According to the pornographic video website Pornhub, Brazil is the second country that most accesses this type of content in the world. Another piece of data, from a UN (United Nations) survey published in 2015, showed that Brazil was the 5th country that killed the most women on the planet. But how are these two pieces of data related?

Violence against women is only one of the harms that pornography causes in male behavior, since women are always portrayed as people who are less deserving of pleasure and who are at the service of men in pornographic productions... Check this and other harms of pornography to men!

Early Sexuality

Let's start at the beginning: According to a survey conducted in 2017 by Carmita Abdo, psychiatrist and professor at the USP School of Medicine, Brazilian adolescents today begin their sexual lives at the age of 13.

Although pornographic magazines and other sensual and sexual content have always been available, it is undeniable that the easy access to the abundant pornography that can be accessed today on the Internet makes the beginning of young people's sexuality increasingly precocious, which is dangerous, since 13-year-old adolescents have little information about sex.

The same research by Carmita Abdo showed that only one third of 13 to 17 year olds who had sex used condoms.

It becomes an addiction...

Early consumption of pornography has one major risk: it becomes addictive. A study by American physiologist Gary Wilson, published in 2012, showed that Pornography causes ADHD, social anxiety, depression, performance anxiety and OCD The amount of dopamine released by watching pornography overrides natural satiety mechanisms, according to Wilson.

Yanal Tayyem / Unsplash

Throughout life, therefore, it is common for men to become increasingly anxious and depressed about their sexual performance, among other behaviors, because the reference they have of sex life is usually the pornographic videos starring actors and actresses.

Insecurity with the body

Much is said about how beauty standards are bad for women's self-esteem, but they also have a lot of harm for men's self-esteem, especially since men consume more pornography than women, according to figures from the Pornhub site itself.

Penis size, body definition, height, performance after hours and hours of sexual activity, erections that never end... All these questions are on the minds of men - and, more worryingly, boys - who feel bad for not being up to the performance and physical characteristics of pornographic actors.

And many unrealistic expectations

Besides this dissatisfaction with their own bodies, another serious consequence of pornography on men is to set unrealistic goals and expectations about sex, ranging from women liking aggressive men, something often shown in this type of content, to men having sex non-stop for hours at a time.

So what happens is a general dissatisfaction. Men feel insecure about their own performance and inability to reproduce these unrealistic expectations, but they are also disappointed with the performance of real women, who do not reproduce the exaggerations of pornographic films.

Doesn't the woman feel pleasure?

Can you, man, imagine good sex without orgasm? No, right? Well, you should know that a survey published in 2019 by the Prazerela institute showed that only 36% of Brazilian women achieve an orgasm in their sexual relations. If that gets too abstract, look: out of 100 women who had sex, only 36 had an orgasm.

Sujal Patel / Unsplash

If you consume pornographic films, search your memory: how many films have you seen in which the female pleasure was in focus? In how many productions did the man put himself at the service of the woman, not only extracting his pleasure from her?

Men who have pornography as a reference of their sex life naturally end up diminishing the importance of women's pleasure in the relationship, since they reproduce this pattern stimulated by these productions.

What about intimacy?

There is no intimacy in porn movies, at least not in most of them. They are actors acting out a satisfactory sex - note the "acting"; yes, they are faking it. Most real-life sexual relationships start from some intimacy, be it physical attraction, the famous "chemistry", hard-on for the partner, and so on?

But this is the opposite of what the movies show, which show women always willing to serve the pleasure of the man, who, in these productions, doesn't need to make any effort to make them available, which distorts the minds of many men regarding the need and even the pleasure of developing intimacy with their partner.

Decreased sensitivity

When you get your brain used to feeling visual pleasure from watching a certain scene, hearing certain expressions of pleasure, and so on, the ability to get aroused in real sex tends to be reduced.

And what happens is that many men who consume a lot of pornography realize that they are unable to feel pleasure in sex, so used are they to the stimuli provided by pornography.

Heavier content

The more pornography you consume, the less sensitive you are to it, in the long run. It is common to get "sick" of those videos that used to excite you so much, and then go in search of different content that stimulates you more... And this different content ends up being, many times, more fetishistic, aggressive, violent, considered "heavy".

There is no problem in having fetishes. The problem happens when the man becomes incapable of feeling pleasure in ordinary sex, because he is too attached to the stimuli of the "heavier" pornographic content that he has been consuming, which distances him from the sex of everyday life.

Violence Against Women

We have already explained here how the female body, in the porn industry, is always at the service of men, and it is inevitable that this behavior is reproduced by men in real life. Even more worrying is that much of this content is violent.

Slapping, verbal offenses, aggressive movements, lack of consensus, and even productions that simulate abuse and rape naturalize violence against women among men who consume pornography, and who come to consider them as inferior beings.

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And there is another problem, which affects the so-called amateur videos, those starred by ordinary people, not actors and actresses: most of them are published without the woman's authorization and/or consent, which is, besides being a crime, a great demonstration of how men diminish their relevance.

Being aware of all these harms of pornography does not force you to stop consuming this content, but it does help you discover what effects it has on your behavior and your sex life. The final word on whether or not to consume it is up to you, but now you have more information to make this decision!