In this YouTube discussion, host David Ley and several contributors examine how pornography consumption can affect romantic relationships. They cite user comments describing porn’s role in fostering sexual aggression, desensitization, and a shift toward selfish, performance‑oriented sex that marginalizes female pleasure. The panel argues that most mainstream porn is designed for male arousal, leading to unrealistic expectations such as multiple orgasms and rapid, scripted encounters. They link these trends to market forces and algorithmic amplification: platforms prioritize increasingly extreme, aggressive content because it generates clicks and revenue. The conversation draws parallels to other media (e.g., movies, TV shows) to illustrate how repeated exposure subtly shapes attitudes and behaviors, even if direct causation is hard to prove. Participants also discuss the psychological fallout—sexual anxiety, disassociation, and a “slot‑machine” mentality that turns sex into a search for ever‑greater stimulation—potentially eroding intimacy and self‑esteem, especially for younger people beginning their sexual lives. While acknowledging consensual role‑play, they warn that a constant diet of de‑humanizing porn can foster a selfish, aggressive sexual partner and damage relationship health.
Chapters
Let's get into it. Porn in relationships or with someone you are dating. So are you okay with the person you're dating or in a relationship with watching porn? What were these comments?
Well, we had some really interesting comments on it. One of the most upvoted comments was a woman who wrote, It ruined my marriage. He became sexually violent and desensitized. I personally don't want my future partner binging or willingly lusting after another woman's body. I'll stop there. And somebody wrote underneath that comment saying, it's true. It's ruined so many relationship. Porn kills love. That was one of the most upvoted comments, which I think, you know, is, and we're going to get much deeper than this, but I think it's a point that's really important to address, which is I think a worry and a fear if you take jealousy and kind of uncomfortability aside, I think the worry for women is, is it going to basically make what women really enjoy during sex become so far from what men enjoyed doing? Does that make sense? Like female pleasure is already something that, you know, takes a backseat in a lot of sexual relationships. And I think when you watch porn, it's very much aimed at turning on men. not very much at turning on women. So it's sort of like, is that going to be over time? If you have somebody who consumes a lot of porn, is it going to mean that your intimacy is going to be good in such a way that you're not going to be able to get pleasure out of it? And, you know, what she's saying is it made him sexually violent, which I think is quite common. And she's also saying that it desensitized him, which I think is another point. You know, if you're subjecting to a lot of kind of highly sexual and intense pornography, you know, the real act of sex, real life act of sex might just end up feeling very vanilla.
Yes. Look, there is obviously so much porn trends towards being either aggressive, demeaning, It can be degrading. It trains people to think in a certain way. Look, this is very complex because.
On.
One hand, you can say it trains people to think about sex a certain way. On the other hand, you can say these sites are purely capitalist sites. They just want to make money. and they are just creating what people will watch. And when a category is popular, they spend more money and time creating porn around that category.
Or it's just, yeah, it's the free market. But in the same way that Facebook and Twitter is the free market, which is just getting worse and worse and more, you know, it's a, in the same way that you know, conspiracy theory and stuff that just outrages you is getting the most attention on those other places. As soon as you put an algorithm in charge, the porn algorithm is just going to be upping the game every time the same way those other ones are.
Right, because that's, I suppose in the same way that you see with newspapers, right? I have to be, I have to, as a newspaper, try to become more and more scandalous in order to stand out.
Correct.
And as you say, the same is true of Facebook. You have to keep pushing the boat out, become more and more outrageous or anger people more and more to get those clicks. And porn naturally is, it's gonna, it's like in order to do something different, you have to keep doing something different. That doesn't naturally explain why stuff that's aggressive towards women wins. But there is clearly something in the male psyche that that is speaking to, that that is playing on and does well for that reason. So I think that it's fair to say that if in the same way that if you're watching, if you're on Facebook and getting made to be angry all the time, then you're getting an angry and unnatural amount of the time. If in porn, you're consistently watching things that dominate women, which some women want, some women are into, and a lot aren't. Right. So it's not like that. It's not like I. I don't want to. I want to separate things.
Right.
Because whatever role play people have within the context of their bedroom is fine with me. if they're both, if they both, if it excites them, I don't care who dominates who. But the, the kind of trend of constantly just barraging, like, bombarding people with stuff that is, has no care for the female experience at all, but simultaneously makes it look like the woman is having the best time ever. That is, that creates a very, very, on the, on the worst side, aggressive partner, but on the, even on the more kind of, what's the word? Even on the more innocuous side, it just creates a very selfish sexual partner.
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Back to the video.
Which I think is an interesting point because and I can only speak to how I'm, from what I've seen in the comments and what I know women to feel, and I can't speak for every woman, but I think the issue that people, women take to porn and to their partners watching porn comes from the fact that the male orgasm is always overvalued in comparison to the female orgasm, meaning you would very, imagine having sex with someone and she came and you didn't, that just wouldn't happen. it just seems like such a strange thing. You'd have to somehow make yourself orgasm after that happens. So, whereas there are so many times when women don't get to climax during sex, and I think that the frustration on to that point particularly, I think for women is that it ends up, as you say, not taking into consideration at all the female experience because it's so heavily geared towards what turns men on. And then if you carry that over completely directly into the bedroom, you end up having, as you say, a very one-sided and selfish experience, which is already something that women have to fight against.
I actually feel like there's a different problem. I mean, that's definitely a problem too. But the most visceral problem that I've just noticed is just unrealistic expectation. And when you say like, oh, what if she doesn't climax? It's like, well, actually, the porn you see now is just like, What if she doesn't have seven orgasms? Or it's just like, everything after 30 seconds.
It's so performative.
Yeah.
And fake.
Like, coincidentally, I watched the movie last night, Don Jon, when he was, he's got a, it's Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Scarlett Johansson.
It's a good movie.
It's a great little movie. I think it's a directorial debut, actually, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. But he's got a massive porn addiction. He's not having any real connection with the person that he's having sex with. He's just having whatever idea that is in his head that the porn, the unrealistic expectation of porn is taking up, and it just takes him out of reality. And I think that's the part that is really Insidious. And I probably come into this a little bit more. I feel like at least more open-minded than a lot of these comments, because a lot of these comments are just like, no, it shouldn't. Like, if you ask them, if you ask a lot of these people, they probably think it should be outlawed or something, and it's just not really. what I think the case is, but I think you have to be really honest with yourself about just what a performance and what a piece of phoniness it all is, really.
I mean, God help people who kind of start off on their sexual journey as teenagers with all of that, because the insecurity that must breed and how much harder it is to navigate a woman than porn suggests. It is that you are just going to be able to get someone off that easily. That's not a good thing either. So in that sense, it's not good for anyone's self-esteem.
Well, it's causing massive amounts of sexual anxiety.
It's actually interesting you say that. We had a comment from someone who said, It depends what they're watching and whether they know the difference between real life and porn. men my age in brackets in their 30s think that what men and women do during porn is completely normal. Romance is dead.
That's interesting. I feel like that's not giving men in their 30s an awful lot of credit. I thought she was going to say, like, men in their 30s know the difference.
Yeah.
I mean, we, you know, you fall. Look, I I kind of want to zoom out a little bit, but I just want to make this point. before we do that, when a movie director suggests that it's utterly crazy that their movie could have caused any kind of violence at all, and that there is no connection between real life violence and what people see in movies, that to me seems willfully intellectually dishonest because things do have, things make an impression on us in unconscious ways. I drank more old fashions after watching Mad Men than I did beforehand because you saw Don Draper drinking old fashions all the time. Jameson and I, we ate oysters in New York and drank martinis because of an episode of Mad Men.
It's true. You took me to Waffle House because.
Of an episode of Parts unknown.
Parts unknown.
Man was a misogynist for three years after Mad Men.
Not true, Johnson. But that's, but that's, the reality is if, if we weren't influenced by things, then companies wouldn't spend money on advertising. It wouldn't make sense. Companies aren't stupid. They don't flush money down the toilet. So things can have an influence on us and they can build new associations. Porn is no different in that respect. It can influence us. But there's a difference between influence and being like, I don't know the difference. And I think that people who have had long term relationships generally, I would argue, know the difference. Now, I do think that it gets in someone's, it can take someone trending down a path of being more and more ignorant of someone else's sexual experience, being more and more sexually aggressive. And I also hear what she's saying about desensitization, because I think that's a real thing that is in some ways, I think more even more likely than someone becoming sexually aggressive. That's not me saying I don't think people don't become more sexually aggressive through porn. I think a lot of people do. But the desensitization within relationships, I think happens to a lot of people because, or even outside of relationships, because they are just, you can drown yourself in this world of extremes. that is very disassociated. It's a very disassociated experience watching porn. You're on the outside of it. You're not connected to anything. It's a very disconnected experience, which is why most people, if they are being self-aware and introspective about it, will say that after they've come through porn, They feel kind of slightly... It's not like anyone feels better afterwards. Maybe some people do, but most people will say, It's not like my proudest moment after I've done that. I don't then think, what a great way I just spent the last 20 minutes.
Is that how long it takes? 20 minutes?
That was the funny thing about the movie, where it's like actually just picking the right video, that takes a long time. But Don Jon, once he finds the right video. But that's how he wasted his whole, you know, life.
In a weird way, that becomes the kind of metaphor for what it does to people's sex lives. Because the experience of searching on porn is that you're always looking for the perfect thing. You don't even know what the perfect thing is. you're just searching and they know that and it's like dragging you down this rabbit hole and that rabbit hole and so on. And there's nothing present about it. It's like the slot machine as applied to sex. And there's always thinking there's this bigger jackpot, there's this other experience. And when that carries over into someone's real life, their sex can become disassociated. It can become disconnected. It's hard for someone to have real intimacy in the same way. And it's hard to connect to the real experience of it and be present with it because you're used to playing that slot machine.
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