The idea that pornography leads to negative attitudes toward women is pervasive, helping shape obscenity laws, fueling censorship attempts and even spawning a recent Hollywood movie.
But the notion may have little actual foundation in fact, suggests a contentious new Canadian study that concludes the average porn user holds, if anything, more egalitarian views regarding women than non-users.
Many pornography aficionados might even be “useful allies” in women’s struggles for equality in work, income and public office, the researchers at London’s Western University argue in a paper that is already generating fierce criticism.
At the very least, they say, the study calls into serious question the view that pornography is so damaging that, in one activist’s words, it’s “what the end of the world looks like.”
“I’d rather not live in a culture where our government, lawmakers decide to regulate, outlaw behavior or material because they assume it’s harmful,” said Taylor Kohut, the post-doctoral fellow in psychology who led the study, about its value. “I’d rather they demonstrate it is, first.”
He and his colleagues analyzed data from 35 years of the General Social Survey, a government-funded U.S. project that interviews about 24,000 men and women a year on a variety of issues.
They reported in the Journal of Sex Research that the 23 per cent who reported having watched an “X-rated” movie in the previous year were no more or less likely than porn abstainers to identify as feminists, or voice support for the traditional family.
And the blue-movie watchers expressed on average more positive attitudes toward women in positions of power, and less negative attitudes toward abortion and women in the workforce than those who refrained from pornography.
One prominent, anti-pornography academic, however, charges that the study is at odds with the vast majority of research in the area, akin to denying climate change or the harms of smoking.
In fact, the easy and free access to often-aggressive sexual clips on the Internet has spawned a ubiquitous new porn culture that is warping young men’s sexual behavior and attitudes as never before, argued Gail Dines, a sociology professor at Boston’s Wheelcock College.
Men may say on surveys they believe in equality of the sexes, but still treat women as disposable sex objects, she said. Dines cited a 2014 German study of 384 males that found frequent porn use was linked to sex practices such as hair pulling, hard spanking and gagging.
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