Watching Porn May Increase Sexual Arousal With a Real Partner

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Concerns about watching pornography often include predictions that porn consumption will negatively affect arousal with a partner. Specifically, claims are made that pornography represents a form of super stimulus that real-world sexuality cannot compete with. Furthermore, the claim is often made that porn watching or excessive sexual behaviors desensitize individuals to being sexually aroused by an actual human partner.

Unfortunately, research examining these issues is based on retrospective self-reports, and none have ever tested actual partners stimulating each other. New in-laboratory testing (Prause and Siegle, 2022) involving en vivo monitoring examined these potential effects and found no evidence for them, instead finding that higher levels of pornography consumption predicted higher sexual arousal when with a partner.

Study Using Orgasmic Meditation

In this study, researchers recruited 125 couples who had practiced orgasmic meditation (OM). OM is a unique sexual behavior where one partner, wearing a glove, manually stimulates in a prescribed manner the lubricated clitoris of a female partner for 15 minutes. In previous research on this practice, it was shown to increase relationship closeness and enhanced their relationship.

The current study involved further analysis of these data, examining links between hypersexual behavior problems (sometimes described as “sex addiction”) and pornography use, and self-reported and observed sexual arousal. Before and immediately following the OM session, both partners answered questions about their experience and feelings of sexual arousal. In addition, the galvanic skin response (GSR) was monitored of the person having their clitoris stimulated. GSR is an indication of general emotional arousal, so it is interpreted with subjective report of sexual arousal.

Before the study, participants had reported information on their sexual histories, along with their viewing of sex films (pornography) and whether they had concerns that their sexual behaviors were ever out of control. Fifty percent of the sample reported no history of regularly watching pornography, which the authors show is more common than often assumed in the general, adult population. Using the Hypersexual Behavior Inventory, a well-validated instrument, the researchers found that a single item “Even though I promised myself I would not repeat a sexual behavior, I find myself returning to it over and over again” predicted the majority of variance in this sample. Beyond porn issues, a majority of the study’s participants reported a history of distress about their level of self-control of their sexual behaviors, some reaching severe distress.

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In the results of this study, researchers found that a history of more frequent consumption of pornography predicted higher levels of sexual arousal before the OM partnered sexual experience, and was not related to feelings of sexual arousal during the experience. Concerns about hypersexual behaviors and sexual self-control had no statistical relationships to sexual arousal reported or observed during these partnered sexual experiences. GSR during the OM was positively predicted by history of watching more porn, consistent with subjective sexual arousal reports.

Effects of Porn-Watching History on Arousal

This large laboratory study had sufficient statistical power to identify if a history of watching porn or hypersexual behavior problems were related to decreased sexual arousal in partnered experiences, as has been frequently claimed. Were the predictions of addiction or compulsion models accurate, people with a history of more porn watching would have shown decreased sexual arousal during the experience, compared to those who watch no pornography on a regular basis. Instead, the opposite was true—people who watch porn regularly reported, and demonstrated, higher sexual arousal with a partner.

While this sample involved volunteers, always a factor that can potentially limit the generalizability of these findings, the participants were demographically similar to the general population, and the study involved both male and female participants. Thus, concerns that watching pornography or having difficulty with sexual self-control may cause you to be less sexually aroused by your partner appear to be unfounded.

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