The Unfortunate Effect That Watching Porn Has On Women

Women watch porn, obviously. The taboo around this fact has thankfully begun to dwindle over the last few years, thanks to the ascendance of ethical porn, porn centred around female pleasure and feminist directors such as Erika Lust.

But, while it's been well documented that men can suffer from watching too much porn, with side effects ranging from erectile dysfunction to sexual dissatisfaction, less discussed – still – are the potentially negative effects it can have on women. Women get addicted to porn, too, for instance.

But even a casual porn-viewing habit can affect our mental health and have a detrimental impact on our sex lives and relationships, as a new study suggests. Researchers from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, claim that porn can lead women to have "unrealistic expectations" of sex, reported The Sun.

The study of 1,000 adults, of whom two thirds were young women, required participants to fill out an online survey on how much they watched porn, their body- and performance-related distractions during sex, their perception of their genitals, and their expectations of their partner.

The bad news? The research found that porn can lead women to expect too much from their male partners in the bedroom and result in them feeling unsatisfied with sex. “Genitalia can be digitally or cosmetically altered, depicting larger than average penis size," said Kaitlyn Goldsmith, who led the study.

“Intercourse is shown to last longer than average, men sustain erections longer and women experience orgasms more easily than in real-world encounters," she added. Unfortunately for straight men, watching porn also led the women to feel dissatisfied with their partner's appearance.

Research by Pornhub earlier this year found that more than a quarter of its online visitors are now women, while another porn site, YouPorn, recently found that 18% of women watch it every day and 63% watch it every week. The moral of the story? We should all be paying more attention to the potential risks.