Does Porn Take the Sex Out of Sex?

Porn is back in the news. A recent study published by the Journal for Sexual Medicine has argued that porn watching by young Dutch adults had little measurable effect on behavior.

Nowadays we are rightly skeptical of social science research, especially the kind that comes out of the Netherlands. See the case of Diederick Stapel.

Commenting on the study in the Wall Street Journal Holly Finn points out that many young women have been distressed to find that young men who learned about sex from pornography want to model their sexual encounters on what they have seen on the screen.

A woman who feels that she is being auditioned for a role in the next Vivid production does not feel loved or cherished. She feels like she is being used. Unsurprisingly, this is a turnoff.

Finn reports on one young woman’s experience:

This woman finds herself repeatedly in porn-informed situations that are unpleasing, even unpleasant, while—crucially—her partner feels nothing's amiss.

One is naturally curious to know whether these situations involve one man or a series of men.  Random, anonymous hook ups are more likely to involve pornification. To be fair, we have been hearing stories of how porn-watching can influence the sex life of married couples.

Still, if you don’t know who you are in bed with you are more likely to objectify your partner and to try to mimic what you see in pornography.

By now, no one is surprised to learn that men who watch too much porn tend to objectify women.

Beyond that, it is also an addictive substance. Males, in particular, are especially susceptible to becoming pornoholics. My previous post here.

Unfortunately, overexposure to porn changes the way you respond to sexual stimuli. Today’s neuroscience explains what happens.

In Finn’s words:

Repetitive viewing of pornography resets neural pathways, creating the need for a type and level of stimulation not satiable in real life. The user is thrilled, then doomed. But the evolutionary plasticity of our mind makes this damage reversible. In "The Brain That Changes Itself," psychiatrist Norman Doidge writes about patients who overused porn and were able to quit, cold turkey, and change their brains back. They just had to stop watching it. Completely.

Again, this is not news. Nor is the cure. Psychiatrists know well that the cure for an addiction to pornography is to stop watching porn. In time the brains of pornoholics revert to normal functioning.

Yet, porn does have its defenders. Among them is Aleks Krotoski who wrote a spirited article about the value of pornography two years ago in the London Guardian.

Krotoski found something positive about pornography. She argued that it can contribute to sexual enlightenment.  Thus, it would have a didactic function.

She noted that young people who watch porn tend to have a more open and frank attitude toward sexuality. She did not explain why it is such a good thing to speak so openly and frankly about sex. After all, there might be a reason why women invariably call sex: “intimacy.”

Krotoski wrote:

This interactive relationship with explicit content offers the possibility of ushering in a new age of sexual enlightenment: by having the opportunity to get involved with and generate sexual material, people are learning to express themselves as sexual beings and to develop a deeper understanding of what does and doesn't excite them. But in a culture that ridicules, vilifies and commercialises sex, this is laden with politics.

I hope everyone is amused to learn that, since British culture commercializes sex it cannot approve of porn. As though porn is anything but commercialized sex.

And, by the way, how can a culture commercialize sex while at the same time ridiculing and vilifying it? Krotosky should think before she writes.

Of course, pornography is not a guide for exploring what does and does not excite. It influences and even changes what stimulates people sexually. It is not good news to learn that a teenager who is numbed by porn to the point where he can only become aroused by pictures of violent degradation should believe that he has discovered something about his sexuality.

Pornoholics are driven to seek out more degrading and debasing material. That tells us that pornoholism causes people to modify their preferences?

Naturally, we are all in favor of enlightenment. But just as there are limits to how much pornography is good for you, there are limits to how much light we should be shedding on sex.

We have been reliably informed, by no less than St. Augustine, that most human beings have sex in private, not in public. In many cases they go so far as to have sex in the dark. Few people have sex in view of others; fewer still do it on the public square. Perhaps there’s a reason why we call the genitals “private parts.” Absent the mystery desire cannot survive.

This is so for one obvious reason. You are less likely to desire what you already have, in abundance. If sex is no longer a scarce commodity, but has been commoditized to the point where it is readily available to anyone then it will cease to be desirable.

Ultimately, sex via porn cannot be satisfying because the individual qua individual cannot be involved. If the porn is directed to just anyone its viewer is reduced to the status of just anyone. Thus, he is being depersonnalized.

The increasing availability of porn has demystified sex to the point where we have taken the sex out of sex.