by Sara Pascoe
That’s the root of our anxiety about how porn might affect someone right there. He starts off a wholesome lad admiring the front cover of Jugs and ends up brutally murdering thirty women.
Rationally, we know that it’s not common for a porn user to descend into murderous rampaging, purely because there are so many men watching porn and so few rampaging murderers. Just as horror movies or computer games might influence an impressionable few with destructive or fatal consequences, though it’s a sorry outcome the films and games cannot themselves be blamed.
Some heartening statistics: if porn encouraged rape, then we’d expect rape rates to rise along with the availability of the internet. The ‘Porn Up, Rape Down’ study conducted at Northwestern University School of Law found that the incidence of reported rape declined by 85 per cent in the United States after technology made porn freely available. The author of the study, Anthony D’Amato, argues that porn has a cathartic effect and that its availability reduces the likelihood of rape rather than encouraging it. D’Amato found that states with the lowest rates of internet access (Kentucky, Minnesota, West Virginia and Arkansas) all bucked the trend and had suffered a 53 per cent increase in sexual crimes over the period studied, while the states with the best internet access (Alaska, Colorado, New Jersey and Washington) showed a 27 per cent decrease.
While this correlation does not definitively prove the influence of porn on its viewers one way or another, it’s important to flag that many governments (especially right-wing ones) have attempted to prove that porn makes rapists but have been unable to. Rapists definitely use porn, but then so does everybody else. It’s an area that needs more study. Ideally, I’d be given five hundred or so sets of identical twins and two islands, where the boys will be separated and have indistinguishable upbringings, with one difference: island A has internet access; island B has no wifi, just board games and knitting patterns. After fifty years I’ll tell you the crime stats. Thank you for not telling Amnesty on me.
Concern Two: Porn makes men disrespect women.
Too easy for me to believe. Before I started researching this book, I’d have sworn on my life that porn was to blame for much of modern sexism. Here are some hot opinions from past Sara: for a straight man, the abundance of porn reinforces that women are all for his sexual consumption. Our worth depends on whether he considers us fuckable or not. He cannot take women seriously because he has seen too many with spunk on their face.
So, there is evidence that porn use influences young men’s attitudes. In a study from 2014 conducted by Gert Martin Held from the University of Copenhagen, random participants were approached by mail, asked to watch a thirty-minute violent pornography film and then to fill out a questionnaire about how much porn they’d seen before, how much they enjoyed the porn they’d just been shown, and then some leading questions about how realistic they found porn to be and others relating to the treatment of women. The study found that men with a higher past porn use were more likely to support violence against women, more likely to believe it was occasionally justified. Even more relevant, those reporting higher arousal from the porn they’d just watched were more likely to agree that giving women a thump now and then was okay. The study concludes that men may learn a sexual script from watching porn that they believe applies in the real world, which is cause for concern. This study only comprised two hundred people though, which is pretty small.
For comparison, twenty-eight thousand people completed the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey between 1974 and 2010, and they found no connection between porn use and sexism. The difficulty with extrapolating from these results – calm down, guys, there’s nothing to panic about – is that they only asked if participants had seen one or more porn videos in the past year – so there is no way to discern between a heavy porn user and someone who saw one at a hotel they worked at and then it was 9/11. I guess we can be reassured that watching one porn movie doesn’t turn people into raging sexists.
I am very interested in a study by Australian academic Alan McKee. He interviewed a hundred men, asking things like ‘Should women be allowed to hold powerful positions? Should they be able to work outside the home? Can they have abortions?’ and the results showed that being provincial, right-wing and middle-aged were far stronger predictors of sexist attitudes than the amount of porn watched. Lucky that ain’t the majority of our politicians, right, guys?
Concern Three: Porn encourages paedophilia.
I’m gonna be honest with you, paedophilia is where my attempts at liberalism and ‘let’s examine the evidence, not our emotions’ goes out the window. Some people film children being raped, some people pay to watch it. All of those people are breaking the law and I hope they die in prison. I am not considering paedophilia as part of the pornographic genre, because it is criminality. I know there is much to explore in this area of human depravity but that is not for this book.
I’m sticking to the legal parts of filmed sex but, bearing this in mind … if porn can make you get a semi for an old boot, does watching porn make men attracted to younger women?
Whether porn encourages it or not, the attraction is there. There’s an abundance of youth-intimating categories on tube sites. Looking at YouPorn now, both ‘teen’ and ‘college’ are offered on the homepage, with over a hundred thousand videos grouped within each category.
In every age bracket, from teenage boys to octogenarians, ‘babysitter porn’ is one of the most viewed categories. This tells us something about human sexuality – not that young-looking girls are fanciable, we know that already, they’re fertile, we’re over it. What interests me here is the power dynamic. Babysitter porn is the story of a young woman, vulnerable, in the house of an adult man – a dubious fantasy. Unless some of the films are about babysitters fucking the teenage boys they’re looking after? Either way there is an imbalance in power, and what has surprised me, from my position of naivety, is how often porn works like this. It seems no one is interested in sex between equals, it’s all teacher and student, stepmom and son, drug smuggler and customs officer. There’s something about dominating and being dominated inherent in sexual interplay. This makes me reflect differently on Angela Carter’s notion of all sex being an exchange of power. There is clearly huge sexual potential in power imbalance, something that may be fun in fantasy but can be problematic in real life.
An argument for how persuasive porn can be in influencing sexual tastes involves pubic hair. There are a lot of bald fannies in porn, and that’s weird, huh? Pubic hair is a signifier of adolescence. It shows that a person is reaching fertility. Why would there be a fashion for women to emulate being pre-fertile? Why would men find pubelessness sexy? You should be aware that the trend for bald fannies has spread into the real world; lots of women choose to have most or all of their pubes waxed or shaved. Does this mean that we can’t help but want to be what we see on our screens? Is it proof that women are so entrenched in being attractive to men that they’ll spend time and endure pain to look a certain way? If a man has a preference for women with no pubes, does it mean he is attracted to pre-pubescent girls?
There are stories of young men growing up and then being ‘surprised’ when they discovered real-life women had pubic hair, but I’ve not been able to find anyone who actually experienced this. The truth is that while there are plenty of hairless pussies, there is a rainforest of unshavens and anyone who is watching porn regularly has seen everything. Some interesting evidence against the influence of porn on young people is that all recent surveys have reported that up to 90 per cent of men prefer their partner to have pubic hair. I’m sure that the pubic hair thing is a trend, like with eyebrows. Bushy one decade, over-plucked the next. People like to deviate from the norm until we’ve all deviated into conformity and back we go. Now that grandmas are getting Hollywoods, of course granddaughters are rebelling with the natural look.
On the question of male attraction to children on the cusp of puberty, this is called hebephilia and is
much more common than paedophilia. The evolutionary theory about hebephilia is that it relates to sperm competition and paternity certainty. A man might be attracted to a girl who has not yet reached sexual maturity because he knows she is not pregnant, she cannot be cuckolding him. If he can form a pair bond with a younger mate and then guard her, he might effectively ensure his paternity certainty when she does reach fertility. It’s an ugly theory for our modern sensibility, but younger women are usually smaller and easier to dominate. It used to be traditional all over the world for girls to be married at eleven or twelve. In tens of countries it still is.
Just to be clear, I am not supporting or excusing this. I think the majority of men who feel these types of feelings would not act upon them, would actually feel very guilty. In 2008 sex researcher Ray Blanchard attached phallometric testing devices to 881 penises and measured their arousal in response to their owners viewing photographs of naked people. He found that in both gay and straight men, while they might verbally deny attraction, hebephilia was relatively common. The majority of these men claimed not to be attracted to younger people, yet had a physiological reaction to their photos.
This is where socialisation is important. We learn what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ from the people around us. We police ourselves, even in private.
One of the worries I expressed earlier was whether porn was a slippery slope – you begin watching loving couples respectfully pleasuring each other and from there you slide unavoidably, watching increasingly violent stuff, until you can only get it up for the most brutal sex. The received wisdom is that porn is becoming alarmingly aggressive because easily bored consumers are demanding it. If this concerns you, the study ‘Harder and Harder’ published by the Journal of Sex Research in 2018 might put your mind at rest. Sociologists from McGill University in Canada studied the most popular videos on Pornhub, assessed the aggressive content in a random selection and found it wasn’t true that viewers preferred aggressive content, or that the content was becoming more aggressive over time. They actually found, when measuring the length of time spent on visible aggression (biting, slapping, choking, etc.) in these videos, that violence was a declining trend. And films where the female performer seemed to be enjoying herself were far more popular (in views and ‘likes’) than any in which women simulated or experienced distress.
We can’t help but worry.* Even when I read a study like this one, I am still anxious about the people who do like the choking. Even if it’s a small proportion of young people wanting to try extreme sex acts or play out violent sexual scripts, I worry about the ramifications for them if it goes wrong. The study uses words like ‘habituation’ – people get used to seeing violence and it becomes normalised. That does worry me, and it appears difficult to quantify. There is a multitude of studies examining how watching hardcore porn might change how the viewer interacts with the real world, but unfortunately there are so many other factors in somebody’s life, it’s impossible to say definitively what causes an opinion or a behaviour. Until I get my porn-island twin study off the ground, that is.
I have been seeking a study about empathy and sexual arousal. I want a clear answer to my question from right at the beginning: does being turned on make someone care a bit less? Something I have experienced personally from sex with men is that when they are very aroused, they are also very motivated to orgasm. Motivated is a polite term, but it’s why stopping just before or during sex can be difficult to orchestrate. There are all sorts of reasons that someone might want sex to stop, from feeling nauseous to being in pain or any number of psychological reasons. When I was much younger, a teenager, I used to have a game I played where, to check if a guy was ‘good’, I’d pretend to be dead during sex to see if he stopped.
Stop judging me. There was logic to this at the time. I believed that when a man was sensitive enough to worry – ‘she’s gone limp, she’s not moving, I’ll check if she’s alright’ – then I would know he was worth my time. But no one ever stopped, so I quit doing it. It was a horrid feeling, but I recognised a psychopathy in aroused males. A line was crossed where I mattered less than their orgasm. I don’t think I’m alone in this experience, feeling like someone is using your body to masturbate rather than having sex with you. And I know for a fact some men don’t believe they should be expected to ‘stop’ past a certain point, because there are Reddit threads thousands of posts long that should be titled ‘How to Be a Rapist and Not Even Know It’.
Extending this outward, this is my theory for what happens with porn. I believe/hope that most non-aroused individuals would tell you they believe all porn performers should work safely, in supportive environments; that they should be able to choose what the job entails; their willingness and happiness should be of the utmost concern; they should be well remunerated. But I think once they’ve got a hard-on, the boner wants what it wants. The masturbator is not so concerned about ethics and workers’ rights. I’ve looked for proof of this and the study that comes closest is called ‘The Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision Making’.
Professors Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein assembled a group of men, got half of them to masturbate and then compared the groups’ answers to questions like ‘Would you encourage a date to drink?’ and ‘How attractive is this sixty-year-old man?’ The experimenters were focusing on three areas: 1) openness to sexual exploration, 2) willingness to coerce or manipulate to get sex, and 3) willingness to have ‘unsafe’ sex.
Numbers 2 and 3, while morally reprehensible/illegal and stupid, actually make good evolutionary sense. The paper states that ‘most appetite systems in the brain, including hunger and thirst, are designed to increase motivation during times of opportunity’.
It’s harder not to eat a doughnut when a doughnut’s in front of you. I get it. Pretty terrifying when another person’s body is the doughnut though, eh? I’m reminded of a section of tosspot’s bragfest dating manual The Game by Neil Strauss. A Pick-Up Artist (PUA) is informing a group of men that they should never lie to a woman in order to seduce her, that lying is cheating. The only two acceptable lies, he goes on, are ‘I’ll only rub it around your ass’ and ‘I promise I won’t finish in your mouth.’ I don’t know if you’ve ever had someone insert their penis or ejaculate where you don’t want them to, but I have, and it’s pretty fucking horrible. Not just the sensation, which might be painful or sickening, but the disregard. Have you ever had something stolen, a wallet, a laptop, and felt an outrage – BUT THAT WAS MINE? It’s like that, but with your body.
The Game was published nearly fifteen years ago, and I wonder if it would receive the same reception now. I wonder if that line would be found as funny? Or if I am very much the wrong crowd?
The theory of the sexual decision-making study was that when aroused, participants would be more likely to behave in ways which would increase their chances of having sex, which makes complete sense. You’d be most ready for dinner after laying the table too, I expect. The results of their questionnaires found that the masturbating men did show more interest in sexual variety and frustration with ‘just kissing’. They also showed a higher likelihood of finding a twelve-year-old attractive and of contemplating having sex with an animal. When it came to the morally questionable behaviours, the aroused men said they would be more likely to pretend they loved a woman to get sex and to keep trying to have sex after a woman had said no. The last question was about drugging a woman to have sex with her WHICH IS THE INCORRECT WORDING THAT IS NOT SEX IT IS RAPE and the aroused men were five times more likely to say they would do that. So let’s all throw humanity in the bin, shall we? What, there’s more study? Oh good. The last section, about using condoms, found that the turned-on men were less likely to, so it’s lucky no one is ever aroused when making that decision, isn’t it?
I think this study is fascinating, but it’s also incredibly limited as it only measured the responses of thirty-five men. This area of human psychology needs a lot more focus. This
is important stuff! The experimenters themselves note that ‘self-insight’ is vital. If men know that they are less likely to use contraception or more likely to drug someone, then they can make sure they always have condoms on them or take themselves straight to prison just in case. If men knew they might make less empathetic decisions when aroused, couldn’t that help them check themselves: ‘How will I feel about this tomorrow?’
* I got my mum to proofread a draft of this and she said, ‘Just because they haven’t proved it yet doesn’t mean it’s not having a terrible effect.’ That’s something many people can’t help but believe.
Addicted to Porn
Concern Four: Porn is addictive.
Here’s an interesting fact for ya: men ejaculate more sperm, and better-quality sperm, when they are watching porn than when they are using their imagination. That’s why fertility clinics give men stuff to masturbate to, because it improves the potency of the orgasm. Porn tricks the male body into thinking it is really trying to get someone pregnant. The power of visual images changes how the body responds. A small study in 2015 also tested the Coolidge effect and found that new porn stars, those not previously seen by the participants, resulted in larger ejaculate volume, higher motility and a quicker ejaculation. The male body is practising sperm competition, even when all by itself.
Another experiment on male ejaculate, which I found so interesting, showed that male masturbatory orgasms trigger only a quarter of the prolactin that is released during copulation. So an orgasm with someone else will make a man feel sleepier than one he has alone. Why has nature done this? We talked earlier of the theory that men get sleepy after sex to stop them inhibiting the female, so she can leave and have sex again – can it really be that?! What interests me is that without the prolactin, masturbatory orgasms will be less satisfying. And perhaps this explains why often people report feeling dissatisfied by masturbating to porn, or a bit empty, or low afterwards. They were expecting a more satisfying hormonal hit, and didn’t get it.
