Exclusive: Are We Living Through a Porn Epidemic? Here's What Science Says.
How much porn is too much?
Porn is a touchy subject.
On the one hand, people love it. It feels like it’s everywhere. Porn companies rake in billions more than some of our largest corporations (household names, might I add). PornHub is only a click away and our porn viewing habits are something we talk about openly. Our sexuality has never been freer.
On the other hand, many people feel discomfort or shame when pornography enters the picture. And if you don’t like porn, you don’t like porn, the ease of access can feel suffocating. It can feel like you’re forced to measure up to performers who go to extreme lengths to create the final product.
On top of this, porn is a habit we carry into new relationships with us. One partner may find porn perfectly acceptable while the other partner considers porn an uninvited guest.
How porn affects our sex lives depends on the person in question.
But what does science have to say about all of this?
The Pornography Epidemic?
First, let’s tackle the elephant in the living room.
Numerous sites exist solely to scare you into believing there’s a porn epidemic. All of these sites try to sell you something or get you to pay them money, so they can “cure” the porn problem.
We’re in the middle of what’s been dubbed a “sex panic” where aggressive institutions are attempting to convince the public that sex is bad, in hopes they’ll adopt conservative social views. They claim that pornography is rampant.
Make no mistake: these are conservative and religious organizations masquerading as unbiased academics.
CovenantEyes doesn’t hide its religious undertones--it’s right there in the name. The very popular site Fight the New Drug is more covert, pretending to be an unbiased site trying to give you the facts.
But they’re really a non-profit based in Utah with deep, ambiguous connections to the Mormon Church. The group’s founders claim to be acting out of sincere concern for public wellbeing, but the group’s leadership has consistently fought to repeal anti-LGBTQ legislation.
The leaders of these organizations (not the organizations themselves) aren’t just anti-porn, they’re anti-sex…or, at least they’re against any kind of sex that isn’t religious and for procreation. Not exactly the epitome of intellectual rigor.
All the big names hail from Utah and have ties with the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
Internal literature from the church proves that its mission is moral, not scientific. They don't hide being propagandists.
One woman frequently featured on Fight the New Drug even went as far as to say that women who watch porn are increasing their likelihood of being raped.
A lot of people don’t realize that the organizations driving a lot of the anti-porn disinformation aren’t harmless and unbiased non-profits, but think tanks steeped in religious zealotry and social conservatism.
One site claims that 30% of the internet is porn. They also claim that porn sites enjoy more daily users than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined. They also say that 88% of porn is violence against women.
Science tells a very different story.
First off, the 30% number is totally bunk. This has been proven time and again.
An excellent book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships dove headfirst into the labyrinthine questions that relatively new technologies like internet porn have manifested. Researchers scanned billions of data points to find out what makes us tick when we think no one’s looking--when we’re searching for internet porn.
The study found that only 4% of websites are pornographic, contrary to the 30% claim.
Furthermore, very few web searches are for porn. Considering that one user could conduct hundreds or thousands of different pornographic searches, all fetching roughly the same sites, we can expect the number of total searches to be higher than the number of sites catering to those searches.
13% of web searchers from the browser and 20% of mobile searches are for porn.
This chart from Statista shows the prevalence of porn online.
In the 1990s, a substantial percentage of porn searches were for porn (up to 40% in 1999). That’s not because we’re a porn-hungry populace, but because so few people had internet access and those who didn’t have many choices. YouTube didn’t exist. Social media didn’t exist. Even sites like eBay and Amazon were in their infancy. You could look up stock prices, news, porn, and not too much else.
Since those sites became popular, the percentage of porn searchers sank to between 4% and 10% in the 2000s. Twenty years ago.
We have tools like Google Trends available to us and, if these overblown claims were indeed true, we’d likely see porn dominating the trending searches all the time. But that’s not the case.
I often conduct research into the best-performing searches, and I’ve never seen a pornographic search top the list. Usually, it’s pop culture news and sports, especially soccer.
All these organizations have to do is conduct the necessary research, but their purpose isn’t to inform, but rather, to misinform and scare.
What’s the Problem?
The problem is these organizations are politically and religiously motivated, and they’re deflecting away from some uncomfortable truths.
In a stroke of pure irony, Fight the New Drug even cites research that’s shown that it’s not pornography that’s an issue, in itself, but religious affiliation and conservative views about sex that cause internal conflicts in porn viewers.
This is what leads people to constantly feel like their porn-viewing habits are “unhealthy” because when your goal is zero then any amount more than that is too much. It’s what tragically inspired the mass shooting at a massage parlor in Atlanta, in 2020.
In other words: their ideological leanings are the problem--not the porn.
For the claim that 88% of porn depicts violence against women, the study cited a single study that was initially published in a journal called Violence Against Women, and it included all forms of consensual aggression as violence against women. In other words, pretty much any BDSM porn video would automatically hit such a low bar.
Numerous studies have proven this wrong.
Most rational people don’t consider consensual light spanking as violence against women.
The claims about the potential dangers of porn are clearly overblown. The work of Nicole Prause at UCLA has shown that a lot of the “neuroscience” published claiming to show porn is addictive like a drug is pseudoscience. Time and again, studies have shown that the idea that porn is addictive and widespread are disinformation.
A brand-new study published at Oxford says that porn doesn’t fit the public health definitions of a crisis.
And no, it doesn’t cause erectile dysfunction, either.
It’s all deeply sinister. These organizations must know they’re instilling extremely harmful ideas in people’s minds. Believing in “porn addiction” creates conflicting thoughts in people, and it makes them seriously depressed.
It’s the oldest trick in the book, convince people they have a problem and that you’re the solution. Then sell them the solution. Yes, this is a book written by Donald L. Hilton M.D., one of the prominent members of the movement, a neurosurgeon who produces bunk research regularly that’s indistinguishable from quality science.
Is Porn Harmless?
Porn may not be as harmful as some people say, but does that mean it’s utterly harmless? Well, not exactly. These websites and activist movements are successful because they speak to people’s fears and traumas. Their statistics might be bunk, but they resonate with people’s pain. That pain is real.
And just because someone’s emotional traumas don’t bend to the cold, hard rigor of logic doesn’t mean they aren’t real and don’t deserve to be respected.
The truth is that porn can be harmful to some people--people with lingering sexual trauma. Whether that trauma is from sexual assault, a strict religious upbringing, or just conflicting beliefs about sexual morality, lingering trauma can trigger intense feelings of pain, fear, insecurity, or worry in many people when they’re exposed to pornography.
In a perfect world, we’d all be able to snap our fingers and overcome our lingering sexual hangups overnight. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in an ugly, messy world with partners who are living, breathing human beings, complete with complex emotions.
And even when trauma isn’t present, studies have shown that when a partner uses pornography as a substitute for partnered sex, our partners tend to suffer. Porn isn’t a replacement for sex, it’s a component that helps those who consume it to better explore and express their sexual selves.
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I’d like to take a moment to recommend checking out Michael Castleman M.A. whose writings on this subject have been immensely informative. David Ley Ph.D. has also conducted a lot of crucial research on the subject.
A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships is a wonderful read that I highly recommend. It’s available on Amazon here.
It’s also available on Audible in audiobook format, and you get a free trial along with up to two free e-books if you sign up for Audible using this link.
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