Watching porn not a big deal, study suggests
In a time when pornography seems omnipresent, r esearchers have delivered a consistent message: watching the stuff is toxic to couples and healthy sexuality.
The U. S. Republican party even recently declared sex on the Internet a public health crisis, “destroying the lives of millions.”
But a new Canadian study calls into question that conventional wisdom. A sample of men and women is telling researchers that pornography generally has no negative effects on their relationships, and some potential benefits.
The results, though preliminary and qualitative, challenge a view of porn partly rooted in “radical feminist” ideas, say the authors, psychologists at Western University in London, Ont.
“Maybe, for many people, this is no different than a hobby they might have or their partner might have,” Taylor Kohut, the lead author, said in an interview. “They get some personal benefit, but it doesn’t have any serious ramifications for their relationships. Like one partner really liking golf.”
Kohut is part of the Smart Lab research project at Western, which aims to examine scientifically the impact of online pornography, and says talk of its alleged harms “dramatically” outstrips the evidence. But some researchers are already criticizing the new study’s methodology, and noting its results conflict with years of data — and the experience of therapists and marriage counsellors.
“We’re seeing a rise in the number of people coming forward saying ( compulsive porn watching) is a problem,” said Jill Manning, a Colorado- based therapist who has testified on the issue before the U. S. Congress. “We’re seeing people losing jobs, losing multiple relationships .… This is really a negative and harmful thing for a lot of families and relationships.”
Manning, a Canadian native, pointed to a recently published University of Oklahoma analysis of survey data that suggested porn users are more likely to have marriages of poorer quality.
On the other hand, a recent examination of Australian government survey results found just 12 per cent of porn consumers felt it had negative effects.
The Western team readily admits that much of the social-science literature comes to more alarming conclusions than it did, suggesting that watching porn promotes casual sex and infidelity, and curbs relationship commitment and satisfaction with partners.
But Kohut and his co- authors argue that research has generally been “top- down,” asking questions geared to finding evidence of porn’s perils. Their goal was to garner more open- ended responses, asking neutrally about the effects of porn on relationships, good and bad.
The sample of 430 with an average age of 32 was not randomly selected — an even number of men and women involved in heterosexual relationships were recruited through newspaper ads and pitches on social media. That means the results are not an empirical measurement of population-wide sentiment.
But they do offer at least an indication of porn’s effects without the influence of researcher bias, Kohut argues. By f ar t he most common response was that watching pornography had no negative effects on couples.
Many reported positive impacts, such as porn being an educational source of information about sex. And a number talked about negative effects, including creating unrealistic expectations or decreasing interest in sex.
One prominent researcher in the field says the Canadian study makes sense, and agrees that much of the other porn scholarship is “bad science.”
Neuroscientist Nicole Prause said many studies, for instance, fail to filter out the statistical effects of masturbation, which is often the reason for watching porn and a symptom of marital troubles — rather than pornography being the culprit.
“Porn is an easy target; lots of people like to demonize it, and so ( researchers) look for that,” she said.
But Manning said the Western study itself had a fatal flaw: It was based on respondents talking in isolation about their relationships — without corroboration from their partners — which could produce overly positive responses.
The U. S.- based website Your Brain on Porn questioned whether the choice of subjects biased the results, given the study’s surprisingly high number of female porn users.