BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – If I were to tell you a lot of data suggests watching porn makes men less satisfied in their relationships, but the same data indicates porn-watching does not appear to have the same effect on women, what conclusion would you draw?
From where I sit, without substantially more information, no conclusion whatsoever can be drawn from the claim — but don’t tell that to the world’s headline writers, because doing so might kill the lingering buzz they feel from boldly proclaiming things like “Study: Men Who Watch Porn Less Happy in Relationships.”
In defense of the author of the piece, Tracy Clark-Flory, the article that appears beneath the eye-catching title is far more nuanced and balanced in its presentation of the study’s conclusions than the headline implies. This is in keeping with Clark-Flory’s consistent approach to porn as a subject. She has written extensively about porn and the porn industry over the years, including during her stint as a staff writer for Salon.
As Clark-Flory notes, there’s bound to be a great deal of disagreement concerning the significance and reliability of the study’s conclusion concerning the impact of porn-watching on men’s satisfaction with their relationships.
Published in the journal Human Communication Research, the paper referred to in Clark-Flory’s article is called “Pornography Consumption and Satisfaction: A Meta-Analysis.” As the term “meta-analysis” implies, the study comprises a statistical analysis of data drawn from 50 other studies, which collectively involved more than 50,000 participants in 10 countries.
If you’re thinking this sounds like an analysis of a bunch of different surveys and experiments, give yourself a gold star, because that’s precisely what it is. While there’s nothing “wrong,” methodologically speaking, with analyzing data from a variety of disparate sources, each of which was likely carried out via different methods and criteria, it’s also not unfair to suggest this sort of meta-analysis is not at all the same thing as a clinical study involving randomly selected subjects and the direct, empirical collection of data concerning those subjects.
For starters, no amount of survey data can tell us whether there’s a causal link between men watching porn and experiencing dissatisfaction in their relationships, or whether men who are dissatisfied in their relationships are more likely to watch porn than those who are content in their relationships.
Even the researchers’ way of expressing the correlation found between porn watching and relationship dissatisfaction suggests more ambiguity concerning the study’s conclusion than headlines about the study are likely to let on.
“Pornography consumption was not related to the intrapersonal satisfaction outcomes that were studied,” the abstract notes. “However, pornography consumption was associated with lower interpersonal satisfaction outcomes in cross-sectional surveys, longitudinal surveys, and experiments. Associations between pornography consumption and reduced interpersonal satisfaction outcomes were not moderated by their year of release or their publication status. But analyses by sex indicted significant results for men only.”
In the end, the researchers still concluded “the convergence of results across cross-sectional survey, longitudinal survey, and experimental results points to an overall negative effect of pornography on men’s sexual and relational satisfaction.” In this context however, “points to” is just another way of saying “may indicate” — and no matter how one says it, this is a far cry from “proves” or “reveals.”
Naturally, this wiggle room in the researchers’ claims isn’t about to stop anti-porn crusaders from putting this study squarely in the “scientific evidence” column of their arguments.
“Pornography is sex-negative,” asserted Executive Director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation Dawn Hawkins in a press release touting the study as “research showing pornography use decreases satisfaction.”
“Pornography rewires an individual’s sexuality to pixels on a screen rather than to a real person, which is inherently inconsistent with healthy, organic relationships,” Hawkins said. “A wide body of research is bringing attention to the various ways pornography negatively impacts both women and men, and this latest meta-analysis contributes important findings to that on-going dialogue.”
Somehow, I don’t expect Hawkins and the NCSE to put out a press release the next time a study tends to argue against her point of view in the “on-going dialogue” to which she refers, but that’s a whole other subject.
As you might expect, those who disagree with Hawkins’ various theses about how porn is destroying Western civilization as we know it aren’t quite as impressed or persuaded by the study in question.
As David Ley, the author of Ethical Porn for Dicks: A Man’s Guide to Responsible Viewing Pleasure told Clark-Flory, what the paper represents is “further validation that sex, and porn, are complex, individualized issues with different effects in different people.”
“The overall message is porn may indeed correlate with negative relationship satisfaction in some people, but not others, and that in order for our society to have better conversations about helping those people, we need to be having much more nuanced conversations about porn,” Ley added. “The whole Chicken Little routine regarding porn is increasingly distant from the real facts.”
It’s a very reasonable point of view, but when it comes to this much-more-nuanced conversation about porn, I wouldn’t advise holding your breath while waiting for it to happen.
