How Pornography Could Either Help or Ruin Our Relationships
Understanding the conflicting science about pornography, sexual health, and relationships
Jonathan spends his nights staying up late and staring at butts.
He’s a total ass man, and he’s got the browsing history to prove it. He can’t get enough of women’s butts. And he spends a curious amount of money paying for pornography that displays women’s butts in all of their shapely, glorious wonder. Even when he doesn’t have a lot of cash, he still spends it on one thing — bubbly butt porn.
Even when he doesn’t have a lot of money, he’s more than willing to cash in on the sight of voluptuous booties. It’s an overstatement to say he’d trade his last red cent for a glimpse of a backside, but it’s not that big of an overstatement.
People around him have taken notice. They’ve silently begun to wonder if Jonathan has a porn addiction, or if he’s merely harmlessly enamored with the content he consumes.
He never expresses regret for paying for the porn he consumes. He’s not in any danger, and neither is anyone else. So who’s really being harmed, here?
Is porn really that harmless of an act?
Or is it really as destructive as some say it is?
The Scientific Debate
A black-and-white image of pornography has emerged in the minds of millions, with one camp lambasting it as the next tobacco — destructive, painful, and grossly immoral — while the other team staunchly defends pornography as a harmless right that we all should have, calling the critics crazy and overreactive.
Some science says pornography is perfectly healthy, while other science uncovers some pretty damaging links to negative health consequences. A quick search will turn up articles from Healthline, Very Well Mind, Psych Central, and other media outlets that are battling for your clicks, and eyeballs will turn up a flurry of worrisome articles warning against such links.
There have been many scientific studies in recent years that have linked pornography use, especially men’s pornography use, with some pretty serious diseases, like depression and erectile dysfunction. Others have shown that it causes changes to the neural structure of the brain, though it should be noted, so do both watching television and reading books.
It turns out, a lot of these claims are misleading or missing context.
Some suggested that pornography causes spikes in the brain that can be measured on an EEG until research from Nicole Prouse and her team at UCLA showed otherwise.
So what should we make of it all?
Is pornography really damaging to our sexual health and wellbeing?
Like most things in the real world, the potential harm and benefits of pornography use defy oversimplification — and the answer to this riddle certainly takes us deep down the rabbit hole of human psychology.
Sweet, Juicy Pornography
Back to Jonathan. Jonathan’s use of porn isn’t exactly the best example of the intersection of pornography and human psychology, because Jonathan is a monkey. He’s a rhesus macaque, to be exact, and he has a penchant for trading his boxes of sweet, delicious fruit juice to catch a glimpse of a few photos of other members of his troop — especially bubbly butts.
Researchers observing Jonathan at Durham University, in North Carolina, gave him two choices: a cup of his usual fruit juice, something that monkeys scarf down like the fiendish juice aficionados they are, or to check out some pictures the researchers provided him (of butts, of course).
Over time, it became clear that Jonathan really liked looking at the butts of other monkeys in his troop. He was often even willing to forego his beloved juice to get a peak. The other photos, the ones that weren’t pornographic to a little monkey brain, he didn’t care much for, opting to drink the juice instead.
But that’s not the end of it.
The researchers changed the amounts of juice they offered each day as time went on. They were eventually able to discover the value of the erotic photos relative to the juice. Too little juice and the monkeys would choose the photos, but an oversized serving of juice just might sway a monkey to forego the porn and indulge his taste buds.
Robert Deaner of the team of researchers said the following:
Monkeys are basically juice experts; they’re very sensitive to the differences [in how much juice they’re getting]. Virtually all monkeys will give up juice to see female hindquarters. They really value the images.
So what does the story of Jonathan mean to us, humans?
I bring all of this up because pornography is a very old invention, with the complete history of pornography spanning from the Paleolithic to modern-day Pornhub (I’ve covered this extensively here).
Some of the earliest human art we’ve discovered has been erotic, pornographically charged, and unashamedly sexual. Our desire to visualize sexuality in erotic ways isn’t unique to us humans, as Jonathan’s case proves.
Suggesting that the simple act of looking at images that arouse the imagination is harmful is a bit of a stretch.
Let’s flip from monkey brains on porn to human brains on porn and see what some fascinating brand-new research has to say about porn and its impacts on our minds and health.
The Magic of Motivations
In a fascinating bit of research titled Associations Between Pornography Use Frequency, Pornography Use Motivations, and Sexual Wellbeing in Couples, researchers decided to tackle the question of harmful pornography use from a different angle — by framing it not as a question of pornography, but human motivation.
Researchers queried participants of mixed backgrounds between the ages of 19 and 74 about various aspects of their sex lives and their pornography use.
On top of questions about porn use and frequency, they also asked participants from the 265 adult couples who participated to rate their sexual satisfaction, their sexual function, and distress, how often they had sex, and any symptoms of depression or anxiety that they might have.
Furthermore, they asked the participants to rate their sexual avoidance and sexual approach goals. Motivation plays a crucial role in our decision to have sex. Our motivations can be broadly partitioned into two categories, seeking connection with our partner(s) and avoiding negative outcomes.
Is our desire for our partner genuine? Or are we just trying to avoid a bad mood or another big fight?
For decades now, the difference between these two fundamental motivations for sex has been linked to differences in sexual satisfaction. When couples want to make their sex lives better, one thing they can do is focus on their sexual approach goals.
One person might be using porn to obtain sex that their partners wouldn’t approve of — or they might be avoiding their partners altogether. Another person might use porn to improve the relationship quality by arousing themselves before sexual encounters or learning new and interesting ideas that they could add to their sexual repertoire.
In the middle, lies the person who feels guilt or shame discussing their sexual fantasies and desires with their partners, so they turn to porn to obtain arousal for the sex they’ll eventually have with their partners.
The overlaps between our motivations for porn use and its impact, or lack thereof, on our sex lives differ between the two sexes.
Men’s sexual negative function, sexual distress, depression, and anxiety weren’t linked to their porn use generally, so much as the motivations for their porn use were linked to those negative effects.
For women, higher use of pornography, both with their partners and alone, was linked with greater sexual function and less sexual distress. Women’s higher use of pornography individually was linked with higher rates of sexual frequency with their partners.
As the study authors note:
Men’s greater emotional avoidance motivation was related to their own lower sexual function and greater sexual distress, while their higher sexual curiosity motivation was related to higher partnered sexual frequency, their own greater sexual satisfaction, sexual function, and lower sexual distress. Women’s higher partnered pornography use frequency was associated with their own greater sexual function and lower sexual distress. Additionally, women’s higher individual pornography use frequency and lower sexual pleasure motivation were associated with higher partnered sexual frequency. No partner effects were observed. Findings highlight that women’s pornography use frequency and each partner’s motivations might play crucial roles in couples’ sexual wellbeing.
I sense that Jonathan shows us just how futile attempts to smite pornography from our relationships might be for most people. But what if outside the jealous partner, the porn itself isn’t the problem, but a symptom of a deeper problem of emotional connection, the ability to form a healthy bond with our partners, and having never learned how to approach sexuality in a healthy manner?
Psychology and Pornography
What if the porn issues we see are more deeply rooted than we think? What if it’s a matter of emotional maturity rather than pornography itself that’s causing difficulties in some relationships? We’ll learn more as more research comes in, but if this was the case, it wouldn’t be all that surprising.
After all, from the violent mass shooters to the highly conservative anti-porn (and anti-sex) champions we see in Congress and around the world, the people who have serious internal hardships with sex usually fit a certain yet-to-be-fully-defined sexual archetype, one bestirred by the thought of the sexuality of others, someone who feels closed off from the world in terms of their own personal sexuality, shut away and incapable of communicating about sex in a way that isn’t, for lack of a better term, triggering.
See my article on this for more.
We have much to understand about human psychology and human sex and I hope future research explores this topic more in-depth.
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I suggest checking out the excellent book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire, which can be found here on Amazon.
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