CYBERSPACE—A week after a New York Times columnist called for an outright ban on porn, and the Times magazine published a lengthy article exploring the purported influence of porn on teenagers, a BuzzFeed columnist pushed back on Friday, recounting the long history of anti-porn panic—despite what writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown called a “total lack of evidence” of harm to teens caused by porn viewing.
Brown published her article just a day after the peer-reviewed academic journal Porn Studies published a research paper on “the pseudoscience behind public health crisis legislation,” debunking claims behind the legislation in several states that has officially declared porn a threat to public health.
“With each new generation of aging pundits and politicians, we get a whole new round of delusional doomsaying about how teenagers are being uniquely messed up by the sex they’re watching, having, and reading about,” Brown writes.
In her BuzzFeed article, Brown cites research “that goes back half a century” demonstrating that no significant correlation exists between porn consumption and sexually deviant or maladjusted behavior. In fact, the equation may work the other way around.
"Research commissioned by the federal government in the late '60s concluded that family background was a bigger predictor of sexually deviant behavior than access to porn,” Brown wrote. “And sexually well-adjusted adults ‘reported more experience with pornography as teenagers’ than their maladjusted counterparts.”
Brown cites 2015 data from the Centers for Disease Control showing that despite what alarmists describe as a porn-saturated culture that has twisted the sexual attitudes of America’s young, in fact teenagers today are less sexually active than their counterparts in the 1980s and 1990s—and those who do engage in sexual intercourse are more likely to use contraceptives than their predecessors in earlier generations.
In fact, the CDC found, in 1988, 60 percent of never-married males between the ages of 15 and 19, and 51 percent of females, reported having sexual intercourse at least once. By 2013, those percentages were down to just 44 percent and 47 percent.
In similar fashion, the Porn Studies paper argues that the claimed harmful effects of porn consumption on adults are equally without basis. The paper says that claims that porn leads to "negative affective states such as depression" likely have their cause and effect confused. In fact, regular consumers of porn “are more likely to view sex and masturbation as acceptable ways to cope with emotional stressors,” and use their porn viewing as “a private, safe outlet for preceding or repressed sexual interests.”
In her BuzzFeed article, Brown cites an extensive 2009 research study finding that “evidence of a causal relationship between exposure to pornography and sexual aggression is slim.”
But public “panic” over pornography goes back to the 19th century when erotic French novels were the targets of moralistic fear and outrage, Brown writes. But somehow, young people have been able to survive despite the supposed centuries-long assault on their sensibilities by porn.
“Kids don’t need another moral panic about porn—they need responsible people in their lives and in the media to help them process it,” Brown concludes.
Read Brown’s BuzzFeed article in full at this link.
