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15 July 2009 11:00 AM
Pornography: A Good or Bad Idea?
Rod Dreher writes the following about pornography:
The point isn't that every person who develops a porn habit will turn into Greg Goben or Ted Bundy. That's absurd. But it seems inarguable to me that no good can come of pornography, and whatever weaknesses we struggle with in relation to sexual and emotional health will be amplified by porn. Put another way, can anybody imagine that using pornography makes you a better or more emotionally healthy person?Sure. I have no idea if that's true, but I can certainly imagine circumstances wherein it is true. Take a 28 year old guy given a 30 year jail sentence for tax fraud. Is he better off or worse off if he has a locker full of Playboy magazines at the foot of his cot? Or how about someone whose spouse has recently died. As yet their grief makes them unable and unwilling to begin dating again. But their sexual drive isn't gone. Or again, consider the traveling businessman with a high sexual drive, self-control problems, and a wife he very much never wants to cheat on. Might he make good use of pornography?
I'm actually not arguing that it's clear that pornography makes all these folks more emotionally healthy, but it's at least plausible. And I haven't even gotten to the strongest counterargument to Rod. Steven Landsburg writes in Slate:
Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems.
First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.
The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.
OK, so we can at least tentatively conclude that Net access reduces rape. But that's a far cry from proving that porn access reduces rape. Maybe rape is down because the rapists are all indoors reading Slate or vandalizing Wikipedia. But professor Kendall points out that there is no similar effect of Internet access on homicide. It's hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it's easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.
If not Wikipedia, then what? Maybe rape is down because former rapists have found their true loves on Match.com. But professor Kendall points out that the effects are strongest among 15-year-old to 19-year-old perpetrators--the group least likely to use such dating services.
Moreover, professor Kendall argues that those teenagers are precisely the group that (presumably) relies most heavily on the Internet for access to porn. When you're living with your parents, it's a lot easier to close your browser in a hurry than to hide a stash of magazines. So, the auxiliary evidence is all consistent with the hypothesis that Net access reduces rape because Net access makes it easy to find porn.
None of this is meant to argue for or against the morality of pornography. It is meant to suggest that on utilitarian grounds there is a good case to be made that society and some individuals are better off for its presence. On the other hand, if anyone is imagining that this issue isn't fraught, check out Rod's followup post.
Comments (3)
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"Use pornography." What a strange expression, Conor. They enjoy erotica, if that's what you mean.
Time magazine has some interesting things to say about this
http://www.time.com/time/2004/sex/article/the_porn_factor_in_the_01a.html
My view is that, while porn may have the capacity to promote unrealistic sexual paradigms and misguided conceptions about gender roles and relationships it also has the potential to offer a great deal of good. My sex drive is unquestionably strong. In regards to myself and others, however, I believe that porn allows a safe and impersonal outlet for sexual urges that would have otherwise had a greater effect upon my daily existence. This, in turn, allows me to interact with women without thinking about sex all of the time, thereby allowing me to focus on the things that are really important, for example, their words. Additionally, I feel that I speak for most men when I say that there is a certain desire for sexual diversity which exists regardless of our devotion to any given partner. To act on these would be out of the question but to deny them would be ridiculous. Through porn these desires can be mediated in a way that prevents unnecessary emotional harm (i.e. cheating or sexual dissatisfaction).
I do not feel that watching porn has reduced my ability to be intimate with lovers. This is because porn is clearly not realistic and intelligent people are able to separate it from their personal lives. It seems, however, that women have a hard time understanding the significance of porn in their partner's life. I have read many letters (to sex editors) in which women confess to having discovered that their loved one's internet history was full of porn sites and to subsequently feeling betrayed, improperly valued, and disgusted. First of all, it is almost assuredly true that your husband was looking at porn before he met you, while he courted you, and immediately before he proposed to you. This did not keep him from loving you, being true to you and proposing to you. For many men, watching porn and masturbating is no more significant than taking a shower. The long history of porn sites does not mean we were looking at porn all day; we usually switch sites/videos all the time so we may cover a lot of territory in a very short amount of time.
One reason that men look at porn in spite of their relationship is that their partners may not have the same level of sex drive. This cannot be helped but it must be dealt with, as it can be very frustrating and stressful.
*I'd be interested to see what people think about this and if anyone has any feelings/questions about anything I have said.
I'm becoming less convinced that porn encourages the typical American male to become sexually violent. My limited research about the porn/violence hypothesis has been inconclusive at best. I'm becoming more convinced, however, that the real pitfall of pornography is that it promotes cleavage between sex and the human element.
TheWriteThing, it struck me when you said, "I believe that porn allows a safe and impersonal outlet for sexual urges...". While I agree with you that masturbation can be a healthy extension of human sexuality, I cringe to think that we are coming to find it acceptable that our sexual needs can be fulfilled in an 'impersonal' context. As humans, we have social and emotional needs, as well as physical, and sex attends to each of these to a certain extent. I'm trying to say that, whether through solo play or with a partner, sex without the human element is not sex at all; the idea of 'impersonal' sex is a dangerous fallacy.
Moreover, I think it is a fallacy that pornographers are all to willing to promote. If porn producers can convince you that what they're selling is all you need for sexual satisfaction (or merely that it should be a key component), then they can continue to count on your business. Considering the estimates I've seen about porn being a multi-billion dollar industry, I shudder to think how common the delusion must be that humans can have sex with screens.
In this sense, I would even go so far as to say that pornography promotes violence of a different sort: not sexual violence so much as violence to sex. (The women Naomi Wolf spoke to [http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/] seem to agree.)