Refined taste makes it harder to be satisfied

Once your taste is refined, the things that used to satisfy you no longer do.

I think knowing good things is basically a good thing.

You see good paintings. You hear good music. You eat good food.

The more you experience, the more differences you can tell. But there's a price.

The same thing happens with art

The first time you went to a museum, a single painting may have been enough to make you think, "Wow."

But once you've seen hundreds, thousands of works, what you look at slowly changes.

• Composition
• Color
• Technique
• Historical context
• Originality

The more you know, the more criteria you have for judging. That isn't bad. You could say you've learned to enjoy art more deeply.

But at the same time, "ordinarily good" stops moving you.

It's the same with having a refined palate. The more good food you know, the higher your standard.

Might the same happen with pornography?

I suspect this happens with sexual stimulation too.

You watch huge amounts of intense video. Unusually attractive people, situations you'd almost never meet in real life, one stimulus after another.

Watch that again and again, and your internal sense of "normal" may shift. Then, looking at a real partner, you may no longer find attractive what you once did.

But from here on, this is my hypothesis. Research has not shown, as such, that "pornography refines your taste and so lowers your satisfaction with real partners."

What research has confirmed is narrower

A meta-analysis published by Wright and colleagues in 2017 combined data from 50 studies and more than 50,000 participants.

It found that among men, more pornography consumption went with lower sexual and relationship satisfaction.

But the association was small. The average correlation with men's relationship satisfaction was −.12.

And this alone doesn't tell us about cause and effect. Does watching pornography lower satisfaction? Do people who are already less satisfied with their sex lives or relationships watch more? Or both?

The researchers themselves say more research is needed on the mechanism, including the possibility of the reverse direction.

Even more important, what this research mainly measures is satisfaction with a current partner or sex life.

"Watching porn makes you less inclined to go out and meet people." "You stop finding real women attractive." The research doesn't directly prove claims like those.

Still, you can test it yourself

So I won't go as far as "you must quit pornography."

Instead, I think it's worth trying to cut back once. Two weeks is fine. Four weeks is fine.

During that time, watch how you change.

• Has your interest in real partners changed?
• Has how often you want to go out and meet people changed?
• Has your sexual satisfaction changed?
• How are your focus and mood?

Where research hasn't given an answer, you can make yourself the subject of a small experiment.

More stimulation doesn't always make life richer

I don't think this is only about pornography.

Art. Food. Social media. Short videos. Games. Shopping. Entertainment.

We live in an age where it's easy to move on to something stronger than yesterday.

But raising the ceiling on stimulation isn't the same as raising satisfaction. Sometimes it may even go the other way.