This wasn't in the paper, but men in general tend to be geared toward non-emotional stimulus and action-oriented thinking. Their supernormal stimulus is hardcore and paraphilic porn for this reason, which then of course invokes unfavorable comparisons, because of how unrealistic they are.
Women in general respond to emotional stimulus better. Their supernormal stimulus is erotic romance, also known to create unrealistic expectations, however these expectations are about men, not the readers themselves.
I don't know porn much, but I know erotic romance, and it's central thesis is that it's a form of fantasy in which the MFC (main female character) is wanted by one, sometimes two (menage) and occasionally more (reverse harem) MMCs (main male characters). The allure is that she is the center of their world. HEA (happily ever after) is usually expected, especially for romance, and cheating is forbidden. Alpha males, billionaires, daddy and stepbrother types are the most popular MMCs, along with aliens and monsters. The pattern is being able to tame, or at least withstand or even enjoy something possessive, dominant and aggressive. Another pattern is being able to lay down the burden of having to be in control, or having adult responsibilities altogether.
Women also enjoy reading about gay men, reportedly because they don't have to identify with an MFC. In romance it is important to create an emotional framework that explains why the characters want each other, and in erotic romance this can happen through sexual discovery. Being fated to be together is a popular, if lazy framework. Erotica without an emotional framework is much less popular and hard to monetize because the payment processors are squeamish of adult content in the first place and the readers tend to feel bad about just erotica, which is a recipe for disaster. Reportedly erotic romance actually helps women improve their sexual life, perhaps because it encourages sexual discovery.
>but men in general tend to be geared toward non-emotional stimulus and action-oriented thinking. Their supernormal stimulus is hardcore and paraphilic porn for this reason, which then of course invokes unfavorable comparisons, because of how unrealistic they are.
>Women in general respond to emotional stimulus better. Their supernormal stimulus is erotic romance, also known to create unrealistic expectations, however these expectations are about men, not the readers themselves.
Do you have a source for this claim? I've heard this claim many times but I've never seen it proven scientifically.
Humans are pretty complicated and arousal is a dynamic and malleable, biopsychosocial process. The individual differences, variability is what makes humans so successful.
There is however truth to women relying on emotional context more for arousal, but remember it's a biopsychosocial process, so some of that is malleable.
Within the erotic fiction market stories with an emotional context tend to do better with both men and women, however men are less sensitive to the lack of such context. Erotic fanfiction is also very popular with women, reportedly because the characters and their relationships are already fleshed out. Also lesbian erotic fiction is two different market, men and lesbian women tend to like different stories. Stories that turn men into women (feminization, genderswap) are somewhat popular, but have a cis woman dominate a cis man and the readers vanish. Most women (more than 95%) don't care for it, even if a lot of men do (around 25%), however most of those men prefer watching femdom porn. You can sell maledom diaper age play erotica with shapeshifters or aliens, as long as there is a relationship to be developed between the characters, the female readership is there for it. The 18th best seller in erotica on Amazon is a monster romance book about milking monsters for a living, specifically because it's a love story between a human and a minotaur.
Interestingly, I can see basically almost all of the tropes described in the last paragraph in many male-targeted manga/anime/visual novel with romance elements.
Manga is a rich tapestry, but men tend to prefer younger women in those, often inexperienced ones. Even feisty women (tsundere) are expected to be inexperienced and sooner or later lovestruck. The pattern is a partner who can't compare you to anyone else, so you are automatically the best. Nobody sexualizes young girls quite like the Japanese. Also family members, probably because of how paternal their government is, and how suddenly parents stop coddling their children, like one minute you are spoiled, and the next you are on your own and much is expected of you.
Women still tend to prefer charming, possesive, dominant men in these though.
I think your view is biased. In practice I see a lot of Japanese couples where the woman is slightly older than the man, which I don’t see as often in Europe. And there are many Anime where there is a dominant, sexually experienced woman (“MILF”). I guess that also fits the trope of “being allowed to hand over control”. So I’d agree that male and female fiction is not as different as some make it out to be.
This strikes me as cultural. In the vein of "guys like drawing dicks on things". Not only do I not do that but I know few who do across many countries.
This makes me think that this stuff is cultural mimicry resulting in conforming to local gender roles rather than a true gender divide.
Happy to alter beliefs based on evidence that target this specific notion: that it is not subcultural.
I'm specifically perfectly okay with "there exist guys who like doing this in every culture". I do not question that. It appears true even today. Personally I interpret "guys do X" as "among guys, doing X is common".
For instance, if I said "guys do MDMA" and showed evidence of MDMA use in different cultures, you wouldn't be convinced right?
MDMA is not ancestral and you won't find guys doing it in ancient Babylon
The point is boys have a penis and they draw penises.
The penis has always been a symbol of fertility because it represents the seed. Semen in English translates to the Italian word seme (which means both sperm and seed) and, no wonders, it comes from Latin semen (pronounced /'se|me|n/), but the Latin word meant "from the same roots". In Greek it's σπέρμα (pronounced /'spέrma/), in Italian the same word is sperma, in English it's sperm.
From σπέρμα (seed) comes the Italian word speme, that means "hope"
In Japanese, Chinese, Sino-Tibetan, Vietnamese, the word is always related to "sprout" and "grow".
The Japanese kanji for sperm has two roots from Chinese alphabet, one means energy, perfect, the second means child.
MDMA is just a synthetic drug of this time and place (mostly the west), it doesn't mean anything for anyone.
So, while girls today are (mostly) free to express their artistic abilities, unlike the ancient past, they prefer to draw vulvas (in various forms from the most realistic to the metaphorical ones) and not dicks, because they do not have one.
the cult of Priapus it's very old, it was born in ancient Greece and the story says that he was the son of Aphrodite and another god (some say Dionysus some Zeus himself) and Hera, jealous of her unfaithful husband, gave him a grotesque look and a giant phallus.
It became an auspicious of fertility during Alexander the Great and an important figure in Roman mythology.
If you know of female roman soldiers walking the Hadrian's wall, female painters in Pompei or female sculptors in ancient Egypt, I'm eager to read about'em.
We know of women artists in Japanese Edo period, but they did not paint penises (AFAIK)
But that's besides the point, the point wasn't if women sometimes draw penises, the point was that 'boys like to draw dicks on things' and historical records show that they kinda always did.
I don't think that Japanese painting supports your point. It also contains vagina-headed people, and appears to have some deeper layers beyond "haha penis so funny".
> and appears to have some deeper layers beyond "haha penis so funny".
most penises drawings don't and the overwhelming majority of them is the work of a man.
BUT, that particular Japanese painting is kept at the British Museum [1] and it depict a parody of the death of Buddha...
So yeah, "ahahaha, penis (and vulva) so funny"
This is an hilarious and inventive – not to say scurrilous – parody of the sacred Buddhist subject of the Buddha's death and passing into a state of nirvana (‘nothingness’). Conventional painted versions of the subject have survived in quite large numbers in Japan, dating from the late 11th century onwards. They were displayed in temples each year for rituals held on the anniversary of the Buddha’s passing, traditionally the fifteenth day of the second month. Here the ‘Penis Buddha’, with golden skin, reclines on a dais resting his ‘head’ on one arm, the same pose taken by the Buddha Shakyamuni in conventional versions. Women with vulva faces gather round to lament, in company with paired couplings of various animals and vegetables. Two penis mourners stand in place of Buddhist guardian kings. At the back, pine trees and a river painted on a screen represent the sal trees and Badaiga River of tradition. Between the trees at the back are two esoteric deities with multiple vulva-heads and multiple arms that hold sex toys in place of their normal attributes.
There is a tradition in Japan since at least the late eighteenth century of comic parodies of the Death of the Buddha
Well I am only one example but I am transgender and started taking estrogen six months ago. As my dosage has increased, my porn preferences have changed. I used to be interested in live performance porn with no interest in comics, but recently the live performance stuff has lost almost all appeal and I have found that erotic comics are very interesting and arousing.
So I think in some respects there are true differences between estrogen and testosterone. The rest of my life has stayed rather constant during this time, and I am 37 years old.
I find these sorts of personal stories fascinating, it’s a unique and valuable window into the hormonal tides our psychological foundations are floating upon.
It would be wildly unethical to get people to take these out of hormonal manipulative drugs for purely a psychological study so the only way to get this sort of understanding is through people like yourself sharing your experience, so thank you for sharing your story!
Yes! If you are in trans circles this stuff is all common knowledge as everyone wants to talk about this stuff, but I understand the stories don't get in to the wider discourse as often.
I no longer remember who said that, but it was a woman who started taking testosterone for some medical reason. She said something like "wow, that was a change, suddenly I wanted to fight or fuck almost everyone I met".
Yes this is a well known effect of trans men taking testosterone. But trans issues in the wider discourse currently still boil down to some very basic stuff with no real nuance or understanding.
Thanks for calling this out. The twitter meme of "anything I like is natural, anything I don't like is cultural" is pretty braindead. Even just one aspect of our biology like hormones impacts human behavior considerably.
Well there is this issue right of for example men saying women aren't good at programming because of hormones, which is nonsense. But the real answer isn't to assume anything in one direction or the other it is to look for scientific evidence. And in this case trans people going either way provide for some great information on this topic and trans people are also often very willing to talk about these changes (when its safe).
I voted dick and balls this year - great Australian tradition of saying "you are all fucked and I am not taking any responsibility for any of you getting in"
No, I took a fat permenant marker and drew a giant dick and balls symbol on the ballot sheet and then stuffed it in the box.
If you don't "vote" you get fined $20, but voting has occured once you turn up and claim your ballot paper and get ticked off on the electroral roll, after that you can do what you want.
There was some talk (rumour) that these particular type of informal votes were being counted up as a means of tallying up general voter disaffection. Not sure if true.
I was particularly driven by two factors
a) Party voting policy whereby your local member is forced to vote along "party lines" more than 99.9% of the time, even if it is blatantly and severely against their constituants best interests.
b) The nature of the electoral system whereby if your vote is with a losing candidate, it might end up being redistributed on "preferences" that you have no say in, to decide the ultimate winner. This means it is possible that it is very hard to predict where your vote might actually end up at the time you cast it.
> Happy to alter beliefs based on evidence that target this specific notion: that it is not subcultural.
I won't address your particular example (“guys like drawing dicks on things”), but a similar one that I'm sure strikes you as cultural as well: the sex difference in toy preferences and play behaviour. The following is an excerpt from the book Perspectives in Male Psychology by Louise Liddon and John Barry, which argues that it's not subcultural:
“Some of the most intriguing evidence supporting the biological basis for sex differences in toy preferences comes, unexpectedly, from animals. There is a large body of evidence in animal research finding strong effects of prenatal and perinatal exposure to sex hormones on a range of sex-related behaviours, including juvenile play (Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2004). Even more intriguingly, some research has found that male monkeys spend longer than females manipulating toys that move (wheeled toys or a ball), whereas female monkeys make more contact with a doll and cooking pot (Alexander & Hines, 2002; Hassett et al., 2008). Most intriguing of all is research that finds a sex difference in how primates play with objects: young females tend to play with objects as if they are nurturing an infant, and young males play with the same objects with more vigour, often as a weapon.
Compelling evidence for a biological basis for play behaviour comes from a 14-year study of ‘stick-carrying’ in Ugandan chimpanzees (Kahlenberg & Wrangham, 2010). These chimps tend to use sticks to signal aggression, to find food (e.g. taking honey from a hole), during play or as ‘stick-carrying’. This latter behaviour accounted for about 40% of stick-related behaviour, and was initially puzzling for researchers. The behaviour was observed to be most common in juvenile females, compared to weapon use, which was most common in males. The researchers noted that stick-carrying sometimes involved cradling of the stick, and the behaviour always occurred prior to the female’s first birth and ended when the female became a mother. The researchers concluded that stick-carrying is a form of play-mothering. The sex difference in stick-carrying appeared to be spontaneous and without any teaching by adult chimps, making social learning an unlikely explanation.
The overall explanation for the sex differences observed in these various human and non-human animal studies is that, in general, males are naturally predisposed to activities such as hunting and building, and females are naturally predisposed to nurturing the young (Hines, 2005). Extrapolating this evidence to humans, when boys are playing with cars this could be an expression of an innate tendency to track moving objects, as might be done in hunting, and when girls play with dolls this could be an expression of an innate tendency to nurturance and mothering.”
Humans have not been hunter-gatherers for 5 thousand years now. This is approximately the time it took to make wolves into dogs, domesticate cats, etc. You can’t possibly assume everything men/women do is related to that time when we were primal humans because there was already thousands of years of evolution that separated us from those people.
Interesting argument. Wolves and dogs are behaviorally almost identical. Domestic cats and wild cats are as well. If you've ever been around feral cats or stray dogs, you know to stay well clear of them, as they revert to wild behavior pretty quickly. Their domestic performances depend on their living experience being carefully controlled by humans.
5 thousand of years aren't nothing, but they aren't that much either, at least when it comes to the course of human evolution. We seem to be anatomically indistinguishable from people who lived not 5, but 50 thousand years ago.
There are obviously some newer adaptations (the ability to digest milk as adults in certain populations, or even sickle cell disease in West Africans), but they seem to be the exceptions to the rule.
A question. I've no problem with hardcore porn but I'm put off by badly by some of what I assume to be porn oriented at men; completely emotionless robotic banging. Porn for women is much more affectionate and for me that makes it so much more enjoyable. I really want to see people genuinely having a good time or (to me) what's the point.
I don't know if I'm unusual in this but I'd like to know what other people think. I seriously wonder if a lot of porn produced is aimed at what the studios think the audience want rather than actually finding out if it is. I could well be wrong though.
No judgement on anyone for liking what I don't, that's fine.
> I've no problem with hardcore porn but I'm put off by badly by some of what I assume to be porn oriented at men; completely emotionless robotic banging. Porn for women is much more affectionate and for me that makes it so much more enjoyable. I really want to see people genuinely having a good time or (to me) what's the point.
Counterpoint: I find this stuff creepy and voyeuristic. I think watching porn to watch normal loving couples having straight sex is somewhere between peeping in windows to watch a healthy, normal family have dinner (and to fantasize about being them), or like going to the circus to watch nonathletic people exercise.
Watching porn to see sexual athletes and performers do what they do for a living, and enjoying the unusual and exceptional, and not really thinking that its something that you're obligated to imitate or emulate, for me, is the least creepy perspective. The opposite, to me, is a strange insistence that the only porn that is worthwhile is porn that is held up as a model, and that people who don't see pornography as a model are perverted. For me, that's like saying it's perverted to watch a trapeze artist, or a gymnast.
Saying "I watch porn for the athleticism" feels creepy and wrong to me, but then again I don't understand the fervor for professional sports so maybe I'm just not tuned into the zeitgeist.
I would much rather get turned on and get my little dopamine rush from watching two people enjoy having intense and romantic sex with each other than by watching some sexual gymnast pull off a zero-g inverse mating press with hammerlocked arms while covered in enough lube and sweat to fill a 55 gallon drum.
I think the massive increase in amateur porn is filling this gap. Much of the content on PornHub is now amateur, and there are camming sites like Chaturbate that feature real couples having live sex, and of course OnlyFans.
I think there are plenty of amazing "mainstream" porn scenes out there too, but they tend to get lost in an endless sea of repetitive sub-par pro porn.
Maybe go for erotic novels (or Visual Novels to video games) instead?
Male oriented erotica in book form is rare in US culture, but common in the Japanese light novel / visual novel community.
Books focus on characters thoughts and emotions because that's the medium of words.
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Most book-based erotica seems to be aimed at female audiences for some reason, so I think there is a bit of a cultural expectation here.
Still, with the growing popularity of erotic visual novels (and heck, just novels in general) I have to imagine that the male reader base exists out there.
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I'm not saying Hunniepop is the best written piece of literature I've seen. But there are words and emotions there, and a mild focus on what the various women want (albeit with the male sex fantasy slants).
Since the majority of the game is in fact, reading mundane situations and figuring out which gifts work best for each girl (ie gameplay mechanic to force the players into reading the story), it forces the player to at least explore the female characters a bit before you get the porno scene.
Obviously everyone's tastes are different but, broadly speaking, the most popular porn videos do not tend to be the most romantic or sensual. That said, there are many niches in porn, and videos made for women can be very successful within that niche.
Producers are incentivised to create videos that will sell. It's not much good if a video is popular on free tube sites but nobody pays for it. There is evidence to suggest that women are a lot less likely to pay for porn than men are, and there is therefore a lot less of an incentive to create porn for that demographic.
Creating romantic/passionate porn is not easy! The script and casting (amongst many other things) need to be just right for it to work. Therefore it's going to take more time and effort. So many studios will focus on mass producing videos. There's an obvious trade-off between quality and quantity, and many studios will have found that it's just more profitable to churn out videos as quickly as possible.
I think I'm probably the other end of the spectrum. I'm perfectly content with just a close-up picture of a vagina. Penis going in and out of vagina in as high def as possible is basically optimal. If there's anything else in the scene my brain basically disregards it.
This is the case for me about 75% of the time, unless I'm in "a mood."
This is an interesting difference because I'm a man and at bare minimum I need to see that the people doing it are really into it. I need enthusiasm, but prefer to see or read the development of how it got to such a boiling point. I also like teasing better, sex is a mind game, you play it with your brain, and it lasts more than 3 minutes that way too.
My guess is this. People like you might enjoy a softer form of porn, but are you going to click through to the ads that they're using to monetize?
Free online porn is not optimized for people's tastes. It's optimized to attract the people who are so obsessed that they're going to click through and actually buy products that are advertised at some point.
I think this basically applies to all fictional works though.
I can go on a rant (and in fact, I have multiple times) about how Iron Man and Batman have taught an entire generation of moviegoers about incredibly shitty corporate behavior.
Instead of showing people the moral and just thing to do in company settings, people see the crap Batman or Ironman pulls (Iron Man literally killing a board member who ended up being a villain for example, or batman forcing his board and strong arming them out of the company).
These are shown as heroic actions by the protagonist, but really would be the stuff of moral disaster in the real world.
I've more or less accepted that most fiction is about doing amoral things that the author personally thinks is cool. But the authors understanding of morality in these situations is pretty bad in most cases, possibly because the author has little experience of corporate ethics (or in this topic, crazy large sexual harems and whatnot)
> Iron Man and Batman have taught an entire generation of moviegoers about incredibly shitty corporate behavior.
This rings true, and I would like to extend it to more general behavior. Many of these tropes are common in superhero films: unquestionably heroic good guys pitted vs irrationally evil bad guys, society is inherently corrupt and only the heroes can improve it (by personal intervention), a contrarian weakling nearly dooms everyone by disagreeing with the hero, but is ultimately shamed/killed... etc.
At the risk of sounding paranoid, they sound vaguely fascist in tone. I wonder if the last decade of movies has pushed society in that direction, or vice-versa.
This is just a bad feminists ant-porn rant. She can't mention porn without bringing in hurting women or sadism. I reject that this has anything useful related to my question. I reject this view that any but a small minority of men want to see such things.
"Most porn is about watching women pretend to enjoy sex acts that are unpleasant to them. It doesn't have to be this way, but it is."
It doesn't have to be this way, and it isn't. Amateur porn is on the rise and doesn't fit at all with most of the above anti-porn screed. There's always going to be awful porn, but there seems to be a lot of people who refuse to believe that there is also an near-endless supply homemade and semi-pro porn. It's easy to criticize porn (or anything) if you only look at the worst examples.
"The results revealed a twofold phenomenon. Among men, a higher frequency of porn use and increased porn use over time were associated with lower levels of sexual self-competence, impaired sexual functioning, and decreased partner-reported sexual satisfaction. In contrast, among women, higher and increasing frequencies of porn use were associated with higher levels of sexual self-competence, improved sexual functioning, and enhanced partner-reported sexual satisfaction (for some aspects)."
Let’s not forget that old arrow of causality. Perhaps men who are bad at sex are more likely to view porn rather than viewing porn making them bad at sex. Similarly maybe women who view porn are already sexually successful and are looking for ideas.
Male and female sexual function aren’t particularly comparable either. If a man can’t get an erection then sexual intercourse just isn’t going to happen. There’s no hard analog for women. That’s just one example, there are many others.
> and enhanced partner-reported sexual satisfaction (for some aspects)."
I read this as something like: women who watch porn are more likely to perform fellatio well.
There's another issue with causality: maybe women who are disinterested in sex, for reasons that have nothing to do with their partner, are unfulfilling to their male partner, who starts to blame themselves and seek out porn? This is kind of a classic dead bedroom problem.
Tellingly, as far as I can tell, they left out analyses of the relationship between self-reported sexual satisfaction with their partner and porn use. That is, how related is my sexual satisfaction with my partner to how often I seek out porn?
Both of these types of processes play out in sex education and couples therapy settings: women who complain about men who have unrealistic ideas about sex due to porn, and don't seem to care about their satisfaction; but also men complaining about sexually cold female partners who aren't interested in sex, and so they find themselves interested in porn more as a result. It's hard to tell from the study results what's going on, or both.
In my experience, real-world fellatrices are either naturally good at it, or aren't. I don't think porn presents a good demonstration of competent technique or how to adapt one's style to changing circumstances.
“The findings reveal the irony that porn – a male-dominated industry that targets a male-dominated audience – is associated with the erosion of the quality of men's sex lives and the improvement of women's sex lives.”
Porn is engineered to suit men's desires and tastes, rather than women's. Watching it teaches both groups to accept norms that are preferential to men. If you're a (hetero) man, this makes you a more selfish partner and vice versa for a woman.
I think this theory falls flat based on the conversations I've had with other women about this. I don't know a single woman that enjoys watching content geared towards heterosexual men. Of the ones that do watch (as opposed to reading erotica, which is far more prevalent) they almost exclusively go to niche sites/genres intended to appeal to women, or they watch amateur content.
While this makes sense, it's not convincing to me because it seems that similar logic could be applied even if the observed results were the opposite. Ie if porn increased men's performance and decreased women's performance, that could also be explained from porn teaching norms that are preferential to men.
Porn properly engineered to suit men’s desires suck. This is just my experience but they don’t work. Good porn has female audiences or are sometimes even authored by cis female person even when the product is classified as “for men”. I don’t know if opposite is true as well but this “porn is men’s thing made by men” don’t seem factual.
Sorry if I’ll be somehow offending trans or cat people by saying this, but not everyone has a concrete gender identification above life and always prefixing their thoughts with that.
Meanwhile, I think more straight cismen should read the sex section of women magazines (ELLE, Marie-Claire, etc) to get the basics of what women likes and wants.
If the metric is partner-reported sexual satisfaction, it seems more likely to me that women's porn consumption increases men's sex life. It stills works in that direction
Sample collection was from solicitation by a YouTuber:
> In June 2015, the French YouTuber Mathieu Sommet posted an online video that invited his followers to complete a questionnaire entitled ‘Sexual profile of adults’.^2 A total of 171 462 participants (18+ year-olds) started the questionnaire, and 101 572 finished it.
There’s probably some value in the study, but it’s probably inappropriate to draw hard conclusions from it (pun not intended).
This assumes sexual performance in a relationship is worth optimizing for. There may be many other factors at play. Reduction of time spent thinking sexual thoughts. Partner’s with a reduced sex drive or disability etc. Just worth bearing in mind the study (which is very useful/interesting) looks at just one objective.
There’s also the degree and how long one looks at porn. And how that can free up time for other things that are attractive in relationships (financial security etc). As a hypothetical consider a person who looks at porn for 5min every two days, and stays very focused on accumulating wealth for a few years and then reduces this and focuses more on sexual performance.
> This assumes sexual performance in a relationship is worth optimizing for.
I think this is sending the wrong signal to readers. Yes, ninety percent of the time it is worth optimizing for. It's literally what we're wired to do and your partner will appreciate it.
That doesn't mean that that ten percent of an outlier doesn't exist but broadcasting doubt that it is worth optimizing for is not the wisdom most people need to hear.
... or just ask your partner and if it really is unsatisfactory, you can always buy a Hitachi or something and use that together. And maybe don't trust HN for relationship advise. :D
I suspect this is because porn is usually (not always) made by men, for men. Women watching porn learn about what men like. Men watching porn get further entrenched in their own desires, and learn to expect that sex will play out in a way that they themselves prefer.
Wife and I are in an open relationship, this is anecdotal: number of men she's hooked up with who get performance anxiety is massive like it's at least 60 to 70 percent of men who have a hard time getting and maintaining an erection.
Why would she be playing me? I often get videos with the men's consent (when she's found a guy who, ahem, functions) so I don't think there's anything to play me for.
His wife meets only guys who cannot "function" sexually because most of the guys that get sexually involved do not function sexually, right? Is she that unlucky?
His wife either assumes he's aware that's not really true or is taking him for a fool. Perhaps she is selling him the "didn't function" to spare her of the story telling/video tape. The trick is as old as the world.
> The findings reveal the irony that porn – a male-dominated industry that targets a male-dominated audience – is associated with the erosion of the quality of men's sex lives and the improvement of women's sex lives
I wonder if the effect would hold if there were more porn that caters to women. Or if consumption of romance novels has a similar but inverted effect.
I know a lot of women who watch hardcore porn and no one who reads romance novels (that I know of!). I think there is plenty of room for more and better porn (for both women and men) but the idea that women don't want to see graphic sex is a myth.
To be clear - I'm not saying women don't watch porn. What I'm saying is that porn creators mainly optimize their product for a male audience. I imagine porn made "by women for women" would look quite different.
> Accordingly, and contrary to what is often suggested in popular books on the psychology of pornography (e.g. Zimbardo & Coulombe, Reference Zimbardo and Coulombe2015), men who face sexual problems and choose to terminate porn use may experience only marginal improvements in their sexual lives (assuming that we can draw causal inferences from our findings); similarly, women who face sexual problems might be well advised not to consider porn use to be a sexual panacea.
This is interesting for sure but you can't draw sweeping conclusions from this research.
> The findings reveal the irony that porn – a male-dominated industry♧ that targets a male-dominated audience♤– is associated with the erosion of the quality of men's sex lives and the improvement of women's sex lives.
Are ♧ and ♤ true? Or did the paper just make this factoid up on the spot? My gut feeling would have been that it's dominated by women instead, and that the audience skewness would be a reflection of that more than anything.
Don't mock the research if you agree with it. This research is absolutely necessary for awareness and advocacy. Now when you claim porn ruins young adults' sexual health, you can cite this article to back it up.
But also take solace that this is becoming more common knowledge among young people anyway, despite older generations being in denial over it.
yeah fair ig i'm more trying to mock the people where u tell them and they're like "sHoW ME the STudiES". kinda frustrating that a bunch of people been saying this for years and got ignored and kinda frustrating everybody acting like this some huge revalation.
People are always way less active today, which could explain some of the ED in 20-30 something range versus men that age 25+ years ago. I think people can be too quick to point at porn as causing ED when it could be any combination of things (obesity, poor cardio health, nutrition, etc)
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Women in general respond to emotional stimulus better. Their supernormal stimulus is erotic romance, also known to create unrealistic expectations, however these expectations are about men, not the readers themselves.
I don't know porn much, but I know erotic romance, and it's central thesis is that it's a form of fantasy in which the MFC (main female character) is wanted by one, sometimes two (menage) and occasionally more (reverse harem) MMCs (main male characters). The allure is that she is the center of their world. HEA (happily ever after) is usually expected, especially for romance, and cheating is forbidden. Alpha males, billionaires, daddy and stepbrother types are the most popular MMCs, along with aliens and monsters. The pattern is being able to tame, or at least withstand or even enjoy something possessive, dominant and aggressive. Another pattern is being able to lay down the burden of having to be in control, or having adult responsibilities altogether. Women also enjoy reading about gay men, reportedly because they don't have to identify with an MFC. In romance it is important to create an emotional framework that explains why the characters want each other, and in erotic romance this can happen through sexual discovery. Being fated to be together is a popular, if lazy framework. Erotica without an emotional framework is much less popular and hard to monetize because the payment processors are squeamish of adult content in the first place and the readers tend to feel bad about just erotica, which is a recipe for disaster. Reportedly erotic romance actually helps women improve their sexual life, perhaps because it encourages sexual discovery.