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Source: European Association of Urology

(A research survey based on a questionnaire by University of Antwerp and University Hospital Antwerp - Belgium)

A study has shown that the amount of porn a man watches is linked to worse erectile function. Watching porn is also associated with greater dissatisfaction with "normal" sex, with only 65% of respondents rating sex with a partner to be more stimulating than porn. This work is presented at the EAU virtual Congress.

Pornography has been increasingly available via the internet since around 2007. This has led to a rapid uptake in use, but there is little information on how increasing porn use might affect erectile function. Researchers from Belgium, Denmark and the UK established an online questionnaire, which was advertised mainly to men in Belgium and Denmark through social media, posters and flyers. 3267 men replied to the 118 questions, answering questions about masturbation, frequency of porn watching, and sexual activity with partners. The questionnaire concentrated on men who had had sex within the previous 4 weeks, which allowed the team to relate the effect of porn watching on sexual activity. The questionnaire incorporated questions from standard erectile function and sexual health surveys (see notes).

Head researcher, Professor Gunter de Win (University of Antwerp and University Hospital Antwerp) said:

"We found that there was a big range of responses. In our sample, men watch quite a lot of porn, on average around 70 minutes per week, normally for between 5 and 15 minutes per time, with obviously some watching very little and some watching much, much more".

They also found that around 23% of men under-35 who responded to the survey had some level of erectile dysfunction when having sex with a partner.

Professor de Win commented:

"This figure was higher than we expected. We found that there was a highly significant relationship between time spent watching porn and increasing difficulty with erectile function with a partner, as indicated by the erectile function and sexual health scores. People who watch more porn also scored high on porn addiction scales.

"We need to keep understand what this work means and doesn't mean. It is a questionnaire rather than a clinical trial, and it could be that the people who have responded are not completely representative of the whole male population. However, the work was designed to unpick any relationship between porn and erectile dysfunction, and given the large sample size we can be pretty confident about the findings".

We found that 90% of men fast-forward to watch the most arousing pornographic scenes. There's no doubt that porn conditions the way we view sex; in our survey only 65% of men felt that sex with a partner was more exciting than watching porn. In addition, 20% felt that they needed to watch more extreme porn to get the same level of arousal as previously. We believe that the erectile dysfunction problems associated with porn stem from this lack of arousal.

Our next step in this research to identify which factors lead to erectile dysfunction, and to conduct a similar study on the effects of porn on women.

In the meantime, we believe that doctors dealing with erectile dysfunction should also be asking about watching pornography".

Commenting, Professor Maarten Albersen (University of Leuven, Belgium) said:

"This is an interesting study by prof. De Win and colleagues. The sample consisted mainly of younger men recruited via (social) media and posters, which may result in a sample biased towards higher online porn consumption rates". All-in-all, the study raises interesting insights in the fact that porn consumption by men may lead to impaired erectile function and/or sexual satisfaction or confidence during partner-sex. As Professor De Win says, the running hypothesis is that the type of porn watched may come more explicit over time and partner-sex may not lead to the same level of arousal as the pornographic material does. The study contributes to an ongoing debate on the topic; experts have highlighted that porn may have both positive and negative effects, and could for example be used as an aid in the treatment of sexual dysfunctions, so this is a controversial area and the last words have not been said on this topic".

Professor Albersen was not involved in this work, this is an independent comment.

The 35th European Association of Urology conference takes place online from 17-19 July, 2020. This replaces the physical conference which was scheduled to take place in Amsterdam. The EAU conference is the largest and most important urology congress in Europe, with up to 14,000 attendees. Conference website https://eaucongress.uroweb.org/

Source: Cornell University

Attorney General William P. Barr recently said that he doesn’t believe there’s any systemic racism in policing. His statement is at odds with the data.

As part of the Stanford Open Policing Project, which collects and analyzes data on police traffic stops across the country, my fellow researchers and I have spent more than 10,000 hours looking at policing data. I still remember the feeling I had soon after we began the analysis; as I wrote to a project leader, “something huge + really catastrophic is going on here.” The data made clear that policing had a disproportionate impact on black and Hispanic drivers. For example, they were far more likely to be searched and arrested. This has long been documented by projects like the Police Scorecard, led by Samuel Sinyangwe and DeRay Mckesson, and by the experiences of black and Hispanic drivers. Further, our data provided evidence that this disproportionate impact resulted not merely from racial differences in crime rates, as observers sometimes argue, but from racial discrimination: In other words, the police treat black and Hispanic drivers differently from identically behaving white drivers.

Five years after we began our analysis, our results are clear. Both police stops and police searches show evidence of bias against black and Hispanic drivers. We analyzed data from nearly 100 million stops occurring from 2011 to 2018 across 21 state patrol police agencies and 35 city police departments — one of the largest such analyses ever conducted — and publicly released the data for others to analyze as well.

How we did our research

To assess racial bias in the decision to stop a driver, we applied the classic “veil of darkness” test. The idea behind this test is that for officers to be racially profiling drivers, they must be able to see the driver’s race. It is harder to do this when it is dark outside. Consequently, if police officers were more likely to stop black drivers, we would expect black drivers to make up a smaller share of stopped drivers after sunset, when it’s harder to see the driver’s race. That’s exactly what we found — even after controlling for other factors like location and time of day.

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We also found evidence of racial bias in the decision to search a driver after stopping them: Black and Hispanic drivers were searched at lower thresholds of evidence, when they were less likely to be carrying contraband. Averaging across city police departments, white drivers were searched only when they had at least a 10 percent chance of carrying contraband — compared to 5 percent for black and Hispanic drivers. (State police departments showed similar racial gaps.) To infer these search thresholds, we applied a statistical test called a “threshold test,” which infers search thresholds using two types of data broken down by race and location: how often drivers are searched and how likely those searches are to find contraband. Our data shows that black and Hispanic drivers are searched at higher rates, but those searches are less likely to find contraband, so the threshold test concludes that black and Hispanic drivers are searched at lower thresholds, suggesting discrimination.

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Nationwide data

Our analysis looks at the entire country, providing a bird’s-eye view on racial bias nationwide. Deep dives on individual departments have found similar evidence. Consider only the two largest cities in the country: New York and Los Angeles. In New York, analysis after analysis of data up through 2012 has shown evidence of racial bias in stop and frisk, a widespread practice under which police stopped, questioned and searched pedestrians on the least suspicion. In Los Angeles, investigations by the Los Angeles Times of police traffic stops data up through 2018 also found evidence of racial bias against black and Hispanic drivers in stops and searches.

Our evidence of racial bias in police stops comes from the past few years, as does that from New York and Los Angeles; it isn’t some historical relic, as Barr’s full comments imply. And in New York and Los Angeles, the criminal justice system itself concluded that the evidence was convincing enough to act. In New York, after a federal judge ruled that the stop-and-frisk policy was racially biased, the police department was forced to curtail its use dramatically. In Los Angeles, the police department responded to the Los Angeles Times investigation by cutting back on random vehicle stops in an effort to reduce racial bias.

The evidence of racial bias in policing is unequivocal.All Barr has to do is look at the data.

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Emma Pierson(@2plus2make5) is an incoming assistant professor in the computer science field at Cornell University and at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute.