There are some topics where I do not trust my own ability to find information and where everything seems to be infected with politics and woo and one of those areas is on the benefits/harms of pornography.
Is it harmful? If so, how much, and how do we know?
Like most things, it is sometimes helpful, sometimes harmful, sometimes completely benign, depending on the person, the type, the amount and the day of the week. There is no “consensus” because the topic is so heterogeneous. What is your motivation for asking?
Topics infected with politics and woo should be handled very carefully, if at all, here. Asking general questions without any framing to guide the conversation into LW-relevant dimensions is usually a mistake.
One can imagine all kinds of confounding effects, where some other thing makes someone more likely to use porn, and also is (or causes) something else that is good or bad. And the confounding effects are likely to be different in different subpopulations (e.g. young university kids; people who were raised religious and might not be anymore; people in relationships, some of which are going better than others; old people, some of whom are losing their sex drive). So I would put very little trust in any study that didn’t involve a randomized intervention. (Which isn’t a guarantee of quality—it’s only one dimension.) And I think there are plenty of people making claims based on … well, let’s just say their standards for empirical rigor are much lower than mine.
Wiki has an article, which is somewhat interesting to look through. This is a bit hilarious coming after the above:
It could be worth looking into those 276, but I’m not going to do so before posting this comment. (Also I wouldn’t be surprised if many of those were bad for reasons the researchers didn’t catch.) So, um, I think we’re left with armchair theorizing and amateur observation. Let’s see.
Ways it could go wrong:
There are apparently people who get addicted to porn, so maybe it’s harmful for them. On the other hand, I think people who get addicted to things often have bad stuff happening in their life already.[1] On the first hand, even if the addiction is caused by bad stuff, it’s possible that the addictive behavior makes the situation worse. On the second hand, if you were going to be addicted to something, porn is probably way less bad than, say, drugs or gambling.
Obviously, porn has its realistic and its unrealistic elements, and people who can’t tell the difference and don’t know it are likely to do ill-advised things.
For some, the usage of porn has baggage because of an upbringing that thought it (or perhaps masturbation or sex more generally) was shameful, or because other people in their life have opinions about their porn usage, or it connects to relationship problems (e.g. the partners have differing sex drives, or one wants a type of sex the other is unwilling to do, and uses masturbation with porn to compensate). Recommendations there would be situation-specific, although in general I’d say these situations already have a conflict, and the other option (i.e. abstaining from porn, or masturbation in general) may carry its own downsides (frustration, resentment) and isn’t necessarily better.
I’ve seen claims that some people get bored with “vanilla” porn, check out something a little spicier, get bored, etc., and end up in pretty extreme places. I’m sure this has happened. I don’t think it’s common. I also suspect that those people had an underlying tendency and many of them would have arrived at similar places via in-person sex, if their environment made this easy (and would have been frustrated, and done who knows what else, if their environment did not).
Ways it could go well:
Obviously, people find it pleasurable or otherwise rewarding.
If one’s sex drive would otherwise lead one to do unsafe, immoral, or otherwise bad things, this may be a better alternative. (To some extent one can say this about masturbation regardless of whether it involves porn.)
If one wants to expand the range of, say, body types or demographics one is interested in, porn is an easy way to explore that.
There is plenty of speculation about long-term effects, habit forming, and so on. (I personally look out for the possibility of becoming dependent on porn, and make a point of masturbating using only my imagination reasonably frequently.) I don’t think there are large effects that reliably happen, otherwise I’d probably have heard about it. (There’s a whole “No Fap” movement that some subscribe to. I think some people claim it improves their motivation / energy.) Probably, if there are such effects, they affect some people much more than others.
Overall, I’d say “seems probably harmless; it’s probably worth having some awareness of failure modes and paying attention to yourself, but beyond that, do what thou wilt”.
Valentine had an interesting post where he said “This is the basic core of addiction. Addictions are when there’s an intolerable sensation but you find a way to bear its presence without addressing its cause. The more that distraction becomes a habit, the more that’s the thing you automatically turn to when the sensation arises.” The idea of being addicted to escape from a thing you’re avoiding, rather than being particularly addicted to the specific form of escape, rings true to me.
Even that .69%-acceptable statistic may be a political maneuver. I found a meta analysis a year or two ago of AI healthcare diagnostics that found about this level of acceptability in the literature.
Where it becomes political is that a prestigious doctor friend unsympathetic to AI diagnosis used this statistic to blow off the whole field, rather than to become interested in the tiny fraction of acceptable research. Which is political on its own, and also has to make you wonder if researchers set their quality bar to get the result they want.
Nevertheless it IS discouraging that about 276⁄40000 papers would be acceptable.
I agree with everything you say about how the studies that try to research this issue can go wrong, but I can’t entirely agree with your conclusion that it seems probably harmless. I mean, it depends on what you mean by that. If you mean that the effect of pornography is more or less neutral on average—not sure, but also not sure about the opposite. If you mean that somebody should just start consuming this media—I guess that it would be good to be a little bit more careful. I think there is some evidence that suggests that pornography can negatively impact relationships, and… it seems quite clear to me that starting to consume pornography is easier than stopping. If there is a chance of developing an addiction that negatively influences your life and relationships, maybe you should just be careful.
I think it’s a complex question. For example, people debate whether porn is harmful or helpful:
Morally or practically
In the short vs. long term
To the actors
Directly to the viewer
To the viewer’s partner
To culture as a whole
For intrinsict reasons or because of how it intersects with the rest of our culture
Universally, on average, or in specific circumstances
Whether it’s actually harmful/helpful or just a suboptimal/better way to express sexuality
If you get specific enough about these questions, it may be possible to ask meaningful scientific or moral questions. When I’ve seen debates over porn seem productive, it is usually because the participants have stopped generalizing and tried to get really specific on what exact question they’re asking, why, and how.
But this in turn poses a new problem: how would you figure out which bits of this debate are relevant to you? And once you have an answer to this question, you may find that there really isn’t much reliable information out there that’s pertinent to you.
But if you just want to trawl through the scientific literature, I would just approach it with the same open-minded skepticism you’d bring to any other such project.
As an example of question specific enough to be answerable by science, there is Is Pornography Use Associated with Sexual Difficulties and Dysfunctions among Younger Heterosexual Men? (2015). It begins:
The answer is no. As far as I know, this was among the first study powerful enough to answer this question. Well done, science!
Of course, nobody listens to science. Compare the introduction above with another introduction written 4 years later, from Is Pornography Use Related to Erectile Functioning? (2019).
The shift in tone is palpable, and you can just feel the powerlessness researchers feel about the situation.
This looks to be a correlational study. As an exercise, let’s try thinking of confounding effects that would point in both directions.
If I had ED, then I imagine (a) I would try looking within porn to see if there was some way to sustain arousal, and (b) the problems with ED might mean I’d have less sex with a partner (or even break up, in marginal relationships; or lack the confidence to form new ones), and have to satisfy my sex drive by myself more often. Thus, ED causes more porn use, and we’d expect them to be correlated. Therefore, a null result means there must be a counter effect: porn use must reduce ED!
(a) If I had ED, and I believed the “common wisdom” that porn causes ED, then I would avoid porn; in other words, ED causes less porn use. (b) I would guess that a lower sex drive can cause both ED and reduced porn use. Both of these effects imply anticorrelation, and therefore the study’s result of a null correlation means porn use must cause ED.
Some of these might be investigated and/or controlled for. Let’s imagine controlling for 1(b), by looking at single men. Now let’s try to imagine what could screw up the analysis. Consider these two worlds:
For those with a high sex drive, ED is no handicap to relationships, because one compensates with oral sex and other measures. But having low sex drive and ED will lead to a breakup. Therefore, by restricting our sample to single men, we’re creating an extra correlation between ED and low sex drive; and low sex drive causes less porn use, so we expect this to yield an anticorrelation between ED and porn use (and therefore null result means porn use causes ED).
Having a high sex drive has no effect on whether ED causes you and your partner to break up. Therefore, null result means null causation.
In general, if there’s a piece of the causal chain you don’t know about and could go either way, then whatever analysis you do can’t yield the correct answer in both worlds. If you have enough data, accurate measurements of all relevant variables, then you might be able to account for all confounding effects and end up isolating the causation you want.
Checking out the actual study… they controlled for exactly two things: age and education. The sample was also restricted to “sexually active” men, which it doesn’t seem to define. (Does it mean they’re currently in a relationship? Have had sex in the last 12 months? If a bad case of ED means a man hasn’t had sex in years despite wanting to, does this exclude him from the study? Surely such men are the most important ones for the study’s goals?) They did ask about sex drive… but in study 1, they lumped in “lack of sexual desire” with “sexual difficulties” that include ED, and in study 2, they asked specifically about a reduction in sex drive in the last 12 months, but seemingly nothing about overall sex drive.
Well, I was going to say: (a) if the “high sex drive protects relationships from ED” hypothesis is true (which I just made up; I suspect it’s a real but weak effect), then this would leave us with a sample where ED is extra-correlated with high sex drive, which could be relevant; more importantly, (b) within a relationship, I expect things like “the man becomes less attracted to his partner” or “emotional conflicts or other relationship problems interfere with the attraction” (which have many possible causes, and I think are not rare) to cause both “instances of ED when the man tries to have sex with his partner” and “the man to use porn more often”. I expect (b) is a significant effect.
And even if there were a study that controlled for all the above, I can come up with more effects, at least some of which would be plausibly significant. Not to mention, controlling for something requires measuring it, and I’m not sure things like “the man feeling emotionally distant in a way that may interfere with attraction” could be accurately quantified in survey questions. This is why I want studies with a randomized intervention.
Technically, the title of the study asks about an “association”—that is, a correlation—and it delivered on that. But I don’t think anyone seriously cares about the association except insofar as it sheds light on causation. (If they truly didn’t care about causation, then why do any controls?) Thus, despite the study’s size, in terms of causality it looks pretty impotent.
Ya think?! (And are they using the word “association” to mean “causation” in that sentence? I’m not sure what a “directed association” would be otherwise. Is this a motte and bailey on the word “association”? The paper comes from a Croatian university—maybe a translation issue? Google says half of Croatians speak English fluently.) Surely this was foreseeable. I guess the charitable explanation is that they would have done followups to tease out the details if it looked like there was a big effect.
The study shows there can’t be a huge effect that outweighs all confounders, but I think some potential confounders are at least medium-sized… and I do worry that the “sexually active” criterion might have excluded a lot of central examples of the phenomenon they’re supposed to be investigating. In study 1, only 52% of men who took the survey met all their criteria (including filling out the whole survey), and in study 2 it’s only 26%. Also, lumping in low sex drive with ED, as study 1 did, would probably reduce the correlation of ED with porn use (given that low sex drive probably reduces porn use).
I’m afraid I agree with those who don’t listen to whatever this study is an exemplar of. I want to believe their conclusion, and I think it seems likely based on my “armchair theorizing and amateur observation”, but their contribution has not really updated my beliefs or confidence. Actually, I feel a little more worried than I did before.
Seems like the consensus is that there is no consensus, only many people with strong opinions either way.
Perhaps the question is underspecified, and we need to ask more precisely: what kind of porn? for whom? how often? compared to what alternative? harmful for whom? (etc., see DirectedEvolution’s answer).
Now of course this sounds like a fully general counterargument—we can deflect any inconvenient question by asking endlessly (are apples healthy? -- what kind of apples? for whom? how many? compared to what?), but with apples, we can assume some reasonable defaults, like “the kind of apples you can buy in a supermarket, or grow in your garden” and “somewhere between one apple a week and ten apples a day”, and within this range the answers will probably be quite similar.
With porn, the range is probably much wider. Frequency, from “a magazine hidden under my bed, which I browse once in a month”, to “I am an unemployed guy and I spend 16 hours a day watching porn online”. The kind of porn, from mere uncovered boobs, or the kind of vanilla sex that your Pope would approve of, to the most depraved shit that would leave an average person traumatized for the rest of their lives. Is watching porn a part of a balanced lifestyle that also includes seeing real people occasionally; or a way to overcome solitude during your climb to the top of Mt. Everest; or a neurotic distraction while you procrastinate on filing your tax reports?
Arguments in favor of porn:
some people like it;
under some hypothetical, extremely rare circumstances that practically never happen in real life, carefully selected porn could serve as a form of sex education;
for perverts who are turned on by horrible things, watching porn is a socially preferable alternative to actually doing horrible things in real life;
no one gets pregnant from watching porn;
people can find inspiration that will enrich their sexual lives;
watching porn together with your partner can be a form of foreplay.
Arguments against porn:
it makes Jesus cry;
it makes you objectify people, and that’s wrong;
general objection against superstimuli (you can see more attractive people naked during one evening than your ancestors could see naked or clothed during their entire lifetime, isn’t that amazing?);
if you spend too much time—you should be doing something useful instead;
seeing too many too attractive people may set one’s bar unrealistically high;
and vice versa, people can be afraid that porn sets other people’s bars too high;
seeing too much too soon can make people scared of actually trying sex (afraid that their partners would expect things they are not comfortable with);
people may not realize that average porn is not representative of average sex (things that look best on screen are not necessarily the things that feel best in real life; perverts are better customers than normies, therefore their preferences are overrepresented);
people saturated with porn may be less motivated to find partners in real life, or may neglect their existing partners;
multiply the changes in individual behavior by millions, and you get social changes (fewer marriages? fewer kids?);
sometimes porn is produced unethically (people coerced into performing);
masturbating while watching porn makes you lose precious bodily fluids.
Now good luck putting this all into one equation!
One strong argument in favor of porn is that almost nobody alive gets as much sex as they actually want; vast majority gets less than they want, minority gets too much, and without some kind of extreme social engineering this cannot be solved.
Porn is the closest thing to a “bandaid solution” to that problem. Sexless or severely undersexed people can achieve an illusion of sex life with porn. Yes, porn is addictive and can an be psychologically harmful, but involuntary celibacy is definitely severely harmful, and we cannot solve it any other way.
“Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure-grain alcohol?”
The underlying issue here is that the supply of sex, quality of sex, supply of quality partners and the logistics of all the above cannot meet the popular demand. It would require the number of highly libidinous attractive partners to be equal or exceeding the number of adults that desire sex. Until we somehow achieve Sexual Post-Scarcity (how? Sex-bots? VR sex? Massively orgiastic global swinger culture?) then porn is unavoidable.
Good sex with an attractive partner is an extremely scarce resource. In fact, any sex, even crappy one, is scarce, and far, far below popular demand. Porn is a necessary plug. It provides a better form of sexual release than pornless masturbation.
So in that regard, it is obvious that porn is more beneficial than harmful, since the alternative to porn for many is effectively celibacy, which has plenty of harmful psychological and social effects, including violence (sexual and otherwise).
very simple. porn is pleasure to make and consume, therefore good. the end
(how to simplify your life with hedonism, s0ph1a 2012-∞)
I mean, debatable. If consensual and enthusiastic amateurs decide to get into it, sure. But when a huge exploitative industry develops around it the same kind of soul-sucking, alienating work culture that profit-driven optimisation tends to inject into anything, that risks being really bad. Not only sex that isn’t pleasurable can be far worse than just boring or annoying, but even if it was just that, having sex turn into drudge work to the point that you are disgusted with it (as work is wont to do to many otherwise pleasurable things), that’s bound to take a good chunk of potential pleasure from your life as a whole.
(very different principles apply to drawn smut/porn, where the act of creation itself doesn’t involve sex)
The consensus is don’t ask, don’t tell. It’s the only media consumption (among movies, tv, books, sports, videos, music, games etc.) that’s not openly discussed around the water cooler or in polite society. A disservice, in my opinion.
It appears to be harmful to children because it takes time away from other activities and creates false impressions of sex/relationships. Especially if porn is their only reference for adult relationships. Children younger than 16 should be educated on media (including porn) but probably shouldn’t have free reign to explore porn content as it may consume their whole life.
There’s also an escalation effect where users will seek out increasingly hardcore content and become so desensitized to pornographic content that they have no physical reaction to real world relations (I assume the 2019 pubmed article that was linked discusses this effect). How harmful it is, and how we know, are open questions which are hard to study because it’s a taboo subject and because it’s difficult to decouple porn from other screen based consumption. For example, we may have strong data with proper testing methods that definitively proves the harms of porn and then still wonder is it necessarily more harmful than YouTube or Netflix?
When I think about porn on net being good or bad, I think, what are characteristics of societies which exist in the world today that ban porn? What are the characteristics of the societies which have a lax, open attitude towards it?
I don’t think this is a good metric. It is very plausible that porn is net bad, but living under the type of govermnment that would outlaw it is worse. In which case your best bet would be to support its legality but avoid it yourself.
I’m not saying that IS the case, but it certainly could be. I definitely think there are plenty of things that are net-negative to society but nowhere near bad enough to outlaw.
we know that involuntary sexual celibacy is psychologically harmful, and socially disruptive. If porn can damped the effects of involuntary celibacy and sexual frustration (which include, but are not limited to: rape, sexual harassment, social radicalization, and co-relates with acts of terrorism or public shootings etc )then it is almost certainly a net positive.
I agree 100% than excessive porn use is bad, and many of the practices of the porn industry are bad. However I believe it is harmless if not beneficial when consumed in appropriate moderation.
The general trend that leads countries to ban porn is a general suppression of sexual expression, either for religious or political reasons. It is almost a natural law in societies that suppressed sexuality will not dampen sexual urges, and it will manifest in less healthy ways than if those outlets were permitted.