Critics say that porn degrades women, dulls sexual pleasure, and ruins authentic relationships – are they right?
Excerpt from an Aeon essay by Maria Konnikova
I don’t remember how old I was when I had my first encounter with pornography, but I must have been around 10 – the experience is entwined with the sound of the AOL dial-up tone. It was something relatively benign – a close-up photo of some genitalia – and I wasn’t much shocked. I grew up in a family not given to sugarcoating the realities of the human condition and I’d known what to expect.
But what if I’d grown up a decade or so later, when the internet had graduated beyond the old-school chatrooms and into the ubiquitous juggernaut of today? My memory might have been decidedly different.
‘The widespread use of internet porn is one of the fastest-moving global experiments ever unconsciously conducted,’ the US science writer Gary Wilson told a TEDx audience in 2012. For the first time ever, Wilson explained, we can track how ever-growing exposure to pornography affects sexual practices, appetites and trends. Wilson – who is neither a scientist nor a professor – is the founder of Your Brain On Porn, a site that popularises anti-pornography research. In his talk, he reiterated the site’s main conclusions: when we have pornography freely available at our fingertips, the brain’s reward circuits go into overdrive as they’re exposed to what he terms ‘extreme versions of natural events’. Instead of one or two possible sexual partners, now there are dozens, hundreds, all readily accessible in a single click. Like any addiction, Wilson says, the result is a numbed response to pleasure, from lack of interest in real women to erectile dysfunction. Ubiquitous pornography undermines natural sexuality.
Wilson’s talk has had approximately 4.6 million views – and its popularity heralds a new movement in pornography consumption: NoFap. ‘Fap’ comes from Japanese manga porn, where it is a sound effect for masturbation. NoFap is a move away from masturbation, and the pornography that so often forms its backdrop. The rationale derives from a version of Wilson’s argument: when you are constantly bombarded with heightened sexual stimuli, your virility is undermined. Your ability to communicate with real sexual beings collapses. You become isolated – porn, after all, is a solitary pursuit – and your emotional wellbeing plummets. Refrain from those stimuli, and from acting on them, and you will find yourself rejuvenated and your sexual powers reawakened, your emotional equilibrium restored and your happiness rising. When Wilson’s talk was first released, the self-styled ‘Fapstronauts’ numbered approximately 7,000. Today, there are more than 150,000.
The NoFap, brain-on-porn arguments are the latest in a common, critical refrain: that, for one reason or another, pornography is bad for you. The more traditional critiques say that pornography is inherently degrading to women – or whoever happens to be the object of sexual activity – and fosters unrealistic expectations of sex. It decreases the quality of real relationships and the self-image of those involved – and increases negative sexual attitudes and actions. Porn-users compare real humans to the fantastical images, and either come out unimpressed and reluctant to have real sex, or, at worst, demanding the types of behaviours they see on screen, regardless of their desirability to their partner. One poll from the US Pew Research Center in 2007 quantified the feeling, finding that 70 per cent of Americans said pornography is harmful.
Do any of these criticisms hold water? It would be nice to know. Reliable statistics about pornography are notoriously difficult to obtain – many people underreport their own habits, and many porn companies are loath to share any sort of viewership statistics. But according to ongoing research by Chyng Sun, a professor of media studies at New York University (NYU), the numbers are high and rising quickly. She estimates that 36 per cent of internet content is pornography. One in four internet searches are about porn. There are 40 million (and growing) regular consumers of porn in the US; and around the world, at any given time, 1.7 million users are streaming porn. Of the almost 500 men Sun surveyed in one of her studies, only 1 per cent had never seen porn, and half had seen their first porn film before they’d turned 13. Cindy Gallop, the founder of the website Make Love Not Porn, told me recently that, in the past six months, the average age when children are first exposed to pornography dropped from eight to six. It wasn’t a deliberate seeking. Online pornography is now so widespread that it’s easier than ever to ‘stumble’ on it.
Get the full essay on AEON
