Porn isn't an important cause

of sexual violence or misogyny

Partisans on both sides of this debate

have littered their arguments with distortions,

hyperbole and cheap rhetorical tricks

We have to wade through a lot of bullshit

to get to the truth

What turns men on in porn scenarios depends crucially

on the fact that the woman is depicted as excited

If she were depicted as primarily hurt and humiliated,

these men would instantly lose their interest and erections

If there is one nearly universal common denominator

in heterosexual porn it is that the women in it

are generally portrayed as easily,

constantly and powerfully sexually aroused,

driven wild by whatever men want to do with and to them

For most men, this fact is crucial to their arousal

Sexual Fantasy Never Harmed Anyone [Original]

Porn is not harmless. But neither is it an important cause of sexual violence or misogyny.

Partisans on both sides of this debate have littered their arguments with distortions, hyperbole and cheap rhetorical tricks. We have to wade through a lot of bullshit to get to the truth.

When representatives of the media conglomerates that produce $10 billion of porn each year come out and talk about the "free choice" of the women starring in their videos and the harmless "entertainment value" provided to male consumers, they're making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

The actors in these films are degraded, underpaid and used up by an industry with the morals of a slaughterhouse, despite what Jenna Jameson and Nina Hartley say.

The women come into the industry with the self-esteem of earthworms, histories of physical and sexual abuse, and are often plunged into alcohol and drug abuse as a way of coping with their jobs.

When the apologists from the porn industry point to the "voluntary" nature of this work, they are using a legal technicality as a fig leaf to cover up the normative pathology and exploitation in this industry.

Furthermore, with the near-universal availability of porn, there are now thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of men who have become addicted to it.

Spending between 10 and 50 hours/week glued to their computer or TV screens looking at porn, talking dirty in chat rooms, seeking out greater and greater taboos to violate, these particular men are being victimized, their relationships betrayed, and their families and friends cheated of their presence.

Such men were likely never really connected to others in healthy ways before the advent of porn, of course.

Nor can it be convincingly argued that the absence of this outlet would make them so, but like any addict, their compulsion makes any other options impossible, including that of getting psychotherapeutic help.

The presence of a casino doesn't cause the tragedies that sometime result, but neither are casino operators morally innocent.

So much for harmless porn.

Anti-porn advocates who watch a porno film, note its sordid and dehumanizing story line, and then assume that the man masturbating to it must really hate women and secretly want to dominate and devalue them.

The shock value of the story line (to the extent there is one) is intended to carry the weight of an argument that is basically superficial.

After all, if some guy gets off on watching 10 men ejaculate on a woman's face -- while she begs for more -- he must be either a misogynist watching his wishes come true or one in the making.

Except that he's not. I've treated dozens of guys who might get aroused by such scenarios who don't hate women at all.

They have decent and loving relationships with women. And most important, they are able to distinguish between a fantasy and reality, something that Jensen seems both unwilling and unable to do.

What turns them on in porn scenarios depends crucially on the fact that the woman is depicted as excited.

If she were depicted as primarily hurt and humiliated, these men would instantly lose their interest and erections.

If there is one nearly universal common denominator in heterosexual porn it is that the women in it are generally portrayed as easily, constantly and powerfully sexually aroused, driven wild by whatever men want to do with and to them.

For most men, this fact is crucial to their arousal, not because they're looking for a rationalization for their violent impulses but because they are guilty about feeling strong, selfish and masculine.

They feel overly responsible for and worried about women; and secretly believe that women are unhappy and relentlessly dissatisfied with men and their own lives.

In the service of masturbation, these portrayals of "women in heat" momentarily reassure men against their fears, relieve their burdens and offer them a freedom they find lacking in relationships with real women.

The sexual fantasies expressed in pornography, as well as those of their own private invention, are arousing to men not because women are being hurt but because they're not.

Pornography is the visual enactment of a sexual fantasy. That's fantasy -- to be distinguished from reality. That's fantasy -- to be distinguished from an intention, wish or even attitude.

A fantasy occurs in the imagination. The imagination is creative, capable of all sorts of tricks and distortions.

Recently, for example, I had a daydream -- a fantasy -- that my brother had suddenly died. In the daydream, lots of people came to console me in my grief.

Now, in reality I love my brother and don't have a shred of resentment toward him. What I did have at the time was a need for a certain kind of love and attention.

The meaning of my daydream was not "you wish your brother was dead." The real meaning of my daydream was, "You're so guilty about wanting attention that you think the only way you can get it is if you suffer a terrible tragedy."

The meaning of a fantasy is often the opposite of its plot; whatever the meaning, it's subjective and can't easily be inferred from its story line.

Over the last 10 years I've studied sexual fantasies. I've discovered that they have a fascinating but secret logic.

Imagine this scenario: A guy grows up in a family in which he feels responsible for and guilty toward his mother, who he sees as unhappy and weak.

He develops an implicit or default view of women as unhappy and weak like his mother.

Unfortunately, it's difficult for him -- for anyone in this situation, for that matter -- to get really excited by a woman if he experiences her as unhappy and weak.

That's just the way our minds work. We can't get maximally aroused if we're worried, guilty and responsible.

Fortunately, our imaginations come to our rescue, and we construct some type of fantasy or preference in which this barrier is momentarily overcome.

For example, this guy in question might be attracted to strong, dominant or tough women because their energy reassures him that he can't hurt them and doesn't have to feel responsible for them.

Or he might like to be on the bottom during sex or even lightly restrained for the same reason.

It's easy to see in these cases that if the scenario -- really, just another type of fantasy -- involves a strong and excited woman, his unconscious worries about women are temporarily negated and he can get aroused.

Lots of porn features strong women -- picture the dominatrix -- and the male viewer gets aroused for precisely this reason. But many other types of porn address these same issues but in a different way.

For example, often the woman is portrayed as dominated, hurt or even degraded, but in the porno she's excited and eager. Men are doing these bad-looking things, but the women are enjoying them.

Our psyches are amazing things, really. They interpret the depiction of a woman's arousal as signifying her health and happiness! And thus you find in almost all porn that women appear aroused.

Their arousal subliminally says to the male viewer, "I'm not hurt ... I'm even happy!"

In fact, were these male viewers confronted with a woman's real pain and fear, they would immediately extinguish their excitement.

In other words, they know the difference between fantasy and reality. They don't primarily want to hurt woman.

What they really want is to be strong, selfish or masculine in ways that excite women, not degrade them. Porn provides them with imaginary scenarios in which this wish is safely gratified.

This fact accounts for the absence of any reliable, repeatable studies that prove that exposure to pornography increases the likelihood that the men consuming it will act badly toward women.

Among the reasons for this robust finding (or lack thereof) is that the men who were studied intuitively knew the difference between fantasy and reality, between the women on the screen and their girlfriends or wives.

Add to this the fact that men, themselves, often don't understand what they're feeling or why, and you have a good understanding of why porn researchers who interview men to explore the effects of porn on male attitudes cannot come up with any convincing evidence that it poses a danger.

Anti-porn advocates point out that there is a growing species of porn that is explicitly violent and that appears more extreme in its treatment of the women appearing in it.

Know as gonzo or extreme porn, it features such things as gagging, double anal penetration, gangbangs, bukkake (in which a group of men masturbate on a woman), and face slapping.

Again, despite their irrationality, the scripts almost always call for the woman to get aroused by and seek out such abuse behavior.

One might fairly say that it's a sad commentary on the state of our culture and that of the male psyche that such depictions sell so well.

But the reason that the commentary is so sad isn't because it reflects what men want to do to women.

It's sad because men in our culture are so disconnected from themselves and women, and often feel so helpless in their efforts to make women happy, that they require these kinds of fantasies to get aroused and to masturbate

Fantasies that temporarily reassure them that they're connected to women in the most selfish and aggressive way possible and that, in the end, the women are turned on and not hurt.

Now, there is a subtype of these pornos that feature -- that make explicit and central -- the woman's suffering, her fear, humiliation, helplessness or some combination thereof. Some men require the actual suffering of a woman to get turned on.

Such men have almost always been victims themselves of frightening and traumatic abuse as children and develop such fear and hatred of women that the only safe way they can experience pleasure is through turning the tables on their "persecutors" and doing to women what they feel was once done to them.

Out of this cauldron come rapists and other men who get sexually excited by the infliction of fear and pain on women. Were snuff films to actually exist, these would be their customers.

Those against porn would have us believe that this category of men is huge and that its numbers are maintained and replenished by porn.

I see no evidence of either of these assumptions. My research, clinical and otherwise, suggests that this type of man is rare -- dangerous, but rare.

Second, there is no basis for claims that porn causes this type of sexual violence. All kinds of porn, including the gonzo variety, are found in various European countries, which have extremely low rates of sexual violence.

Sexual violence has been seen in recent years in countries like Bosnia and Rwanda, where there is almost no porn.

The fact that men can become sexually violent under extreme conditions is a fascinating and troubling fact, but I see no evidence that porn has ever been causally linked to such transformations.

Instead, I think that other factors are much more important, including various types of deprivation, the creation of paranoid identity myths, messianic leaders and propaganda, economic competition, cultural scapegoating and ignorance.

In the absence of evidence, to argue that such sexual violence, much less male violence in general, is caused or even exacerbated by porn is simply to substitute our own fantasies for reality. Since men who watch porn don't make such a mistake, we shouldn't either.