Yes, I’m really going to talk about erectile dysfunction

I’m a little old-school in that when I’m in the car, I don’t stream music or use satellite radio, but instead just listen to the local stations for the music genres I like. The downside of doing that is the incessant commercials, which can sometimes be exhausting.

A while back, I noticed a trend in the types of commercials constantly being machine-gunned at me and found they fell into four major categories, with the first three being: 1. Ambulance chasing lawyers; 2. Used car dealerships; and 3. Jewelry stores. But over time, they started taking a backseat in frequency to the fourth group, which is ...

Men’s sexual health and erectile dysfunction (ED) commercials.

I finally reached exasperation one day when I was flipping the channels and hit four — let me say it again, FOUR — ED commercials in the span of about two minutes.

Now I’ve been a tech and business executive for many years and I know companies don’t go that heavy on marketing unless there’s proven empirical demand for what they’re selling. And while I’ve lived a long time listening to the first three types of commercials on the radio, the ED ones seem to have burst onto the scene out of nowhere and overshadowed the others in no time.

That being the case, I decided to investigate why that is. Aren’t you glad you have me to do this kind of detective work for you?

And if you’re wondering how all this ties in with Christianity, have patience, I’ll get there.

When it comes to ED, out of every 100 men, anywhere from five to 20 will experience ED symptoms severe enough to impact their quality of life. In the next two years, Johns Hopkins predicts that the prevalence of ED will be approximately 322 million worldwide and a leading cause of sexual disability in men by 2025.

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? The question is — why the dramatic increase in ED cases?

A medical paper published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information begins to answer the question by saying, “Traditional factors that once explained men’s sexual difficulties appear insufficient to account for the sharp rise in erectile dysfunction.” It goes on to state: “Up until the last decade, rates of ED were low in sexually active men under 40 and did not begin to rise steeply until thereafter.”

And what do they suspect to be a possible cause? “Kinsey Institute researchers were among the first to report pornography-induced erectile-dysfunction (PIED) and pornography-induced abnormally low libido, in 2007 … Since then, evidence has mounted that Internet pornography may be a factor in the rapid surge in rates of sexual dysfunction.”

Dr. Robert Weiss, in an article he wrote for Psychology Today, agrees, bluntly stating four facts: “1. The amount of porn a man watches is linked to ED; 2. More porn equals more ED; 3. Heavy porn use is linked to dissatisfaction with real-world sex; 4. The constant fantasy/satisfaction cycle with heavy porn use leads to emotional and psychological disconnection with live partners.”

And that, my friends, is why you get four ED commercials in less than two minutes on the radio.

Sin’s punishment comes from the sin itself

Dr. Weiss highlights that it’s not just the man who suffers from porn, but those around him as well when he says, “Thanks to heavy porn use, growing numbers of men are suffering from sexual dysfunction, be it ED, DE, or anorgasmia. Even worse, male sexual dysfunction affects not just men but their romantic partners.”

But that’s oftentimes how sin works, doesn’t it? It not only hurts the sinner but those they care about too.

I’ll resist the urge to quote the many passages of Scripture that deal with sin and lust and instead focus on just two that seem appropriate in this case.

First, James has an interesting way of describing what lust does to us when he says we are “carried away” (1:14), by it, which telegraphs the idea of a power that assumes total control over someone/thing else and whisks them away to a place they may not ultimately want to go. Those suffering from porn addiction describe that very feeling.

When you’re owned in that way by something, you’re its slave, which is why Peter tells us: “... for by what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved” (2 Pet. 2:19). And with that enslavement can come painful and crippling punishment.

We sometimes think that God’s judgment for sin comes in the form of galactic catastrophes that He visits upon us when in reality, the punishment for sin mostly comes from the consequences of the sin itself. The porn/lust/ED process sure looks like it follows that plan.

And that plan isn’t pretty.  

One example: the Bob and Tom radio show has, once a week, comedian Alli Breen who reads letters sent in to her asking for relationship advice. One letter sent to her was by a woman who said she emerged from the bathroom to find the man she was about to become intimate with for the first time viewing porn, for purposes I doubt I need to explain. She wanted to know if that was normal and OK.  

No, it’s not.

If you’re a man reading this and that describes you, then it’s time for you to repent and “abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul” (1 Pet 2:11). All the literature I read on the subject says that abstinence from porn almost always results in a return to normal sexual health. So how about you start that today?  

If you, and others with the same besetting sin, do that and follow God’s plan for sexuality, maybe in the near future, all the ED commercials will disappear from the radio and I’ll only have to endure lawyer, car, and jewelry ads when I’m listening to music. That would be nice.