A lot of people seem to be under the impression that, if you watch enough porn, your brain will build up a tolerance to it. The result is that you will eventually need to watch more and more extreme stuff in order to become—and stay—aroused. This idea, known as the content progression thesis, has been around for decades, but there hasn’t really been any compelling research that can speak to it…until now.

Two studies have emerged finding that there really isn’t any support for the idea of a porn “tolerance” effect. The first, published in 2017, involved a sample of over 2,000 adults who were asked to rate how arousing they found 27 different categories of porn to be, ranging from the more vanilla end of the spectrum to the kinkier end.

Those who were aroused by kinkier stuff were actually aroused by pretty much all porn categories, which is inconsistent with the idea that porn exposure leads to a “satiation” effect that requires more extreme content for arousal. To learn more about this study, read my write-up of it on the blog here.

The other study, published in 2019, was a longitudinal study of about 250 high school students who were surveyed about their porn habits five times, each separated by about six months.

It turned out that porn viewing practices remained pretty stable over time and, further, there was actually a decrease in preferences for extreme content over the course of the study—which, again, is inconsistent with the content progression thesis. To learn more about this study, read my write-up of it for the Kinsey Institute Research Blog here.

As always, more research would be helpful; however, what the available data suggests is that, at least at the aggregate level, porn users don’t develop more extreme tastes over time. Rather, the more plausible explanation appears to be that people who tend to be into kinkier or more “extreme” porn just have more diverse tastes and enjoy more variety in the porn they watch.

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