Looking forward to the comments on this one!

Hard-core pornography looks very phallocentric, often with a single woman being used as a sort of masturbatory tool shared between several men.

I'm certain I saw a Jack Chick comic promoting just that idea back in the 1980s or thereabouts. The notion that pictures of nekkid women makes you queer was as strange then as now.

The odd congruence of feminist doctrine and fundamentalist Christian ideas isn't all that surprising, really. Modern "gender feminism" is essentially Puritanism in a hemp-cloth blouse. A Calvinist would say "Man is innately sinful and damned," while a feminist would say "Men are innately sinful and damned."

I don't think porn will turn you gay, unless you're already bisexual or something. Although intensity goes up over time, I don't think this will cross a line like staight/gay, which is linked strongly to a person's identity.

Strangely enough though, I agree with the Naomi Wolf article. IMO, it's the much more plausible scenario, that real women are less attractive in proportion to how much men associate sex with pornography. There might be an empirical way to test this too, for example looking at internet use in individual states versus marriage or dating rates. I remember a little while back you were scoffed at the idea that guys would come to prefer cyberwomen to real women Razib, maybe you can put it to the test?

Why should anyone pay to buy Playboy when you can look at Voyeurweb and Guess Her Muff for free?

I could see there being a Pavlovian effect between sexual arousal and watching hardcore porn (50% male) compared to watching strippers or such. (Ron White's bit about this is insightful)

How many 'main-stream' live shows involve male performers?

This is like calling someone gay because they watch project runway or wear an earring.

Rather than discuss the sexual urges of all people, he finds it easier to say it's gay. Probably more effective for 11-year olds, anyway.

My experiences with the christian right is that their world-view is becoming increasingly divergent from the rest of society. They are also becoming more "authoritarian" as well. I don't think that they accept the notion that the individual is an autonomous agent and that morality is contractual in nature (I think this is the default view of morality held be most people even if they do not articulate it this way).

The Christian right is actually very similar to the liberal-left in the belief that people should not be allowed to live their own lives and pursue their own goals and happiness in life, but must be made to serve some larger purpose than pursuit of their own lives.

Both the Christian right and the liberal left are authoritarian by nature.

There is such a thing as male sexuality turned inwards, but it's not homosexuality.

It might actually be plausible that pornography increases homosexuality in women.

Women have more erotic plasticity, so pornography and norms featuring lesbians probably increase bisexual arousal in female viewers.

And men with higher sex drives are not more likely to be attracted to men, but women with higher sex drives are more likely to be attracted to women. So if exposure to straight pornography influences sex drive or sociosexuality it might also increase female attraction to other women.

I never heard that looking at nude girlie pics such as Playboy turns you gay, but I have heard that looking at pictures of hardcore porn with exposed genitals during adolescence can really mess you up. I always wondered. If you are at the stage where you think, girls, yech, wouldn't looking at a hairy wet vagina really disgust you and keep you disgusted? People should take care what happens to kids of impressionable age.

If you are at the stage where you think, girls, yech, wouldn't looking at a hairy wet vagina really disgust you and keep you disgusted?

in which case they wouldn't keep looking. when i was 8 some kids stole a penthouse (from someone's father, i forget) and we looked at it. everyone kind of agreed that the nudity and actions were ridiculous. at that age naked adults, where the man was sucking the woman's breasts was just a funny image which we couldn't really fathom. and we didn't go looking for that sort of stuff every again (in elementary school that is).

anyway, most kids who use the internet a lot should have randomly stumbled onto hardcore porn within the last 10 years. some of the older webmail systems had really bad spam filters. and of course before google search engines were notorious for throwing up irrelevant pornish results. (e.g., the problems with young girls looking for "barbie").

in which case they wouldn't keep looking.

Not always true.

One of my brothers started looking at porn when he was about 10. He got a reputation as dirty-minded and creepy, and when girls and boys started get interested in one another, he was left out. He liked it and wanted it, but he wasn't sexy -- it was like he was the perv uncle already when he was 15.

During his twenties he had a lot of lame relationships with women and a sleazy promiscuous streak, and only really got right when he was almost 30. He's fine now, but early exposure to porn definitely did him some harm. (One thing is that before the hormones kick in, porn is associated with nastiness and weirdness rather than desire.)

Not always true.

(One thing is that before the hormones kick in, porn is associated with nastiness and weirdness rather than desire.)

this seems to ring true. in any case john, yes, not always true. so who are the elementary age kids who keep looking at porn? not to be a dick (this is your brother :-), but the causality might be inverted here.

Hard-core pornography looks very phallocentric, often with a single woman being used as a sort of masturbatory tool shared between several men.

I'm a straight guy, and I definitely like pictures of naked women (even the occasional hair wet vagina). Still,I have to say that I find a lot of pornography quite unpleasant, for reasons you have touched upon. I mean, am I really supposed to get turned on by watching some guy ejaculate all over a woman's face? What's up with that anyway??? My best guess is this: the majority of the people who make pornography are, to put it bluntly, crass lowlifes with warped sexual tastes, and their audience is themselves. That would certainly explain it.

At least that is the best explanation I have been able to come up with. If I were making pornography it would come out very different. Who knows, it might even appeal to a larger audience. I could get rich! But in practice that's just not something I could ever imagine doing, and so it's left to the sort of people who can.

I mean, am I really supposed to get turned on by watching some guy ejaculate all over a woman's face? What's up with that anyway???

it started out as a way to prove that the sex was real instead of simulated.

??? My best guess is this: the majority of the people who make pornography are, to put it bluntly, crass lowlifes with warped sexual tastes, and their audience is themselves. That would certainly explain it.

i think there's a hardcore of porn consumers who require really extreme stuff, and they're the ones willing to pay $ for that "value-add." it is trivially easy to find naked women or "vanilla porn" without having to pay for it. the people i know who will pay for memberships on websites (or, a friend with a penthouse collection back in the 1990s) tend toward kink.

but honestly, i don't know that much about the psychology or economics of porn in a scholarly sense. i plan on doing a literature search this wkd.

During his twenties he had a lot of lame relationships with women and a sleazy promiscuous streak, and only really got right when he was almost 30. He's fine now,

Um... he was crazy horny but couldn't get any as a teenager, was promiscuous in his 20s, and settled down in his 30s. Your brother sounds suspiciously average to warrant such an elaborate psychoanalysis.

I can't think of a study off the top of my head that proves that seeing hot vaj at age 9 doesn't turn you gay or into a loser (your bro??), so the most I can say is that these kinds of quasi-Freudian theories about sexual development are extremely out of favor in the scientific literature.

It would take some time to explain why fully, but this isn't just a matter of arbitrary scientific taste. These kinds of theories are relatively easy to test, they just haven't proven fruitful and mesh awkwardly with what we know about sexual development. Gives them kind of a dated feel.

I don't think that there's research on this, so I gave a datum I was familiar with. In this particular case, getting involved with porn had a negative effect in someone's life. An anecdatum with no statistical value, but I also described a particular dynamic by which it worked in his case.

Throwing out that one little bit of evidence by suggesting that my brother was already a creep at age 10 (unlike your wonderful selves) is not very scientific, don't you think? We're at a very preliminary phase of the investigation.

looking at a hairy wet vagina

Better than the hideous pedophilic Bald Eagle.

sirs,

for long have an absented myself in these salons, but might i request that the allusions to the details at hand might be rendered a bit less coarse? there is no shame in attempting to know oneself, but that need not entail an abolition of decorum and civility and an embrace of baseness.

yours truly,
c. v. snicker

Better than the hideous pedophilic Bald Eagle.

Good to know there are other guys who don't appreciate the porn star look (even in porn!). I must say though that it doesn't actually look pedophilic to me. It just looks... wrong...

Porn probably won't make you gay, but I bet it will decrease your arousal in the presence of real women as measured by a plethysmograph.

Paradoxically that will improve your game as you won't be thinking with the little head.

Once we get home holography systems with lifelike 3D and force feedback (or else stimulators jacked right into the brain) things are going to get very interesting. Porn and pros are imperfect substitutes for non-pro women (by which I mean those that you lease or buy rather than rent), but realistic 3D is another matter entirely. Ever seen the Sixth Day with Schwarzenegger?

The funniest part about that will be the complete end of feminism as any non lesbian is forced to become the most stepford of wives in order to compete with the 3D and/or androids. It points to the fundamental fact that a warm sexbot who can cook and clean is what most men want in a woman -- yet women can't get off to the closest equivalent for them, which would be a picture of a dollar bill on a TV screen.

"Porn probably won't make you gay, but I bet it will decrease your arousal in the presence of real women as measured by a plethysmograph."

I bet it wouldn't. I doubt anything short of chemical means could do that, the sex drive is just too stubborn. But I also bet no-one will ever do that experiment.

If straight porn makes you gay, no wonder so many Christians are watching gay porn...

There's that famous government study from the . . . 60s? that found that incarcerated child molesters were much more likely to have had unusually anti-sex childhoods and to have been completely denied access to pornography as children. Does anybody know what I'm talking about?

asdf, it was my impression that plesythmography had about as much scientific validity as polygraphs. (Except in the limited case of testing for physiological causes in patients with erectile disfunction - i.e. measuring nocturnal erections.)

The funniest part about that will be the complete end of feminism as any non lesbian is forced to become the most stepford of wives in order to compete with the 3D and/or androids.

I think you may very well be right for a few generations. After that, the Amish will take over since the rest of us will be having sex in our holodecks instead of having kids.

There is nothing like a dame, dude. Robots can't make the cut. Even if they made it to 95% real, practically all the value is in the last 5%, last 1%, last 0.1%. This is not as easy as creating artificial bacon. Notice how science has failed to create a tasty diet cola - just because it can do astounding things doesn't mean it can do anything.

There is nothing like a dame, dude. Robots can't make the cut. Even if they made it to 95% real, practically all the value is in the last 5%, last 1%, last 0.1%. This is not as easy as creating artificial bacon. Notice how science has failed to create a tasty diet cola - just because it can do astounding things doesn't mean it can do anything.

i think it depends on the dude, guys. i have met guys who i think would be happy with robots. most guys i think though would find it sub-optimal, but not necessarily because of lack of sensory verisimilitude, but rather the very reality of knowing that someone is a something will crank down the utils. but perhaps values will change over time. don't know.

Throwing out that one little bit of evidence by suggesting that my brother was already a creep at age 10 (unlike your wonderful selves)

Au contraire, John, I think your brother sounds like an exceedingly normal guy on the bell curve of male sexual life history.

But even he didn't, it is impossible to figure out behavioral causality from personal observation. You could like reading because your parents read to you as a child, or, alternatively, maybe your parents read to you and you like reading because you and your parents share genes related to reading. You can figure this out with lots of people and the right kind of experimental design, but both theories will look exactly the same at the observational level.

I don't think your brother grew up to be promiscuous because he started devouring porn when he was 10, I think the two behaviors have a related underlying cause (i.e. earlier puberty and sexual interest is predictive of adult sociosexual orientation).

The best reading of the available evidence, IMO, is that pornography has zero to negligible influence on society. It doesn't cause rape, and it doesn't prevent rape. It doesn't warp children, and it won't prevent them from becoming pedophiles.

And, moreover, the Internet isn't making us all into pornophiles.

I guess the theory that porn turns you gay seems so amazingly unintuitive that I'm sort-of curious what experiences or other reasons would make anyone believe it. I suspect this is just another variant of the hairy palms ploy, in which you try to threaten boys with imaginary horrible consequences to jerking off. But who knows? Maybe the kinds of folks who are drawn to really fundamentalist evangelical churches really are turned gay by too much porn. How would I know.

it was my impression that plesythmography had about as much scientific validity as polygraphs.

As far as criminal convictions are concerned this is true. But phallometry is commonly used to test scientific hypotheses. It can reliably discern sexual orientation, paraphilias, etc. (and is the strongest single predictor of sexual offense recidivism). So it appears to be a valid test of sexual arousal, especially for comparing different groups of men. It is also highly correlated with two different measures of sexual arousal: subjective arousal (e.g. rate how turned-on you feel 1-100), and eye movement (people look longer at arousing stimuli).

Amusingly enough phallometry was invented in the 1950s to sniff out dudes pretending to be gay to get out military service; sort of like corporal Klinger from M*A*S*H.

This video says more about the Christian right's fixation on porn and gays than it does about porn as gays. Normal heterosexual people, like myself, simply do not think about the gays that much. In addition, gays tend to live in a relatively isolated subculture that normal straight people have very little interaction with. That's why we do not care about the gays one way or another. We simply do not have reason to think about them at all.

The Christian right, themselves living in a social milieu that is even more removed from the gay subculture than the social milieu that people like me inhabit, ought to have even less reason to think about the gays than I. The fact that the Christian right people obsess so much about the gays makes me think that they feel some sort of connection to them that people like myself do not.

Its the same for porn. I don't look at porn very much. If I want to look at pretty ladies, I tend to look at sites like babewarehouse.com and the like, which feature girls dressed sexy night clud attire or in swimsuits. I don't the sites I look at would even qualify as porn (maybe soft-porn).

Like the gays, porn does not matter to me much because I do not look at it much. I find videos of people in the actual sex act to be quite boring. I would rather read latest results of IEC polywell (or recently, the latest information on Mach Lorentz thrusters).

The obsession that Christian right people have about gays and porn make me think that they feel some connection to it that I obviously do not. Perhaps all of the Christian right men are secretly gay and have acceptance issues with it.

Jason, we're not doing science here, we're just talking about whether porn might be bad for young boys. By demanding sceientific proof you can effortlessly refute everyone else and win the argument without bringing anything forward yourself, but why should anyone let you do that? You allege a lot of science, but you don't cite any, and your philosophical framework is genetic determinism which denies nurture, so of course you wouldn't think that anything whatsoever influences kids' development. "Your destiny was written on a tablet by Allah, I mean genes."

As far as I'm concerned it remains quite possible that if 10-12 year old boys have access to a lot of porn, it will have a negative effect on a certain proportion of them and that they would have been better off without the porn. You haven't really brought anything powerful to bear against that possibility except general principles. And I still believe that that's probably what happened to my brother.

As far as I'm concerned it remains quite possible that if 10-12 year old boys have access to a lot of porn, it will have a negative effect on a certain proportion of them and that they would have been better off without the porn.

they've had a lot of access to porn since mosaic/netscape came out in 94-95. that is the year that a qualitative change occurred in the access of porn. everything before and after were just changes on the margins. do we see an empirical change in those age cohorts? from 2009 i would say probably not (someone who was 10 in 95 would be nearly 25 now).

So do, some don't. Yu do have to look for it. My brother has access in the sense of a readily-available stack of porn magazines belonging to his best friend's father.

John - your brother's case shows a negative effect as a teenager (not getting laid as a teenager is normal, but being perceived as creepy is not), but what you've reported about later(promiscuous in 20s, settled down in 30s) isn't significantly negative; it's pretty normal.

I can see that exposure to hard-core porn could make a man who was already potentially bisexual more interested in actually experimenting sexually with men; once that barrier has been crossed, if the man has poor social skills with women, he might then end up primarily homosexual in his activity, as it's much easier to get sex from men.

FWIW, I find that young guys circa the age of 25 are quite different than previous generations, and my guess is that internet porn has had something to do with it.

I hope John Emerson isn't your real name, because if it is, your brother probably wouldn't appreciate you broadcasting this embarrassing information about him.

"You allege a lot of science, but you don't cite any, and your philosophical framework is genetic determinism which denies nurture, so of course you wouldn't think that anything whatsoever influences kids' development. "Your destiny was written on a tablet by Allah, I mean genes."


There are large secular changes in sociological variables that are completely inconsistent with genetic etiology, and behavior genetics shows a large role for nonshared environment that often rivals the heritable component. This certainly isn't "denying nurture". The nurture is most definitely there, we just have much better leads on what that nurture isn't than what it is.

A more accurate epithet is that I "deny" shared environment (i.e. that parents and home environment have appreciable enduring effects on behavior), which to many is the only class of environmental variable they are emotionally and intellectually invested in. So a dismissal of shared environment, from their perspective, is the equivalent of saying that environmental influences don't happen at all; it's genes all the way down.

I certainly didn’t claim I had a smoking gun that early porn exposure doesn’t turn men promiscuous. I also don’t have direct evidence or a more compelling theoretical reason to believe it doesn’t do the exact opposite (see Diana's theory of early porn as triple-Xbox repellent).

But, e.g., we can guess that most early porn access is in the home, and so we would expect siblings to be more alike in sexual behavior due to similar opportunities to view porn at young ages, but virtually all sibling similarity is due to shared genes, and not shared environment.

Allahu Akbar

I have lots of brothers, and none of them, or their friends, hang around here. But I suppose I should say "someone I know very well".

"n which case they wouldn't keep looking."

OK, John got to this first but I think the response is not valid for two main reasons.

1. It's not necessarily true -- there's such a thing as horrified fascination.

2. Even one exposure can cause trauma. How many times does a kid have to see violence to be traumatized?

As usual, with humans, it's impossible to prove. You'd have to clone a new control to prove anything and that's not in the cards.

My point is that no matter what the glibs on HuffPo think, and they are probably guffawing at this latest example of conservative buffoonery (in their minds), there is, I think, a grain of truth in it.

BTW i make a distinction between HC porn and tasteful erotica, which the conservo xtians might not.

Confession: I don't really believe porn "turns" boys gay.

But I do think that there is more to sexuality, even supposedly hard wired male sexuality, than genes. See under: kinaidos.

Most male homosexuality is due to non-genetic factors. But the most promising environmental candidates are pre and postnatal biological factors, which most people just lump in with genes because it's not shared environment.

In all seriousness, it's worth point out that (1) the causes of an individual's traits are (per determinism) the sum of all environmental and genetic factors acting on them, but (2) to address the counterfactual of whether a particular factor is a sine qua non requires inference from population based studies. I'd give the porn hypothesis a low probability for the reasons Jason points out.

"Most male homosexuality is due to non-genetic factors."

I agree 100%.

Obviously I've arrived way late to this thread. Nevertheless:

This line of speculation only adds to my suspicion that most if not all straight (heterosexual) men are incapable of personal insight concerning matters of sexuality. I have not found even one in the course of my lifetime who was, best I can recall. Honestly, I find that really odd, and I haven't any explanation for it. If you don't believe me or think my suspicion is factually wrong, please tell me, I would appreciate knowing it.

I'm gay. I declared myself gay decades ago at which point I was certain that I was. At that moment I likewise admitted to myself that I was gay, and believed it, and nothing since has lessened my belief one bit. I've also found this to be so for just about every gay man I can remember. One doesn't believe, one just knows he is gay, and that's the end of it.

The only men I've known who have said they were gay but have/had doubts and fears as to the verity of their claim were simply vague, or somehow distracted from thinking and examining the implications *for them* of their being gay. Maybe my memory is faulty about this, as it is about many things such as past events. It's certainly not far wrong.

I guess my reason for being so sure is being gay isn't a genetic or environmental condition, it's a matter of the heart and will of the individual man. I've met some men who admit they are attracted sexually to other men - some are close, very close friends of mine, but they don't identify with it and they don't commit to it. They're simply not gay and they know it to be so (or else they are psychologically vague as I said, most likely due to environmental or other external influences).

However, what puzzles me is that for occasions of casual conversation or relationship within a group of like (heterosexual) men - notably when intoxicated or generally aroused (horny) - the guys behave in a manner just loopy and exceedingly blase that embarrasses them and evokes shame in them. What is that about??? I'm serious, I would really like to know, if it at all interests anyone.

Cheers,

Tom