The great porn panic Causal arguments rest on pseudo-science

Does pornography warp the minds of the men who watch it? Does it “rewire” the brain? According to a fashionable orthodoxy among journalists — whose favourite mode of assessment, as ever, is panic — the answer is so obvious as to not require much supporting evidence. The consensus is that watching pornography will disfigure even normal men’s lives: “reprogramming” their sexual preferences, tanking their mental health, eliminating their romantic opportunities, rendering them emotionally damaged dropouts disposed simultaneously toward sexual violence and erectile dysfunction, and disinclining them to meet, marry and have families. A safe rule of thumb: if you can bring to mind a modern-day sexual ill, hypothetical or actual, then somewhere a columnist with a deadline has tried to pin the blame for it on porn.

The causal power attributed to porn has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. Of course, that isn’t to say that there aren’t lots of good and familiar reasons to dislike pornography. A lot of porn is disgusting, tacky and misogynistic; it certainly harms the people who make it; to be aroused by its more depraved varieties is, in a completely straightforward way, a manifestation of bad taste. Perhaps the young, or those of limited inspiration, even pick up hackneyed or harmful sexual “scripts” from what they watch. Sex-positive progressives who try to suppress this knowledge for ideological reasons are usually guilty of embarrassing levels of self-deceit.

Not content to rely on those considerations, however, the present wave of anti-porn journalists usually also make extravagant empirical claims about the potential population-level effects of porn use. For instance, Louise Perry and others have suggested that the rise in pornography consumption has seen rates of erectile dysfunction “skyrocket”, from single to double digits, in recent years. Such claims may have the ring of truth. But is there any hard evidence behind them? Not really. There is a dearth of gold-standard longitudinal data. Much of what does exist fails to find statistically significant correlations between ordinary levels of pornography consumption and erectile dysfunction. The catastrophising results have to be cherry-picked: in this case, as the science writer Stuart Ritchie discovered, from unrepresentative self-reported survey data collected from Swiss military conscripts.

Even when pathological, rather than ordinary, use of pornography is brought into focus, journalists steadfastly neglect obvious confounding factors. Extreme pornography use is not independent of other kinds of sexual dysfunction. Men who are predisposed to erectile dysfunction for other reasons may also spend more time seeking solace in porn. Men who are intrinsically bad at relationships will both experience relationship failure and end up as lonely masturbators for want of anything better to do. Innately violent men will both mistreat women and be drawn to depictions of mistreatment in pornography. There is nothing ad hoc about invoking such causes: we have independent reason for believing they are operative. Nobody sensible — and, in particular, no sensible anti-porn feminists — believe on reflection that dysfunctional, violent or aberrant men only came into existence with the advent of high-speed internet. They have always existed. An economical explanatory starting point, then, is that porn does not do all that much to fundamentally reshape men’s sexual dispositions. For the most part it reflects, rather than moulds, their natures, ministering to impulses they have already, however depressing that may seem. The contrary view — that porn corrupts healthy minds — is a completely blank-slatist piece of speculative psychological theorising.

If anti-porn journalists find it hard to accept that starting point as even a live option, it may be because many of them seem, however unreflectively, to be operating with an unreconstructed “behaviourist” background picture of a kind that few working scientists have accepted for about 70 years. This particular anti-porn school of thought conceives of human (or at least male) sexual psychology as a blank slate written upon by the environment, in particular by the internet. Sexual dispositions are thought of as resulting from a process of stimulus and response under conditions of reinforcement learning. The implicit view is something like this: men watch porn and are psychologically rewarded by the pleasure they feel; the association between porn and reward is reinforced by repetition; the effect is that in their sex lives they seek similar rewards, or never seek sex to begin with, or can’t get an erection, or pursue ever more intense versions of the original reward in the form of more extreme porn, or whatever. In its heyday, behaviourist style associationism was an attractively general account of how all learning might take place, but it was widely abandoned in the mid-20th century in favour of paradigms that posited far more innate mental structure, with all behavioural traits shown to depend significantly on genetic factors. Human beings are not blank slates, either in their lives generally or their sexual lives specifically.

None of this is to downplay the evidence, most notably in the form of recent anecdote and survey data, that men can pick up harmful or sadistic ideas, like strangulation, from porn. People engage in cultural learning and imitation of this kind all the time, to both good effect and ill. Acknowledging it requires nothing like a revisionary psychological account of how internet porn “rewires” the mind. In fact, it is the anti-porn behaviourist journalists who would struggle most to account for such unwelcome cultural developments in an accurate way. For many women, as they accurately insist, are repelled by the gross practices that are now ubiquitous in pornographic culture (women’s brains, somehow, resist being “rewired” by the stimulus). Men on the other hand are helplessly “reprogrammed” by all they watch. The motto seems to be: anti-behaviourist psychological nativism for women, rampant behaviourism for men. But that is just silly: a grab-bag of ill-assorted theories invoked as convenience dictates.

Are our journalists and public commentators really so naïve? Anyone worried that the opposition is presently being straw-manned should read Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel’s recent, well-received, book, Pornocracy. In among some well-taken points about the iniquities of the porn industry is an utterly bonkers theory of human psychology hastily dressed up in the reassuring language of neuro-jargon. Porn, we learn, is so “addictive as to cause brain damage”. The visual spectacle of humans having sex is, we are rather implausibly told, a “superstimulus we’ve not evolved to process”. Consequently, it does not “serve our sexual tastes; it shapes them”. Porn “rewires the brain to be aroused by what the user sees and only by that”. “The more orgasms you have with porn,” we are warned, “the more sexually and emotionally attached to it you’ll become.” (So far, so behaviourist. But if the pleasure of masturbation really had such a radical conditioning effect, one might wonder why homo sapiens didn’t millennia ago become a short-lived species of emotionally-self-attached solitary tossers.) No allowance is made for the possibility that different men might be innately predisposed to respond differently to the same environmental stimulus. Porn has turned men into “wanking automata”. If only it were true that mere repeat exposure to the same stimulus did in fact “reprogramme” the mind, Bartosh and Jessell could stop repeating themselves so much and consider the reader successfully re-wired.

Duly alarmed by their own findings, the authors wonder gravely whether we may be witnessing the “de-evolution of humanity into an ape whose every thought and action is influenced… by the adult industry and its values – Homo Pornographicus”. Nor are they cautious about offering advice on the basis of this measured and careful analysis. Given the risk that you will wake up one morning next to a “de-evolved” porn-addicted ape, it may “make better sense for women to swear off men than to put up with a partner who uses pornography”.

Now, such bold counsel surely calls for overwhelmingly robust empirical backing. What are Bartosh and Jessel’s grounds for their startling claim that porn “has the power to enslave its users”? Helpfully, the entire second chapter, “How porn changed our brains”, takes up the question, gesturing at an “Everest of evidence” to draw on. “When people use pornography,” we read, “they create new ‘sex rewards’ pathways in their brain.” Every time they masturbate, “men experience a ‘spritz of dopamine’ that further consolidate[s] the connection between pornography and pleasure” — “reinforcing the new ‘pornsex’ brain network at the expense of the ‘real sex’ neural pathways”. The result is “irreparable damage to the brain’s dopamine system”.

Those who feel a twinge of doubt as to whether contemporary neuroscience has indeed uncovered dedicated “porn sex” and “real sex” neural pathways in the architecture of the human brain may turn to the chapter’s references. There they won’t find much. Bartosh and Jessel are unable to cite a single probative randomised controlled trial or longitudinal study to back up any of their alarmist claims about the effects of porn. Instead, they repeatedly cite from an anecdote-driven pop science book by Norman Doidge, a Canadian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst best known for promoting non-standard remedies for congenital and neurodegenerative diseases that make use of the “brain’s healing energies”. Later on, a promising reference to “dozens of studies [that] have identified the addictive capability of pornography” leads to the non-peer-reviewed work of an anti-masturbation campaigner called Gary Wilson. He is best-known for giving a TED talk on porn addiction that accumulated 17.5 million views, and which is now prefaced by a disclaimer notifying viewers that the presentation contains “assertions that are not supported by academically respected studies in medicine and psychology”.

Polemical overreach often harms a theory more than it helps it. Bartosh and Jessel sidestep obvious responses to their arguments. They misleadingly suggest more evidence is on their side than it is. They ignore evidence that compulsive behaviours have nothing like the pharmacological profile of addictive substances. They risk trivialising the category of addiction by reconceiving all actions positively reinforced by a “spritz of dopamine” as incipient dependencies. And they have their model of porn addiction rely on a strained and somewhat impressionistic analogy between the “extremity” of visual content and stimulant concentration, allowing them to insinuate that men’s initially vanilla erotic tastes escalate insatiably until they all become pornographically-reprogrammed rape fantasists (again, not a phenomenon there is much high-quality evidence to support).

The view that human beings are easily corrupted by imagery is a remarkably seductive cultural trope. Socrates proposed banishing the poets from the ideal city because of their destructive capacity to excite the soul with their fictions. Recent cultural history testifies to our tendency to overestimate the psychological damage done by media of all kinds. The panics of the Nineties and 2000s, over whether video games and R-rated movies disposed their viewers to violence, were remarkably like the porn panic of today. Then too, hysteria far outstripped the arrival of anything close to confirmatory evidence for the theory advanced by panicked columnists and cultural commentators, and such evidence has failed to come to light in the years since. Still, people seem unable to resist the idea that morally depraved media must itself be a kind of poison taken in through the eyes and ears, harming the viewer, despite the striking example provided by the long history of analogous panics whose specific fears now look like relics of parochial concern.

It does no service to the cause of anti-porn commentators that they so often make their arguments depend on shaky psychological presupposition and tendentious empirical conjecturing. But one shouldn’t expect them to stop any time soon. Behaviourist scare tactics provide too versatile a template for cultural critique. And anyway, like the targets of their favourite argument, if there’s one feeling a columnist knows better than most it’s the temptation to set shame and caution aside, slump down in front of the computer, and desperately bash out another one.

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