Two things I think the author has mischaracterized—the feminist critique of pornography and escalating porn use. The author describes the feminist critique of pronography as a moral judgment. That pronography is morally wrong. It is not just feminists who know that pornography is inherently harmful to women and children. It is harmful to those involved in making pornography and is harmful to women because it normalizes violence against women. That is a documented fact, not a moral judgment, though the facts may certainly lead people to adopt the moral position that pornography is wrong.
And another factual misrepresentation by the author is that men are simply watching new or different pronography, as a desire for novelty. Not true. The pronography of today is categorically more violent, and violent toward women and children, than pornography of 15 or 20 years ago. And again, men's documented use of pornography does show not just novelty seeking on a level plane of violence, but rather more violent, hardcore porn viewing over time. These two mischaracterizations by the author that porn use by men for masturbtory enhancement is a benign evoltuionary phenomenon makes the point about masturbation but misses the broader implications of porn by a mile
I think you missed the point that that isn't the most commonly articulated critique, and that approaching the violence in pornography from the starting point of "porn=bad" is the wrong way to go about changing behavior.
A lot fewer people are going to argue that violent and degrading porn shouldn't be normalized than the number of people who consume softcore porn and porn without fetishes present.
You can argue all you want about how wrong (you perceive) others are but at the end of the day public perception matters in changing things the way you want. Prominent feminists using headlines bashing all porn use contributes to negative perceptions about the end goal of violence reduction.
Please read my reply to the writer you replied to here, to understand how porn is used to manipulate women, by the mental health profession. My now ex husband's "gender therapist" suggested I'm so square and bigoted when I wouldn't watch lesbian porn to help me "keep the family together" after I discovered his secret crossdressing life. You can intellectualize women's rejection of porn all you want, you're not changing the facts about how it is used to hurt women and girls.
The difference there is the coercion involved and the attempt to change your sexuality.
The fact of the matter is that trying to ban pornography is impossible in this day and age, and I don't think it should be banned entirely.
Appeals to the morality of pornography altogether, instead of just critiquing pornography that would result in arrests in any other case, are not universally accepted or agreed to. I shouldn't have to be subjected to any religion's idea of sexual ethics that go beyond the common thread of not doing harm. As of yet, the simple viewing of pornography has not been satisfactorily proven harmful.
Case in point: Japan. Sex and violence are common in their media, and yet their violent and sexual crime rates are low. This is because they not only value other people, but also because they understand the difference between fantasy and reality.
I think you understand what happens when fantasy and reality are not separated, given what I've read of yours on this platform and others. The pornography is the symptom, not the root cause.
That kind of thing is literally what I called for to be investigated from the horrible POS who did it to everyone who watched and didn't report it.
I also said that stuff that's considered legal only because it's on film but would be a crime otherwise is not something to be respected.
However, I also know that there are men who are disgusted by this kind of thing and would call for prosecution and probably the death penalty for what those men did.
Treating all porn as equal to literal serial rape is not going to get people to care because you're citing a one-off as though it represents all men, that's my point and you have showcased it perfectly.
I'm not your enemy, but I'm not siding with the feminists here because as a gay man I'm caught in the crossfire. I will call for extremely harsh punishments for those who break the law and harm others, but I will not condemn all porn.
I'm so glad you wrote this comment. You'll probably agree with the one I added, just above yours. This is probably the first article from Reality's Last Stand that I did not give a "like" outside of a ridiculous one about autogynophiles by J. Michael Bailey. When I discovered that my husband, when our sons were 5 and 8, had started secretly crossdressing again and was also taking estrogen, planning to go the whole nine yards, I went to see his diagnosing therapist, with his permission. She suggested I learn to pretend we're lesbians, and there's lesbian porn I can watch in order to get the knack. These delusions about pornography are not something that Colin Wright should be promoting, in my view. I think our 2 comments and my reply here aptly sum up what is despicable about pornography.
This is a good point. Porn sends the men who watch it down a very manipulative path in sexual relationships because they have that actress with the fake boobs implanted in their brains.
That was not my point. My point was that the exact same harms of pornography to women can occur to men and vice versa. There can be pornography of women abusing men, men abusing women, unrealistic bodies of men, unrealistic bodies of women. Pornography is not confined to being a certain way towards a certain sex.
The piece has a serious logical flaw. Variety is not the same as escalation. I read many books and watch many TV shows with variety, but not escalation. The author should not be so dismissive of the desensitization argument. I would argue that the specific cases being described in that passage are unambiguously desenzitization. Variety is different from escalation.
I’m glad I read this piece through to the end. I had been believing all this hype about the dangers of pornography addiction. I should have known better. Thanks for opening our eyes.
You’re welcome. For sure there's a lot of hype out there. I’m not saying that widespread porn use isn't an issue but I believe we're discussing it in the wrong light.
You should do some kind of survey of heterosexual women ages 24-34 regarding the issue of porn in their dating lives. My younger female friends tell me that it is very difficult to get these dudes out of their phones, away from watching porn while having sex with a real woman, how they request acts they've been watching in their porn surfing, how they have low foreplay skills. Men can learn. We grow new brain cells every day.
So is there a difference in the men seeking porn showing adult men and women versus those seeking to view increasingly deviant sexual acts ? Is this a different mechanism than the path of a serial killer? I can understand your explanation of the addiction versus shame, guilt but what about the constant exposure to porn changing the neural pathways in our very plastic brain? Perhaps that contributes to the addiction like behavior ( but not producing the same chemical response as addiction)?
Isn't your theme that we should be investigating the societal reasons for certain men to be compulsive about watching porn ( or their reasons for feeling anxious and " less" masculine) instead of starting with a moral objection and seek reasons from there, in addition the path for addiction is different than compulsion ? Watching porn obviously leads some men to seek more deviant things to watch otherwise it wouldn't be produced. My questions were based on the thought compulsive behavior can actually change how the brain functions.
Then how do you address the detransitioners who say that porn influenced their ideations and delusions that they must have radical body modifications to fulfill the images they found within porn, which they had been inappropriately exposed to at a much too early age?
First off, that is an extremely disingenuous opening sentence.
Second, the point is that much of porn use is highly correlated with a lack of other stress relief practices. Masturbating at home is free; therapy, vacations(even just taking a mental health day), and a good number of hobbies and interpersonal activities are expensive.
Third, masturbation itself is treated shamefully. Baby boys make masturbation motions in the womb: a natural action that's not inherently harmful is colored by the morality it's viewed through.
In conclusion, no, normal porn is not comparable to murder. You might as well argue that trashy sex fantasy novels are the cause of women being abused.
I am disturbed that this piece discusses only men and not women. The author may have justifiable reasons for doing so, but I do not care if most hear attacks snd baldness occur in men: I still want adequate attention to women. If one uses whatever justification the author here has and then 100 articles are published about men and 0 about women, the outcome does not meet the standards of an egalitarian.
That does not explain why the piece would examine males and not females. Supposing there are sex differences. So what? Why examine the behavior of the males and not the females, for this?
Because the author was interested in the question, Why do MEN masturbate (so much)? He wasn't interested in the question about women. He doesn't have to be interested in a question just because you are interested in it. Go find your own woman to write about why women masturbate or watch porn. Or write up an article yourself.
Where research goes wrong is if only men are recruited for a study about a new treatment for heart attacks, and the authors then assume that the same results would apply to women with heart attacks and treat them accordingly without stopping to acknowledge that since they didn't recruit any women to the study, they can't assume women with heart attacks will similarly benefit from the new treatment. If the authors hope that doctors will apply their new treatment to women with heart attacks, they need to include women in the study.
But there is nothing wrong with researchers being careful to say, "We studied this treatment only in men because the population we had access too, say the US Veterans Administration Hospitals, was almost entirely male, so great caution should be used in extending our results to women."
They could even say, "Frankly, we were interested only in men for this study. We don't care whether women get heart attacks or not, so we didn't enroll them in the study. Whether this treatment would work in women we don't know and we don't care." There is nothing intellectually wrong with saying that. Granting agencies don't like to fund studies that don't include everyone, true, so a really big study addressing an important question pretty much has to include women these days, even if the condition is rare among them. But an individual psychiatrist who wants to write an article dealing only with men who masturbate is perfectly free to restrict it to men.
I am unsure if you lack reading comprehension, have an insufficient vocabulary, and/or don't have a strong grasp of logic. I normally don't write a reply that has the tone of this one, but I felt your comment and the way it is written rather merit it.
A) Did I state the author was not free to restrict the article to men? No. I stated that I was disturbed, and that the outcome of repeated focus on one sex (in a particular topic) does not meet egalitarian standards for outcomes.
B) You have provided a plausible explanation, but not an ethical or even academic justification for why the author chose to only write about men, here. In any case, the reason you gave is just speculation.
C) Don't bring me into this discussion. The discussion is the topic. Also, please don't make nonsense statements like that a woman should write about women's masturbation - academic studies and articles should be written by anyone who is academically qualified.
D) "Where research goes wrong is if only men are recruited for a study about a new treatment ... assume ...." No, even if the research doesn't "go wrong", the *act* is still wrong of understudying the other sex. It is really quite a simple concept, that if one repeatedly studies one biological subset and not the other, then data will be lacking. If the only population available happened to be all male soldiers or something like that, it would be justifiable - but still not justifiable to never ever study women, and I made the same point in my first comment.
E) "Granting agencies don't like to fund studies that don't include everyone, true.." What granting agencies do is outside the scope of my comment, in this case.
To reiterate, no academic or rational agent explanation has been provided for why the author would examine and then study solely the case of men. It is true that I earlier used the word "explanation" without specifying any categories of explanation in the previous comment to this one on this thread, but this isn't a street corner discussion. If I asked what the author's credentials were, I also would not preface that with words to indicate I was talking about in relation to this piece rather than their credentials for playing billiards.
If you resort to the explanation of "because they felt like it" (you used the word interest, but interest is just feeling like it) then it ceases to be academic. "Why did they put false statements in their article?" "Because they felt like it." "Why did they not cite the source they used for the information in that paragraph? " "They felt like not citing the source of their information." To be fair, "because that was what was funded" isn't an academic reason either. And real reasons that are not academic should be acknowledged as the truth, when they are. And if the reason is because they felt like it, that should not be hidden.
PS. "lacking reading comprehension" and "limited vocabulary or logic" are old, stale insults that lost all their hurting force many years ago. Please try to do better.
My understanding about this author is that he was married to a woman but decided he was gay, so perhaps he is not the right actor to play this role. Porn is insufferable, as far as I'm concerned. My younger female friends tell me that the male cohort they are trying to date are insufferably porn addicted.
The reasons given why men masturbate make total sense. My immediate reaction to the title was 'Because it feels good'. I don't know how much online porn compulsion differs from other online compulsions. This article doesn't deal with the pornography industry's harms to the women who work in it, or to children's developing ideas about sexuality. It's all true.
Because that's not the focus of my essay. They are separate issues. Protecting women and children from the real harms of pornography is a legitimate MORAL concern that tends to eclipse the issues I’m trying to raise.
It would be nice if the more talkative feminists focused on the violent bit of violent porn and not tar everything with the same brush.
If I was being cynical I'd argue that those feminists want to chase the impossible dream of abolition rather than doing anything sensible like being clear about what incremental changes need to happen in order to achieve their aim.
I have yet to hear any argument against pornography that has included how to make it the less attractive option (without shaming men, anyway). Things like helping men develop friendships, increasing access to male only therapy groups (which friend groups often are in practice), increasing wages to counteract the disconnect between work and worth, etc.
All those things - friends, economic security, etc, are good in themselves. I don't think they can supplant the universal primate urge to experience sexual pleasure, including looking at sexual imagery. I understand the urge to demand abolition, however unlikely that is, of the entire sex industry because envisioning an alternative, or a way to regulate said alternative, is very difficult. Do you have an idea of a better pornography industry, or only a hope of providing alternative activities to the existing one?
I disagree with the assumption that masturbation isn't good in and of itself. However, in not focusing on that in this comment.
There are plenty of other behaviors in which diverting attention and breaking patterns is standard. CBT encourages redirection of thoughts that are rational so that they don't blow up into irrational responses, and other mental health therapies attempt to disconnect trauma from triggers.
Basically, if a fun alternative to masturbation, one that's both physically and mentally fulfilling, is available pretty easily, then stress will reduce and happiness will increase. And, if masturbation is a stress response in an individual, this would lead to less reliance on it as a coping mechanism.
Ideally, I'd prefer the promotion of non-religious stress management through philosophies like Stoicism and mindfulness. These have both been commercialized, though, and presented basically as dissociative practices, so it's not that simple.
Let me know if you feel I've given a good answer. With such a complicated subject it's easy to wander into the weeds.
I think masturbation is also good in and of itself - or can be, like most pleasures - but I got the impression that you thought it was something to be avoided. Now I think you mean that a lot of the causes of stresses that it relieves can be dealt with directly, which I agree with. The same would apply to compulsive eating or getting stoned - things which can also be good in themselves but often aren't.
I did forget to address a better alternative to the porn industry, which is a tough one but which I feel could be done but only to an extent. As I see it, porn is often downstream from culture (examples like porn parodies) and violence in movies and video games is still a bit of an issue though in an indirect way.
It used to be that women weren't graphically killed or sexually assaulted in movies, and a lot of violent games used to not have female enemies. I don't like killing women in video games, and a lot of games have started to be really sadistically graphic about what happens to the bodies after death. A lot of that bleeds over into mods that allow people to roleplay sex slavery and worse.
I, for one, think that one of the ways to regulate the porn industry is to prosecute violent porn as though it's a documented case of assault (which it is). It should also be the case that individuals who upload violent porn should be investigated if only to trace it to its origin. There's no way to stop porn entirely, and there's no stopping the sharing of sexual material, but that doesn't mean it can't be influenced.
People spend much time a day doing things one could argue are a silly waste of time, like binge watching sitcoms. No one often cares, in fact they often get together and bond over the experience the next day.
People spend much time doing physically stimulating activity, and this may not be too different in this specific regard...there are mental and emotional impacts associated with physically stimulating activity.
People spend much time engaging with artifical or real violent content (e.g. action movies or contact sports), and no one seems to care, in fact we often bond over it. Nobody actually wants to be in a fight or high contact sport, but many find it valuable to entertain others doing it in real time. In some regards it's fairly perverse...people are getting real injuries.
People are fed fantastical content, at all ages, that is significantly disconnected from the real world, which certainly affects who we are. Consider moody teenagers who might be more stable if they engaged with less moody content and drama.
There is hyper sexualized content all over the place, in advertisements, music, etc. Where is the line to draw?
Pornography is often not violent or dark, but sometimes. It is ultimately portraying something most people will come to reasonably appreciate in life... physical affection and/or procreation. There is a certain beauty in people. There is also very dark pornography too though, stuff people would never condone in real life, yet it is maybe not unlike people who watch horror movies... yet no one ostracizes those people as if they're crazy, even though the content is extremely disturbing and dark. Obviously one major issue is the ethics of production... people should never be forced into things they don't want to do, etc., and that is very challenging to discern in content. In a horror movie, people aren't actually subjected to torture. It can be hard to tell what's real vs staged, and people push their limits in all kinds of ways such as body building, tattoos, dare devils, etc. One might consider the ethics of AI...is it more moral in that it may decrease the production of actual content?
We must also be careful about the video game fallacy, i.e. that violent video games make kids more violent... they basically don't. Does pornography affect people in such a way? I haven't looked for the data. I think pornography ultimately does affect people in a negative way, but I think it's often partly because of the taboo culture around it. Imagine if we could just talk about it and be able to move on. Of course it's a challenging line to draw, but again, we often promote other things like strength through force in a very young age, basically subconsciously hoping those will grow up to be soldiers and protect, but the degree to which we do that is also somewhat controversial.
We do live in an unprecedented time of the ability to consume anything imaginable at nearly any time with nearly complete privacy, i.e. phones. For the overwhelming majority of humanity, for thousands and thousands of years, people basically dealt with these topics in a way that is so starkly different that they are hardly related at times... no internet, no TV, no radio, no electricity, no books, very different notions of privacy and social functioning and hygiene, etc. Either way, the modern reality is not going to go away or subside anytime soon. Some people are already having AI girlfriends.
I agree with the difference between addiction and compulsion. I think your thoughts and feelings predict your destiny in many ways. My friend just passed away and I am reminded of him because of the places I often visit in town where there were so many memories, it is triggering, objectively. I feel compelled to pause and grieve some, for some innate reason which is another topic I'm sure. Eventually I'll learn to associate those places with happiness and something better in that sense. For pornography, there is so much sexualized content publicly, it might seem nearly impossible to escape, it's everywhere you look, it's such a slippery slope. One second everyone is celebrating a beautiful scantily clad woman accepting a movie award, the next you are feeling shame for going the logical next step which doesn't seem that far.
Overall there are likely worse addictions to have, and, who is really being harmed, they might ask? Isn't everyone addicted to something in some sense? Is this the least bad option? They may say I'm not stealing money, my health is fine, and my social relations aren't really suffering (except maybe with a primary partner, but some partners are in agreeance here). It may be the case that it is not so hard to be a "high functioning" pornography addict more than for most other major addictions, e.g. drugs, alcohol, gambling. Is one alternative to sleep around a lot... and is that more or less ethical? We don't seem to shame that culture in the same way one might perceive to be the case with pornography. Overall I think it can be a downward trapping spiral though that prevents healthy long term relationships. I believe the only relationship that will truly last positively is one with a high level of openness and honesty, and I think it's less reasonable to think you're going to change all of a sudden rather than living the life you want heading into such a relationship.
I think men and women likely have very different experiences and perceptions that create a divide, some for obvious reasons such as regarding the need to manage for consequences of pregnancy. I do think the advent of the pill and abortion access has significantly altered social and individual perceptions and behavior around these things in a controversial way, including pornography.
It is a challenging situation to consider "protecting the vulnerable", especially kids, while also respecting the first amendment and considering other factors and whatabouts. I think being honest about many of these factors is helpful for the conversation.
I wish strength for those hoping to overcome addiction, there are many testimonies out there that it is possible, like with any addiction. If people need help, seeking it is a good thing, and it is worth it, life can be better.
Thank you for this very interesting article, indeed. There is certainly a lot of good information here. I would suggest, however, considering masturbation in a broader context than frustrated or stressed primates. Masturbation is common in a wide variety of animals, including, for instance, squirrels and lizards, among others. Consider some of the thoughts in this essay: “Is Animal Sex Like Porn?”
Like all things biological, there is no simple, monotonic, and consistent reason for the behavior. I would also argue against the promulgation of the dopamine theory of pleasure which, as I teach, is fundamentally illogical from a neurophysiological point of view — although I recognize it is wildly popular.
"...normalizes violence against women." And yet most men say they don't like it. Turns out the majority of people that claim to be turned on by violent porn are WOMEN. In other words, that porn genre is driven by FEMALE viewers.
"Overall, two-thirds of the women in this study confided that they found at least some aggression in porn to be arousing, and about half confessed that they sometimes sought out “harder” forms of aggression as well.... these women insisted that had already been attracted to consensual aggression and dominance before they started viewing porn. In other words, they actively sought out what they were already interested in rather than developing a taste for it after having seen it first in porn."
This article could have been titled "In defense of men who consume material that degrades, dehumanizes, and exploits women." If men truly have an evolutionary need to degrade women, that's a pretty damning indictment of men. The author thinks far less of men than I do. Feminists' opposition to porn is not pearl-clutching. It's grounded in the evidence of the harm that porn causes and the view that women are actually human beings. An article titled (essentially) "Why do men wank?" is far beneath this publication. It's a navel-gazing investigation into why men get off on degrading women while touching their penises. This is not scholarship.
<< In 2023, American men died by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. Among young men between the ages of 18 and 23, two-thirds report feeling that no one really knows them. Richard Reeves, in Of Boys and Men, published by the Brookings Institution and hardly a manifesto of the men’s rights movement, documents in careful detail how boys and men are falling behind educationally, economically, and socially across the developed world. These statistics describe a group under considerable stress, struggling with shame, and in urgent need of relief.>>
Females attempt suicide more often than males—two to three times more frequently. Why wasn't that part of your "one sex is suffering" illustration?
The problem with porn is that it typically utilizes real humans. Maybe porn created with cartoons or AI carries less ethical weight. But live humans are engaging physically in most porn acts, unlike actors in other kinds of escapism like a fantasy or horror movie. Male and female sexuality are very different. Men would likely engage in porn for free!
Studies reveal that a high percentage of females involved in porn end up with PTSD. Like prostitution, most females engage in porn for financial reasons. Ask women in porn if they would want their daughters to do it. That gives you your answer as to how desirable they consider it. The men who watch pornography likely often feel disgust afterward, not because of religion or a rigid moral code, but because some part of their being recognizes the harm being done. Another human is coerced into a very intimate act. Not many young girls growing up in the tony suburbs will turn to this. It is mostly desperate, struggling women who feel unsupported in life.
Pornography promotes risky sexual behavior, is introduced to children via the internet as early as age 8 and 9, introduces the idea of the compliant, doormat female into the male mind and takes away the sensuality in sex. You'll not change my mind, kind sir.
If you are a hammer, everything is a nail. The author may be correct in embracing the evolutionary model as a comprehensive (reductionist?) model for human sexuality. But to be consistent, he must also include every other aspect of human behavior, including moral codes. Using "healthy" and "unhealthy" in lieu of "good" and "bad" is just subterfuge. One is still making value judgements, and if the evolutionary model is universal, those judgements are also subject to it. The author cannot sit outside of the system and make the case for what we "should" do.
As regards pornography, the author mentions the eroticism of watching sex and relates it to primate behavior. But he omits the falsity of the fantasy. Pornography is not real sex anymore that Professional Wresting is real combat. Pornography maximizes the intensity of orgasm in a way that sex with a partner never will. It creates images of women (and men) that bear no resemblance to the complexity of real people, and both the difficulties and rewards of real relationships. At best, it makes real relationships that much more difficult to establish and maintain. At worst, it feeds rape fantasies and the like, thereby perpetuating abuses.
I agree that pornography, like anything else, should be examined objectively. But let us not simplify it to an equivalence with sexually frustrated primate beta males. It is an inexorable part of our lives. We should take full stock of its consequences when we discuss it.
Two things I think the author has mischaracterized—the feminist critique of pornography and escalating porn use. The author describes the feminist critique of pronography as a moral judgment. That pronography is morally wrong. It is not just feminists who know that pornography is inherently harmful to women and children. It is harmful to those involved in making pornography and is harmful to women because it normalizes violence against women. That is a documented fact, not a moral judgment, though the facts may certainly lead people to adopt the moral position that pornography is wrong.
And another factual misrepresentation by the author is that men are simply watching new or different pronography, as a desire for novelty. Not true. The pronography of today is categorically more violent, and violent toward women and children, than pornography of 15 or 20 years ago. And again, men's documented use of pornography does show not just novelty seeking on a level plane of violence, but rather more violent, hardcore porn viewing over time. These two mischaracterizations by the author that porn use by men for masturbtory enhancement is a benign evoltuionary phenomenon makes the point about masturbation but misses the broader implications of porn by a mile
I think you missed the point that that isn't the most commonly articulated critique, and that approaching the violence in pornography from the starting point of "porn=bad" is the wrong way to go about changing behavior.
A lot fewer people are going to argue that violent and degrading porn shouldn't be normalized than the number of people who consume softcore porn and porn without fetishes present.
You can argue all you want about how wrong (you perceive) others are but at the end of the day public perception matters in changing things the way you want. Prominent feminists using headlines bashing all porn use contributes to negative perceptions about the end goal of violence reduction.
Please read my reply to the writer you replied to here, to understand how porn is used to manipulate women, by the mental health profession. My now ex husband's "gender therapist" suggested I'm so square and bigoted when I wouldn't watch lesbian porn to help me "keep the family together" after I discovered his secret crossdressing life. You can intellectualize women's rejection of porn all you want, you're not changing the facts about how it is used to hurt women and girls.
The difference there is the coercion involved and the attempt to change your sexuality.
The fact of the matter is that trying to ban pornography is impossible in this day and age, and I don't think it should be banned entirely.
Appeals to the morality of pornography altogether, instead of just critiquing pornography that would result in arrests in any other case, are not universally accepted or agreed to. I shouldn't have to be subjected to any religion's idea of sexual ethics that go beyond the common thread of not doing harm. As of yet, the simple viewing of pornography has not been satisfactorily proven harmful.
Case in point: Japan. Sex and violence are common in their media, and yet their violent and sexual crime rates are low. This is because they not only value other people, but also because they understand the difference between fantasy and reality.
I think you understand what happens when fantasy and reality are not separated, given what I've read of yours on this platform and others. The pornography is the symptom, not the root cause.
. . . and contribute to negative perceptions about feminism generally. Even if it's just with an eye-roll.
I had forgotten (my god, I'm ashamed) about Gisele Pelicot. Now there is another case in the UK of a husband drugging his wife and inviting men to rape her while he filmed it. And disseminated it .Talk to me about how I don't understand men's porn use. How would you reduce this kind of depravity? Is this just novel porn use? These ordinary men, are they just soft porn users? They seem very ordinary. Explain Gisele Pelicot. Explain this: https://jeanhatchet.substack.com/p/men-dont-know-who-the-rapists-are?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=494678&post_id=203818089&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=uvzs&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
That kind of thing is literally what I called for to be investigated from the horrible POS who did it to everyone who watched and didn't report it.
I also said that stuff that's considered legal only because it's on film but would be a crime otherwise is not something to be respected.
However, I also know that there are men who are disgusted by this kind of thing and would call for prosecution and probably the death penalty for what those men did.
Treating all porn as equal to literal serial rape is not going to get people to care because you're citing a one-off as though it represents all men, that's my point and you have showcased it perfectly.
I'm not your enemy, but I'm not siding with the feminists here because as a gay man I'm caught in the crossfire. I will call for extremely harsh punishments for those who break the law and harm others, but I will not condemn all porn.
I'm so glad you wrote this comment. You'll probably agree with the one I added, just above yours. This is probably the first article from Reality's Last Stand that I did not give a "like" outside of a ridiculous one about autogynophiles by J. Michael Bailey. When I discovered that my husband, when our sons were 5 and 8, had started secretly crossdressing again and was also taking estrogen, planning to go the whole nine yards, I went to see his diagnosing therapist, with his permission. She suggested I learn to pretend we're lesbians, and there's lesbian porn I can watch in order to get the knack. These delusions about pornography are not something that Colin Wright should be promoting, in my view. I think our 2 comments and my reply here aptly sum up what is despicable about pornography.
You are making bad generalizations. "It is not just feminists who know that pornography is inherently harmful to women and children"
It is not magically more harmful to women and children than men.
This is a good point. Porn sends the men who watch it down a very manipulative path in sexual relationships because they have that actress with the fake boobs implanted in their brains.
That was not my point. My point was that the exact same harms of pornography to women can occur to men and vice versa. There can be pornography of women abusing men, men abusing women, unrealistic bodies of men, unrealistic bodies of women. Pornography is not confined to being a certain way towards a certain sex.
The piece has a serious logical flaw. Variety is not the same as escalation. I read many books and watch many TV shows with variety, but not escalation. The author should not be so dismissive of the desensitization argument. I would argue that the specific cases being described in that passage are unambiguously desenzitization. Variety is different from escalation.
Outstanding article.
I’m glad I read this piece through to the end. I had been believing all this hype about the dangers of pornography addiction. I should have known better. Thanks for opening our eyes.
You’re welcome. For sure there's a lot of hype out there. I’m not saying that widespread porn use isn't an issue but I believe we're discussing it in the wrong light.
You should do some kind of survey of heterosexual women ages 24-34 regarding the issue of porn in their dating lives. My younger female friends tell me that it is very difficult to get these dudes out of their phones, away from watching porn while having sex with a real woman, how they request acts they've been watching in their porn surfing, how they have low foreplay skills. Men can learn. We grow new brain cells every day.
So is there a difference in the men seeking porn showing adult men and women versus those seeking to view increasingly deviant sexual acts ? Is this a different mechanism than the path of a serial killer? I can understand your explanation of the addiction versus shame, guilt but what about the constant exposure to porn changing the neural pathways in our very plastic brain? Perhaps that contributes to the addiction like behavior ( but not producing the same chemical response as addiction)?
The evidence that watching porn leads them to seek ever more deviant videos is unpersuasive. But that's an issue unrelated to the theme of my essay.
Isn't your theme that we should be investigating the societal reasons for certain men to be compulsive about watching porn ( or their reasons for feeling anxious and " less" masculine) instead of starting with a moral objection and seek reasons from there, in addition the path for addiction is different than compulsion ? Watching porn obviously leads some men to seek more deviant things to watch otherwise it wouldn't be produced. My questions were based on the thought compulsive behavior can actually change how the brain functions.
Good point, Concerned.
Then how do you address the detransitioners who say that porn influenced their ideations and delusions that they must have radical body modifications to fulfill the images they found within porn, which they had been inappropriately exposed to at a much too early age?
I suspect algorithms, not people. The same pattern exists for political content.
First off, that is an extremely disingenuous opening sentence.
Second, the point is that much of porn use is highly correlated with a lack of other stress relief practices. Masturbating at home is free; therapy, vacations(even just taking a mental health day), and a good number of hobbies and interpersonal activities are expensive.
Third, masturbation itself is treated shamefully. Baby boys make masturbation motions in the womb: a natural action that's not inherently harmful is colored by the morality it's viewed through.
In conclusion, no, normal porn is not comparable to murder. You might as well argue that trashy sex fantasy novels are the cause of women being abused.
I am disturbed that this piece discusses only men and not women. The author may have justifiable reasons for doing so, but I do not care if most hear attacks snd baldness occur in men: I still want adequate attention to women. If one uses whatever justification the author here has and then 100 articles are published about men and 0 about women, the outcome does not meet the standards of an egalitarian.
It would seem the opening paragraphs answer the question: there are sex differences in behavior from an Evolution standpoint.
That does not explain why the piece would examine males and not females. Supposing there are sex differences. So what? Why examine the behavior of the males and not the females, for this?
Because the author was interested in the question, Why do MEN masturbate (so much)? He wasn't interested in the question about women. He doesn't have to be interested in a question just because you are interested in it. Go find your own woman to write about why women masturbate or watch porn. Or write up an article yourself.
Where research goes wrong is if only men are recruited for a study about a new treatment for heart attacks, and the authors then assume that the same results would apply to women with heart attacks and treat them accordingly without stopping to acknowledge that since they didn't recruit any women to the study, they can't assume women with heart attacks will similarly benefit from the new treatment. If the authors hope that doctors will apply their new treatment to women with heart attacks, they need to include women in the study.
But there is nothing wrong with researchers being careful to say, "We studied this treatment only in men because the population we had access too, say the US Veterans Administration Hospitals, was almost entirely male, so great caution should be used in extending our results to women."
They could even say, "Frankly, we were interested only in men for this study. We don't care whether women get heart attacks or not, so we didn't enroll them in the study. Whether this treatment would work in women we don't know and we don't care." There is nothing intellectually wrong with saying that. Granting agencies don't like to fund studies that don't include everyone, true, so a really big study addressing an important question pretty much has to include women these days, even if the condition is rare among them. But an individual psychiatrist who wants to write an article dealing only with men who masturbate is perfectly free to restrict it to men.
I am unsure if you lack reading comprehension, have an insufficient vocabulary, and/or don't have a strong grasp of logic. I normally don't write a reply that has the tone of this one, but I felt your comment and the way it is written rather merit it.
A) Did I state the author was not free to restrict the article to men? No. I stated that I was disturbed, and that the outcome of repeated focus on one sex (in a particular topic) does not meet egalitarian standards for outcomes.
B) You have provided a plausible explanation, but not an ethical or even academic justification for why the author chose to only write about men, here. In any case, the reason you gave is just speculation.
C) Don't bring me into this discussion. The discussion is the topic. Also, please don't make nonsense statements like that a woman should write about women's masturbation - academic studies and articles should be written by anyone who is academically qualified.
D) "Where research goes wrong is if only men are recruited for a study about a new treatment ... assume ...." No, even if the research doesn't "go wrong", the *act* is still wrong of understudying the other sex. It is really quite a simple concept, that if one repeatedly studies one biological subset and not the other, then data will be lacking. If the only population available happened to be all male soldiers or something like that, it would be justifiable - but still not justifiable to never ever study women, and I made the same point in my first comment.
E) "Granting agencies don't like to fund studies that don't include everyone, true.." What granting agencies do is outside the scope of my comment, in this case.
To reiterate, no academic or rational agent explanation has been provided for why the author would examine and then study solely the case of men. It is true that I earlier used the word "explanation" without specifying any categories of explanation in the previous comment to this one on this thread, but this isn't a street corner discussion. If I asked what the author's credentials were, I also would not preface that with words to indicate I was talking about in relation to this piece rather than their credentials for playing billiards.
If you resort to the explanation of "because they felt like it" (you used the word interest, but interest is just feeling like it) then it ceases to be academic. "Why did they put false statements in their article?" "Because they felt like it." "Why did they not cite the source they used for the information in that paragraph? " "They felt like not citing the source of their information." To be fair, "because that was what was funded" isn't an academic reason either. And real reasons that are not academic should be acknowledged as the truth, when they are. And if the reason is because they felt like it, that should not be hidden.
You must be an academic, is all I can say. Enjoy your day in the faculty lounge.
PS. "lacking reading comprehension" and "limited vocabulary or logic" are old, stale insults that lost all their hurting force many years ago. Please try to do better.
They weren't insults, just statements. Words from years ago are still fine today.
My understanding about this author is that he was married to a woman but decided he was gay, so perhaps he is not the right actor to play this role. Porn is insufferable, as far as I'm concerned. My younger female friends tell me that the male cohort they are trying to date are insufferably porn addicted.
The reasons given why men masturbate make total sense. My immediate reaction to the title was 'Because it feels good'. I don't know how much online porn compulsion differs from other online compulsions. This article doesn't deal with the pornography industry's harms to the women who work in it, or to children's developing ideas about sexuality. It's all true.
Because that's not the focus of my essay. They are separate issues. Protecting women and children from the real harms of pornography is a legitimate MORAL concern that tends to eclipse the issues I’m trying to raise.
True, and I'm not expecting you to cover everything.
It would be nice if the more talkative feminists focused on the violent bit of violent porn and not tar everything with the same brush.
If I was being cynical I'd argue that those feminists want to chase the impossible dream of abolition rather than doing anything sensible like being clear about what incremental changes need to happen in order to achieve their aim.
I have yet to hear any argument against pornography that has included how to make it the less attractive option (without shaming men, anyway). Things like helping men develop friendships, increasing access to male only therapy groups (which friend groups often are in practice), increasing wages to counteract the disconnect between work and worth, etc.
All those things - friends, economic security, etc, are good in themselves. I don't think they can supplant the universal primate urge to experience sexual pleasure, including looking at sexual imagery. I understand the urge to demand abolition, however unlikely that is, of the entire sex industry because envisioning an alternative, or a way to regulate said alternative, is very difficult. Do you have an idea of a better pornography industry, or only a hope of providing alternative activities to the existing one?
I disagree with the assumption that masturbation isn't good in and of itself. However, in not focusing on that in this comment.
There are plenty of other behaviors in which diverting attention and breaking patterns is standard. CBT encourages redirection of thoughts that are rational so that they don't blow up into irrational responses, and other mental health therapies attempt to disconnect trauma from triggers.
Basically, if a fun alternative to masturbation, one that's both physically and mentally fulfilling, is available pretty easily, then stress will reduce and happiness will increase. And, if masturbation is a stress response in an individual, this would lead to less reliance on it as a coping mechanism.
Ideally, I'd prefer the promotion of non-religious stress management through philosophies like Stoicism and mindfulness. These have both been commercialized, though, and presented basically as dissociative practices, so it's not that simple.
Let me know if you feel I've given a good answer. With such a complicated subject it's easy to wander into the weeds.
I think masturbation is also good in and of itself - or can be, like most pleasures - but I got the impression that you thought it was something to be avoided. Now I think you mean that a lot of the causes of stresses that it relieves can be dealt with directly, which I agree with. The same would apply to compulsive eating or getting stoned - things which can also be good in themselves but often aren't.
Okay, we're pretty much on the same page, then.
I did forget to address a better alternative to the porn industry, which is a tough one but which I feel could be done but only to an extent. As I see it, porn is often downstream from culture (examples like porn parodies) and violence in movies and video games is still a bit of an issue though in an indirect way.
It used to be that women weren't graphically killed or sexually assaulted in movies, and a lot of violent games used to not have female enemies. I don't like killing women in video games, and a lot of games have started to be really sadistically graphic about what happens to the bodies after death. A lot of that bleeds over into mods that allow people to roleplay sex slavery and worse.
I, for one, think that one of the ways to regulate the porn industry is to prosecute violent porn as though it's a documented case of assault (which it is). It should also be the case that individuals who upload violent porn should be investigated if only to trace it to its origin. There's no way to stop porn entirely, and there's no stopping the sharing of sexual material, but that doesn't mean it can't be influenced.
Here are my thoughts, more or less related:
People spend much time a day doing things one could argue are a silly waste of time, like binge watching sitcoms. No one often cares, in fact they often get together and bond over the experience the next day.
People spend much time doing physically stimulating activity, and this may not be too different in this specific regard...there are mental and emotional impacts associated with physically stimulating activity.
People spend much time engaging with artifical or real violent content (e.g. action movies or contact sports), and no one seems to care, in fact we often bond over it. Nobody actually wants to be in a fight or high contact sport, but many find it valuable to entertain others doing it in real time. In some regards it's fairly perverse...people are getting real injuries.
People are fed fantastical content, at all ages, that is significantly disconnected from the real world, which certainly affects who we are. Consider moody teenagers who might be more stable if they engaged with less moody content and drama.
There is hyper sexualized content all over the place, in advertisements, music, etc. Where is the line to draw?
Pornography is often not violent or dark, but sometimes. It is ultimately portraying something most people will come to reasonably appreciate in life... physical affection and/or procreation. There is a certain beauty in people. There is also very dark pornography too though, stuff people would never condone in real life, yet it is maybe not unlike people who watch horror movies... yet no one ostracizes those people as if they're crazy, even though the content is extremely disturbing and dark. Obviously one major issue is the ethics of production... people should never be forced into things they don't want to do, etc., and that is very challenging to discern in content. In a horror movie, people aren't actually subjected to torture. It can be hard to tell what's real vs staged, and people push their limits in all kinds of ways such as body building, tattoos, dare devils, etc. One might consider the ethics of AI...is it more moral in that it may decrease the production of actual content?
We must also be careful about the video game fallacy, i.e. that violent video games make kids more violent... they basically don't. Does pornography affect people in such a way? I haven't looked for the data. I think pornography ultimately does affect people in a negative way, but I think it's often partly because of the taboo culture around it. Imagine if we could just talk about it and be able to move on. Of course it's a challenging line to draw, but again, we often promote other things like strength through force in a very young age, basically subconsciously hoping those will grow up to be soldiers and protect, but the degree to which we do that is also somewhat controversial.
We do live in an unprecedented time of the ability to consume anything imaginable at nearly any time with nearly complete privacy, i.e. phones. For the overwhelming majority of humanity, for thousands and thousands of years, people basically dealt with these topics in a way that is so starkly different that they are hardly related at times... no internet, no TV, no radio, no electricity, no books, very different notions of privacy and social functioning and hygiene, etc. Either way, the modern reality is not going to go away or subside anytime soon. Some people are already having AI girlfriends.
I agree with the difference between addiction and compulsion. I think your thoughts and feelings predict your destiny in many ways. My friend just passed away and I am reminded of him because of the places I often visit in town where there were so many memories, it is triggering, objectively. I feel compelled to pause and grieve some, for some innate reason which is another topic I'm sure. Eventually I'll learn to associate those places with happiness and something better in that sense. For pornography, there is so much sexualized content publicly, it might seem nearly impossible to escape, it's everywhere you look, it's such a slippery slope. One second everyone is celebrating a beautiful scantily clad woman accepting a movie award, the next you are feeling shame for going the logical next step which doesn't seem that far.
Overall there are likely worse addictions to have, and, who is really being harmed, they might ask? Isn't everyone addicted to something in some sense? Is this the least bad option? They may say I'm not stealing money, my health is fine, and my social relations aren't really suffering (except maybe with a primary partner, but some partners are in agreeance here). It may be the case that it is not so hard to be a "high functioning" pornography addict more than for most other major addictions, e.g. drugs, alcohol, gambling. Is one alternative to sleep around a lot... and is that more or less ethical? We don't seem to shame that culture in the same way one might perceive to be the case with pornography. Overall I think it can be a downward trapping spiral though that prevents healthy long term relationships. I believe the only relationship that will truly last positively is one with a high level of openness and honesty, and I think it's less reasonable to think you're going to change all of a sudden rather than living the life you want heading into such a relationship.
I think men and women likely have very different experiences and perceptions that create a divide, some for obvious reasons such as regarding the need to manage for consequences of pregnancy. I do think the advent of the pill and abortion access has significantly altered social and individual perceptions and behavior around these things in a controversial way, including pornography.
It is a challenging situation to consider "protecting the vulnerable", especially kids, while also respecting the first amendment and considering other factors and whatabouts. I think being honest about many of these factors is helpful for the conversation.
I wish strength for those hoping to overcome addiction, there are many testimonies out there that it is possible, like with any addiction. If people need help, seeking it is a good thing, and it is worth it, life can be better.
Thank you for this very interesting article, indeed. There is certainly a lot of good information here. I would suggest, however, considering masturbation in a broader context than frustrated or stressed primates. Masturbation is common in a wide variety of animals, including, for instance, squirrels and lizards, among others. Consider some of the thoughts in this essay: “Is Animal Sex Like Porn?”
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/is-animal-sex-like-porn
Like all things biological, there is no simple, monotonic, and consistent reason for the behavior. I would also argue against the promulgation of the dopamine theory of pleasure which, as I teach, is fundamentally illogical from a neurophysiological point of view — although I recognize it is wildly popular.
Thank you again for an excellent read.
Sincerely,
Frederick
"...normalizes violence against women." And yet most men say they don't like it. Turns out the majority of people that claim to be turned on by violent porn are WOMEN. In other words, that porn genre is driven by FEMALE viewers.
"Overall, two-thirds of the women in this study confided that they found at least some aggression in porn to be arousing, and about half confessed that they sometimes sought out “harder” forms of aggression as well.... these women insisted that had already been attracted to consensual aggression and dominance before they started viewing porn. In other words, they actively sought out what they were already interested in rather than developing a taste for it after having seen it first in porn."
Read for yourself: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/202207/who-likes-violent-porn-new-research-upends-expectations?msockid=38bc6727420a60a62ff8754f436061b3
This article could have been titled "In defense of men who consume material that degrades, dehumanizes, and exploits women." If men truly have an evolutionary need to degrade women, that's a pretty damning indictment of men. The author thinks far less of men than I do. Feminists' opposition to porn is not pearl-clutching. It's grounded in the evidence of the harm that porn causes and the view that women are actually human beings. An article titled (essentially) "Why do men wank?" is far beneath this publication. It's a navel-gazing investigation into why men get off on degrading women while touching their penises. This is not scholarship.
<< In 2023, American men died by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. Among young men between the ages of 18 and 23, two-thirds report feeling that no one really knows them. Richard Reeves, in Of Boys and Men, published by the Brookings Institution and hardly a manifesto of the men’s rights movement, documents in careful detail how boys and men are falling behind educationally, economically, and socially across the developed world. These statistics describe a group under considerable stress, struggling with shame, and in urgent need of relief.>>
Females attempt suicide more often than males—two to three times more frequently. Why wasn't that part of your "one sex is suffering" illustration?
The problem with porn is that it typically utilizes real humans. Maybe porn created with cartoons or AI carries less ethical weight. But live humans are engaging physically in most porn acts, unlike actors in other kinds of escapism like a fantasy or horror movie. Male and female sexuality are very different. Men would likely engage in porn for free!
Studies reveal that a high percentage of females involved in porn end up with PTSD. Like prostitution, most females engage in porn for financial reasons. Ask women in porn if they would want their daughters to do it. That gives you your answer as to how desirable they consider it. The men who watch pornography likely often feel disgust afterward, not because of religion or a rigid moral code, but because some part of their being recognizes the harm being done. Another human is coerced into a very intimate act. Not many young girls growing up in the tony suburbs will turn to this. It is mostly desperate, struggling women who feel unsupported in life.
Pornography promotes risky sexual behavior, is introduced to children via the internet as early as age 8 and 9, introduces the idea of the compliant, doormat female into the male mind and takes away the sensuality in sex. You'll not change my mind, kind sir.
If you are a hammer, everything is a nail. The author may be correct in embracing the evolutionary model as a comprehensive (reductionist?) model for human sexuality. But to be consistent, he must also include every other aspect of human behavior, including moral codes. Using "healthy" and "unhealthy" in lieu of "good" and "bad" is just subterfuge. One is still making value judgements, and if the evolutionary model is universal, those judgements are also subject to it. The author cannot sit outside of the system and make the case for what we "should" do.
As regards pornography, the author mentions the eroticism of watching sex and relates it to primate behavior. But he omits the falsity of the fantasy. Pornography is not real sex anymore that Professional Wresting is real combat. Pornography maximizes the intensity of orgasm in a way that sex with a partner never will. It creates images of women (and men) that bear no resemblance to the complexity of real people, and both the difficulties and rewards of real relationships. At best, it makes real relationships that much more difficult to establish and maintain. At worst, it feeds rape fantasies and the like, thereby perpetuating abuses.
I agree that pornography, like anything else, should be examined objectively. But let us not simplify it to an equivalence with sexually frustrated primate beta males. It is an inexorable part of our lives. We should take full stock of its consequences when we discuss it.