Psychology Today: Scant Evidence Porn Leads to Misogynist Beliefs

Following a study released earlier this year showing that porn “superfans” who attended the 2019 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas defied stereotypical conventional wisdom by exhibiting attitudes toward women that were more feminist and less misogynistic, at least with regard to certain issues, than men in the general population, as AVN.com reported,  a new report published by Psychology Today aims to demonstrate that evidence showing that porn viewing leads to misogyny is insignificant at best. In fact, argues psychologist David Lea in the article, “It might actually be some anti-porn activists who hate women.” Since the 1980s, Lea recounts, “the social argument against pornography has centered on the belief that the material is, at core, hateful towards women.”  In addition, “there have long been concerns that viewing pornography breeds misogyny in male viewers, teaching them to treat women as sexual objects,” Lea writes. But there is very little evidence to support those conventional views, the psychologist says. In fact, Lea cites research by  another psychologist, Samuel Perry, who found the opposite — that sexist attitudes correlate not with porn viewing, but with anti-porn beliefs. In Perry’s survey of “Americans who believe that pornography should be made illegal for all ages,” considerably more than half — 56.7 percent — agreed with the statement, “women should take care of the home, not the country.” Only 36.6 percent of the anti-porn Americans disagreed. Perry’s study also found high levels of agreement among anti-porn Americans with similar statements regarding the inferior roles of women in society. On the other hand, a 2015 study conducted at Western University in Ontario, Canada — titled “Is Pornography Really about ‘Making Hate to Women?’” — was cited by Lea for its findings “that people who had watched pornography in the last year were MORE likely to hold egalitarian, feminist values toward women.” By contrast, Lea reports that the only evidence suggesting that porn viewing can increase sexist attitudes in men occurred in men who were already misogynists — and in a 2011 study, it applied only to men who viewed violent pornography, rather than all porn.  Even under those conditions, viewing violent porn correlated with increased misogyny in only seven percent of men who already exhibited “misogynistic attitudes and antisocial traits.” For 93 percent of the misogynists in the study, even viewing violent porn had no effect on their attitudes toward women one way or the other. Photo By flipchip / LasVegasVegas.com / Wikimedia Commmons