What Porn Did to American Culture?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Seems absurd to me on the face of it.
Are men objectifying women? Yes. Have they done this since the dawn of mankind? Yes.
I could easily claim the reverse. Society shapes porn. It’s a reflection, not the other way around.
"Abundance"
"Network States"
MrBeast
half of NYC
and whomever this author is
Porn shapes society the exact moment when the majority of young people get the majority of their beliefs and views on sexuality, romance, relationships, gender roles, sensuality, etc, from porn. This isn't true of all groups of humans everywhere, but it's definitely true of many societies right now already, and I would say obviously so.
None of this is meant as a "moral panic" type point. I'm just saying, there's no point hiding from the reality that young people get their views on sex from online porn, and that has major effects on them and the whole of society.
I don't think it's true for porn or for any of the above things that people "do what they want" in any serious sense of the term.
It might be true in some sort of world without advertising, where media is presented neutrally, and barriers to creating and sharing (porn, music, plays, books, etc) are low, and we all explore and pick what we liked from these media sources in a deliberate, thoughtful way.
But that is so very, very far from the world we're in, surely?
Or a different way to make the point, just compare a pre-internet and post-internet kid. What did pre-internet kids know of sex when they were 14 or 15? And post-internet? This is a quick and easy example, but surely it's a major shift?
Yes, people listen to a wider range of music and watch a wider range of videos than ever before today, because there is a wider range available.
Most people are drawn to the same kind of content though so many people consume very similar things.
You state this casually, but it is one hell of a thing to claim.
In my experience this is not true at all. Porn shaped my opinion on sexuality and relationships like GTA informed my social norms and my stance on the use of violence. Sometimes things just are .. relief and don’t mean anything. It’s an escape not an education.
Ironically it is the organized religions that are by and large the most dominant factor in all types of dysfunction surrounding relationships and female rights. Porn is 1,5% of the problem compared to what those guys are doing.
Your 125 IQ mother being a stay at home mom while your deadbeat barely literate dad gets to work and rule “the household”. Now that’s a potent toxin to mess up youth. Funny how those guys tend to focus on porn, but now I’m just ranting. Excuse me.
I wasn't saying that statement you quote is true for all groups everywhere, I was explicit about that, if you reread. I was saying that if that threshold is met in a specific society at a given time, maybe then at that stage we could say that porn was "shaping society" there more than society was shaping porn. As in, it could be a threshold we could look at.
While I agree that it's a large claim by itself, and that it's going to be hard (or impossible) to measure, I think having an idea of a threshold like that can be useful for thinking about where we are. And I do think that "where we are" with porn and its influence is a lot more serious than people are comfortable admitting.
So yes, while I very much agree that religion is maybe the single other huge thing, the effect porn is likely having on human sexuality is something I think we vastly underestimate.
The bigger issue here is outmoded predominant protestant christian views of 'morality'. And that percolates all through the rest of USA culture, including into advertisements and commercialism. Their view of sex is as a sin, so its shamed, hidden, and secretly desired. All these things have popped up with all these pretty terrible results.
Sexuality is 'tittalting' so it helps sell. Those interactions aren't genuine, but transactional. Transactions themselves aren't the problem, but when people crave genuine sexuality and get faced with '$5 for next hour of OF', yeah. Takes advantage of people.
Advertisements also been going on for a while, always pushing harder to see what sells but still legal and norm enough. Like the hot rod magazines - does anybody really think if they buy a red mustang, they'll also get the 44dd blone bimbo?
And really, everybody should at least try a sex party (Bacchanal) once. Have to do some std checks ahead of time, but its just so liberating and freeing for everyone. It gets money, possessiveness, prudishness, and all those distorting things out of the way. And puts sex into perspective. And well, its fun.
And no, possessiveness in regards to other humans is honestly really bad. It may every so often feel good for a moment, in a 'they want me' sort of feel. But that has a really bad tendency to go off the rails and turn violent quickly.
There's ways to do sexuality and relationships healthy. Possessiveness, jealousy, shame, and other similar emotions aren't healthy for anyone involved.
I suppose you think you know better than thousands of psychologists who have explained the difference between adaptive and maladaptive. or perhaps you know better than billions of years of evolution. just because you don't understand how to bond with someone adaptively doesn't mean that there is no way to bond with someone adaptively. There's a reason why we want to make sure that our partners are actually bonded with us and trustworthy. It doesn't have anything to do with oppression. But your externalization and automatic presumption of pathology tells me a lot about what you must have experienced and what you never got to experience.
I’m in the “embrace sex, skip the shame” boat. In the Bay Area there’s a really solid polyamory community. I’ve been reading the books and working on my own communication issues and anxieties for a good 15 years now and at this point things flow so smoothly. I have so many people in my life I’m on a kissing basis with. It’s so lovely! I’m surrounded by genuine connection and affection. Me and my community have good communication. No one ever gets jealous as we’re all consensually dating a bunch of people. (I’m mostly “solo poly” these days.) I have some regular partners I share more structured, intentional loving and intimate connection with. I have cute friends I go on bike rides with and then kiss and cuddle while taking a break at the waterfront. I get invited to all kinds of functions. Sex is a source of genuine joy for me. I get tested once every two or three months and I have a clear communication protocol and safer sex practice I use with new people.
Amongst all this, porn is just a way to get my motor running. An arousing way to engage in self play and to build energy for what weekend adventures await. Or, if I’m so inclined, a way to ease my own stress and experience some physical release of energy and ease stress.
I’ve heard this notion before - that people who suffer from “porn addiction” often have an unhealthy relationship with sex, often coming from Christian puritanical views and shame of the self and the body. Drop the shame! Learn to love yourself. Learn to communicate your needs and desires. Be with your community. Have fun! I am. :)
I'm sure you're reading some of the other comments to me.
For example, I am married. And my partner has similar views as me. And there's nothing at all like looking at a man or woman, looking at my partner and a sly grin and nod, and we both go ask together!
But the most bile and hatred I see come from the puritanical groups of Christianity. They cannot only fail to understand, but I get moralized the whole time as well. Like, try it before you knock it?
And I'm even getting flack for recommending STD testing. Some diseases can hide, like herpes and HIV. I'd rather know for me and my lovers, rather than hurt them. And, its not much different than a covid test - keep the people around you safe.
Can your alternative produce a strong society that can survive external threats? Maybe it can, but intuitively I think it can't. And what would happen, then, is that a society based on polyamory would be destroyed and/or conquered by others who believe in traditional families.
I'm not saying that societies that preach traditional families are good or bad, just that they have a long history of surviving.
There’s so many things I think monogamous culture could learn from polyamorous people. Even if you’re only dating one person at a time, learning to deeply understand your own needs, set boundaries, and communicate clearly with others (mandatory skills in functional polyamory) are super useful skills for monogamous people.
Also who is to say that society lives and dies by who were kissing and sleeping over with and fucking? We also have a society that is obsessed with selfish consumption while an increasing number of people are excluded from our economic abundance, suffering at the outskirts. To me that’s way more likely to destroy society than who I’m sleeping with.
I just intuitively believe that if enough people think like you, there will no longer be a society that can support the existence of people like you. I can't prove this hypothesis.
From my lived experience in this community, absolutely nothing says to me this is some unstable condition. Everyone who is in this community is in it because they are happier this way, and there’s a lot of happy people in this community. Depending on how you slice it our community isn’t for everyone but that’s okay.
So I hear that you have that hypothesis. I can report from the ground people are happy and productive.
If you think there’s something specific that would lead to some sort of societal problem I would be interested to hear about it.
A gestalt of 3rd wave feminisism is "maybe if women are liberated, they will be hornier like men", and there was a huge amount of cultural messaging in this direction. It does not work, and as the interview entails, there is a lot of resentment from the women feeling like they were being propagandized to enjoy a hookup culture that didn't not fulfill their needs.
Either
1. men need to get less sociosexual 2. women need to get more sociosexual 3. wayyy more men need to come out as bi 4. or money needs to change hands.
We've already more or less tried and failed at 2 per the above, no one has a clear proposal for 1, 3 would be great but unclear how high the ceiling is, and then there's 4.
I would love to avoid 4 if anyone could actually come up with a serious proposal on how to massively increase sex party attendance / polyamory / etc. without money changing hands, but I am not seeing it.
If a woman is a slut, they are shamed. If a man is a slut, they are cheered on.
Or put another way, a woman has to play "hard to get" and can't be "easy". When was the last time you heard a man called "easy"?
There is a lot more shame put on woman for having a healthy sexuality that often leads to not exploring their desires.
There's just tons of writing on women against frustration with changing cultural norms around casual sex that doesn't mention stigma at all, and I just can't hand-wave all that away as "subliminated stigma", as convenient as that would be!
Besides, your list comes across as very male-centered[0]: how do we provide men with all the sex they neeEeEeddd?? And oddly enough one answer to _that_ question is also marriage.
Now, there are unhappy sex-less married couples, so of course one question is how to address that. But at least in my and -as far as I can tell- my friends' experience marriage does provide men and women with the level of sexual activity that they need/want.
BTW, your (1) is probably happening as testosterone levels go down. Or at least one would expect that to be the case. If it is then you're getting your wish.
None of this is judging anyone.
[0] If your list is not male-centered, then it is still centered on this idea that sex parties are the bomb, but that's almost certainly not what most people think. I've a ton of close friends from all walks, many of them coupled, many not, and not one has ever even hinted that sex parties are a thing they care about, let alone come right out and said so.
Sex parties are liberating for some people. Not for others. People who go to sex parties are not healthier or unhealthier in my experience.
There is no doubt whatsoever that people who go to sex parties or who have more sex partners are more likely to be diseased. It's just germ theory and simple numbers: the more sexual contacts you have the more diseases you will carry.
Anyone desirous of having children someday would probably want their offspring to be free of disease. Ergo, steer clear of disease and seek a partner who has done the same.
Total strawman argument.
However, the bigger issue here is the demographic bomb detonating in slow motion. Demoting sexuality to a video game at your Bacchanal appears to be slow-motion suicide.
Possibly you could explain how your approach perpetuates the society, please?
Interesting perspective. But this is actually what Protestant Christians believe: https://ca.thegospelcoalition.org/columns/ad-fontes/5-surpri...
What Christianity actually critiques is sex outside of marriage. The reasoning is that sex is viewed as the most complete form of love between two people, and so it belongs within the lifelong commitment of marriage. Even then, it's worth noting that sex isn't at the center of Christian moral teaching. "Sins of the flesh" are taken seriously, but they're considered less grave than sins like pride or cruelty, something C. S. Lewis explains very clearly.
It's less about being "anti-sex" and more about believing that something so powerful deserves a proper framework.
We can argue about the moral framework of Christian values, of course and many have, thoughtfully, but it's important to at least critique what Christianity actually teaches, rather than a caricature of it.
Bizarre that I was downvoted for simply providing evidence. HN readers sure can be a strange bunch!
(There is a movie I like, “Old-fashioned” (2004), that has a moment where the hero talks about “a perfect honeymoon”.)
You were on a good track, until that sentence.
There are multiple sects of Christianity that criticize sex for many other contexts. You may be somehow unaware of this, but homosexual pleasures are disapproved by some churches.
Historically, that's still quite wrong. The Church consistently taught (at least in the West, since circa 400 A.D.) that total abstention was required of their holy leaders.
Besides being a complete stretch, has anyone even showed that men generally watch porn with cruelty? It's never on the front page, and it's kind of aberrant when hyper-enthusiastic "partners" are on offer.
does this somehow relate to your idea?
[1] https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review#gender-...
Paradoxically, I could offer a starkly different argument - it is women who prefer BSDM if you look at the sales numbers of certain books.
Edit: I ended up reading the rest of it, and... there's just nothing there? If you're interested in a short interview with Sophie Gilbert, maybe this is appealing, but if you've never heard of her, I don't see the draw.
What I find interesting is that it seems to equate critiquing porn with critiquing the treatment of the people in porn. Those are 2 very distinct things, you can have issues with treatment within the industry without going down a prudish anti-porn route.
Personally I feel like much of the issues with Porn, particularly in the US, stem from being uncomfortable talking about sex. Instead of feeling like we need to hide and be ashamed that we watch porn, it should be talked about so from a younger age we know its fantasy. We know that these positions, angles, noises, the perfection, isn't normal.
Sex is messy.
This shame about sex, our bodies, leads to many of these problems with how we view porn.
I strongly believe that there is nothing wrong with consuming porn, casually, with your partner(s), regularly, whatever. It is just another way to explore your sexuality and we should not demonize that. We should however address the problems with the industry, but without demonizing its existence.
Made worse by maybe afraid to speak up because of how might be judged ("Oh this person was asking for it because they do porn").
Feeling like you have no power.
It is for sure a complicated issue and societal norms and expectations play into that.
The gay male money-free casual sex market "clears" --- grindr does in fact work. The (unpaid) heterosexual casual sex market will never clear regardless of app design, there are simply not even women interested in not enough casual sex for it to be any other way.
Whether its 2024 voters freaking about inflation (despite it being lower than in other countries), or the rise of the manosphere since hetero dating apps, Americans in particular are very consumer oriented society that freaks out when consumption desires get impeded. Somewhere, between many culture forces (porn, 1990s-2010s sex positivity, hookup culture discourse divorced from reality, hip hop lyrics (?!) the end of the Hayes code (?!), straight men's "needs rising in the hierarchy" rose to include much more casual sex than previous generations aspired to....and now the cat is out of the bag.
A lot of the discourse around this reminds me of say, gentrification discourse. There is a wish that the demand would just go away, that we could rewind the clock to when straight men were less horny, or fewer wealthy professionals wanted to live in the urban core. Neverminding that the former is a lot more sympathetic a goal than the latter, it feels like pipe dreaming divorced from actual tactical thinking about the size of the problem and therefore what remedies are actually sufficient. Actually rewinding the clock is, at least, really hard.
Capitalism has been invading the domestic sphere for decades. It's the same process as, say, less home-cooking and more takeout or restaurant trips too. (And in that case, freeing women from the kitchen is unambiguously good!)
In the housing case, the moral and correct answer is "just build more dense housing" --- allow supply to meet demand. In the straight casual sex case, the analogous answer is "just legalize prostitution", but the morality is admittedly less clear cut. Personally, I think we should try it, as all the other answers seem deeply seriousness given the scale of the problem. Better to do something that might actual work, then half-ass things that will certainly fail while the problem gets worse.
Paradoxically, I'd have a more sound argument if I wanted to argue for the opposite (or, more precisely, the disappearance of sexual intercourse form Hollywood moves - it was omnipresent in the 80s and even 90s).
Of course, declaring that in an interview would be impossible. However, it is obvious. Anyone should be able to make that connection.
Is porn to blame? If it is, then any other kind of sexualization platform also is (you can think of it, I don't need to name it). It's hard to trace a line that doesn't leave you in a place of hypocrisy.
American culture adopted porn as a word, outside its original realm. The expression "action porn", for example, puts the practice into a everyday word, normalizing it. This kind of expression has gone through many entertainment industries and iterations.
The combination of sexual repression and porn is dangerous, the dangerous part being the sexual repression. That repression has also became part of the american culture, and in much higher doses than porn.
So how exactly can it mold the world?
Providing 3 examples of things you actively have to seek online; admittedly i dont know instragram but given they have to then redirect you to onlyfans is just yet another hoop to jump through? Not many are actually doing this.
>mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people.
Then this absurd jump to this? Porn that's not particularly available is somehow impacting immigrant men?
This article is really about politics; but they put a sock puppet in front with unbacked up ideas they just leap over.
Hasn't American society been hating women since its inception? For a majority of its history they couldn't vote.
My not researched take and intuition is if you feel like the world is regressing on treating women well, its because of religion. Like abortion rights being taken back is a religious thing. Ireland did something similar, is Irish culture overly affected by porn too?
> One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people.
So before porn in the 2000s, women, immigrants, gay and trans people were all respected in the human history? Is that the point the author is trying to make?
I mean, "black lives matter", "me too", and generally the wokisme came after that, right?
I am not defending porn, just trying to find where the causation is. What if I said "the world we live in has been molded by the violent video games from the 2000s ("obviously"), and probably that is the reason why we started having wars after 2000"? Wouldn't someone be quick to tell me that we had wars long before the 2000s?
Like this, I wouldn't immediately think that women's rights have become worse after the 2000s in general. I don't need to go back very far to find the time where women were not even allowed to vote.
What distinguishes porn from other depictions of sex? Could it be that porn and social atomization are symptoms of deeper technological or cultural trends, rather than assuming one causes the other?
There is a Sophie Gilbert who writes for The Atlantic, so maybe that's how this article came to be. I haven't been able to determine if it's the same person or a coincidence.
An apathetic vacuum. (American? Capitalist? Global 'Elite'?) Society does not care about the people, actively seeking to use and exploit.
When things go badly who gets the pain? The common person, the modern serf. When things go well who takes the rewards? Their boss's boss's boss.
Porn is just a scapegoat, a symptom of the larger issues. Of the broken social contract for being part of a larger whole and everyone being better off for that collective work.
Though perhaps it's also a symptom of the failed liberation of society from outdated gender roles. Movements towards equality made some progress on empowering women, but didn't finish the job of shattering the yolk of stereotypical roles entirely to reshape the social contract for equality, inclusion, and freedom from old stereotypes. Echos of those old stereotypes, and new flawed ones, can be seen as the basis of the roles explored through exaggerated fiction even if it's erotic in nature.
"Porn is... a symptom of the larger issues."
Since male monkeys in the lab will willingly trade food for monkey porn, I think you have a pretty high hurdle to prove that societal issues cause porn.
Also, you continue the article's unproven premise that "porn is bad". That's an opinion. And objectively, what few factual studies I've seen tends the other direction: ready access to porn correlates with lower sexual violence in countries.
What effects did it have on you?
"made me aware of the extreme perversions"
Such as?
I’ve never experienced this even in the slightest and I’ve definitely had moments where I was unattractive to my partner and not having sex with them and substituting with porn. It was cause they were being a jerk and I didn’t wanna fuck them. Shocker.
I've been in situations like the one you describe but this was not that. It's not about attractiveness. A good analogy is that you can sate your sweet tooth by eating certain fruits. But if you start binging candy bars and ice cream, suddenly that pineapple you used to love no longer does the job.
As for the perversions, you don’t need me to enumerate them. Go visit pornhub if you’re somehow still unclear.
By the way, I’m no prude or religious zealot. I have nothing against sex workers. But the industry fraught with abuse that I can’t be a party to in any way. If you have no problems with it then good for you I guess.
One of the best tools that I continue to employ is deprogramming that objectification. Helping them to see the humanity and personhood of women again. It's incredible how most porn can turn from enticing to absolutely repulsive once you adopt this mindset.
(I'm not judging you but) It's easy for you to say when you have the real thing. And that's why our societies have failed for a lot of people, and why we now must handle porn the same way we are handling drug problems.
For the GP: "escape the clutches of porn" when it's the only alternative to suicide due to lack of social contact? You end up with incels who would do anything to have a way to be a part of society, and most of the time it's in a bad way.
Been there done that, our society has changed in the wrong way and I don't think we're blaming the right guys. "Helping them to see the humanity and personhood of women again" is misled. The issue is that some people have no human contact with men or women at all. No male parental figure which is more important and impacting than the contact with the other sex, even in a social context. Focusing on porn and women is useless in that context (since I suspect OP is talking about, well, porn and incels and the whole bro thing).
This is a pretty common reaction to someone else's addiction. I've heard people say the same about alcohol and other less-socially acceptable drugs. I'm not a porn addict but I suspect that for people who are the response would be something like asking an alcoholic why they want another drink when they've already had so many: how is it possible to not want another drink?
Porn might not be good but your anecdote is a long way from evidence. What you've seen is a tautology; the people who DON'T have a problem aren't showing up in your program.
I am open to arguments that there’s nothing good about sports gambling, however.
I think this is your problem. I didn't make a claim. I provided a personal story about running these groups and how objectification of women was a common result of a porn addiction (something the individual being interviewed mentioned). I was simply providing some anecdotal evidence that agreed with the interviewee.
I wouldn't make an absolute statement about my experiences for the same reasons you're using to criticizing my comment.
That's the claim you made. Every story ends badly because you've never seen one end well at your recovery program.
You've never seen a story end well because by the time you're involved everything has already gone wrong. You're like a fire fighter claiming homes are dangerous because you always see them on fire.
The people who don't have a problem aren't coming to your program.
Exactly, I think we're just talking past each other. My comment very much implies this; I didn't feel the need to state it explicitly.
Are we sure that porn "molds" people like that? Or is it a claim similar to the ones against video games?
Likewise, I've often seen porn used as a tool to deal with other subsurface issues. The high of the hormone rush brings temporary relief, but like most highs, it requires more and more for it to stay the same.
Interestingly, no one in any of the comments so far has provided any anecdotal experiences of porn resulting in the opposite effect on someone. I don't doubt it happens, but it seems more people are focused on attacking my statement rather than engaging in a conversation. I'm happy to hear more stories.
I am kind of interested in the causality. The featured article says that "porn has molded the world we live in", which is much wider than saying "some people get addicted to porn and it is bad", right?
It seems like this is a result of selection bias. If you're already seeing a group of people that have decided that porn is a problem for them, then the porn is going to be a problem for the people you're seeing.
That seems like a very strong blanket statement. Are you specifically referring to a porn addiction or just consuming porn at all?
If the later... not everyone has negative stories about porn.
Can you speak to other transformations you've observed?
The interview repeats the common aphorism "sex sells", but it should follow it up "sex sells other things". Sublimated desires into other categories this way doesn't seem good either.
What are you talking about? Sex workers are routinely beaten / degraded / killed at higher rates than other people.
- Sex work is much more dangerous because it is illegal
- Legal sex work could lead to increased trafficking when there is so much unmet demand for legal immigration, but abundant legal immigration would solve that
- The people currently seeking out illegal sex work, or seeking it out in countries were there is more violence against women in general, are probably much more prone to violence. Increasing the size of the industry would result in a "regression to the mean" among johns
The porn problem is a bunch of people subtlety rewire their libidos in anti-social ways over time. That is involving orders of magnitudes more people than those that currently beat sex workers, and men and women alike (as the interview makes clear). A good legal prostitution system would have be:
1. Still quite expensive
2. No "pimps" or anything of that nature
3. Sex workers higher their own private security, run their own brothels, little reliance on police (who are likely to continue to be misogynist fucks regardless of how the law changes)
Basically poorer men, instead of going to cheaper brothels where the workers are treated worse, would have to "save up" for fewer trips to still-expensive establishments where 2 and 3 are still abundantly true. High American equality does also make this a challenge, for sure.