See a doctor first. Erectile difficulty can be an early sign of a cardiovascular problem, and that is worth ruling out before anything else on this page.
The case for it. A widely cited 2016 review and a body of clinical case reports argue that erectile difficulty and low desire in men under 40 rose after high-speed streaming video arrived around 2006, and document men whose difficulties improved after they stopped. Clinicians in sexual medicine report seeing the pattern.
The case against. Studies that measure how often people use porn and correlate it with erectile function have not produced consistent results. Erectile difficulty in young men has many established causes, and comparisons across decades are complicated because instruments and willingness to report have both changed. Some researchers regard the whole idea as a hypothesis still waiting for controlled evidence.
What's reasonable to conclude. Conditioned arousal is real and unremarkable: arousal responds to what it has been paired with. It is plausible that for some people, heavy use of one very specific kind of stimulus makes another kind less immediately effective. That is a long way from a proven syndrome affecting everyone.
If you want to test the hypothesis for yourself, a structured period without porn is a reasonable personal experiment, with the honest caveat that you are an n of 1 who will be highly motivated to see a result. Nobody can tell you a timeline. Anyone who does is making it up.
Where this comes from
Read the full lesson: The erection question, answered honestly →
Sources and how strong they are (2)
- Mixed evidencePorn-induced erectile dysfunction is a clinical hypothesis supported by case reports and clinician reports. Frequency-based population studies have not produced consistent associations, and the one longitudinal study to measure erectile function with a validated instrument over a year found that self-reported problematic use correlated with erectile difficulty at any single moment, that mere use did not, and that no pornography variable predicted the trajectory of erectile function. It remains contested.
- Park BY, Wilson G, Berger J, Christman M, Reina B, Bishop F, Klam WP, Doan AP 2016, Behav Sci 6(3):17, doi:10.3390/bs6030017, PMID 27527226, PMC5039517 — carries a 2018 correction, Behav Sci 8(6):55, doi:10.3390/bs8060055, PMID 29857562, disclosing that co-author Gary Wilson is the author of Your Brain on Porn and removing the academic editor's name; see C58
- Cuts toward an association — Jacobs T, Geysemans B, Van Hal G, Glazemakers I, Fog-Poulsen K, Vermandel A, De Wachter S, De Win G 2021, JMIR Public Health Surveill 7(10):e32542, doi:10.2196/32542, PMID 34534092, PMC8569536
- A practitioner magazine commentary, not a peer-reviewed study — Kirby M 2021, Trends in Urology & Men's Health 12(2):6-10, doi:10.1002/tre.791
- Grubbs JB & Gola M 2019, J Sex Med 16(1):111-125, doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2018.11.004, PMID 30621919
- Dwulit & Rzymski 2019, J Clin Med 8(7):914, PMID 31247949
- Landripet & Štulhofer 2015, J Sex Med 12(5):1136-1139, PMID 25816904
- Prause & Pfaus 2015, Sex Med 3(2):90-98, PMID 26185674
- Not a retraction — a published Comment on Prause & Pfaus 2015: Isenberg RA 2015, Sex Med 3(3):219-221, doi:10.1002/sm2.71
- Mixed evidencePark et al. 2016 argue that rates of erectile difficulty and low desire in men under 40 appear higher in studies published after 2006, when the first internet video tube sites appeared, than in earlier ones. That comparison rests on that paper alone. Causation is not established and measurement differs across studies. Separately, a 2025 narrative review reports that recent studies find rising erectile-dysfunction prevalence among younger men, without the 2006 cut-point and without any low-desire trend.
- Park BY, Wilson G, Berger J, Christman M, Reina B, Bishop F, Klam WP, Doan AP 2016, Behav Sci 6(3):17, doi:10.3390/bs6030017, PMID 27527226, PMC5039517 — carries a 2018 correction, Behav Sci 8(6):55, doi:10.3390/bs8060055, PMID 29857562, disclosing that co-author Gary Wilson is the author of Your Brain on Porn and removing the academic editor's name; see C58
- Supports only the general trend in younger men, not the 2006 cut-point and not low desire — Safa A & Waked C 2025, Cureus 17(8):e89918, doi:10.7759/cureus.89918, PMID 40809937, PMC12349891
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