Looking for further proof of the damaging effects of porn? Lucky for you, the pre-eminent scientific journal Cosmopolitan magazine has weighed in with a survey purporting to show that porn is ruining sex.

I kid, of course. The glossy surveyed 68 “relationship experts” and found that the majority think X-rated material can harm relationships. The magazine also found that said experts believe porn damages women’s confidence, which is rich coming from a publication that inflames women’s insecurities in order to sell them a consumerist wet dream. I’m not going to even address the countless glaring research flaws here — that would be giving the survey far too much credit — instead, this seems a good excuse to talk about about how porn can be used to the benefit of relationships.

This isn’t at all to negate the potential for porn to be legitimately damaging. Reasonable people can agree that mainstream porn, as with most popular media, often produces unrealistic aesthetics and expectations — not to mention poor sex education and instruction, right? That’s something worth discussing in a relationship, no doubt. But instead of condemning all erotic material as an enemy to sex, what about taking the more productive route of talking about how porn can actually be good for relationships.

First off, it’s important to note that porn “is by no means monolithic,” as Carol Queen, Good Vibrations’ staff sexologist, puts it to me in an email. “Choosing what to watch can be a great communication exercise by itself. Say one partner wants to watch gonzo and the other wants to see feminist porn; what a useful conversation that might be!” Similarly, Debby Herbenick, a research scientist at Indiana University and author of “Sex Made Easy,” tells me in an email that porn “is so many things” — from professional to amateur, vanilla to kinky, natural bodies to artificially enhanced. “I’m always a bit wary when I hear people say that ‘porn’ does anything specific unless they are willing to say what type of porn they mean and under what circumstances,” she says.

To the extent that porn can be damaging to relationships, it is, as with most things, often in our refusal to communicate honestly about it with our partners (and that tendency toward shame isn’t helped by surveys like this one). It’s easy to make incorrect inferences about a partner’s real-life desires and expectations by secretly reviewing their browser history. It’s also easy to jump to worst-case conclusions about what a partner might think of our own fantasy material of choice. Assumptions build on miscommunications which build on resentments — and before long you’re having really, truly horrible sex.