FREDERICTON, Canada – According to researchers from the University of New Brunswick (UNB), women who watch porn develop “unrealistic expectations” regarding men’s sexual performance and prowess.
“Intercourse is shown to last longer than average, men sustain erections longer and women experience orgasms more easily than in real-world encounters,” said Kaitlyn Goldsmith, a graduate student at UNB who led the study.
In the resultant report, the UNB researchers asserted “often narrow representations of sexual performance and physical attractiveness in pornography may be linked to sexual concerns and sexual expectations among young men and women (e.g., body- and performance-related sexual distractions, negative genital self-image, expectations of one’s partner).”
Using language with (surprise!) more qualifiers and caveats than the headlines written to summarize their work, the researchers stated the results of their study “suggest that individuals who consume visual pornography may experience some forms of sexual insecurity and sexual expectations related to their pornography use.”
Wow. So, people who watch porn “may” experience some forms of sexual insecurity? Color me shocked! I assume folks who don’t watch porn have no such insecurities?
The stunning revelations don’t end there, though. It turns out porn viewing is also “linked” to “consumers’ dissatisfaction with their partners’ appearance,” and women who watch porn risk developing “unrealistic expectations for sexual performance.”
Again, this is all so unanticipated, I don’t know where to start!
You mean to tell me some people watch porn because they’re not turned on by their partner’s looks? I suppose next you’re going to tell me some people prefer to watch NBA games over their child’s Amateur Athletic Union matches — and this sordid habit causes them to develop unrealistic expectations that their 12-year old kid should be busting out wicked tomahawk dunks at the conclusion of each fast break.
None of the articles reporting on the “groundbreaking” study provide a link to its text, nor have I been able to track down a copy of the research on my own, so I’m not sure how the researchers came to their conclusions. I have only a few spartan facts: The research involved 1,000 adults, two-thirds of whom were “young women.”
The lack of detail in the reporting leaves a lot of questions unanswered, including what sort of porn these young women watched, and whether any of it included no men from whom to develop unrealistic expectations about the lovers in their own lives. For that matter, we don’t know what percentage of these young women, if any, were lesbians — which might mean they don’t have much in the way of sexual expectations for men to fall short of in the first place.
Beyond the above, we’ve also been told in a great many Cosmo-like articles many straight women watch all-male gay porn. Does watching that genre cause them to develop unrealistic expectations of an openness to pegging?
What of the catalog of other horrible outcomes associated through various studies with male porn viewers? Do any of those apply to female porn consumers, as well?
Do women who are exposed to porn early in life develop a “playboy” (r should that be “playgirl,” or possibly even “playgrrrl”?) attitude? Do they become more hostile or disrespectful toward other women, or does it have the opposite effect?
Several studies claim to have connected porn viewing with erectile dysfunction. Does porn have a similar effect on female viewers? If so, how does that work? Do their nipples refuse to stiffen during arousal?
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, we’d better get it figured out quickly. The experts from UNB are sounding alarm bells in a big way.
“Young people turn to porn to find out how things work, but what they learn is not especially helpful,” Lucia O’Sullivan, a professor of psychology at UNB, asserted in a recent article. “Porn provides lessons in exaggerated performance, dominance and self-indulgence. The relationships are superficial and detached. Producers rely heavily on shock value and ‘freak’ to maximize viewer arousal, distorting our understanding of what is typical or common among our peers.”
I gotta say, this all sounds quite dire, like the makings for a dystopian, futuristic sci-fi novel in which nobody wants to fuck anybody else, and the world’s population is slowly dwindling to the point there are no new hot young people to make the sick, abusive gonzo porn we’re all addicted to.
Unfortunately, without commissioning a study of 1,000 adults, there’s no way to prove my own pet theory: If these researchers tried talking to people who watch different porn — maybe even something from a source other than a tube site — they may come away with a different, possibly less alarming, set of conclusions about porn’s impact on viewers.
Just a thought.
