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Pornography is a huge industry. In fact, it is difficult to wrap one’s head around how big a business pornography is. According to the Science of Relationships Blog, pornography use generates 13 billion dollars a year, “which is more annual revenue than Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, eBay and Netflix produce combined.“
Although we do know that pornography has negative effects on people, little is known about the specific problems associated with the use of pornography. A new study addressed this question and found four particular problems associated with the use of pornography.
“To understand the effect of pornography on men’s romantic relationships researchers examined pornography viewing among young men who were in heterosexual relationships. They sampled 373 college-attending men who were involved in relationships of 4 months to just over 7 years in duration. The men were asked to complete a series of questionnaires, including measures of gender role conflict, attachment style, relationship quality, and pornography use. The questions measuring porn viewing asked about frequency, amount of time each week and per sitting, and if porn interfered or negatively impacted daily life.
What did they find? The frequency of men’s pornography viewing was positively associated with gender role conflict, insecure attachment, lower relationship quality, and decreased sexual satisfaction.” READ MORE
What Does This Mean?
The researchers note that their study could not determine whether these problems were caused by porn use or made the use of pornography more likely. It is probably some combination of both. For instance, because attachment styles are relatively fixed traits that are established in the first several years of life, it is more likely that anxious or avoidant attachment styles (as opposed to secure attachment) are associated with greater use of porn than it is likely that porn leads to insecure attachment. At the same time, there is good reason to believe that pornography use could contribute to gender-role conflict, since other studies have suggested that porn use tends to increase misogyny, and decrease both relationship quality and sexual satisfaction.
Porn Isn’t “Normal”–Even for Men.
Whether subsequent research determines that pornography is the cause or bad fruit of these problems, it is clear that porn use isn’t the sign of a normal, healthy functioning person. For instance, many people believe that more men’s use of pornography is both normal and unavoidable because they are “more visual” and because men “think about sex every 7-15 seconds.” These oft quoted “facts” are actually both myths (see here and here). In fact, as I point out in Beyond the Birds and the Bees: Raising Sexually Whole and Holy Kids. based on the available research it is much more likely that the reason men are more frequent users of porn is that male children are often more poorly attached than female children due to parent’s fear of giving too much affection to boys less they “sissify” them. The fact that this study found a lower association between securely attached men and porn use reinforces this conclusion. In other words, degree of porn use is not a normal part of masculine behavior, it suggests that many traits that we popularly associate with “maleness” are actually traits that men and women display if they are poorly attached.
Good Help is Available
Regardless, if you or someone you love is using pornography, don’t accept is as normal. Address it directly and seek appropriate help. To learn more about how to have a healthy, vital, adult sexuality read, Holy Sex! or, for help raising porn-free kids, check out Beyond the Birds and the Bees: Raising Sexually Whole and Holy Kids.