COMMENTS: From the introduction, it seemed as though the study set out to prove that “perception of pornography” determines whether porn is a problem for the user – as opposed to levels of porn use. Contrary to their hypothesis, greater porn use was correlated with higher levels of depression, even after controlling for all sorts of variables, including perceptions of porn:
Therefore, even after controlling for a variety of demographic factors, impulsivity, pornography acceptance, and the general perception of sexual content as pornographic, the accumulated total viewing of sexual content was still significantly linked to higher levels of depressive symptoms as found in previous studies.
The study’s main finding didn’t align with its prediction:
Results suggested that viewing sexual material that is not considered pornography was consistently associated with more depressive symptoms. In other words, when individuals tended to regularly view images of women without any clothing and did not perceive this as pornography, they were more likely to report higher depressive symptoms. Conversely, when individuals reported not viewing such images and believed such images to be pornographic, reports of depressive symptoms tended to be lower.
To put another way, porn users who thought porn (i.e. a threesome/fully nude) wasn’t really porn, had higher levels of depression. The study suggested that normalizing porn may lead to more porn use… and more problems:
While more evidence of such an association is needed before definitive explanations are proposed, one possibility is that those who do not believe the sexual content they are viewing is pornographic have fewer mental barriers to such use and may view explicit content more frequently. Those who tend to view graphic sexual content they do not view as pornographic may also tend to spend significantly more time viewing pornography in general than others as the lack of labeling such material as pornography may remove internal barriers to excessive use. Such individuals may also be out of step with normative definitions of sexual content.
…may even suggest that such individuals who are viewing such content regularly may internally rationalize such frequent use by no longer labeling such content as pornographic, despite the fact that such an internal definition does not appear to be normative. Given that more frequent and compulsive use of pornography appears to be connected with additional negative outcomes, including neurological changes in the brain (see Kraus, Voon, & Potenza, 2016 for a review), those with more accepting views of pornography may be at particular risk for developing compulsive use patterns….
Sure, using more porn would cause greater problems. That said, believing that hard core porn isn’t really porn, that it’s on par with watching Seinfeld re-runs, that too could be a problem.
Willoughby, B.J., Busby, D.M. & Young-Petersen, B.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-018-0345-x
Abstract
Pornography has received increased scholarly and policy attention, as the rate of online pornography consumption has increased and the availability of sexually explicit material grows. However, few studies have taken into consideration how personal definitions of what sexual material is perceived as pornographic may influence the correlates and outcomes associated with such consumption. Using a sample of 1639 individuals sampled online from the MTurk website, we explored how definitions of sexual material as pornographic are related to actual use and how differences between the perceptions of sexual material as pornography and use of such material were associated with depressive symptoms. Results suggested that the perception of sexual material as pornographic was significantly related to usage patterns and that this pattern varied based on how explicit the material was. Results also suggested that individual differences between perception and use were significantly related to depression. Specifically, viewing sexual material one does not deem as pornographic was related to higher levels of depressive symptoms. However, global acceptance of pornography and the general perception of sexual content as pornographic or not did not moderate associations between pornography use and depressive symptoms. Implications for future research and for the further understanding of the effects of pornography use are discussed.
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