Mainly an interview study. A few relevant excerpts describing escalation, sexual conditioning and habituation:
These extracts offer a significant challenge to the idea that pornography’s impact upon others might be over-rated, as the following extracts suggest that there are those for whom the effects of pornography have been self-ascribed:
I am currently very confused as to where I sit with my pornography use. Up until about six months ago, I would not have thought about the negative effects of its use. I believe it was one of the contributing factors that led me to break up with my girlfriend of four years, I saw a psychologist for pornography addiction in aid of trying to keep our relationship together but this did not seem to help…. [Survey response 194, Q2].
Media has influenced me a bit on this and I do sometimes feel like I consume too much porn. I also feel like it desensitises me to my real life sexual experiences. My real life sexual experiences are always better when I’ve had a break from porn. I also worry the type of porn I watch influences my desire to have vanilla sex. [Survey response 186, Q2].
For example, the following interview with a man who wondered whether he was ‘addicted’ to pornography, as a result of spending too much time viewing it, indicates an explicit rejection of the idea that pornography addiction is a problem of escalating content – for himself at least:
C: Well, you know, I don’t think that there’s anything unusual about my scenario in that I think I can relate to all people my age and those guys I grew up with is you go from looking at soft focus nudie pictures –
Interviewer: Yeah like Penthouse and –
C: Yeah, well even less than that and then it just goes up and up. You go from Playboy to Penthouse to uurgh I dunno, and then it’s turned into vids umm, and it’s getting stronger and stronger.
Interviewer: Mmm but there’s a point that you stop though isn’t there? Because –
C: Aww, well that was my choice umm, because I just thought ‘urgh that’s enough for me
Interviewer: And – is there a concern that other people won’t be able to make that –
C: I – well I think the fact that there’s so much bondage and abuse type of stuff on these sites – says there’s a market. I don’t – I assume that those people started off like me just looking at nudie pictures of girls and went from there.
Interviewer: Yeah, and then at some point you ended up –
C: Into real real hardcore.
Here C’s ‘choice’ to halt the progression from stronger and stronger content is contrasted with those who might have started by viewing the same pornography that he had, but had ended up in the ‘real hardcore’. Such concerns were explicitly made clear in relation to both how the internet has changed pornography’s content, and how young people’s experiences might contrast with that of the speaker….
Here, E describes his early experiences with pornography through the familiar index of pornography sources (i.e. a friend’s father), suggesting that this early exposure made things ‘a lot easier’ as he grew older. However, at a later stage in the interview, E also suggests that such early exposure to pornography can actually be detrimental to ‘other’ young people:
Interviewer: Or like what about violence or like –
E: Yeah, well, it’s the same thing. Like you know that violence is wrong as a child when you see – you know, ‘Don’t hit Ji – Johnny ‘cause he didn’t give you the donut’, you know, you know it’s wrong. So, it’s like that kind of behaviour is – you should be but the hard part of course is um the youth, before they get a cognitive brain before they’re 23, 24, um struggle often to make the distinction between um acceptable behaviour and non-acceptable behaviour and consequences to their behaviour. So, they might think that it’s okay for three guys to take some girl and bang her in the back of the car because that’s what they’ve seen on video you know, like on the internet, and they might think that but they haven’t really grasped the concept of what it actually means for what they’ve done to that girl and so on and so forth.
Interviewer: So in your experience though when you were like 13 you said you’d seen like multiple partners, let’s say. So – but were you ever like tempted to, you know, as you said, like, you know, get some friends together and –
E: Oh, and go after a – no.
Interviewer: Or, I mean, like in terms of the influence of what you’d seen in – in the pornography?
E: No. I just thought that, well, that’d be pretty cool you know. [Laughs]
Interviewer: Yeah. But you weren’t gonna be like, oh, you know, ‘Come on guys’ –
E: Yeah. No.
Interviewer: No. [Laughs]
E: No, and I – I think that – and it – I – it’s – it’s like I said before, I mean, I think that people um – people’s behaviour, it comes down to um their intelligence, you know, and how they’ve been treated. If you have the wro – wrong kind of upbringing then you might do exactly that, you might, ‘Come on dudes, let’s get this chick’, you know. You know, blah blah blah ‘cause you can’t relate to anything other than the – the – that little split second of time, you know. And some people never grow out of it.
Thus, again, the problem of pornography is both the changes to the medium over time and the (in)ability of young people to make sense of this new medium. In the first instance, E suggests that pornography in magazine form was helpful to his sexual development, before then suggesting that exposure to similar pornography – specifically group sex scenes – could lead young men to ‘take some girl and bang her in the back of the car’.
ABSTRACT
(Note: paper is by Kris Taylor. See this for more concerning Taylor’s extraordinary biases – Debunking Kris Taylor’s “A Few Hard Truths about Porn and Erectile Dysfunction” (2017))
(2020)
‘Accessing something that’s meant to be inaccessible’: pornography viewers’ reconciliation between early pornographic memories and pornography’s perceived risk,
Porn Studies, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2020.1736609
Is pornography more dangerous than ever before, or is there a gap between nostalgic memories of pornography and today’s landscape of pornographic risk? In this study, the memories of pornography viewers are re-situated against a cultural backdrop in which pornography is understood as more dangerous than ever before. Using a combination of survey and interview data, the current empirical study works to understand how pornography viewers themselves reconcile their memories of early experiences with pornography within a contemporary environment that focuses on pornography’s negative powers. The results suggest that adult pornography viewers do this through two primary mechanisms: by describing contemporary pornography as dangerous for ‘other’ people (but not themselves); and by accounting for their early experiences with pornography as positive, thereby perpetuating pornography’s supposed effects as a problem for ‘other’ people. This article concludes with a discussion of how discourses of pornographic danger to young people engender a discursive environment in which young peoples’ pornography viewing is simplified to a notion of risk, thereby foreclosing the sorts of considerations of pleasure and excitement allowed to adults.
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