“Porn” is the sort of word we tend to use silently. It’s thought about, typed out, Ctrl-Shift-Deleted. It’s rarely actually spoken. Pornography’s increasing availability dovetails with the rise and proliferation of the internet, and porn’s subsequent place in American culture has no real precedent. How exactly does online porn affect someone’s sexuality?

A strange combination of technical misinformation, anachronistic sexual mores, value-suffused pleasure-seeking, and personal shame are keeping that conversation from happening. Here I’m going to try to lay out what science has (and hasn’t) substantiated about internet porn.

First of all, the sheer size of the porn industry is enough to make anyone’s head spin. XVideo, a particularly large internet provider, streams more data than CNN, Dropbox, and the New York Times combined (Pandey). Mind Geek, the parent company of several providers, is the third-largest bandwidth-consuming company on the planet – only Google and Netflix outrank it. In any given year, the porn industry will bring in more money than the NFL, the NBA, and MLB combined (ABC News).

Porn viewing patterns have changed in time with the erection (oh grow up) of this digital infrastructure. Roughly 93% of American males and 62% of American females now view online porn prior to turning 18 (Sabina et al.). Into young adulthood, just over 60% of men and 30% of women engage in self-described “habitual” porn usage.

I’d like to offer more concrete numbers here, but unfortunately porn usage research tends towards unreliability – named surveys invite dishonesty, anonymous surveys skew samples, and, frankly, pornographic technology develops faster than formal research can keep up with. Suffice it to say that a lot of people regularly watch porn.

All of this newfound exposure generates an array of social, psychological, and sometimes even physical effects. To be clear – they are not all bad. Let the record reflect that I am not some evangelical NoFap disciple who morally opposes masturbation.

In fact, research suggests that moderate pornography consumption can actually improve quality of life. Danish psychologists found in a sample of hundreds of men and women that porn moderately increases sexual knowledge and sexual satisfaction (Hald).

Responses from that sample all followed the same general line of reasoning – porn enabled pseudo-experimentation with new sexual techniques sans the risks of pregnancy/STDs/feeling or being unsafe. Alan McKee, a leading sexual psychology researcher, writes, “most people [who use pornography] seem to find their time with porn pleasurable rather than sad, demeaning, addictive or harmful.”

So it would seem that modern stigma surrounding pornography isn’t especially warranted. There are, however, two major caveats to that rule.

The first is that porn can become addictive. I feel like anytime someone writes about a bad habit, it’s almost required of them to invoke some half-baked neuroscience, something like “you have a reward circuit in your brain that compels you to chew your pen.” Here it’s real though. Climaxes are about as potent a short-term reward as a human being can experience, and anything that “gets you there,” so to speak, has the potential to hold power over you that goes much deeper than habit.

This is especially true for teenagers, who, as already discussed, are more likely to encounter porn than ever before. If you’re skeptical, take a look here for an in-depth look at the neural mechanisms of porn addiction, here for a video summary, here for its impact on young people specifically, and here for a more personal take.

And the second caveat is that self-reporting – on which virtually all research in this area relies – has blind spots. In other words, the fact of someone believing something is good for them ≠ to that thing actually being good for them. Porn alters desires in subtle ways, not just because it’s porn, but because it works like anything else – anything someone spends enough time with will be somehow incorporated into their self-image, just like a TV show, or a favorite album (Gavrieli).

A man who watches aggressive or violent porn, for example, will not turn misogynistic or abusive overnight. But that behavior could very well lead to intimacy issues down the line (Streep). Again, these effects are compounded when exposure occurs at a young age; compounded again if the behavior turns addictive; and compounded once more by the ease of access the internet has created.

To summarize: pornography does not seem to me to be fundamentally harmful. However, it is fundamentally misunderstood, and that misunderstanding absolutely can cause harm. I have no moral or practical advice to offer… except, maybe, to learn all you can about it. You’ll be the better for it.