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I am referring to these lines:
A recent study reported that increasing porn use is linked to decreased sexual performance in men and increased sexual performance in women.
Big Think - Is watching pornography bad for men — but good for women?
The researchers found that more frequent porn use was associated with lower sexual performance for men but higher sexual performance for women.
This question is about Pornography and the male libido so I am asking about women.
The relevant research paper doesn't address the question as to whether or not pornography increases sexual performance in women. Sommet and Berent (2022) found a correlation:
In contrast, among women, higher and increasing frequencies of porn use were associated with higher levels of sexual self-competence, improved sexual functioning, and enhanced partner-reported sexual satisfaction (for some aspects).
Porn use and men’s and women’s sexual performance: evidence from a large longitudinal sample; see also this survey data.
The paper doesn't claim that porn does (or doesn't) improve women's sexual performance. In fact, they spend a paragraph warning the reader about the correlation vs. causation problem:
Third, observational data cannot be used to draw causal inferences. However, we believe that causality should be assessed in terms of a ‘continuum of plausibility’ (Dunning, 2008) along which longitudinal evidence is located above cross-sectional evidence (but below experimental evidence; see also Grosz, Rohrer, & Thoemmes, 2020). In our case, given the consistencies between the results from the fixed-effects (focusing on within-participants change) and first-difference (focused on wave-to-wave change) regressions, we believe that causality is at least plausible. That being said, two alternative explanations – which we regard as less parsimonious in the case of a reversed interaction (for a related discussion, see Wright, 2021b) – cannot be formally excluded: (i) the presence of unobserved time-varying confounders (e.g. variations in well-being; see Kohut & Štulhofer, 2018) and (ii) reciprocal effects (e.g. for men, a decrease in sexual self-competence can cause an increase in porn use, and for women, the reverse could be true).
