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As it turns out, men are virtually hard-wired to like watching or reading about others having sex. Here's why they do it and why it's probably ok.
Most nights, after his wife, Kate, had gone to bed, Tom surfed the internet for porn. Kate learned about this during their second session of couples therapy. Despite Tom's claims that his nocturnal habit had nothing to do with their love life, she worried he preferred porn to having sex with her.
That is a common reaction. "Often, one partner has a porn interest, as well as the other thinks that's an issue," says Russell Stambaugh, PhD, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based psychologist and sex therapist. "It rarely is. The very best adult content (have a peek at this site) studies suggest that directly about 5% of porn users have an issue that interferes with their daily life."
That's good news, because a great deal of men and women look at porn. In line with a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 26% of male Internet users visited adult web pages (only 3% of women went to these sites). In 2006, the porn industry raked in nearly 13 billion dollars.
For most women, there is no need to stress. Whatever could be drawing a man to porn, it's seldom a reflection on his partner, says sex therapist Lonnie Barbach, PhD, in practice in San Francisco. "Some women feel threatened because they do not think they are as sexy as a porn star," she says. "But it is not about what he's not getting at home. It's the novelty. It is a turn-on."
Why do so many men like looking at pictures of naked people? That is not a very easy question to answer. Porn-induced arousal has been linked to many parts of the brain. One recent theory holds that mirror neurons, brain cells that fire when an action is performed as well as when it's observed, play a significant role in male arousal. But knowing what's fired up by porn does not tell us why our brains get turned on.
Stambaugh points to evolution. Men's brains, he says, are hard-wired for easy arousal, to ensure that men are ready for sex whenever opportunity knocks -- a propagation-of-the-species thing. With online porn so readily at hand, vicarious opportunities -- cue the mirror neurons -- are ever present.
Once Kate realized that porn was not her replacement and Tom felt less ashamed about his habit, the couple talked more conveniently about their sex life. And that led to sexy outfits as well as a little experimentation within the bedroom. The porn was never the problem, Stambaugh says. "More more often than not, the problem is how you talk and how you reveal yourself to each other."
