By Chris Sick
Few topics grind a polite conversation to a screeching halt like talking about porn. Unless you preface it with a qualifier like “food” or “car,” you probably can expect to be met with some uncomfortable silence.
Polling has found that only 30 percent of Americans believe it’s morally acceptable to view pornography, with 66 percent indicating it is wrong. The study, which focused on changing values among Millennials compared to older Americans, found that younger Americans are much more open to pornography, but only relatively so – they split on the issue, 51 percent indicated disapproval and only 41 percent approval.
These findings might not sound that surprising if you’re not familiar with the fact that the Internet is for porn, literally, with estimates that up to 30 percent of all Internet traffic is pornography. Other metrics, such as unique visits, suggest that porn sites attract more eyeballs than streaming video services such as Netflix or Hulu, by several orders of magnitude.
It’s pretty unlikely that the lonely 30 percent of Americans comfortable judging porn as morally acceptable are responsible for all that traffic. There’s a lot of evidence that respondents are less than honest about what they get up to when no one is looking. A survey about Americans’ work habits found 3 percent willing to admit to watching porn at work, but the Nielsen Company reports that the real number is closer to 30 percent.
The data only can tell us so much from the outside, but if we accept all (or at least, most of it) at face value, we’re left with more questions than answers. The numbers from sites like Pornhub and similar sources suggest that far more Americans are watching porn than not, despite consistent and widespread moral disapproval. This suggests a lot of shameful private browsing is happening, but why the fear of being honest about it?
For Her Eyes Only
To better understand, it might be helpful to look at the emergent genre of porn explicitly for women. For the most part, many producers of porn aren’t concerned with what women might want to see. It’s a little tricky to gauge, but Nielsen data suggests that women might account for up to a third of porn viewers. However, they make up such a tiny percentage of paying customers, that payment processors automatically flag female names as potentially fraudulent charges.
It’s long been accepted wisdom that women don’t watch pornography or do a lot of other things, because they’re just not as interested in sex as men. But research suggests it might have far more to do with social conditioning. When research includes controls for that, reputational damage, and potential risks of assault, they’ve found that women are just as likely as men to accept offers of casual sex. More and more it’s becoming accepted that woman are just as interested in visual sexual stimulation as men, and just as likely to watch porn. Other research has found that as many as 40 percent of women film their own pornography, the problem with mainstream porn might not be women, as much as what they’re seeing on offer. Female porn director Jacky Saint James told Slate.com in 2013 that: “We’ve done enough research on that demographic to know that a large percentage of women watching our stuff do not want to see cum shots above the neck. They don’t want to see something that is gonzo or all-sex.”
These issues have led some producers, such as Saint James and Courtney Trouble, to offer an alternative model to the mainstream industry. While Saint James has produced porn “for women,” Trouble and others are focused on creating pornography that isn’t just feminist and female friendly, but also ethically produced. So-called “queer porn” also attempts to explicitly work to present a range of body types and gender and ethnic identities in a sexual way without fetishizing them. Many of these producers are women who watch and enjoy porn, and are working to create porn that’s as ethical as it is arousing.
Real-World Consequences
The moral disapproval of porn has real-world ramifications, beyond the sanitization of Times Square. When the Department of Justice was caught pressuring the banking industry to crack down on less-than-savory-but-still-legal businesses, such as payday lenders, apparently on their list were porn producers and performers.
But that disconnect – between what people do behind closed doors alone with their laptop and what they’re willing to admit or accept in public – might be one of the bigger problems. More honest conversation about what gets us off and how often might mean less stigma of the industry, and less seediness overall.
Whether it’s complaints about the implications of the content, or the confused expectations of a generation brought up on porn as sex education, there’s a lot wrong with porn, and little suggests we’re going to have much luck getting people to watch less of it. Porn serves as a safe space—for both women and men, based on the search queries – to explore fantasies they might not get to enjoy in real life.
But the lack of acceptance of the industry, and our widespread use, if not exactly “support,” of it leaves it strangely out on the margins. As sales dwindle thanks to more widespread access to free sites, producers seem to be in a race to the bottom to produce the most extreme scenes, get the youngest models, and generally one another.
An honest reckoning of how mainstream porn is – get everyone talking – all 2,300 Americans visiting Pornhub right this second – about what kind of fantasies they really have and what kind of porn they’re willing to accept.
