Whole concept of porn influencing men view on women preferences is a bit of science-fiction for me. What porn represents is just what men like to watch. It's just a product chosen by consumers. If I eat Big Macs often it doesn't make me think it's healthy or that everyone else finds them tasty. I personally love porn, especially because of my preference for threesomes, but the fact that I watch tons of FFM threesomes never made me think that average woman would like to invite her friend to have sex with her partner. Also making guess about random women is strange, I may not know what are the statistics for ordinary woman but I may be perfectly good in predicting what women I choose like - simply because I match with them based on mutual characteristics.
So all in all final result of this survey kinda confirm my point of view, porn usage is almost meaningless in predicting opposite sex preferences. Mistaking women for being less kinky is based more on social/cultural bias than what we consume as carefully picked up product as porn video.
I have to disagree. Porn definitely does change your tastes. People crave new stimuli, and people adapt. When people watch porn, they eventually adapt to what they're into, and what's originally stimulating becomes boring. They crave new stimuli and may develop a new kink. This is something Dr. K has talked about and I've observed in many people (though this is anecdotal and also influenced by my own bias)
With the big Mac analogy. People first eating fast food will start with just the hamburger or cheeseburger. Then they'll go up to a double cheeseburger, a quarter pounder, a double quarter pounder, etc. Or if you're a regular big Mac eater, you'll eventually want to maybe try the McChicken or the filet o fish or even burger king. Why? Because variety is the spice of life and you want to try something new and maybe you'll end up liking it!
I totaly disagree with your theory and I never observed something like this in real life. It always felt like some kind of made up argument used by far right activists just like post abortion syndrome. If you think that porn or fast food works like that (like drugs) then please explain why rl sex or homemade food or any other life activity is free from that slippery slope? I'm actually kind of freak when it comes to data hoarding and year ago I summed up my 20 years of porn usage. I watched 41,2k porn videos (over 8000h total) and you know what? Now in mid 30' I watch exactly the same type of stuff I watched as teenager and never ever went into anything more hardcore than threesomes, blowjobs and glamporn in general. After watching 41k vids I should be total porn junkie and perv by now (and 99% of my friends who did the same) while I'm not, even my daily fap scheme lowered down from as much as 4-8 orgasms per day around 20y to 1 or less by now in mid 30. Simple biology and selfregulation, completly different from addiction to artificial substances.
It's funny in general how some people treat "porn" like some kind of monolith with 0 user control over what one's watching. It's like saying that "movies" are harmful because you know, today you go to the cinema to watch some Marvel's blockbuster and tomorrow you download snuff movies from dark web. :D I never had any problem with deciding what to watch and watch turns me on both with porn and ordinary cinematography.
Real life sex and homemade food can happen in the same way. People will go from being into vanilla things to bdsm because normal sex gets boring or they want something more stimulating. This happens especially when sex is devalued via casual hookups instead of an intimate relation between two people. When the focus becomes the pleasure instead of the relationship, then there can be escalation of interests to seek out more pleasure. Hell, even in boomer relationships you see it to a lesser degree, where they try role-play or different outfits or scenarios. It's the same concept. Sex gets boring, so they spice it up.
And you do see the same thing in home cooking. If you make just rice and beans all day every day you get bored. That's why there's such a variety of food at supermarkets, because people want something new every once in a while because what they have gets boring. If that wasn't true, we'd all be eating the same thing every day. The same DOES apply to home cooking and the same DOES apply to irl sex.
I can't say the same for myself. I started at around 11 and I'm 19. It's gotten better in terms of quantity but not in quality. I've went from vanilla stuff to extreme things like rape, murder, gore, etc. Then I realized this is fucked and that's when I started cutting back. Now I'm still into bad things just in a lesser extent. I can say with absolute certainty that porn did it gradually because when I had encountered these things when younger I was repulsed. But after I became fully addicted, I eventually came to like those things.
So maybe it's just a thing in heavy porn users and not casual ones.
Porn is the viewers choice what they want to watch, but sometimes we get manipulated. Like how advertising uses certain language, imagery, and colors, we can have our tastes shifted by the media we consume. It's the viewers choice at the end of the day, but their choice isn't isolated.
Think of this as well. What forms our preferences? Our values and behaviors, right? Well what forms those? Our experiences. How do we know what we've experienced? From our memories. But if our memories are clogged with things like media, your behavior is therefore directly influenced BY media and what media wants you to do.
Again, Dr. K made a wonderful video on this all that I highly encourage you to watch if you genuinely want to understand my point of view. Part of the reason I'm this passionate about the subject is because like I said porn addiction is something I've had since I was 11, literally spending 6+ hours a day every day jerking off. I still have the habit and porn and sex have ruined my ability to form relationships and interact with people and I've only recently started to get back on the right path.
I'm not gonna deny your experiences but you must admit your case is rather unique. Some people may be vulnerable for such exposition, especially if we take into account that you started very early in digital era with limitless ocean of porn across internet while your taste didn't have chance to develop itself. I started earlier than that, around 8, but all I had access to were clothing catalogs with swimsuit ads. :P I even rememeber that on my first pc with DOS I used to draw naked women and fapped to them. Then I've had just few magazines and literally 1 VHS tape until I got internet first time in 2003 as 15y. Then I started data hoarding but despite 2 decades of definitely heavy usage I still skip even anal scenes simply because I find them as disgusting as back then in teenage years. I must admit though that I'm exceptionally immune to addiction and developing tolerance in general, I hardly ever get bored with things. You mentioned experiments with homemade food, well absolutely honestly I eat exactly the same meals everyday for last 10 years. Moreover I never eat sweets, sure occasionally I like chips, burgers, pizzas, but never ever had taste for sugar. I heard such condition negatively correlates with alcoholism, but who knows, maybe other addictions too.
However me being unusual is one thing, but porn usage at 90%+ rate among men is a fact and those with problems are just barely visible minority. Before porn era there were such people too and what caused their extreme habits? How it is that during wars there are so many rapists, even among men who in normal conditions wouldn't commit any crime? Porn is just convenient scapegoat and while in some cases it may be the one and only reason someone discovered his inner beast in general itsn't source of a problem. Not so long time ago I read article about guy like you and he with an army of psychologists blamed porn for everything that went wrong in his life but reading carefully everyone could see that his story was pure example of ecclesiogenic neurosis. Huge conflict between his porn habits and deeply religious parents caused extreme lack of self esteem and self-hatred which pushed him into harder and harder stuff. I would encourage you to look deeper into your experiences and current problems because finding real source of them could be crucial to get proper help. Again - I'm not denying that porn could play huge role in your addiction to extreme stuff but it may not be the only factor but rather mix of those that alone would be harmless.
And one more thing - you should be ready to accept that your preferences could develop in the same way even without porn at all. It's important because as long as you treat it only as defect you can't overcome your personal life problems and you make yoursef vulnerable for somatization of even bigger ones. Your value as a human has nothing to do with being average and meeting social expectations. No matter what shaped you this way you can still be happy person in happy relationship even if your bedroom gonna be "bit" more kinky. At 19 you just start to build your abilities of forming relationships and interacting with people, it's totaly normal you may feel lost and come across some problems. Good you're working on it and I'm sure you gonna meet your goals. Keep up on the right track and never give up!
Yep. Been into the same stuff I've been into when I was a teen (in the 90s! Shudder!). The whole escalation theory is the same one can see when conservative culture folks talked about video games, movies, music . .even dancing, going back decades.
Yeah, this is the male version of the high-bodycount “throwing a hot dog down a hallway” myth. Hell, at least once a year, I return to the best scene in the first porn I ever saw... in 1990.
Maybe it is worth asking: do women require ever bigger, more powerful, and faster-vibrating sex toys? If so, is it because they get bored—or because they get nerve-damaged?
"People crave new stimuli, and people adapt. When people watch porn, they eventually adapt to what they're into, and what's originally stimulating becomes boring. They crave new stimuli and may develop a new kink."
This is just a product of unhealthy sexual repression, not a normal phenomenon. When you stop shaming yourself for being a sexual being and accept that porn is normal and natural, that craving for more and more extreme things disappears.
Objection. I was perfectly fine with, if not proud of, my sexuality, sex drive, and porn habits. I felt no shame or repression. Yet during this period is where these interests developed the worst, and only when they developed to an extreme degree did I begin to repress my sexuality and begin to recover. When I was fully open and liberalized about sex, that's where I developed kinks for hurting, dismembering, kidnapping, stalking, abusing, and goring people. Only recently have I begun to recover with repressive habits.
Unhealthy sexual repression doesn't lead to these things, it cures these things. But again, maybe I'm an extremely niche case that should be studied by medical professionals. But they'll never get their hands on me since involuntary institutionalization bars me from ever owning a firearm and I would rather die than not be allowed to own guns.
Yes, that's extremely niche and not caused by porn, and you should be seeing medical professionals and should not own guns. But you already know all that.
I support the right to bear arms and communities being ready to defend themselves against invasion and authoritarian governments and all that, but I also have depression and know that the most responsible thing for me personally is to not own them.
Porn didn’t corrupt me so much as actually knowing a woman who’d do stuff like that with me (3way etc.). It spoils a man, and it can be a long road back…
I think you vastly overestimate how much communication about sexual preferences happens in a conservative marriage scenario - in general my experience in those circles is nobody talks about sex to anyone of the opposite sex (women talk to each other about strategies for dealing with it, not so much about enjoying it, obviously I don't know what the men were talking about), and the clueless men do attempt surprises that the women, who are primed to tolerate rather than enjoy sex, do not appreciate.
Exactly. I’m a regular mainstream American woman, and I don’t know any women who like to be choked, etc. It’s the maladjusted women on the fringe who, I would argue, go along with some of the things mentioned in this thread to please their partners. Men being men, they probably have little interest in what the women in their lives actually feel or long for in an intimate relationship. Some of this “men being men” is likely a genetic/evolutionary tendency, but porn reinforces it.
I’m not sure why you’re putting your faith in a survey about which you know very little. How was it conducted? Who were the people who participated and how were they found? If they were mostly or even exclusively porn watchers then that explains the results.
Of course the men are going to believe the poll results about anything and all things that degrade women & borderline abuse if not outright abuse. Those are the men that hate women & have no respect for them.
Yes, and they can’t seem to grasp (or don’t want to grasp) the concept that women who are porn actors are victims of trauma and abuse which is what leads them into a life of porn to begin with. To these men, the behavior they see in porn is normal because they probably grew up watching it. Likewise, any women that participate in the behaviors sited by the survey are women who have also been damaged either by circumstances or by exposure to porn at a young and vulnerable age. Thank you, World Wide Web, and thank you to the men who drive all of this.
Surveys/polls are never accurate. Biggest example lately of how inaccurate they can be is the US election. I don't know a single woman with dignity & class that wants cum in their mouth, on their face & eyes, to be slapped, to be choked. Many Women are weak when it comes to speaking up for themselves & many are so desperate for a man's attention that they will agree to anything the man wants "for affection". They will allow a man to abuse them & degrade them, treat them like nothing but 3 holes on a body for a man's dick because they have no self respect or were taught they are only here for a man's pleasure. Or they learned about sex by watching porn & they think that shit is normal, arousing, acceptable. Anyone that believes even 1% of porn is real life is a fool, an abuser, a predator, a rapist or pedophile. Hence the reason so much porn has many women that look under 18 yrs old & most titles will mention "Teen" in the title of the smut video because men want that smut, to imagine it's a virgin & barely legal. Research the dark side of porn industry. A MF evil man named Max Hardcore was the devil on earth & is talked about in some of those videos because of the mental, emotional & physical abuse that put many women in the hospital. Thank God he died a painful slow death & lost function of his dick before that. 😂 That v was ultimate karma for the demon he was. The women in porn are often drugged, threatened personally or their family threatened once the devil's have them in their grip. They are raped, sodomized, held against their will until they do what producers want them to do for a video. It's horrific, all at the hands of men & their dicks. The suicide rate among female porn 'stars' is very real. To see the real world of porn & what the women go thru look up videos on YouTube from a channel called Fight The New Drug.
One thing to consider is that even if porn is not misleading men on average, it may be misleading men on the tail.
That is, suppose without porn, some men would think that no women like to be choked, and some other men think that some women like being choked. Then they watch porn, and their estimates of whether women like to be choked increase.
So then, some of the men who thought no women like to be choked now think some women like to be choked, and some of the men who thought that some women like to be choked now think all women like to be choked.
In that case, as you show, the average accuracy of men's predictions will increase; now men on average predict that some women like being choked, whereas before on average they predicted that few women like being choked.
But in this model, the rate of overestimates has massively increased as a result of porn! In this model, before porn, no men thought all women liked getting choked, but now some men do. And these men might decide to choke women during sex, based on the assumption that of course she likes it, which is presumably what the people concerned about porn misleading men are talking about.
So misleadingness cannot be understood unidimensionally; there are many different men and some may be mislead while others are coming to a better understanding.
There's also an interesting thing that can be done. You can use your model of the effects of porn on men's views about women's preferences to compute what views the men would have if they watched less porn or more porn, giving you a whole range of counterfactual beliefs. Then based on this, you can compute numbers for how many men got less accurate beliefs as a result of porn, vs how many men got more accurate beliefs as a result of porn.
Of course this sort of computation implicitly assumes that the effect of porn is the same for all men, which might not be the case. But the comparisons in your original post also sort of assume that, so I think it's a reasonable assumption to go with, given that we don't have any other assumptions.
If we want to model whether porn has different effects for different men, I suspect ideology may be an interesting place to look for interactions with. Ideology tends to form a lens for how people interpret the world. For instance, someone who thinks that female activists are heroes who represent women's interests may note that a lot of female activists talk about porn misleading men, and therefore be concerned about this and take porn with a heavy grain of salt, whereas someone who thinks that feminists are crazy and women like to play mindgames and men ought to dominate may take porn more strongly as an indication of women's natural preferences.
Though when it comes to measuring ideology there's a whole bunch of complications, so YMMV.
I have to say I find the whole choking trend bizarre, especially since it just wasn't a thing when I was dating 20 years ago (and as a guy who likes to be dominant . .it's just . .not sexy?). I also suspect the % of women who'd actually say they like being choked during sex is not particularly high.
1. The average man slightly over-predicts how much the average woman is into things.
2. In a randomly-selected sexual encounter between a man and a woman, the average man slightly under-predicts how much that woman is into things.
#1 isn't exactly what's reported, but I'm inclined to say the paid women are more representative of the general population, and the Twitter follower women are probably selected for being more into things (which is plausible for people who follow a sex worker). And #1 is true if you take only the sample of paid women.
I think you didn't take into account that choking is a recent fashion. Well, maybe not that recent, but at least of the last 10-20 years. Therefore, older men and women would not be as much into it as younger people. Besides, there are serious safety concerns about heavy choking involving carotid occlusion or breath stopping. So, using it to determine how much people are into rough sex is not accurate. Age and risk-taking are important confounds related to choking.
Seems like porn either has no effect or helps with men's estimations. That makes sense to me since porn industry tries to attract viewers and show them what they like to see. I think the argument against porn assumes that what men like is different from what women like which I think is wrong. The evolution requires both sexes to be attractive to each other and have similar sexual interests. I have seen my theory matches your data from the big kink survey.
How about the statement "Young boys who are about to start sexual relationships will get the wrong understanding of what women like"? I would love to see a graph about how accurately young boys with no sexual experience (so one or less sexual partner and age as low as the data allows) estimate women's preference by their amount of porn consumption.
What you've uncovered is that porn is indirectly molding women's sexuality because it creates expectations of them - from the shape of their pubic hair to the things they do in bed. They don't even have to watch porn themselves, the trends spread via social osmosis.
Very, ***VERY*** few women were into choking before it became a porn genre. You'd maybe read about some degenerate doing it in a French novel about bored nihilists and that was pretty much the extent of it.
But it is the thing to do now and women feel they must go along because when everyone does it they think they'd lose points in the sexual competition if they didn't. Women do a lot of self harming things in order to secure mates, things like breast implants or unpleasant sex acts, and publicly rave about how great they are while nursing their painful wounds in private.
You should do a poll among people 35+, ask them when they found out about choking and when they did it first. Ask the completely uninhibited free love hippies.
Women are more into rough hard sex than they are likely to admit. But I am not sure that is true of a long term relationship. Something that is exciting in the short run doesn’t necessarily translate to that over a long time period. I read a porn star asked whether she likes big penises. She said yes in the short run. No over time. She said in a long term Relationship you might be having sex when you aren’t 100% into it or super excited. But after five minutes you get into it and after it is over you are glad you did it. But if the guy is very large she said you have to be really into it or it hurts. She said you end up having less sex and being less sexually satisfied.
If you are not a woman, then you couldn’t possibly know this. I can tell you that regular mainstream women want nothing to do with what you are describing. Porn has normalized behavior for you that isn’t normal.
In my mind constricting someone's oxygen flow during sex goes beyond rough hard sex. There's evolutionary reasons why a lot of men and women prefer the latter; not really one for the former-you don't want to accidently kill someone you're trying to impregnate.
This is a survey, their results are anonymous so they have no reason to hide their true preferences. You're right that porn is changing their sexuality, but you're wrong about why. They are being exposed to new ideas and becoming more open to them, allowing them to explore their sexuality more freely.
If that were true, young people would be more relationally healthy and happy than previous generations, which stats show is not the case, with a large number of Gen Z not having any sex.
Here's another aspect where it's even more obvious: if porn were just enabling experimentation and personal expression, the fully shaved look would be a one-time experiment in pain and discomfort rather than the norm in correlation with sexual activity. You'd see a diversity of hair styles. If it were just a personal grooming preference, shaving one's labia would either not be the norm (shaving is uncomfortable and painful and really not ideal from a health standpoint) or it wouldn't be correlated with sexual activity (people groom themselves regardless of whether they're going to have sex or not).
The fact Gen Z had fewer relationships is not evidence that they have worse sex, there are many other factors that influence that.
Furthermore, the fact women do some things that are uncomfortable to please men is not evidence for your argument that women don't actually like what they said they do on this survey. If the topic of shaving showed up, women would likely respond that they'd rather not have to.
Quite the opposite actually, I prefer affectionate sex rather than BDSM. And surveys show this is common, men are typically less dominant than women would prefer them to be.
Being dominant or taking the lead isn’t the same as being abusive, which, I would argue, is what’s being described in this article and in these comments. Men can justify these behaviors all they want, but they are all porn watchers who assume these things are normal. The fact is that human beings don’t want to be abused unless they themselves have been abused or have been exposed to abuse via porn. Healthy, grounded women with a strong sense of self would never accept this kind of behavior.
I am hesitant to publicly go into details about how I cleaned suspicious results out of my data (don’t wanna give people a handbook), but am happy to share this with other researchers privately."
+1 and well done! Savvy researchers already know what you're doing.
Interesting post. I would not have expect as many women to be into some of these things as your survey reports, e.g. choking.
A related question is to what extent does porn make men interested in trying things, believe thst it is appropriate to try things? E.g. in you survey men weren't all that far off on predicting how likely it is that women like anal sex (not very), but I could see porn use making men more interested in trying it or more willing to try to convince their partner to try it as a favor to him.
I also would be interested in how porn impacts prediction of degree of preference. Men might accurately predict that women aren't into something regardless of porn use, but it might cause them to assume something is a thing something women are into, but still an acceptable ask, while women are likely to rank it as unacceptable.
And there is the whole side issue of people who are into things but won't admit it or wouldn't ever think that. Lots of that happens.
"It is really hot and I love it if my partner is accidentally choking me slightly, but I would never ever ask to be or want to be "choked" as a specific action or part of sex."
Well fuck, once you get to specifics everything is up for grabs and no one is all that reliable.
I had a girl I was "friend-zone" dating for months, who would regularly talk about how she would never date me and had zero interest in me romantically, and appreciated I never put move son her, go off the deep end and start cutting and threatening suicide when I got a girlfriend. "Didn't I know she loved me and we were meant to be together?".
5 years later a "work girlfriend" was clear it was totally platonic and I had no shot with her. Said it explicitly multiple times. Until one night when out for drinks after work she clearly purposefully liquored me up and suggested we go back to my place for sex. Which we did. She was adamant she wasn't at all into oral and that was never happening, but we had some good drunk sex...
And then a week later she was blowing me left and right all weekend. And then a month later she asked me back to her place after a date, and I said "no I want to get some good sleep tonight", and she totally ghosted me from that point on extremely hurt.
I think the problem is that the 'paid' rather than the 'your-follower' women are much more common, and porn shifts men's estimation of preferences in a far kinkier direction than the average woman. (This appears to be the case for the older generation on your graph.) Thus, people buy Louise Perry's books.
FWIW, I've been through parts of my life where I had two regular sub play partners, and I *never* explored choking. No way to do it safely, risks to airway.
The opening paragraphs summarizing your study could not have been better. Data science is so much more fun with tongue-in-cheek “you were right for the wrong reasons.” Fantastic work and great delivery!
I have the impression that porn preference correlates with unrestricted sociosexuality - men who use porn are more likely to want to have casual sex with lots of different women. (E.g. I once did a factor analysis of sexual interests and found "watching porn" to load on the sociosexuality factor.) I think this makes sense from a theoretical perspective; porn isn't really made for romantics, and committed relationship porn sort of seems like an oxymoron. (I mean, you can have more romantic versions of porn, but it will still depict a total stranger...)
Whenever people find that porn correlates with stuff, I always wonder if it is confounded with unrestricted sociosexuality. I would tend to think that it is best to control for unrestricted sociosexuality, though I suspect moral zealots would instead argue that porn causes unrestricted sociosexuality and that therefore one shouldn't control for it.
> committed relationship porn sort of seems like an oxymoron. (I mean, you can have more romantic versions of porn, but it will still depict a total stranger...)
I disagree with that last claim. There are many situations where porn depicts someone you're familiar with:
- Fan-made porn depicting pre-existing fictional characters, e.g. "a bunch of colored pencil drawings of all the different characters in Harry Potter fucking each other".
- OnlyFans and camming sites, where you might follow specific sex workers.
- Dating sims, where you might have dozens of hours of gameplay interacting with a given love interest (including both explicit and pg scenes).
People who don't like X, and don't do or use X, will, when they notice that X relates to undesirable trait Y, presume that X causes Y.
Though this trend might be ameliorated through education, cultural shifts, and yelling at people on Substack, actually curing in such a way is impossible, not least of all because this trend is itself an X relating to a Y, which, like most Y, has nonzero heritability.
"men who use porn are more likely to want to have casual sex with lots of different women". Interesting take on the data or reality. I don't think we have such a homogenous type of "male porn consumer", as usage is so widely spread among different personality types. People resorting to porn for "sexual maintenance" could (IMHO) as easily be demi-sexual types as any other kind of demographic. But just my two cents, from observations…
I wonder how much of this is confounded by people who seek out novelty. People who consume porn regularly might have a propensity towards seeking out novelty generally, so ADHD sufferers, BPD might be getting selected for.
Whole concept of porn influencing men view on women preferences is a bit of science-fiction for me. What porn represents is just what men like to watch. It's just a product chosen by consumers. If I eat Big Macs often it doesn't make me think it's healthy or that everyone else finds them tasty. I personally love porn, especially because of my preference for threesomes, but the fact that I watch tons of FFM threesomes never made me think that average woman would like to invite her friend to have sex with her partner. Also making guess about random women is strange, I may not know what are the statistics for ordinary woman but I may be perfectly good in predicting what women I choose like - simply because I match with them based on mutual characteristics.
So all in all final result of this survey kinda confirm my point of view, porn usage is almost meaningless in predicting opposite sex preferences. Mistaking women for being less kinky is based more on social/cultural bias than what we consume as carefully picked up product as porn video.
I have to disagree. Porn definitely does change your tastes. People crave new stimuli, and people adapt. When people watch porn, they eventually adapt to what they're into, and what's originally stimulating becomes boring. They crave new stimuli and may develop a new kink. This is something Dr. K has talked about and I've observed in many people (though this is anecdotal and also influenced by my own bias)
With the big Mac analogy. People first eating fast food will start with just the hamburger or cheeseburger. Then they'll go up to a double cheeseburger, a quarter pounder, a double quarter pounder, etc. Or if you're a regular big Mac eater, you'll eventually want to maybe try the McChicken or the filet o fish or even burger king. Why? Because variety is the spice of life and you want to try something new and maybe you'll end up liking it!
I totaly disagree with your theory and I never observed something like this in real life. It always felt like some kind of made up argument used by far right activists just like post abortion syndrome. If you think that porn or fast food works like that (like drugs) then please explain why rl sex or homemade food or any other life activity is free from that slippery slope? I'm actually kind of freak when it comes to data hoarding and year ago I summed up my 20 years of porn usage. I watched 41,2k porn videos (over 8000h total) and you know what? Now in mid 30' I watch exactly the same type of stuff I watched as teenager and never ever went into anything more hardcore than threesomes, blowjobs and glamporn in general. After watching 41k vids I should be total porn junkie and perv by now (and 99% of my friends who did the same) while I'm not, even my daily fap scheme lowered down from as much as 4-8 orgasms per day around 20y to 1 or less by now in mid 30. Simple biology and selfregulation, completly different from addiction to artificial substances.
It's funny in general how some people treat "porn" like some kind of monolith with 0 user control over what one's watching. It's like saying that "movies" are harmful because you know, today you go to the cinema to watch some Marvel's blockbuster and tomorrow you download snuff movies from dark web. :D I never had any problem with deciding what to watch and watch turns me on both with porn and ordinary cinematography.
Real life sex and homemade food can happen in the same way. People will go from being into vanilla things to bdsm because normal sex gets boring or they want something more stimulating. This happens especially when sex is devalued via casual hookups instead of an intimate relation between two people. When the focus becomes the pleasure instead of the relationship, then there can be escalation of interests to seek out more pleasure. Hell, even in boomer relationships you see it to a lesser degree, where they try role-play or different outfits or scenarios. It's the same concept. Sex gets boring, so they spice it up.
And you do see the same thing in home cooking. If you make just rice and beans all day every day you get bored. That's why there's such a variety of food at supermarkets, because people want something new every once in a while because what they have gets boring. If that wasn't true, we'd all be eating the same thing every day. The same DOES apply to home cooking and the same DOES apply to irl sex.
I can't say the same for myself. I started at around 11 and I'm 19. It's gotten better in terms of quantity but not in quality. I've went from vanilla stuff to extreme things like rape, murder, gore, etc. Then I realized this is fucked and that's when I started cutting back. Now I'm still into bad things just in a lesser extent. I can say with absolute certainty that porn did it gradually because when I had encountered these things when younger I was repulsed. But after I became fully addicted, I eventually came to like those things.
So maybe it's just a thing in heavy porn users and not casual ones.
Porn is the viewers choice what they want to watch, but sometimes we get manipulated. Like how advertising uses certain language, imagery, and colors, we can have our tastes shifted by the media we consume. It's the viewers choice at the end of the day, but their choice isn't isolated.
Think of this as well. What forms our preferences? Our values and behaviors, right? Well what forms those? Our experiences. How do we know what we've experienced? From our memories. But if our memories are clogged with things like media, your behavior is therefore directly influenced BY media and what media wants you to do.
Again, Dr. K made a wonderful video on this all that I highly encourage you to watch if you genuinely want to understand my point of view. Part of the reason I'm this passionate about the subject is because like I said porn addiction is something I've had since I was 11, literally spending 6+ hours a day every day jerking off. I still have the habit and porn and sex have ruined my ability to form relationships and interact with people and I've only recently started to get back on the right path.
I'm not gonna deny your experiences but you must admit your case is rather unique. Some people may be vulnerable for such exposition, especially if we take into account that you started very early in digital era with limitless ocean of porn across internet while your taste didn't have chance to develop itself. I started earlier than that, around 8, but all I had access to were clothing catalogs with swimsuit ads. :P I even rememeber that on my first pc with DOS I used to draw naked women and fapped to them. Then I've had just few magazines and literally 1 VHS tape until I got internet first time in 2003 as 15y. Then I started data hoarding but despite 2 decades of definitely heavy usage I still skip even anal scenes simply because I find them as disgusting as back then in teenage years. I must admit though that I'm exceptionally immune to addiction and developing tolerance in general, I hardly ever get bored with things. You mentioned experiments with homemade food, well absolutely honestly I eat exactly the same meals everyday for last 10 years. Moreover I never eat sweets, sure occasionally I like chips, burgers, pizzas, but never ever had taste for sugar. I heard such condition negatively correlates with alcoholism, but who knows, maybe other addictions too.
However me being unusual is one thing, but porn usage at 90%+ rate among men is a fact and those with problems are just barely visible minority. Before porn era there were such people too and what caused their extreme habits? How it is that during wars there are so many rapists, even among men who in normal conditions wouldn't commit any crime? Porn is just convenient scapegoat and while in some cases it may be the one and only reason someone discovered his inner beast in general itsn't source of a problem. Not so long time ago I read article about guy like you and he with an army of psychologists blamed porn for everything that went wrong in his life but reading carefully everyone could see that his story was pure example of ecclesiogenic neurosis. Huge conflict between his porn habits and deeply religious parents caused extreme lack of self esteem and self-hatred which pushed him into harder and harder stuff. I would encourage you to look deeper into your experiences and current problems because finding real source of them could be crucial to get proper help. Again - I'm not denying that porn could play huge role in your addiction to extreme stuff but it may not be the only factor but rather mix of those that alone would be harmless.
And one more thing - you should be ready to accept that your preferences could develop in the same way even without porn at all. It's important because as long as you treat it only as defect you can't overcome your personal life problems and you make yoursef vulnerable for somatization of even bigger ones. Your value as a human has nothing to do with being average and meeting social expectations. No matter what shaped you this way you can still be happy person in happy relationship even if your bedroom gonna be "bit" more kinky. At 19 you just start to build your abilities of forming relationships and interacting with people, it's totaly normal you may feel lost and come across some problems. Good you're working on it and I'm sure you gonna meet your goals. Keep up on the right track and never give up!
Cheers!
"I must admit though that I'm exceptionally immune to addiction and developing tolerance in general, I hardly ever get bored with things."
You are the outlier.
Yep. Been into the same stuff I've been into when I was a teen (in the 90s! Shudder!). The whole escalation theory is the same one can see when conservative culture folks talked about video games, movies, music . .even dancing, going back decades.
Yeah, this is the male version of the high-bodycount “throwing a hot dog down a hallway” myth. Hell, at least once a year, I return to the best scene in the first porn I ever saw... in 1990.
Maybe it is worth asking: do women require ever bigger, more powerful, and faster-vibrating sex toys? If so, is it because they get bored—or because they get nerve-damaged?
Used to be made by far right activists. Nowadays, it's also made by far left and not so far left ones... at least where I live.
"People crave new stimuli, and people adapt. When people watch porn, they eventually adapt to what they're into, and what's originally stimulating becomes boring. They crave new stimuli and may develop a new kink."
This is just a product of unhealthy sexual repression, not a normal phenomenon. When you stop shaming yourself for being a sexual being and accept that porn is normal and natural, that craving for more and more extreme things disappears.
Objection. I was perfectly fine with, if not proud of, my sexuality, sex drive, and porn habits. I felt no shame or repression. Yet during this period is where these interests developed the worst, and only when they developed to an extreme degree did I begin to repress my sexuality and begin to recover. When I was fully open and liberalized about sex, that's where I developed kinks for hurting, dismembering, kidnapping, stalking, abusing, and goring people. Only recently have I begun to recover with repressive habits.
Unhealthy sexual repression doesn't lead to these things, it cures these things. But again, maybe I'm an extremely niche case that should be studied by medical professionals. But they'll never get their hands on me since involuntary institutionalization bars me from ever owning a firearm and I would rather die than not be allowed to own guns.
Yes, that's extremely niche and not caused by porn, and you should be seeing medical professionals and should not own guns. But you already know all that.
I support the right to bear arms and communities being ready to defend themselves against invasion and authoritarian governments and all that, but I also have depression and know that the most responsible thing for me personally is to not own them.
It's hilarious how far the "rationalist" community will go to deny the existence of reality.
Porn didn’t corrupt me so much as actually knowing a woman who’d do stuff like that with me (3way etc.). It spoils a man, and it can be a long road back…
I think you vastly overestimate how much communication about sexual preferences happens in a conservative marriage scenario - in general my experience in those circles is nobody talks about sex to anyone of the opposite sex (women talk to each other about strategies for dealing with it, not so much about enjoying it, obviously I don't know what the men were talking about), and the clueless men do attempt surprises that the women, who are primed to tolerate rather than enjoy sex, do not appreciate.
Exactly. I’m a regular mainstream American woman, and I don’t know any women who like to be choked, etc. It’s the maladjusted women on the fringe who, I would argue, go along with some of the things mentioned in this thread to please their partners. Men being men, they probably have little interest in what the women in their lives actually feel or long for in an intimate relationship. Some of this “men being men” is likely a genetic/evolutionary tendency, but porn reinforces it.
From my experience even most of the maladjusted women don't seem to want that kind of thing or if they did they were very bad at communicating it.
I’m not sure why you’re putting your faith in a survey about which you know very little. How was it conducted? Who were the people who participated and how were they found? If they were mostly or even exclusively porn watchers then that explains the results.
Of course the men are going to believe the poll results about anything and all things that degrade women & borderline abuse if not outright abuse. Those are the men that hate women & have no respect for them.
Yes, and they can’t seem to grasp (or don’t want to grasp) the concept that women who are porn actors are victims of trauma and abuse which is what leads them into a life of porn to begin with. To these men, the behavior they see in porn is normal because they probably grew up watching it. Likewise, any women that participate in the behaviors sited by the survey are women who have also been damaged either by circumstances or by exposure to porn at a young and vulnerable age. Thank you, World Wide Web, and thank you to the men who drive all of this.
all of your answers are literally in the article itself and every assumption you’ve made about the survey is wrong. read before you comment next time
Surveys/polls are never accurate. Biggest example lately of how inaccurate they can be is the US election. I don't know a single woman with dignity & class that wants cum in their mouth, on their face & eyes, to be slapped, to be choked. Many Women are weak when it comes to speaking up for themselves & many are so desperate for a man's attention that they will agree to anything the man wants "for affection". They will allow a man to abuse them & degrade them, treat them like nothing but 3 holes on a body for a man's dick because they have no self respect or were taught they are only here for a man's pleasure. Or they learned about sex by watching porn & they think that shit is normal, arousing, acceptable. Anyone that believes even 1% of porn is real life is a fool, an abuser, a predator, a rapist or pedophile. Hence the reason so much porn has many women that look under 18 yrs old & most titles will mention "Teen" in the title of the smut video because men want that smut, to imagine it's a virgin & barely legal. Research the dark side of porn industry. A MF evil man named Max Hardcore was the devil on earth & is talked about in some of those videos because of the mental, emotional & physical abuse that put many women in the hospital. Thank God he died a painful slow death & lost function of his dick before that. 😂 That v was ultimate karma for the demon he was. The women in porn are often drugged, threatened personally or their family threatened once the devil's have them in their grip. They are raped, sodomized, held against their will until they do what producers want them to do for a video. It's horrific, all at the hands of men & their dicks. The suicide rate among female porn 'stars' is very real. To see the real world of porn & what the women go thru look up videos on YouTube from a channel called Fight The New Drug.
One thing to consider is that even if porn is not misleading men on average, it may be misleading men on the tail.
That is, suppose without porn, some men would think that no women like to be choked, and some other men think that some women like being choked. Then they watch porn, and their estimates of whether women like to be choked increase.
So then, some of the men who thought no women like to be choked now think some women like to be choked, and some of the men who thought that some women like to be choked now think all women like to be choked.
In that case, as you show, the average accuracy of men's predictions will increase; now men on average predict that some women like being choked, whereas before on average they predicted that few women like being choked.
But in this model, the rate of overestimates has massively increased as a result of porn! In this model, before porn, no men thought all women liked getting choked, but now some men do. And these men might decide to choke women during sex, based on the assumption that of course she likes it, which is presumably what the people concerned about porn misleading men are talking about.
So misleadingness cannot be understood unidimensionally; there are many different men and some may be mislead while others are coming to a better understanding.
There's also an interesting thing that can be done. You can use your model of the effects of porn on men's views about women's preferences to compute what views the men would have if they watched less porn or more porn, giving you a whole range of counterfactual beliefs. Then based on this, you can compute numbers for how many men got less accurate beliefs as a result of porn, vs how many men got more accurate beliefs as a result of porn.
Of course this sort of computation implicitly assumes that the effect of porn is the same for all men, which might not be the case. But the comparisons in your original post also sort of assume that, so I think it's a reasonable assumption to go with, given that we don't have any other assumptions.
If we want to model whether porn has different effects for different men, I suspect ideology may be an interesting place to look for interactions with. Ideology tends to form a lens for how people interpret the world. For instance, someone who thinks that female activists are heroes who represent women's interests may note that a lot of female activists talk about porn misleading men, and therefore be concerned about this and take porn with a heavy grain of salt, whereas someone who thinks that feminists are crazy and women like to play mindgames and men ought to dominate may take porn more strongly as an indication of women's natural preferences.
Though when it comes to measuring ideology there's a whole bunch of complications, so YMMV.
I have to say I find the whole choking trend bizarre, especially since it just wasn't a thing when I was dating 20 years ago (and as a guy who likes to be dominant . .it's just . .not sexy?). I also suspect the % of women who'd actually say they like being choked during sex is not particularly high.
Damn, that was a 4️⃣8️⃣ page email
If I am interpreting these results correctly:
1. The average man slightly over-predicts how much the average woman is into things.
2. In a randomly-selected sexual encounter between a man and a woman, the average man slightly under-predicts how much that woman is into things.
#1 isn't exactly what's reported, but I'm inclined to say the paid women are more representative of the general population, and the Twitter follower women are probably selected for being more into things (which is plausible for people who follow a sex worker). And #1 is true if you take only the sample of paid women.
I think you didn't take into account that choking is a recent fashion. Well, maybe not that recent, but at least of the last 10-20 years. Therefore, older men and women would not be as much into it as younger people. Besides, there are serious safety concerns about heavy choking involving carotid occlusion or breath stopping. So, using it to determine how much people are into rough sex is not accurate. Age and risk-taking are important confounds related to choking.
Seems like porn either has no effect or helps with men's estimations. That makes sense to me since porn industry tries to attract viewers and show them what they like to see. I think the argument against porn assumes that what men like is different from what women like which I think is wrong. The evolution requires both sexes to be attractive to each other and have similar sexual interests. I have seen my theory matches your data from the big kink survey.
How about the statement "Young boys who are about to start sexual relationships will get the wrong understanding of what women like"? I would love to see a graph about how accurately young boys with no sexual experience (so one or less sexual partner and age as low as the data allows) estimate women's preference by their amount of porn consumption.
Yeah I would say that porn gives men both good and bad ideas, so is pretty neutral. A lot of going down on women for example in porn these days.
What you've uncovered is that porn is indirectly molding women's sexuality because it creates expectations of them - from the shape of their pubic hair to the things they do in bed. They don't even have to watch porn themselves, the trends spread via social osmosis.
Very, ***VERY*** few women were into choking before it became a porn genre. You'd maybe read about some degenerate doing it in a French novel about bored nihilists and that was pretty much the extent of it.
But it is the thing to do now and women feel they must go along because when everyone does it they think they'd lose points in the sexual competition if they didn't. Women do a lot of self harming things in order to secure mates, things like breast implants or unpleasant sex acts, and publicly rave about how great they are while nursing their painful wounds in private.
You should do a poll among people 35+, ask them when they found out about choking and when they did it first. Ask the completely uninhibited free love hippies.
Women are more into rough hard sex than they are likely to admit. But I am not sure that is true of a long term relationship. Something that is exciting in the short run doesn’t necessarily translate to that over a long time period. I read a porn star asked whether she likes big penises. She said yes in the short run. No over time. She said in a long term Relationship you might be having sex when you aren’t 100% into it or super excited. But after five minutes you get into it and after it is over you are glad you did it. But if the guy is very large she said you have to be really into it or it hurts. She said you end up having less sex and being less sexually satisfied.
If you are not a woman, then you couldn’t possibly know this. I can tell you that regular mainstream women want nothing to do with what you are describing. Porn has normalized behavior for you that isn’t normal.
In my mind constricting someone's oxygen flow during sex goes beyond rough hard sex. There's evolutionary reasons why a lot of men and women prefer the latter; not really one for the former-you don't want to accidently kill someone you're trying to impregnate.
This is a survey, their results are anonymous so they have no reason to hide their true preferences. You're right that porn is changing their sexuality, but you're wrong about why. They are being exposed to new ideas and becoming more open to them, allowing them to explore their sexuality more freely.
If that were true, young people would be more relationally healthy and happy than previous generations, which stats show is not the case, with a large number of Gen Z not having any sex.
Here's another aspect where it's even more obvious: if porn were just enabling experimentation and personal expression, the fully shaved look would be a one-time experiment in pain and discomfort rather than the norm in correlation with sexual activity. You'd see a diversity of hair styles. If it were just a personal grooming preference, shaving one's labia would either not be the norm (shaving is uncomfortable and painful and really not ideal from a health standpoint) or it wouldn't be correlated with sexual activity (people groom themselves regardless of whether they're going to have sex or not).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science /article/abs/pii/S1743609519311166
The fact Gen Z had fewer relationships is not evidence that they have worse sex, there are many other factors that influence that.
Furthermore, the fact women do some things that are uncomfortable to please men is not evidence for your argument that women don't actually like what they said they do on this survey. If the topic of shaving showed up, women would likely respond that they'd rather not have to.
You wish that this were true because then it would justify your preferences and behavior, and for men it may be true. For women, it is not.
Quite the opposite actually, I prefer affectionate sex rather than BDSM. And surveys show this is common, men are typically less dominant than women would prefer them to be.
Being dominant or taking the lead isn’t the same as being abusive, which, I would argue, is what’s being described in this article and in these comments. Men can justify these behaviors all they want, but they are all porn watchers who assume these things are normal. The fact is that human beings don’t want to be abused unless they themselves have been abused or have been exposed to abuse via porn. Healthy, grounded women with a strong sense of self would never accept this kind of behavior.
"Cleaning
I am hesitant to publicly go into details about how I cleaned suspicious results out of my data (don’t wanna give people a handbook), but am happy to share this with other researchers privately."
+1 and well done! Savvy researchers already know what you're doing.
Interesting post. I would not have expect as many women to be into some of these things as your survey reports, e.g. choking.
A related question is to what extent does porn make men interested in trying things, believe thst it is appropriate to try things? E.g. in you survey men weren't all that far off on predicting how likely it is that women like anal sex (not very), but I could see porn use making men more interested in trying it or more willing to try to convince their partner to try it as a favor to him.
I also would be interested in how porn impacts prediction of degree of preference. Men might accurately predict that women aren't into something regardless of porn use, but it might cause them to assume something is a thing something women are into, but still an acceptable ask, while women are likely to rank it as unacceptable.
And there is the whole side issue of people who are into things but won't admit it or wouldn't ever think that. Lots of that happens.
"It is really hot and I love it if my partner is accidentally choking me slightly, but I would never ever ask to be or want to be "choked" as a specific action or part of sex."
That's fascinating. I wonder whether relationship context matters?
For example, I remember a one-night stand who was up for sex, but not for receiving oral - that was for relationships only.
Well fuck, once you get to specifics everything is up for grabs and no one is all that reliable.
I had a girl I was "friend-zone" dating for months, who would regularly talk about how she would never date me and had zero interest in me romantically, and appreciated I never put move son her, go off the deep end and start cutting and threatening suicide when I got a girlfriend. "Didn't I know she loved me and we were meant to be together?".
5 years later a "work girlfriend" was clear it was totally platonic and I had no shot with her. Said it explicitly multiple times. Until one night when out for drinks after work she clearly purposefully liquored me up and suggested we go back to my place for sex. Which we did. She was adamant she wasn't at all into oral and that was never happening, but we had some good drunk sex...
And then a week later she was blowing me left and right all weekend. And then a month later she asked me back to her place after a date, and I said "no I want to get some good sleep tonight", and she totally ghosted me from that point on extremely hurt.
Anyway, you get absolutely freaking everything.
I'm sure it all made sense from the other side!
I think the problem is that the 'paid' rather than the 'your-follower' women are much more common, and porn shifts men's estimation of preferences in a far kinkier direction than the average woman. (This appears to be the case for the older generation on your graph.) Thus, people buy Louise Perry's books.
FWIW, I've been through parts of my life where I had two regular sub play partners, and I *never* explored choking. No way to do it safely, risks to airway.
The opening paragraphs summarizing your study could not have been better. Data science is so much more fun with tongue-in-cheek “you were right for the wrong reasons.” Fantastic work and great delivery!
"On average, paid men reported having 9 sexual partners; paid women reported 10.
Both my-following men and my-following women reported 14 sexual partners.
My-following men were 35 years old, while the women were 31.
Paid men were 40 years old, while the women were 41."
Huh.
Well, that and all of these graphs make me feel a lot more normal, so thanks for that. I guess I'm not that bad at sex after all.
I have the impression that porn preference correlates with unrestricted sociosexuality - men who use porn are more likely to want to have casual sex with lots of different women. (E.g. I once did a factor analysis of sexual interests and found "watching porn" to load on the sociosexuality factor.) I think this makes sense from a theoretical perspective; porn isn't really made for romantics, and committed relationship porn sort of seems like an oxymoron. (I mean, you can have more romantic versions of porn, but it will still depict a total stranger...)
Whenever people find that porn correlates with stuff, I always wonder if it is confounded with unrestricted sociosexuality. I would tend to think that it is best to control for unrestricted sociosexuality, though I suspect moral zealots would instead argue that porn causes unrestricted sociosexuality and that therefore one shouldn't control for it.
> committed relationship porn sort of seems like an oxymoron. (I mean, you can have more romantic versions of porn, but it will still depict a total stranger...)
I disagree with that last claim. There are many situations where porn depicts someone you're familiar with:
- Fan-made porn depicting pre-existing fictional characters, e.g. "a bunch of colored pencil drawings of all the different characters in Harry Potter fucking each other".
- OnlyFans and camming sites, where you might follow specific sex workers.
- Dating sims, where you might have dozens of hours of gameplay interacting with a given love interest (including both explicit and pg scenes).
It might be interesting to see whether different types of erotic materials have different correlations with sociosexuality-related variables.
> and committed relationship porn sort of seems like an oxymoron.
Isn't this just "romance" novels that are 2/3 erotica?
There is a general trend:
People who don't like X, and don't do or use X, will, when they notice that X relates to undesirable trait Y, presume that X causes Y.
Though this trend might be ameliorated through education, cultural shifts, and yelling at people on Substack, actually curing in such a way is impossible, not least of all because this trend is itself an X relating to a Y, which, like most Y, has nonzero heritability.
"men who use porn are more likely to want to have casual sex with lots of different women". Interesting take on the data or reality. I don't think we have such a homogenous type of "male porn consumer", as usage is so widely spread among different personality types. People resorting to porn for "sexual maintenance" could (IMHO) as easily be demi-sexual types as any other kind of demographic. But just my two cents, from observations…
I wonder how much of this is confounded by people who seek out novelty. People who consume porn regularly might have a propensity towards seeking out novelty generally, so ADHD sufferers, BPD might be getting selected for.