In 1986, US Attorney General Edwin Meese published a report on pornography. President Ronald Reagan commissioned it during what the left used to call the Reagan era’s unholy alliance between free markets and religion.
The report documents harmful effects of pornography and links between the industry and organised crime, but social scientists declared it inaccurate and not credible.
Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon’s preceding 1970 Commission on Obscenity and Pornography recommended loosening the restrictions on pornography.
This raises the question – is pornography bad?
Let’s address the crime issue first. Some criminal element will creep into any popular but illegal pastime, as happened during the Prohibition.
Yet it appears that the organised crime connection is rather less than expected. The most likely connection would be trafficking of vulnerable women. However, there was never a shortage of women voluntarily applying to join it. The industry has no need to take the risk of smuggling people and wouldn’t benefit financially by tricking women into it. Besides, so many people film themselves today, either for Only Fans or because they are exhibitionists.
A number of actors do have an unhealthy relationship with drugs, but that is a function of their own propensity for thrill-seeking and not something structural in the porn industry itself. No different from Hollywood really.
Surveys of porn stars report relatively high job satisfaction levels and a liking for the people they work with. The rate of bad interactions compares well with ordinary jobs. The porn industry does not appear to be bad for the performers.
Paedophilia is another crime attributed to pornographers. However, paedophilia rates by occupation show that no one in the adult porn industry has ever been convicted for paedophilia, in contrast to, say, priests. Incidentally priests have below-average rates of paedophilia too.
Obviously, paedophile film material exists, but that is an underground amateur phenomenon entirely separate from the adult porn industry.
What about the effect of porn on society? There are many claims.
One is that it devalues women. The validity of this claim depends to some extent on who is doing the evaluation. Women who say porn devalues them are insisting that men value them for something other than sex and are claiming that being a sex object is somehow intrinsically bad.
Flavours
Values are subjective, personal and probably partly biological. You cannot mandate what people must or must not value, just as you cannot dictate what flavours people must prefer. We need to consider the plausible biological basis for gender differences in values too.
Trying to dictate what men value is bound to fail, and the attempt will itself lead to social harm if differences in sexual values by gender have evolved. While perhaps most women would prefer that men not see or value them as sex objects, the effort the average women put into making themselves physically attractive suggests women accept this as a reality.
Something else to consider is that about a third of regular porn consumers are women. It does not seem that they are concerned about the devaluation of women in porn. Indeed, explicit eroticism abounds in romance novels but is uncommon in the cowboy genre.
Interestingly male consumers of porn tend to be extremely appreciative and respectful toward female porn stars. They will queue quietly for hours to meet one, and when they do they act gentlemanly toward them, showing no signs of entitlement. That puts a lie to the notion that seeing someone as a sex object leads to disrespectful treatment.
A claim related to the ‘sex object equals disrespect’ claim is that porn leads to rape.
In Japan, West Germany and Sweden the legalisation of pornography allowed a natural experiment on its effect on rape rates. All three countries experienced a reduction in rape, in the case of Japan from an already low level.
In West Germany a lot of the porn was S&M or dominance and submissive-themed. One would expect that to lead to more predatory behaviour, but the opposite occurred.
Other countries that legalised pornography also conclude that it does not increase sexual attacks. Researchers hypothesise that porn serves as a cathartic replacement for the urge to predate. An interesting thing about the average rapist is that he tends to be more sexually conservative than average rather than liberal like most porn consumers.
Unrealistic sexual expectations
Another claim is that porn creates unrealistic sexual expectations and leads to unwanted forms of the sexual act. Porn does give an unrealistic notion of your chances of scoring with attractive women and hence to be less likely to approach less attractive women. Therefore, it raises the prospect of loneliness for both the man and the rejected women.
This is however no different from the unrealistic standards created by the prioritisation of the beautiful in women’s magazines and in movies.
Porn does not appear to create sexual tastes people don’t initially have. So, if someone is trying to persuade a partner to do things they would rather not, it is probably a taste they had independently from their porn experience. There is a story of two daughters of pornographers who grew up exposed to it all. Both ended up in normal marriages and perfectly vanilla sex lives.
Many women have told me that their man’s porn habits destroyed their relationship. I am sure that is true. I am equally sure these are simple mismatches in subjective preferences that pre-existed the relationship, much like mismatches in attitudes toward money. Detesting a partner’s preferences is a good enough reason to terminate the relationship. It isn’t an acceptable reason to impose your own preferences on them. Take it or leave it.
Porn may give men the idea their penis is smaller than required or simply below average. That may (excuse the pun) deflate their ego and confidence.
Porn certainly portrays unrealistic standards of sexual performance which may also impact sex lives negatively if you fail to live up to them.
There is a claim that porn leads to addiction and after a while an inability to respond to normal sexual stimuli. I imagine that may well be the case for those with an addictive personality, but I don’t know how often this happens. Addiction happens in relation to a wide variety of things, including, for example, food, drink, gambling, social media, shopping or exercise. There is nothing special about any of them. We need to treat the general propensity to addiction rather than its specific content.
Finally, moralists insist that porn (and immodesty in clothing) is intrinsically immoral or obscene.
Very revealing clothing has been the norm in many places and times. For example, most primitive societies in hot parts of the world didn’t wear clothes.
Public nudity
Civilization doesn’t require modesty to function either. Minoan and Mycenaean women (including priestesses) wore dresses that explicitly exposed and drew attention to their breasts by framing them. Germany manages to combine an extremely open attitude toward public nudity, and porn, with the maintenance of an exceptionally ordered society.
Religious modesty seems arbitrary, absurd or oppressive to me – such as, for example, covering your face or hair in public, or not using the word “leg” in Victorian society. My own research into prosocial helping behaviour showed it to be either unrelated to sexual mores or mildly positively related to more liberal attitudes.
Now, a short note on violence in films and games.
The Island of St Helena is isolated and only acquired TV in 1995. This was a great natural experiment on whether exposure to gratuitous violence caused real increases in violence. The finding was that exposure to onscreen violence had no effect on real rates of violence. Similar findings apply to violent computer games.
In summary, gratuitous sex or violence don’t cause related antisocial behaviours. Rather these are reflections, and not drivers, of society. Don’t shoot the messenger. These forms of entertainment have positive effects too. One is that they were the primary drivers of the growth of the internet.
And, higher measured intelligence is associated with favouring relatively unrestricted pornography, implying that it is the wiser choice.
[Image: Javier Contreras on Unsplash]
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