LOS ANGELES – One of the more common claims porn critics make is that porn consumption is ruining the sex lives of young male consumers. It fills their heads with unrealistic expectations, desensitizes them to actual sexual contact and grants Satan a gateway through which to steal their souls, or at the very least, through which to send some of his demonic errand-boys.
Not long ago, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, staff editor at Reason.com, took up the question of porn’s impact on male viewers’ sex lives, drawing on a study published by researchers from UCLA and Concordia University to argue porn’s alleged detrimental effects on the male libido are trumped-up and overblown.
“Many clinicians claim that watching erotica makes men unable to respond sexually to ‘normal’ sexual situations with a partner,” Nicole Prause from UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior wrote in relevant research. “That was not the case in our sample.”
Rather than get into the methodological questions I have concerning the UCLA/Concordia study (among them, whether the research conducted and participant pool assembled could even begin to answer the questions asked by the study in the first place), I’d like to ask a more fundamental question: What’s it to you?
For a variety of reasons, I find it hard to believe all the hand-wringing about the impact of porn on the sex lives of men is really born of a legitimate concern for the nature and quality of men’s sex lives. To me, it smacks of finding a problem to which busybodies can then assign a cause. And, what do you know, the cause of the problem just happens to be material of which those same critics disapprove.
What a coincidence.
Growing up, I often found myself surrounded by other young males who were a step or two ahead of me developmentally, a function of having a popular brother who was six years my senior. As a result, I spent more than my fair share of time listening to “guy talk” and absorbing what these fellows considered their primary sexual problem: Namely, the problem of not getting enough sex.
Speaking as one of them, I can tell you the first and most debilitating “unrealistic sexual expectation” harbored by the average male is the average female might be interested in having sex with him.
This expectation is the cause of many problems — a substantial percentage of which eventually wind up requiring the intervention of a bouncer and/or designated driver. It’s also an expectation roughly as old as our proto-hominid predecessors, but which some people seem to believe is a modern concoction of sinister members of the marketing trade.
Whether or not we like it, there will always be problems in the sexual dynamics between partners of any kind, straight or homosexual, young or old, simply because most human beings are sexually fucked-up, hung-up and/or mixed-up in one way or another — and it has always been so.
Does anybody who has read the works of Sigmund Freud really believe people were less sexually fucked-up before internet porn came around? If so, boy do I have a book for you: Portnoy’s Complaint.
(At the risk of letting loose with a “spoiler,” let’s just say given the fact the book was published in 1969, it’s a pretty safe bet author Philip Roth didn’t get the idea of jerking off with a piece of liver wrapped around your dick by watching internet porn.)
We can pretend outside influences, like porn, romance novels, Hollywood movies, or old reruns of The Muppet Show are the source of our various sexual issues all we like. The truth is, we write those books and we make those movies (and those Muppets), not the other way around.
To paraphrase the late, great, Bill Hicks: Porn doesn’t cause sexual thoughts; Porn is caused by sexual thoughts. In the end, I think what’s really eating a lot of the most staunchly anti-porn people about porn is it doesn’t reflect sexual thoughts with which they are personally comfortable.
To be fair to these people I’ve never met (people who apparently are deeply concerned about whether my dick still works after watching so much porn in my life), when it comes right down to it, we’re all selective when it comes to giving a shit. Some people I know who were absolutely fit to be tied over George Bush’s adventurist and interventionist foreign policy seem to like it just fine now that it’s Barrack Obama’s adventurist and interventionist foreign policy, for example.
By the same token, many of the same people who are constantly riled up about the grave social injustice porn represents don’t give one tiny rat’s ass about any other factors which might be contributing to our collective sexual fucked-upness. Maybe this is because it’s far easier to pin modern sexual ills on excessive porn consumption and set aside the thorny, nuanced possibility there’s no such thing as ‘normal’ when it comes to human sexuality.
So, do these activists, pundits and columnists asserting porn’s negative impact on viewers really care about the rest of us enjoying “healthy sex lives,” or do they just have a problem with other people watching porn?
I’d close by saying “you tell me” … but the truth is, I really don’t give a selective shit.
