General Social Surveys (1 repeated measure); 2006 Portraits of American Life Study (13 measures); 2012 New Family Structures Study (12 measures); and 2014 Relationships in America Survey (5 measures). This allowed for 57 independent tests examining the association between pornography use and relationship outcomes for married Americans and 29 independent tests for unmarried Americans.

For married and unmarried Americans alike, pornography use was either unassociated or negatively associated with nearly all relationship outcomes. Significant associations were mostly small in magnitude. Conversely, except for one unclear exception, pornography use was never positively associated with relationship quality. Associations were only occasionally moderated by gender, but in inconsistent directions. While this study makes no claims about causality, findings clearly affirmed that, in instances where viewing pornography is associated with relationship quality at all, it is nearly always a signal of poorer relationship quality, for men and women.

4) A Love That Doesn’t Last: Pornography Consumption and Weakened Commitment to One’s Romantic Partner (2012)

The study had subjects try to abstain from porn use for 3 weeks. It then compared the two groups. Those who continued using pornography reported lower levels of commitment than those who tried to abstain. Excerpts:

Study 1 found that higher pornography consumption was related to lower commitment

Study 3 participants were randomly assigned to either refrain from viewing pornography or to a self-control task. Those who continued using pornography reported lower levels of commitment than control participants.

Study 5 found that pornography consumption was positively related to infidelity and this association was mediated by commitment. Overall, a consistent pattern of results was found using a variety of approaches including cross-sectional (Study 1), observational (Study 2), experimental (Study 3), and behavioral (Studies 4 and 5) data.

5) Internet pornography and relationship quality: A longitudinal study of within and between partner effects of adjustment, sexual satisfaction and sexually explicit internet material among newly-weds (2015)

Longitudinal study. Excerpt:

The data from a considerable sample of newlyweds showed that SEIM use has more negative than positive consequences for husbands and wives. Importantly, husbands’ adjustment decreased SEIM use over time and SEIM use decreased adjustment. Furthermore, more sexual satisfaction in husbands predicted a decrease in their wives’ SEIM use one year later, while wives’ SEIM use did not change their husbands’ sexual satisfaction.

6) Does Viewing Pornography Reduce Marital Quality Over Time? Evidence from Longitudinal Data (2016)

First longitudinal study on a representative cross-section of married couples. It found significant negative effects of porn use on marriage quality over time. Excerpt:

This study is the first to draw on nationally representative, longitudinal data (2006-2012 Portraits of American Life Study) to test whether more frequent pornography use influences marital quality later on and whether this effect is moderated by gender. In general, married persons who more frequently viewed pornography in 2006 reported significantly lower levels of marital quality in 2012, net of controls for earlier marital quality and relevant correlates. Pornography’s effect was not simply a proxy for dissatisfaction with sex life or marital decision-making in 2006. In terms of substantive influence, frequency of pornography use in 2006 was the second strongest predictor of marital quality in 2012. Interaction effects revealed, however, that the negative effect of porn use on marital quality applied to husbands, but not wives.

Note: When the author was asked privately about the raw numbers of women who reported increased satisfaction as porn use increased, he said:

I can’t remember the exact number off the top of my head, but I recall it being pretty small.

7) Till Porn Do Us Part? Longitudinal Effects of Pornography Use on Divorce (2017)

This longitudinal study used nationally representative General Social Survey panel data collected from thousands of American adults. Respondents were interviewed three times about their pornography use and marital status — every two years from 2006-2010, 2008-2012, or 2010-2014. Excerpts:

Beginning pornography use between survey waves nearly doubled one’s likelihood of being divorced by the next survey period, from 6 percent to 11 percent, and nearly tripled it for women, from 6 percent to 16 percent. Our results suggest that viewing pornography, under certain social conditions, may have negative effects on marital stability. Conversely, discontinuing pornography use between survey waves was associated with a lower probability of divorce, but only for women.

Additionally, the researchers found that respondents’ initially reported level of marital happiness played an important role in determining the magnitude of pornography’s association with the probability of divorce. Among people who reported they were “very happy” in their marriage in the first survey wave, beginning pornography viewership before the next survey was associated with a noteworthy increase — from 3 percent to 12 percent — in the likelihood of getting divorced by the time of that next survey.

Additional analyses also showed that the association between beginning pornography use and the probability of divorce was particularly strong among younger Americans, those who were less religious, and those who reported greater initial marital happiness.

8) Pornography Use and Marital Separation: Evidence from Two-Wave Panel Data (2017)

Longitudinal study. Excerpts:

Drawing on data from the 2006 and 2012 waves of the nationally representative Portraits of American Life Study, this article examined whether married Americans who viewed pornography in 2006, either at all or in greater frequencies, were more likely to experience a marital separation by 2012. Binary logistic regression analyses showed that married Americans who viewed pornography at all in 2006 were more than twice as likely as those who did not view pornography to experience a separation by 2012, even after controlling for 2006 marital happiness and sexual satisfaction as well as relevant sociodemographic correlates. The relationship between pornography use frequency and marital separation, however, was technically curvilinear. The likelihood of marital separation by 2012 increased with 2006 pornography use to a point and then declined at the highest frequencies of pornography use.

9) Are Pornography Users More Likely to Experience A Romantic Breakup? Evidence from Longitudinal Data (2017)

Longitudinal study. Excerpts:

This study examined whether Americans who use pornography, either at all or more frequently, are more prone to report experiencing a romantic breakup over time. Longitudinal data were taken from the 2006 and 2012 waves of the nationally representative Portraits of American Life Study. Binary logistic regression analyses demonstrated that Americans who viewed pornography at all in 2006 were nearly twice as likely as those who never viewed pornography to report experiencing a romantic breakup by 2012, even after controlling for relevant factors such as 2006 relationship status and other sociodemographic correlates. This association was considerably stronger for men than for women and for unmarried Americans than for married Americans. Analyses also showed a linear relationship between how frequently Americans viewed pornography in 2006 and their odds of experiencing a breakup by 2012.

10) Pornography Use and Marriage Entry During Early Adulthood: Findings From a Panel Study of Young Americans (2018)

Longitudinal study. Excerpts:

The current study takes this research in a different direction by examining (1) whether pornography use may be associated with entrance into marriage during early adulthood and (2) whether this association is moderated by both gender and religion, two key factors strongly related to both pornography use and earlier marriage. Longitudinal data were taken from waves 1, 3, and 4 of the National Study of Youth and Religion, a nationally-representative panel study of Americans from their teenage years into early adulthood (N = 1,691). It was theorized that frequent pornography use at earlier survey waves may foster more sexually progressive attitudes that may lead to devaluing marriage as an institution, and, for religious men in particular, may disincentivize marriage as a “socially legitimate” means of sexual fulfillment.

Findings affirmed that, compared to more moderate levels of pornography use, higher levels of pornography use in emerging adulthood were associated with a lower likelihood of marriage by the final survey wave for men, but not women. This association was not moderated by religiosity for either gender.

The remaining studies are listed by date of publication:

1) Effect of Erotica on Young Men’s Aesthetic Perception of Their Female Sexual Partners (1984) – Excerpt:

Male undergraduates were exposed to (a) nature scenes or (b) beautiful versus (c) unattractive females in sexually enticing situations. Thereafter, they assessed their girl friends’ sexual appeal and evaluated their satisfaction with their mates. On pictorial measures of bodily appeal profiles of flat through hypervoluptuous breast and buttock, preexposure to beautiful females tended to suppress mates’ appeal, while preexposure to unattractive females tended to enhance it. After exposure to beautiful females, mates’ aesthetic value fell significantly below assessments made after exposure to unattractive females; this value assumed an intermediate position after control exposure. Changes in mates’ aesthetic appeal did not correspond with changes in satisfaction with mates, however.

2) Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography on Family Values (1988) – Excerpt:

Male and female students and nonstudents were exposed to videotapes featuring common, nonviolent pornography or innocuous content. Exposure was in hourly sessions in six consecutive weeks. In the seventh week, subjects participated in an ostensibly unrelated study on societal institutions and personal gratifications. Marriage, cohabitational relationships, and related issues were judged on an especially created Value-of-Marriage questionnaire. The findings showed a consistent impact of pornography consumption.

Exposure prompted, among other things, greater acceptance of pre- and extramarital sex and greater tolerance of nonexclusive sexual access to intimate partners. It enhanced the belief that male and female promiscuity are natural and that the repression of sexual inclinations poses a health risk. Exposure lowered the evaluation of marriage, making this institution appear less significant and less viable in the future. Exposure also reduced the desire to have children and promoted the acceptance of male dominance and female servitude. With few exceptions, these effects were uniform for male and female respondents as well as for students and nonstudents.

3) Pornography’s Impact on Sexual Satisfaction (1988) – Excerpt:

Male and female students and nonstudents were exposed to videotapes featuring common, nonviolent pornography or innocuous content. Exposure was in hourly sessions in six consecutive weeks. In the seventh week, subjects participated in an ostensibly unrelated study on societal institutions and personal gratifications. [Porn use] strongly impacted self-assessment of sexual experience. After consumption of pornography, subjects reported less satisfaction with their intimate partners—specifically, with these partners’ affection, physical appearance, sexual curiosity, and sexual performance proper. In addition, subjects assigned increased importance to sex without emotional involvement. These effects were uniform across gender and populations.

4) Influence of popular erotica on judgments of strangers and mates (1989) – Excerpt:

In Experiment 2, male and female subjects were exposed to opposite sex erotica. In the second study, there was an interaction of subject sex with stimulus condition upon sexual attraction ratings. Decremental effects of centerfold exposure were found only for male subjects exposed to female nudes. Males who found the Playboy-type centerfolds more pleasant rated themselves as less in love with their wives.

5) Men’s leisure and women’s lives: The impact of pornography on women (1999) – Excerpt:

The section of the interview where the women discussed their own current or past relationships with men revealed additional insight into the effect of pornography on such relationships. Fifteen of the women were in, or had been in, relationships with men who rented or bought pornography at least on an occasional basis. Of these 15 women, four expressed strong dislike of their husband’s or partner’s leisure time interest in pornography. It was clear that the husbands’ use of pornography affected the wives’ feeling about themselves, their sexual feelings, and their marital relationships in general

6) Adult Social Bonds and Use of Internet Pornography (2004) – Excerpt:

Complete data on 531 Internet users are taken from the General Social Surveys for 2000. Social bonds measures include religious, marital, and political ties. Measures of participation in sexual and drug-related deviant lifestyles, and demographic controls are included. The results of a logistic regression analysis found that among the strongest predictors of use of cyberporn were weak ties to religion and lack of a happy marriage.

7) Sex in America Online: An Exploration of Sex, Marital Status, and Sexual Identity in Internet Sex Seeking and Its Impacts (2008) – Excerpt:

This was an exploratory study of sex and relationship seeking on the Internet, based on a survey of 15,246 respondents in the United States Seventy-five percent of men and 41% of women had intentionally viewed or downloaded porn. Men and gays/lesbians were more likely to access porn or engage in other sex-seeking behaviors online compared with straights or women. A symmetrical relationship was revealed between men and women as a result of viewing pornography, with women reporting more negative consequences, including lowered body image, partner critical of their body, increased pressure to perform acts seen in pornographic films, and less actual sex, while men reported being more critical of their partners’ body and less interested in actual sex.

8) Adolescents’ Exposure to Sexually Explicit Internet Material and Sexual Satisfaction: A Longitudinal Study (2009) – Excerpt:

Between May 2006 and May 2007, we conducted a three-wave panel survey among 1,052 Dutch adolescents aged 13–20. Structural equation modeling revealed that exposure to SEIM consistently reduced adolescents’ sexual satisfaction. Lower sexual satisfaction (in Wave 2) also increased the use of SEIM (in Wave 3). The effect of exposure to SEIM on sexual satisfaction did not differ among male and female adolescents.

9) Wives’ Experience of Husbands’ Pornography Use and Concomitant Deception as an Attachment Threat in the Adult Pair-Bond Relationship (2009) – Excerpt:

Evidence is growing that pornography use can negatively impact attachment trust in the adult pair-bond relationship. Analyses uncovered three attachment-related impacts from husbands’ pornography use and deception: (1) the development of an attachment fault line in the relationship, stemming from perceived attachment infidelity; (2) followed by a widening attachment rift arising from wives’ sense of distance and disconnection from their husbands; (3) culminating in attachment estrangement from a sense of being emotionally and psychologically unsafe in the relationship. Overall, wives reported global mistrust indicative of attachment breakdown.

10) Sexual media use and relational satisfaction in heterosexual couples (2010)

Sharing porn was better than using alone. But how many couples use porn together? Not too many. Porn use is still bad for men. Excerpt:

This study assessed how sexual media use by one or both members of a romantic dyad relates to relationship and sexual satisfaction. A total of 217 heterosexual couples completed an Internet survey that assessed sexual media use, relationship and sexual satisfaction, and demographic variables. Results revealed that a higher frequency of men’s sexual media use related to negative satisfaction in men, while a higher frequency of women’s sexual media use related to positive satisfaction in male partners. Reasons for sexual media use differed by gender: Men reported primarily using sexual media for masturbation, while women reported primarily using sexual media as part of lovemaking with their partners. Shared sexual media use was associated with higher relational satisfaction compared to solitary sexual media use.

11) Exploring actor and partner correlates of sexual satisfaction among married couples (2010) – Excerpt:

Using the Interpersonal Exchange Model of Sexual Satisfaction, we consider how infidelity, pornography consumption, marital satisfaction, sexual frequency, premarital sex, and cohabitation are associated with married couples’ sexual satisfaction. Data from 433 couples are analyzed with structural equation models to determine the contributions. Finally, some evidence suggests that pornography consumption is costly for own and spouse’s sexual satisfaction, especially when pornography is used by only one spouse.

12) Individuals who never viewed SEM reported higher relationship quality on all indices than those who viewed SEM alone (2011) – Excerpt:

As expected, individuals who did not view SEM (sexually explicit material) at all reported lower negative communication and higher dedication than individuals who viewed SEM alone or both alone and with their partner.

13) Associations between young adults’ use of sexually explicit materials and their sexual preferences, behaviors, and satisfaction (2011) – Excerpts:

Higher frequencies of sexual explicit material (SEM) use were associated with less sexual and relationship satisfaction. The frequency of SEM use and number of SEM types viewed were both associated with higher sexual preferences for the types of sexual practices typically presented in SEM. These findings suggest that SEM use can play a significant role in a variety of aspects of young adults’ sexual development processes.

Specifically, higher viewing frequency was associated with less sexual and relationship satisfaction when controlling for gender, religiosity, dating status and the number of SEM types viewed.

Because a substantial proportion of the young adults in this study reported using SEM, the potential implications are especially noteworthy, particularly for young men.

14) Viewing Sexually-Explicit Materials Alone or Together: Associations with Relationship Quality (2011) – Excerpt:

This study investigated associations between viewing sexually-explicit material (SEM) and relationship functioning in a random sample of 1291 unmarried individuals in romantic relationships. More men (76.8%) than women (31.6%) reported that they viewed SEM on their own, but nearly half of both men and women reported sometimes viewing SEM with their partner (44.8%).

Individuals who never viewed SEM reported higher relationship quality on all indices than those who viewed SEM alone. Those who viewed SEM only with their partners reported more dedication and higher sexual satisfaction than those who viewed SEM alone. The only difference between those who never viewed SEM and those who viewed it only with their partners was that those who never viewed it had lower rates of infidelity.

15) Pornography and divorce (2011) – Excerpt:

We test whether pornography causes divorce. Using state-level panel data on the divorce rate and sales of Playboy magazine, we document a strong cross-sectional and time-series relation between lagged sales of Playboy and the divorce rate. The simple correlation between divorce and sales lagged two years is 44 percent, with a T-statistic of 20. This large correlation is robust to using only the first half of the sample, adjusting for all state-level heterogeneity and for any time trends by including state and year fixed effects, and using an instrumental variable to correct for any possible endogeneity in Playboy sales. Divorce rates are also significantly correlated with sales of Penthouse but they are not correlated with sales of Time magazine. Our overall estimates suggest that pornography probably caused 10 percent of all divorces in the United States in the sixties and seventies.

16) Young Adult Women’s Reports of Their Male Romantic Partner’s Pornography Use as a Correlate of Their Self-Esteem, Relationship Quality, and Sexual Satisfaction (2012) – Excerpt:

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between men’s pornography use, both frequency and problematic use, on their heterosexual female partner’s psychological and relational well-being among 308 young adult college women. Results revealed women’s reports of their male partner’s frequency of pornography use were negatively associated with their relationship quality. More perceptions of problematic use of pornography was negatively correlated with self-esteem, relationship quality, and sexual satisfaction.

17) Pornography use: who uses it and how it is associated with couple outcomes (2013) – Excerpt:

This study examined associations among pornography use, the meaning people attach to its use, sexual quality, and relationship satisfaction. Participants were couples (N = 617 couples) who were either married or cohabiting at the time the data were gathered. Overall results from this study indicated substantial gender differences in terms of use profiles, as well as pornography’s association with relationship factors. Specifically, male pornography use was negatively associated with both male and female sexual quality, whereas female pornography use was positively associated with female sexual quality.

18) Internet Pornography Exposure and Women’s Attitude Towards Extramarital Sex: An Exploratory Study (2013) – Excerpt:

This exploratory study assessed the association between adult U.S. women’s exposure to Internet pornography and attitude towards extramarital sex using data provided by the General Social Survey (GSS). A positive association between Internet pornography viewing and more positive extramarital sex attitudes was found.

19) The use of pornography and sexual behaviour among Norwegian men and women of differing sexual orientation (2013)

Hidden away in the study: Greater pornography use in men was correlated with lower sexual satisfaction (or “greater sexual dissatisfaction”).

20) Pornography and Marriage (2014) – The abstract:

We used data on 20,000 ever-married adults in the General Social Survey to examine the relationship between watching pornographic films and various measures of marital well-being. We found that adults who had watched an X-rated movie in the past year were more likely to be divorced, more likely to have had an extramarital affair, and less likely to report being happy with their marriage or happy overall. [Our study] also found that, for men, pornography use reduced the positive relationship between frequency of sex and happiness.

Finally, we found that the negative relationship between pornography use and marital well-being has, if anything, grown stronger over time, during a period in which pornography has become both more explicit and more easily available.

21) More than a dalliance? Pornography consumption and extramarital sex attitudes among married U.S. adults (2014) – Excerpts:

This brief report used national panel data gathered from two separate samples of married U.S. adults. Data were gathered from the first sample in 2006 and in 2008. Data were gathered from the second sample in 2008 and in 2010. Consistent with a social learning perspective on media, prior pornography consumption was correlated with more positive subsequent extramarital sex attitudes in both samples, even after controlling for earlier extramarital sex attitudes and nine additional potential confounds.

In total, the results of the present study are consistent with the theoretical premise that pornography consumption leads to the acquisition and activation of sexual scripts, which are then used by many consumers to inform their sexual attitudes (Wright, 2013a; Wright et al., 2012a).

22) Korean Men’s Pornography use, Their Interest in Extreme Pornography, and Dyadic Sexual Relationships (2014) – Excerpt:

Six-hundred eighty-five heterosexual South Korean male college students participated in an online survey. The majority (84.5%) of respondents had viewed pornography, and for those who were sexually active (470 respondents), we found that higher interest in degrading or extreme pornography was associated with the experience of role-playing sexual scenes from pornography with a partner, and a preference for using pornography to achieve and maintain sexual excitement over having sex with a partner.

We found that higher interest in viewing degrading or extreme pornography … has a significant positive … association with sexual concerns.

23) Pornography and the Male Sexual Script: An Analysis of Consumption and Sexual Relations (2014) – Excerpt:

We argue pornography creates a sexual script that then guides sexual experiences. To test this, we surveyed 487 college men (ages 18-29 years) in the United States to compare their rate of pornography use with sexual preferences and concerns. Results showed the more pornography a man watches, the more likely he was to use it during sex, request particular pornographic sex acts of his partner, deliberately conjure images of pornography during sex to maintain arousal, and have concerns over his own sexual performance and body image. Further, higher pornography use was negatively associated with enjoying sexually intimate behaviors with a partner.

24) Psychological, Relational, and Sexual Correlates of Pornography Use on Young Adult Heterosexual Men in Romantic Relationships (2014) – Excerpt:

Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine theorized antecedents (i.e., gender role conflict and attachment styles) and consequences (i.e., poorer relationship quality and sexual satisfaction) of men’s pornography use among 373 young adult heterosexual men. Findings revealed that both frequency of pornography use and problematic pornography use were related to greater gender role conflict, more avoidant and anxious attachment styles, poorer relationship quality, and less sexual satisfaction. In addition, the findings provided support for a theorized mediated model in which gender role conflict was linked to relational outcomes both directly and indirectly via attachment styles and pornography use.

25) Associations between relational sexual behaviour, pornography use, and pornography acceptance among US college students (2014) – Excerpt:

Using a sample of 792 emerging adults, the present study explored how the combined examination of pornography use, acceptance, and sexual behaviour within a relationship might offer insight into emerging adults’ development. Results suggested clear gender differences in both pornography use and acceptance patterns.

High male pornography use tended to be associated with high engagement in sex within a relationship and was associated with elevated risk-taking behaviours.

High female pornography use was not associated with engagement in sexual behaviours within a relationship and was general associated with negative mental health outcomes.

26) IASR Fortieth Annual Meeting Book of Abstracts – Dubrovnik, Hrvatska, 25.-28. lipnja, 2014

This is an abstract of a presentation given by Landripet and Stulhofer at a sexology conference. These 2 researchers published a portion of their data in this “brief communication,” which is cited as finding no relationship between porn use and sexual problems. In reality, their “brief communication” doesn’t mention a pretty important correlation mentioned in their paper: Only 40% of the Portuguese men used porn “frequently,” while the 60% of the Norwegians used porn “frequently.” The Portuguese men had far less sexual dysfunction than the Norwegians. In a shocking move, Landripet & Stulhofer omitted three other correlations between porn use and sexual problems which they presented to at the Dubrovnik conference:

However, increased pornography use was slightly but significantly associated with decreased interest for partnered sex and more prevalent sexual dysfunction among women.

Reporting a preference for specific pornographic genres were significantly associated with erectile, but not ejaculatory or desire-related male sexual dysfunction.

Omission

It’s quite telling that Landripet & Stulhofer chose to omit a significant correlation between erectile dysfunction and preferences for specific genres of porn from their “brief” paper. It’s quite common for porn users to escalate into genres that do not match their original sexual tastes. It is then common for them to experience ED when these conditioned porn preferences do not match real sexual encounters. As pointed out in this review of the literature (and this critique of Landripet & Stulhofer), it’s very important to assess the multiple variables associated with porn use – not just hours in the last month, or frequency in the last year.

27) Factors Predicting Cybersex Use and Difficulties in Forming Intimate Relationships among Male and Female Users of Cybersex (2015) – Excerpt:

This study used the Cybersex addiction test, Craving for pornography questionnaire, and a Questionnaire on intimacy among 267 participants (192 males and 75 females) mean age for males 28 and for females 25, who were recruited from special sites that are dedicated to pornography and cybersex on the Internet.

Results of regression analysis indicated that pornography, gender, and cybersex significantly predicted difficulties in intimacy and it accounted for 66.1% of the variance of rating on the intimacy questionnaire. Second, regression analysis also indicated that craving for pornography, gender, and difficulties in forming intimate relationships significantly predicted frequency of cybersex use and it accounted for 83.7% of the variance in ratings of cybersex use.

28) Male Partners’ Perceived Pornography Use and Women’s Relational and Psychological Health: The Roles of Trust, Attitudes, and Investment (2015) – Excerpt:

Results revealed that women’s reports of their male partners’ pornography use were related to less relationship satisfaction and more psychological distress. Results from the moderation analyses indicated that the direct effect of male partners’ perceived pornography use and relationship trust and the conditional indirect effects of male partners’ perceived pornography use on both relationship satisfaction and psychological distress were contingent on relationship investment.

These findings indicated that when male partners’ perceived pornography use is high, women who have low or mean levels of relationship investment have less relationship trust. Finally, our results revealed that the relationship between male partners’ perceived pornography use and relational and psychological outcomes exist regardless of women’s own attitudes toward pornography

29) Relationship of love and marital satisfaction with pornography among married university students in Birjand, Iran (2015) – Excerpts:

This descriptive-correlation study was conducted on 310 married students studying at private and public universities in Birjand, in 2012-2013 academic year using random quota sampling method. It appears that pornography has a negative impact on love and marital satisfaction.

30) From Bad to Worse? Pornography Consumption, Spousal Religiosity, Gender, and Marital Quality (2016) – Excerpts:

I test the above hypotheses using data from Wave 1 of the Portraits of American Life Study (PALS), which was fielded in 2006. PALS is a nationally representative panel survey with questions focusing on a variety of topics…. Looking at bivariate correlations, for the full sample, viewing pornography is negatively associated with overall marital satisfaction, suggesting that those who view pornography more often tend to be less satisfied in their marriage than those who view pornography less often or never

31) Sexually explicit media use and relationship satisfaction a moderating role of emotional intimacy? (2016)

The authors attempted to obfuscate their findings in the abstract by stating that once sexual and relationship variables were “controlled for,” they found no link between porn use and relationship satisfaction. Reality: The study found significant correlations between porn use and poorer relationship and sexual satisfaction in both males and females. Excerpt from discussion section:

For both men and women, significant, yet modest negative zero-order correlations between SEM use and relationship satisfaction were found, indicating that increased SEM use was associated with lower relationship satisfaction across gender.

32) Effect of soft core pornography on female sexuality (2016) – Excerpt:

An overall 51.6% of participants who were aware that their husbands were positive watchers reported experiencing negative emotions (depression, jealous), whereas 77% reported changes in their husbands’ attitude. Non-watchers watchers were more satisfied with their sexual life compared with their counterparts. Although watching soft-core pornography had a statistically significant effect on sexual desire, vaginal lubrication, ability to reach orgasm, and masturbation, it had no statistically significant effect on coital frequency. Watching soft-core pornography affects female sexual life by increasing sexual boredom in both men and women, causing relational difficulties.

32) A Common-Fate Analysis of Pornography Acceptance, Use, and Sexual Satisfaction Among Heterosexual Married Couples (2016) – Excerpt:

Results indicated that the shared variance of pornography acceptance was positively associated with both spouses’ pornography use and that spouses’ pornography use was negatively associated with their own sexual satisfaction. Wives’ pornography use was found to be positively associated with the couple’s shared variance of sexual satisfaction, but pornography use did not significantly mediate the relationship between pornography acceptance and sexual satisfaction.

34) Differences in Pornography Use Among Couples: Associations with Satisfaction, Stability, and Relationship Processes (2016) – Excerpt:

The present study utilized a sample of 1755 adult couples in heterosexual romantic relationships to examine how different patterns of pornography use between romantic partners may be associated with relationship outcomes. While pornography use has been generally associated with some negative and some positive couple outcomes, no study has yet explored how differences between partners may uniquely be associated with relationship well-being.

Results suggested that greater discrepancies between partners in pornography use were related to less relationship satisfaction, less stability, less positive communication, and more relational aggression. Mediation analyses suggested that greater pornography use discrepancies were primarily associated with elevated levels of male relational aggression, lower female sexual desire, and less positive communication for both partners which then predicted lower relational satisfaction and stability for both partners.

35) Internet Pornography Consumption and Relationship Commitment of Filipino Married Individuals (2016) – Excerpt:

Internet pornography has many adverse effects, especially to the relationship commitment. The use of pornography directly correlates to a decrease in sexual intimacy. Hence, this might lead to weakening of the relationship of their partner. To find out the relevance of the claim, the researchers aimed to explore the relationship of Internet pornography consumption to the relationship commitment of married individuals in the Philippines.

It is revealed that Internet pornography consumption has an adverse effect on the relationship commitment of married Filipino couples. Furthermore, watching porn online weakened the relationship commitment that leads to an unstable relationship. This investigation found out that internet pornography consumption has a nominal negative effect on the relationship commitment of Filipino married individuals.

36) Perceptions of relationship satisfaction and addictive behavior: Comparing pornography and marijuana use (2016) – Excerpt:

This study contributes to the broader literature on how pornography use impacts perceptions of romantic relationships. [It] examined if negative outcomes due to a romantic partner’s excessive pornography use are different than negative outcomes produced by other compulsive or addictive behaviors, specifically marijuana use. This study suggests that problematic partner pornography use and problematic partner marijuana use are perceived to similarly impact romantic relationships and contribute to a decrease in relationship satisfaction.

37) The effects of sexually explicit material use on romantic relationship dynamics (2016) – Excerpts:

More specifically, couples, where no one used, reported more relationship satisfaction than those couples that had individual users. This is consistent with the previous research (Cooper et al., 1999; Manning, 2006), demonstrating that the solitary use of sexually explicit material results in negative consequences.

With gender effects held constant, individual users reported significantly less intimacy and commitment in their relationships than non-users and shared users.

Overall, how frequently someone views sexually explicit material can have an impact on users’ consequences. Our study found that high frequency users are more likely to have lower relationship satisfaction and intimacy in their romantic relationships.

38) Cyberpornography: Time Use, Perceived Addiction, Sexual Functioning, and Sexual Satisfaction (2016) – Excerpt:

First, even when controlling for perceived addiction to cyberpornography and overall sexual functioning, cyberpornography use remained directly associated with sexual dissatisfaction. Even though this negative direct association was of small magnitude, time spent viewing cyberpornography seems to be a robust predictor of lower sexual satisfaction.

39) Relationship quality predicts online sexual activities among Chinese heterosexual men and women in committed relationships (2016) – Excerpt:

In this study, we examined the online sexual activities (OSAs) of Chinese men and women in committed relationships, with a focus on the characteristics of OSAs and the factors prompting men and women with steady partners to engage in OSAs. Almost 89% of the participants reported OSA experiences in the past 12 months even when they had a real-life partner. As predicted, individuals with lower relationship quality in real life, including low relationship satisfaction, insecure attachment, and negative communication patterns, engaged in OSAs more frequently. Overall, our results suggest that variables influencing offline infidelity may also influence online infidelity.

40) The Role of Internet Pornography Use and Cyber Infidelity in the Associations between Personality, Attachment, and Couple and Sexual Satisfaction (2017) – Excerpts:

Our results indicated that pornography use is associated with couple and sexual difficulties through increased cyber infidelity.

Pornography use was negatively related to sexual satisfaction for men, but positively for women. In men, pornography use is associated with higher sexual desire, stimulation, and gratification. However, these effects may lead to decreased sexual desire their partner and decreased sexual satisfaction within the couple.

41) The Development of the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale (PPCS) (2017)

This paper’s goal was the creation of a problematic porn use questionnaire. In the process included validating the instruments. The researchers found that higher scores on the porn use questionnaire were related to lower sexual satisfaction. An excerpt:

Satisfaction with sexual life was weakly and negatively correlated with PPCS scores.

42) Explicit Sexual Movie Viewing in the United States According to Selected Marriage and Lifestyle, Work and Financial, Religion and Political Factors (2017) – Excerpts:

Analyses involved 11,372 adults who responded to questions about demographics and explicitly sexual movie use in the General Social Survey (GSS) from 2000 to 2014. Viewing such movies was related to less happiness in marriage, multiple sex partners in past year, less satisfaction with one’s financial situation, no religious preference, and a more liberal political orientation.

Explicit sexual movie viewing is associated with factors from diverse domains, including poorer relationship quality, more liberal sexual views and practices, poorer economic conditions, lower religious orientation or commitment, and more liberal political views.

43) Associative pathways between pornography consumption and reduced sexual satisfaction (2017) – Excerpt:

Guided by sexual script theory, social comparison theory, and informed by prior research on pornography, socialization, and sexual satisfaction, the present survey study of heterosexual adults tested a conceptual model linking more frequent pornography consumption to reduced sexual satisfaction via the perception that pornography is a primary source of sexual information, a preference for pornographic over partnered sexual excitement, and the devaluation of sexual communication. The model was supported by the data for both men and women.

Pornography consumption frequency was associated with perceiving pornography as a primary source of sexual information, which was associated with a preference for pornographic over partnered sexual excitement and the devaluation of sexual communication. Preferring pornographic to partnered sexual excitement and devaluing sexual communication were both associated with less sexual satisfaction.

44) The pervasive role of sex mindset: Beliefs about the malleability of sexual life is linked to higher levels of relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction and lower levels of problematic pornography use (2017) – Excerpt:

The examined model showed that growth sex mindset had moderate positive association with sexual satisfaction and relationship satisfaction while problematic pornography use only showed a negative, but weak one.

45) He’s Just Not That Into Anyone: the Impact of Sex Fantasy on Attraction (2017)

This “extended abstract” discusses 4 experiments that involved fantasizing about sexual stimuli. All results suggested that sexual fantasy reduces desire for romantic relationships. Excerpt:

Engaging in sexual fantasy increases attraction to sexual targets, but decreases attraction to romantic targets. This research adds to the literature on sex fantasy, attraction, and offers practical implications on porn watching, sex in advertising, and relationships.

46) Is the Relationship Between Pornography Consumption Frequency and Lower Sexual Satisfaction Curvilinear? Results From England and Germany (2017) – Excerpts:

Several studies using different methods have found that pornography consumption is associated with lower sexual satisfaction. The language used by media-effects scholars in discussions of this association implies an expectation that lowered satisfaction is primarily due to frequent-but not infrequent-consumption. Actual analyses, however, have assumed linearity. Linear analyses presuppose that for each increase in the frequency of pornography consumption there is a correspondingly equivalent decrease in sexual satisfaction.

Survey data from two studies of heterosexual adults, one conducted in England and the other in Germany, were employed. Results were parallel in each country and were not moderated by gender. Simple slope analyses suggested that when the frequency of consumption reaches once a month, sexual satisfaction begins to decrease, and that the magnitude of the decrease becomes larger with each increase in the frequency of consumption.

47) Personal Pornography Viewing and Sexual Satisfaction: A Quadratic Analysis (2017) – Excerpts

This article presents results from a survey of approximately 1,500 U.S. adults. Quadratic analyses indicated a curvilinear relationship between personal pornography viewing and sexual satisfaction in the form of a predominately negative, concave downward curve. The nature of the curvilinearity did not differ as a function of participants’ gender, relationship status, or religiosity.

For all groups, negative simple slopes were present when viewing reached once a month or more. These results are correlational only. However, if an effects perspective were adopted, they would suggest that consuming pornography less than once a month has little or no impact on satisfaction, that reductions in satisfaction tend to initiate once viewing reaches once a month, and that additional increases in the frequency of viewing lead to disproportionately larger decrements in satisfaction.

48) The Survey of Sexual Health and Pornography among Divorce-Asking Women in West Azerbaijan-Iran: A Cross-Sectional Study (2017) – Excerpts:

One of the factors affecting the incidence of divorce and relationship problems between couples is the sexual and marital behaviors. There are several different reasons to suspect that pornography might affect divorce in either a positive or a negative way. Therefore this study evaluated the sexual health of divorce-asking in Urmia, Iran.

Conclusions: The results of the study indicated that who had low sexual satisfaction score, had higher rate of watching pornography clips. Based on current study, paying attention to family education and counseling programs especially in the sexual field will be more fruitful.

49) Pornography consumption of young adults in the context of gender stereotypes and sexual behaviour (2017) – Excerpts:

In the empirical study an online questionnaire about consumption habits and sexual behaviour was filled in by 130 young adults between 18 and 30 years. While there are less accurate coherences of female pornography consumption habits, males could feel possible influences in their sex-life, because of an higher pornography consumption frequency. The pornography consumption habits of men are correlating negatively with the reported frequency of sexual intercourse and ratings of their sexual life.

50) Pornography consumption and its association with sexual concerns and expectations among young men and women (2017) – Excerpts:

Multivariate regression analyses revealed that visual pornography viewership was uniquely associated with higher partner performance expectations among women. Among men, visual pornography viewership was uniquely associated with body- and performance-related cognitive distractions during sexual activity. Literary pornography use was not uniquely associated with these variables among men or women. The results of this investigation suggest that individuals who consume visual pornography may experience some forms of sexual insecurity and sexual expectations related to their pornography use.

51) The Role of Internet Pornography Use and Cyber Infidelity in the Associations between Personality, Attachment, and Couple and Sexual Satisfaction (2017)

In addition to increased fidelity, porn use was also correlated with poorer sexual & relationship satisfaction. Excerpts:

Many researchers and clinicians have attempted to identify variables related to couple and sexual satisfaction. Some have focused on personality [26] [27] , others on attachment [33] , sexuality [34] , conflicts, violence, lack of commitment [73] , and many other variables. New behaviors surrounding computer technologies, specifically pornography use and cyber infidelity, are social, cultural, and relational issues, and need to be included in new explanatory models. Our results indicated that pornography use is associated with couple and sexual difficulties through increased cyber infidelity. These original findings confirm the existence of “modern” forms of infidelity. While previous studies have suggested that these virtual relationships do not represent a “real” physical transgression of couple norms or a betrayal of one’s partner [55] , our empirical data is evidence to the contrary.

52) Pornography Use: Its Impact On Heterosexual Men’s Lives & Romantic Relationship (2018) – Excerpts:

180 males aged 18 – 29 years responded to the Pornography Use Scale, Pornography Consumption Effect Scale (PCES), and Investment Model Scale. Our study demonstrates that the more pornography males used, the more problems it created in their lives. Similarly, the men’s perception of negative effects of pornography increased and their perception of the positive effects of pornography decreased with increased use of pornography.

As pornography use in males increase, their commitment, satisfaction and investment in their romantic relationships decrease, while their perception of attractive alternatives outside their relationship increases.

53) Pornography use, marital status and sexual satisfaction in a non-clinical sample (2018) – Excerpts:

In the present study, the association between sexual satisfaction and frequency of pornography use was examined, as well as the effect of marital status and its interaction with frequency of pornography use. A sample of 204 people completed an online survey. Results suggest that sexual satisfaction is negatively associated with frequency of pornography use. Marital status also correlated significantly with sexual satisfaction, but the effect of the interaction between both independent variables was not significant.

54) Pornography Consumption and Sexual Satisfaction in a Korean Sample (2018) – Excerpts:

This research report assessed pornography consumption and sexual satisfaction in a heterosexual sample of Korean adults. Consistent with prior studies, the linear association between pornography consumption and satisfaction was negative and significant. However, the addition of a quadratic term to the equation increased model fit. Interaction effect analyses revealed an inverted U relationship for both men and women, such that occasional pornography consumption was associated with higher satisfaction, while consumption with any degree of regularity was associated with lower satisfaction. Further assessments showed that the negative relationship between more regular pornography consumption and lower satisfaction was slightly more marked for women, while the positive relationship between intermittent pornography consumption and higher satisfaction was slightly more marked for men. The nature of the relationship between pornography consumption and satisfaction was similar for religious and nonreligious people and for people in a relationship and not in a relationship.

55) Is Women’s Problematic Pornography Viewing Related to Body Image or Relationship Satisfaction? (2018) – Excerpts:

We specifically examined the relationships between viewing frequency and problematic viewing constructs on body image and relationship satisfaction in women….. Also regarding H1, viewing frequency was significantly negatively associated with women’s relationship satisfaction at the bivariate level.

56) Behind Closed Doors: Individual and Joint Pornography Use Among Romantic Couples (2018)

Note: The % of women in relationships that regularly use porn is not very high. So findings that higher porn use for females is related to greater sexual desire is based on a tiny percentage of females who regularly use porn. Cross-sectional data from the largest nationally representative US survey (General Social Survey) reported that only 2.6% of married women had visited a “pornographic website” in the last month. Data from 2000, 2002, 2004 (for more see Pornography and Marriage, 2014).

Excerpts:

Using a dyadic data set of 240 committed heterosexual couples from the United States, we explored actor and partner associations between pornography use, sexual dynamics, and relational well-being. We also explored how couple pornography use and partner knowledge of pornography use were associated with well-being. Results suggested that female pornography use was associated with higher female sexual desire but no other dependent variables. Male pornography use was associated with a wide array of negative well-being indicators, including less male and female relationship satisfaction, lower female sexual desire, and lower male positive communication. Couple pornography use was associated with higher reported sexual satisfaction for both partners but no other well-being indicators.

57) Influences of Sociosexuality and Commitment on Online Sexual Activities: The Mediating Effect of Perceptions of Infidelity (2019) – Excerpt:

The perceived infidelity of online sexual activity (OSA) has been noted as an important factor contributing to individual differences in OSA among people in romantic relationships. OSAs were classified as viewing sexually explicit material, seeking sexual partners, cybersex, and flirting. Participants were 313 heterosexuals in romantic relationships who completed measures of OSA experience, sociosexuality, commitment, and perceptions of infidelity. The results showed that more unrestricted sociosexuality and less commitment were associated with more frequent engagement in OSAs.

58) Pornography, preference for porn‐like sex, masturbation, and men’s sexual and relationship satisfaction (2019)

Questionable write-up, and playing games with the data, obscures the actual findings: Both studies (not just study 2) reported more porn use related to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. This paper attempts to blame masturbation, not porn, for relationship dissatisfaction. However, there is no legitimate method to tease masturbation apart from porn use. Excerpts:

Frequent pornography use was associated with sexual dissatisfaction, greater preference for porn‐like sex, and more frequent masturbation in both studies. Pornography use was associated with relationship dissatisfaction in Study 2 only (not true)…

59) Examining sexual motivation profiles and their correlates using latent profile analysis (2019)

The write-up of this 2019 study leaves a lot to be desired. That said this figure #4 from the full paper reveals a lot. Problematic porn use is strongly related to poorer scores on four factors. They were harmonious sexual passion (HSP); obsessive sexual passion (OSP); sexual satisfaction (SEXSAT); life satisfaction (LIFESAT). Simply put, problematic porn use was linked to far lower scores on lower sexual passion, sexual satisfaction & life satisfaction (group to the right). In comparison, the group that scored highest on all these measures had the least problematic porn use (group to left).

60) Pornography and Heterosexual Women’s Intimate Experiences with a Partner (2019) – Excerpts:

We surveyed 706 heterosexual women (18-29 years of age) in the United States, associating consumption of pornography with sexual preferences, experiences, and concerns. Among female consumers who were sexually active, higher rates of consumption for masturbation were associated with increased mental activation of the pornographic script during sex-heightened recall of pornographic images during sex with a partner, heightened reliance on pornography for achieving and maintaining arousal, and a preference for pornography consumption over sex with a partner. Furthermore, higher activation of the pornographic script during sex, rather than simply viewing pornographic material, was also associated with higher rates of insecurities about their appearance and diminished enjoyment of intimate acts such as kissing or caressing during sex with a partner.

61) Affection substitution: The effect of pornography consumption on close relationships (2019)

The abstract attempts to obfuscate the basic correlations , which were pretty straightforward: More porn use was related to greater depression & loneliness/less relationship satisfaction & closeness. Excerpts:

In this study, 357 adults reported their level of affection deprivation, their weekly pornography consumption, their goals for using pornography (including life satisfaction and loneliness reduction), and indicators of their individual and relational wellness…. As predicted, affection deprivation and pornography consumption were inversely related to relational satisfaction and closeness, while being positively related to loneliness and depression.

62) Underlying Mechanisms Affecting the Relationship Between Sexually Explicit Material Consumption and Relationship Satisfaction in Long-term Relationships (2019) – Excerpt:

However, SEM consumption was negatively related to relationship satisfaction among heterosexual, but not gay or lesbian individuals. This study explored the processes underlying the relationship between SEM and relationship satisfaction by applying evolutionary mechanisms relevant to human mating.

63) Prevalence, Patterns and Self-Perceived Effects of Pornography Consumption in Polish University Students: A Cross-Sectional Study (2019)

Large study (n = 6463) on male & female college students (median age 22) reports relatively high levels of porn addiction (15%), escalation of porn use (tolerance), withdrawal symptoms, and porn-related sexual & relationship problems. Relevant excerpts:

The most common self-perceived adverse effects of pornography use included: the need for longer stimulation (12.0%) and more sexual stimuli (17.6%) to reach orgasm, and a decrease in sexual satisfaction (24.5%)…

Age of first exposure was significantly associated with reported need for longer stimulation and more sexual stimuli to reach orgasm when using pornography, decrease in sexual satisfaction, and quality of romantic relationship…

In the opinion of the majority of the surveyed students, pornography use may have a negative effect on the quality of social relationships (58.7%), mental health (63.9%) and sexual performance (67.7%)….

64) Sexual and reproductive health and rights in Sweden 2017 (2019)

A 2017 survey by The Swedish Public Health Authority contains a section discussing their findings on pornography. This study is in the previous section, also. Greater pornography use was related to poorer sexual health and decreased sexual dissatisfaction. Excerpts:

Forty-one percent of men aged 16 to 29 are frequent users of pornography, i.e. they consume pornography on a daily basis or almost on a daily basis. The corresponding percent among women is 3 percent. Our results also show an association between frequent pornography consumption and poorer sexual health, and an association with transactional sex, too high expectations of one’s sexual performance, and dissatisfaction with one’s sex life. Almost half of the population state that their pornography consumption does not affect their sex life, while a third do not know if it affects it or not. A small percentage of both women and men say their pornography use has a negative effect on their sex life. It was more common among men with higher education to regularly use pornography compared to men with lower education.

There is a need for more knowledge on the link between pornography consumption and health. An important preventive piece is to discuss the negative consequences of pornography with boys and young men, and school is a natural place to do this.

65) Which Dimensions of Human Sexuality Are Related to Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder (CSBD)? Study Using a Multidimensional Sexuality Questionnaire on a Sample of Polish Males (2019)

The study compared a group of treatment-seeking male porn users to a control group of males from the general population. The treatment-seeking men reported significantly higher rates of porn use (though most of the controls used porn). Higher rates of porn use were related to:

feeling more depressed about one’s sex life
less satisfaction with one’s sex life
greater fear of sexual relationships
greater sexual anxiety
lower sexual esteem
less sexual motivation

66) Effect of pornography on married couples (2019)

A rare Egyptian study. While the study reports porn use increasing parameters of arousal, the long-term effects don’t match porn’s short-term effects.

The study shows that watching pornography has a statistically positive correlation with years of marriage. This was in agreement with Goldberg et al. ¹⁴ who stated that pornography is highly addictive.

There is a highly negative correlation between satisfaction of sexual life and watching pornography as 68.5% of positive watchers are not satisfied with their sexual life.

Pornography increases masturbation among 74.6% of watchers, but it could not help to reach orgasm among 61.5% of them. Pornography watching increases the incidence of divorce (33.8%) (P = 0.001).

Conclusion: Pornography has a negative effect on marital relation.

Table from the study:

Porn addiction less satisfaction

67) A Psychological Perspective of Craving Towards Pornography and Its Effect on Relationship Satisfaction and Sexual Attitude (2020) – Excerpts:

The results indicate that there exists an insignificant relationship between pornography craving among dating and non-dating males. Hence, the hypothesis was not supported. The reason for no significant relationship found between dating and non-dating males might be due to the dearth of sample size. Though, there is a slight difference in the mean of dating scores and non-dating scores i.e. dating mean score is lower than non-dating scores. This indicates that both the groups watch such content on nearly equal level. The present study found that there was a negative correlation (-0.303) between pornography craving and couple satisfaction. This indicates that higher is crave for pornography, lower will be the relationship satisfaction.

68) Are Playboy (and girl) Norms Behind the Relationship Problems Associated with Pornography Viewing in Men and Women?

The basic correlations: higher frequency of porn use (and problematic porn use) correlated with poorer relationship satisfaction and less commitment for both men & women. Excerpts:

Furthermore, we controlled for the role of sexual orientation. Our results were partially consistent with our hypotheses. Consistent with H1, pornography viewing frequency was modestly negatively correlated with relationship satisfaction for men (and women) when playboy norms were not entered in the model. The size of the correlations was also roughly commensurate with metanalytic findings from Wright and colleagues’ (2017). Moreover, problematic pornography viewing was also modestly inversely related to relationship satisfaction in men (and women). Similarly, partially consistent with H2, pornography viewing frequency was modestly negatively correlated with relationship commitment in men (and women) when playboy norms were not entered in the model.

I find studies like this annoying. Seems like the authors injected a variable (“Playboy Norms”) that cannot be teased apart from porn use. We know that porn shapes sexual norms. I tweeted about this attempt to downplay the study’s basic correlations. How can behaviors/attitudes be factored out when porn use shapes sexual attitudes & behaviors. This includes “Playboy Norms”, or any other sexual assessment one might choose to employ. Employing variables to downplay relevant correlations is called an “Everest regression”. The Everest Regression is what happens when you “control” for a fundamental variable when comparing two populations. For example after controlling for height, Mount Everest is room temperature. Porn studies often employ this strategy to obfuscate findings that place porn in a negative light.

69) Does Low-Cost Sexual Gratification Make Men Less Eager to Marry? Pornography Use, Masturbation, Hookup Sex, and Desire to Be Married Among Single Men (2020)

By RealYBOP member Samuel Perry. Oddly, the results of more porn use correlating with wanting to be married is being spun as porn use being beneficial to relationships (Huh?). Following this logic, alcohol is beneficial to relationships because drinking alone at a bar is correlated with wanting to be married, or wanting a girlfriend, or wanting to get laid. No matter, the study reported that more porn use was correlated with poorer sexual contentment:

70) Watching Pornography Alone or Together: Longitudinal Associations With Romantic Relationship Quality (2020)

A few comments. First, the couples were unmarried, so it may tell us little about long-term relationships. Somewhat typical results: men who watch alone had poorer relationship satisfaction while females who watch alone had better relationship quality. In past studies, men who watched alone comprised the vast majority of study participants, while women who watched alone were usually a small percentage of the sample (and watched far less frequently that their male counterparts). In this study, only 2.9% of the women reported “often viewing”, so the finding involves outlier couples. While watching porn together was related to some measures of higher relationship quality, only 3.2% indicated “often” viewing together. The findings apply to a relatively small percentage of unmarried couples in their 20’s (average age 26). Interesting finding – Both watching alone and watching together were related to higher levels of psychological aggression between partners. Excerpts:

A random national sample of 1,234 individuals, who began the study in unmarried heterosexual romantic relationships of at least 2 months’ duration, completed five waves of mail-in surveys over a 20-month period. Watching pornography alone was generally associated with poorer relationship quality for men (e.g., lower relationship adjustment and commitment, less emotional intimacy), but better relationship quality for women. People who reported watching more pornography with their partner reported more relationship intimacy and increases in watching together over time were associated with increases in sexual intimacy. Both watching alone and watching together were related to higher levels of psychological aggression between partners, with few differences by gender.

For men, the longitudinal (within-subject) analyses showed a similar pattern. As men watched more pornography alone over time, they reported decreasing relationship adjustment, commitment, and emotional intimacy.

For both men and women, higher levels of watching alone and increases in watching alone were associated with less sexual intimacy.

71) Associations Between Pornography Use and Sexual Dynamics Among Heterosexual Couples (2020)

As with all other qualitative studies, male porn use was related to poorer sexual satisfaction:

Consistent with hypothesis 1 and previous research (5, 27,29) male partner pornography use had a negative association with his own sexual satisfaction, despite accounting for multiple elements of sexual desire and frequency of sexual activity, as well as controlling for relationship length and religiosity.… This is one of the most consistent associations found in the literature on pornography and relational outcomes29 and additional research is still needed to fully understand the mechanisms behind this association.

Results for females differed:

Despite many indirect associations from female pornography use, her use did not have any direct association with either satisfaction or the frequency of engaging in sexual behaviors, providing support for hypothesis 2. All associations between female pornography use and the outcomes of interest were mediated by her own desire.

Note: When evaluating the research, it’s important to know that a relatively small percentage of all coupled females regularly consumes internet porn. This study only surveyed 240 couples, using the somewhat unreliable M-Turk system. The study failed to provide data on how many women regularly used porn.

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Note – excerpts from a 2018 review of the literature (Pornography, Pleasure, and Sexuality: Towards a Hedonic Reinforcement Model of Sexually Explicit Internet Media Use, summarizing porn’s effects on sexual satisfaction:

Sexual Satisfaction:

Another domain in which the present model may also have implications is sexual satisfaction. As hedonic sexual motives are often focused on obtaining sexual satisfaction, one would expect an increase in such motives to be associated with sexual satisfaction outcomes. However, given the immense number of factors that contribute to sexual satisfaction (e.g., relational intimacy, commitment, self-confidence, self-esteem), it also likely that these relationships between IPU and satisfaction will be complex.

For some individuals, an increase in hedonic sexual motives may be associated with actual decreases in sexual satisfaction, as high levels of desire may be met with frustration, particularly if such increases are not met with increases in the satisfaction associated with partnered sexual activity (Santtila et al., 2007). Alternatively, if one were to start with low levels of hedonic sexual motivation, an increase in such motivation may be associated with greater sexual satisfaction as the individual becomes more focused on obtaining pleasure in a sexual encounter.

IPU and sexual satisfaction

In contrast to many of the previously discussed domains related to IPU and motivations, in which research is still burgeoning, the relationships between IPU and sexual satisfaction have been extensively studied, with dozens of publications addressing the topic. Rather than exhaustively review the list of studies examining IPU and sexual satisfaction, the findings of these studies are summarized in Table 1. [This paper is open access and Table 1 is available from the link above]

In general, as indicated in Table 1, the relationships between IPU and personal sexual satisfaction are complex, but consistent with the supposition that IP may promote more hedonic sexual motivations, particularly as use increases. Among couples, there is limited support for the idea that IPU may enhance sexual satisfaction, but only when it is incorporated into partnered sexual activities. On an individual level, there is consistent evidence that IPU is predictive of lower sexual satisfaction in men, with both cross-sectional and longitudinal works pointing to the associations of such use with diminished satisfaction for men. Regarding women, scattered evidence suggests that IPU may enhance sexual satisfaction, have no effect on satisfaction, or diminish satisfaction over time. Despite these mixed findings, the conclusion of no significant effect of IPU on sexual satisfaction in women is the most common finding.

Meta-analysis

These results have also been confirmed by a recent meta-analysis (Wright, Tokunaga, Kraus, & Klann, 2017). Reviewing 50 studies of pornography consumption and various satisfaction outcomes (e.g., life satisfaction, personal satisfaction, relational satisfaction, sexual satisfaction), this meta-analysis found that pornography consumption (not internet-specific) was consistently related to and predictive of lower interpersonal satisfaction variables, including sexual satisfaction, but for men only. No significant findings were found for women. Collectively, such mixed results preclude definitive conclusions about the role of IP in influencing satisfaction for women.

One of the most important findings of recent works examining IPU and sexual satisfaction is that there appears to be a curvilinear relationship between use and satisfaction, so that satisfaction decreases more sharply as IPU becomes more common (e.g., Wright, Steffen, & Sun, 2017; Wright, Brigdes, Sun, Ezzell, & Johnson, 2017). The details of these studies are reflected in Table 1. Given clear evidence across multiple international samples, it seems reasonable to accept the conclusion that as IPU increases to more than once per month, sexual satisfaction decreases.

Furthermore, although these studies (Wright, Steffen, et al., 2017; Wright, Bridges et al., 2017) were cross-sectional, given the number of longitudinal studies (e.g., Peter & Valkenburg, 2009) linking IPU to lower sexual satisfaction, it is reasonable to infer that these associations are causal in nature. As IPU increases, interpersonal sexual satisfaction appears to decrease, which is consistent with the present model’s contention that IPU is associated with more hedonic and self-focused sexual motivation.

Anomalous study

Finally, this anomalous Taylor Kohut study is often cited as evidence that porn use offers primarily benefits to couples: Perceived Effects of Pornography on the Couple Relationship: Initial Findings of Open-Ended, Participant-Informed, “Bottom-Up” Research. (Kohut et al., 2017). Click on the link to read more.

Two glaring methodical flaws produce meaningless results:

1) The study does not rest on a representative sample.

Whereas most studies show that a tiny minority of porn users’ female partners use porn, in this study 95% of the women used porn on their own. And 85% of the women had used porn since the beginning of the relationship (in some cases for years). Those rates are higher than in college-aged men! In other words, the researchers appear to have skewed their sample to produce the results they were seeking. Reality: Cross-sectional data from the largest US survey (General Social Survey) reported that only 2.6% of women had visited a “pornographic website” in the last month. Data from 2000, 2002, 2004. For more see – Pornography and Marriage (2014)

2) The study used “open ended” questions where the subject could ramble on and on about porn.

Then the researchers read the ramblings and decided, after the fact, what answers were “important”. And then they decide how to present (spin?) them in their paper. Then the researchers then had the gall to suggest that all the other studies on porn and relationships were flawed. These were studies which employed more established, scientific methodology and straightforward questions about porn’s effects. How is this method justified?

Despite these fatal flaws several couples reported significant negative effects from porn use, such as:

Pornography is easier, more interesting, more arousing, more desirable, or more gratifying than sex with a partner
Pornography use is desensitizing, decreases the ability to achieve or maintain sexual arousal, or to achieve orgasm.
Some said that specifically described desensitization as the effect of pornography use
Some were concerned a loss of intimacy or love.
It was suggested that pornography makes real sex more boring, more routine, less exiting, or less enjoyable

For some reason these negative effects did not appear in articles about the study. The lead author’s new website and his attempt at fundraising raise more than a few questions.

Thousands of recovery stories consistent with the above research can be found on these pages:

Browse thousands of recovery self-reports to learn what those who’ve recovered from porn-induced sexual dysfunctions have experienced: Rebooting Accounts Page 1, Rebooting Accounts Page 2 and Rebooting Accounts page 3. In addition, the following eight pages contain shorter stories describing recovery from porn-induced sexual dysfunctions: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.