It turns out the biggest assumption we make about porn isn't true

Despite it slowly entering mainstream pop culture, we still have a lot of preconceptions and misconceptions about porn.

What consuming pornography does to the brain is still a hotly debated topic. There’s a widely held belief that watching all that idealised, unrealistic sex can’t be good for your real life relationships.

In fact, a series of the studies in the 1980s by Professor Douglas Kendrick suggested that constantly looking at naked attractive people caused men to feel less love to their current partner, or to find them less attractive (interestingly, women didn’t seem to be affected by this).

But a new study conducted by Rhonda Balzarini, a PhD student at the University of Western Ontario, says that that might not be true at all.

Balzarini’s study had ten times the participants that Kendrick’s research did. And it found something very different.

Essentially, she found that porn had no affect on how men already felt about their partners.

The study said:

We did not find support for the original finding that exposure to attractive images of opposite-sex others affects males' ratings of their partners' sexual attractiveness or love for their partner.

However, Professor Kendrick has hit back at his research being questioned. In particular, he suggested that we're already exposed to so much more pornography than we were in the 1980s, that it had already warped the participants' minds before they even participated in the trials.

As he said to Slate:

Maybe the damage has been done.

Whatever your opinion on the various studies, I think we can agree on one thing: guys, it’s probably a better idea to take your partner out to dinner tonight instead of firing up Pornhub.

HT: IFL Science

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