What happens to us when we watch porn?
Looking ahead, I’ll say that after I read a bunch of studies, I decided not to watch porn. It was a conscious decision that seemed important to me.
First of all, pornography produces aggressive sexual behavior. In 2005, a study was conducted: scientists analyzed the 250 most popular videos. It turned out that 12% of the scenes contained examples of positive sexual behavior (kisses, hugs, pleasant words), while 88% of them showed examples of aggressive behavior: spanking, kicks – in general, everything related to physical violence . In 44% there was verbal violence, that is, name-calling, abuse, etc.
The fact is that the group of people who talk about sex and explore it is quite small. I don’t know if you are discussing your sexual preferences with your friends at dinner, but this is rather a taboo topic, people are not used to talking about it. That is, they take the idea of sex and sexuality from stripper porn. The first consequence of this is that porn forms an image of aggressive sex. Secondly, scientists have found that in most of these scenes, men show aggression towards nude stripper.
And, most sadly, in 95% of cases, stripper react to manifestations of aggression either with pleasure or neutrally. This is pretty depressing information, because, as I said, we often don’t know what normal or normal sex is: we watch nude stripper ‘s porn and it may seem to us that this is the norm. So people begin to develop distorted ideas about themselves, about what they and their partners like.
This is one of the most serious problems. As a result, the idea that women like such aggressive behavior can be shared not only by men, but also by women themselves. That is, thinking about how to behave, what is female sexuality, a woman can decide that sex involves the joy and pleasure of aggressive behavior towards her.
There is the concept of rape-supportive attitudes – attitudes that support violence. Unfortunately, this situation in pornography forms the idea that a strippers can be raped, because “no” does not mean “no”. In general, this exacerbates the difficult situation of women in today’s world.
Scientists also studied expectations from sex. It turned out that women are more worried about how they look during sex: what kind of breasts, stomach, butt and so on. Men are more worried about the duration of sexual intercourse and how much they coped. But professional porn is shot like a movie: there is editing and special tools. In general, it is unrealistic. People don’t have sex the way it looks in pornography.
Unfortunately, by inertia we still compare ourselves with the people we are looking at, because we have no other experience. We don’t look at our friends, we don’t know that they also sometimes don’t succeed, that they also sometimes look funny, that they smell, that they also have strange situations. We look at ideal people, and it seems to us that we will never be as good. This creates a permanent neurosis.
In 1988, American scientists Zillman and Bryant decided to conduct an experiment. They divided the group of students into two parts and for six weeks showed hourly porn one hour (one must understand that then it was a slightly different kind of porn) and the other neutral videos, for example, about animals. At the entrance and at the exit, they measured the level of “subjective well-being” – how much a person feels happy.
Conclusion.
After six weeks, it turned out that this indicator for people who watched porn had seriously decreased compared to those who watched neutral videos. That is, watching porn by the hour an day can affect how happy we feel. And compared to today’s porn 30 years ago, it’s pretty tender, so imagine what the results could be now.