Is Internet Porn Making Young Men Impotent?

Thousands of men claim that porn addiction has led to erectile dysfunction — but many in the the medical community are skeptical

One afternoon last March, Tony, 27, logged onto PornHub to jerk off, as he usually did when he came home from work. He had just broken up with his girlfriend, and to fill the time he watched porn a few hours a day, “mostly out of boredom,” he says. This time, however, he found that he couldn’t get hard — at all. He tried the next day, then the next. Nothing. “It literally happened overnight,” he said.

Tony, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, went to multiple doctors and a sex therapist, all of who were baffled by his condition. He took a series of tests to check his testosterone levels, all of which came back fine. “I made it clear that my ED was not brought on by some sudden social-emotional-financial trauma,” he says. “I’m a healthy and otherwise content young man.”

One of the doctors prescribed him Viagra, which didn’t work: Viagra increases blood flow to the penis, which can help strengthen erections, but its efficacy requires the penis to be at least slightly erect in the first place. Tony could not get even a little bit hard, full stop.

For Tony, it was nothing short of a eureka moment. “I discovered porn could have made some damage in my brain,” he says. “It was a bit like how a tire wears down and down over constant use, until suddenly, one day, it bursts.”

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