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I'm pretty skeptical on the "people like porn too much and stopped fucking" theory; we're not the first society that's had easy access, and the variation in timeline for the TFR problem don't really line up well with any specific culture's sudden access to modern internet porn. (And, uh, pregnancy kink is common enough that The Gays sometimes get it.) It's tempting, and I can see the initial focus on it, but there's too many other potential drivers that seem more immediately connected.
I'm even more skeptical that, had humans reproduced by budding or like sqid, the philosophy of All Within The State would have not found some other problem or problems to solve first.
Well I did say 'in part'... There are lots of other poisons getting into Western culture and causing different harms.
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The social sciences is one of those things where it's tempting to want to assume a direct causality "x caused y" but it's always more nuanced or multifaceted.
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Are you a man? Do you have a partner? Do you watch porn? If yes to all three then I propose the following. Stop watching porn for 2 weeks and see how your relationship with sex changes.
For me, porn absolutely reduces the desire to have sex.
But sex is not a reliable cause of fertility in developed countries.
Sure it is. Not 100% of pregnancies are planned. In fact, it's quite possible that a majority are unplanned.
Consistent with what I said.
What's your evidence? In places with the morning after pill and abortion on demand, why do you think that it is plausible that a majority of children are accidental?
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Yes to all three (though I do try not to watch porn). Trust me, it doesn't reduce my desire to have sex. It's an outlet at those times when I can't have sex, because I can't have sex.
I genuinely have no idea why anyone would prefer porn over sex. Availability aside, it is a strictly inferior substitute for the real thing. So based on my experience, no, I don't think availability of porn is causing people to have less sex.
Because porn features different actors and my sex life features the same actors. I'm an N of 1 here sure, but it's common knowledge that the first thing men do when their wives leave the house is enjoy a good wank session.
If you'd said wife and kids i might have bought it, but as is, no I don't think that's common knowledge at all.
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To the extent that is true (and I do not think it is literally true at all for most people), I would surmise that's because they aren't getting as much sex as they want and prefer to be alone to take care of their needs. I certainly have enjoyed a nice wank when my wife is out of the house, but it isn't replacing sex (and never will). Variety is cool and all, but pales in comparison to the pleasure of actually interacting with a real live woman.
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Ease. No need to get your partner in the mood, no need to pleasure your partner, you get to focus solely on your own pleasure when you want to be pleasured and you're done when you want to be done.
My personal controversial belief about this is that people are often against porn for this very reason. They want actual sex to be like this, where you focus solely on your own pleasure. Porn "raises the bar" in a way that makes them uncomfortable about their own performance.
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These are two of the main enjoyable activities in sex, though.
It's a specific instance of the more general loving vs. being loved distinction. Being loved by someone isn't a tremendously enjoyable experience in itself, because it's passive. Loving someone, insofar as your actions tend to succeed, is about as enjoyable as life gets, because it's active and you can recognise the meaningfulness of your actions towards a valued goal.
See also being rich vs. getting rich, being famous vs. getting famous, being academically successful vs. getting academically successful etc. Most of the enjoyment comes from recognising that your actions are helping you to achieve a valued goal.
If you don't have a sexual partner, then your actions aren't meaningful for the goal of achieving intimacy with a sexual partner, and hence they lose most of their meaning. Hence "masturbatory" as a metaphor for "meaningless".
It's still more work. Like cooking a steak vs having a microwavable meal for dinner. The sex/steak's going to be better, but if you don't feel like putting in more than a lazy five minutes in, the porn/microwave is the choice people will go for.
But whether the time over five minutes is worth it is not independent of people's evaluations of the end goal.
In Love and Friendship, Allan Bloom argued that the net effect of Freud, Kinsey, and the pseudo-scientification of sexuality was to de-eroticise a lot of American culture. There was more open sexuality in the culture, but less of a sense of majesty to the sexuality, and hence a loss of eroticism. Perhaps the appeal to pornography to people is not that they have been desensitized to real-world sexual activities by pornographic experiences, but that they have lost the hope of a genuinely erotic experience in the real-world.
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I did say "availability aside". Yes, sex is harder to get - but when you can get it, it blows porn out of the water. That is why the "people are having less sex because of porn" hypothesis doesn't ring true to me, because that hypothesis basically says that people are willingly forgoing a superior experience for an inferior one.
Even if your partner is happy to have sex and all you need to do is ask, the reasons I listed are reasons why someone might not want to.
I disagree. I cannot envision someone seriously citing those reasons to not have sex in favor of having a wank. I certainly never would.
I don't get that much sex, but I don't find it as vastly pleasurable as you do. There's a decent chance that this is because I've wanked too much and have desensitized my penis, but whatever, it's reality now for me. If I had a partner who rarely would initiate sex, but would always say yes if I initiated- I imagine I'd have sex lots in the beginning of the relationship, then the experience would get a bit stale and I'd go down to a couple times a week.
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I agree. Allan Bloom once said that sado-masochism was a substitute for natural eroticism when people had lost any hope for the latter, e.g. even if you are being abused and deprived by someone, or you are abusing/depriving them in various ways, that's at least some sort of connection, and humans will often prefer even painful and tormented connections to loneliness.
I think that the same dynamic appears in many other parts of life. For example, I have done volunteer work where I met many abused/formerly abused women, and they had always lost hope of a loving relationship with anyone other than their abuser.
Porn, and masturbation more generally, seems to be an instance of the same phenomenon: a substitute activity for when people don't think that they can have the alternative. Note that the alternative is not just sex, but intimacy. A lot of porn users think that they could use prostitutes, unattractive partners, and so on, but don't see that as a path to intimacy. Or they see intimate relationships as too much work, like those men who see sex as a burden of pleasing their partner, rather than as a fun and spiritual (for lack of a better word) activity.
Christian thinkers were really on to something when they said that hope was the most important virtue.
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sex is much more expensive in more ways than just money
What do you mean?
false rape accusations , for one
there are so many hidden costs
I mean, that is bad. But anyone for whom that is a serious risk needs to really reevaluate their sex life. You shouldn't be banging someone you have so little trust in for that to be a realistic possibility.
And this has quite clearly already happened; that's the entire reason for why there's less sex now. (Socioeconomic conditions changed such that women could demand a higher price from men; traditionalists agree with the feminists that this is good, but they're the only ones.)
That's certainly plausible, though I can't really say it's a bad thing if people have learned that promiscuity is bad actually. But in that case, people aren't having less sex because of porn, really. At most one might say it's a contributing factor (risks of casual sex + no-risk porn), but to me that's not the same thing.
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I don't think appeal to personal experience is a very strong. Particularly in my case: I'm a bi furry and have a variety of circumstances where I'll not have access to porn (or any serious personal privacy) for upwards of a month, or sometimes just not watch the stuff at all for my own reasons. It doesn't seem to have much an impact on my sex drive, but I'm hesitant to generalize that to anyone else.
More broadly, though, even assuming and accepting that it reduces desire for sex, we're talking a chart that looks like this. There's ways to talk about a big decrease in sex after the 1990s, but they end up with most sex not being baby-making.
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this is not a good argument, imho
i don't think it's easy to generalize a personal experience to society
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I can only speak form experience, but it is very demotivating - especially if you're a marginal man and you needed to stretch a bit (or a lot) to be successful. You can easily anesthetize yourself.
I think there are a lot of trends today relative to the past that could make men more marginal which would...interact badly with porn: greater levels of anxiety, obesity, smaller social groups, fewer free communal spaces, less money, COVID -> internet dating's issues...
I don't think you can put it all on porn (putting the blame on industrialization and urbanization providees a much more parsimonious theory here), but I don't think it's good either.
And, of course, promoting total commodification of sex has its costs outside of causing our race to go extinct.
Would you say the same thing for women and romantic fiction? Could we motivate women to breed more by banning or at least discouraging the consumption of romantic novels, films, and TV programmes?
I suppose that you could argue that romantic fiction is at least giving you a guide of how to have an intimate relationship, but I'm not convinced that's true. I suspect that reading Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, ceteris paribus, gives you a bad idea of how to have a good relationship, and the same is presumably true of a lot of trashier romantic fiction (which I haven't read). In fact, there were attempts to censor Madame Bovary exactly on these grounds: not just that it portrayed adultery and moral dissolution (in more senses than one) but that it failed to offer an alternative. Anna Karenina does offer an alternative, albeit one that I at least don't find attractive.
Hm...unsure. Not really my vice. Maybe.
Though one potentially relevant difference here is that women tend to be the more selective sex and men are expected to pursue. The demotivated man harms his goals immeasurably by not pursuing, but that situation is not necessarily symmetrical for both sexes.
I suppose you could be constantly approached and just have such a distorted view of romance that you don't ever succeed. Basically this premise
Not necessarily, but women still have standards, and these are affected by their expectations just as much as men's.
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Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are very odd choices to condemn as "romantic novels." They're both very explicitly about dysfunctional relationships, bad choices, and the misery this causes. They're certainly not aspirational - I doubt any woman reads them and wants to be Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina.
My point is that not all romantic novels could be defended as examples of how to romantically relate to others. I'm not claiming that they are representative of all romantic fiction.
For example, Pride and Prejudice does feature some misbehaviour, but it also features some useful positive lessons about relationships.
(Note: I am not conflating the literary merit of books with their didactic merit. I would rank all three book as approximately equally brilliant from a literary perspective.)
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Yup, when people talk about this, I always want to be fair to both sexes.
Yes, for a man, going out to a bar, hitting on a bunch of women, and possibly after spending way too much money, going home to somebody you're moderately attracted too, only for her to either not talk to you again and/or become super clingy seems worse than playing AAAA video games for a few hours, then watching HQ porn w/ amateurs that look better than any woman you could ever have to get off.
OTOH, for a woman, getting hit on by weirdos, unattractive guys, and aggressive assholes, all to lead to a situation where you maybe go to bed to a guy who lasts for a little time in bed and/or tries to push you to do things you're uncomfortable with/dangerous, and then you have to worry about a stalker or worse seems worse than watching a Hallmark Holiday Movie marathon, then reading Amazon Kindle erotic fiction you get via Kindle Unlimited to get off via your vibrator.
The interesting thing is that both pornographic and romantic fiction fantasies seem to have large quantities of what I shall vaguely describe as "unhealthy" connections: adultery/cheating, coercion, jealousy etc.
My suspicion would be that it is desire for excitement + lack of hope. Not all exciting situations are unhealthy, but the exciting situations that are possible when people have a lack of hope in pleasant eroticism are unhealthy. It's probably unfair to compare Madame Bovary with the Song of Songs, but they represent two very different images of the possibilities of sexual experience. And I grant that what is regarded as "unhealthy" is culturally specific, e.g. Odysseus's infidelity in The Odyssey does not seem to have been regarded by its creators as a problem (morally, as opposed to prudentially - he's still missing out on the deepest satisfaction, which would be with Penelope) whereas Penelope's fidelity is clearly supposed to be admirable and her reunification with Odysseus is an example of healthy erotic fulfillment for her.
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We aren't? I get that defining "easy access" (how easy? Access to what?) could conceivably be fraught, but it's difficult to imagine a sensible interpretation that doesn't currently put us a mile off the top of the chart of the baseline human experience.
Fair, this is a complex topic and it's somewhat hard to model, especially as you go back further. And it's hard to even talk about with specificity: there's a great wikipedia article on the Erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and I'm also not going to link it because it starts out with a detailed picture of a satyr penetrating a goat and goes downhill from there. Not all of the 'erotic art' is pornographic, there's always a difficult line between erotica and 'fertility rite' (or even genuine fortune ritual), and the natural tendency for history to leave only the most durable artifacts leaves a lot of unanswered and probably unanswerable information, but there's pretty strong evidence that at least citizens could access imagery of nudity and sex in many different venues, and that these competed with direct prostitution or bawdy shows that are believe to at least involve full nudity and (at least in relation to 'ritual') penetrative sex for an audience. Despite all of this, Roman and Greece morals still emphasized male restraint, which doesn't seem what you'd expect from a culture made flaccid at its own hands.
Similarly, Japanese shunga probably wasn't widely available starting from the 1300s simply because of the price and low repeatability of the underlying woodblock painting technique, but by the 1600s was common enough to be commercial items. Restrictions starting in the 1700s were largely ineffective, though eventually more serious bans began to at least drive supply underground later that century. But even then Victorian traders and art-collectors were getting surprise faceful pretty late into the 1800s. And, again, live shows and outright prostitution-for-display were common-enough and tolerated-enough to be pretty well-documented.
These aren't as high-quality as 4k video, nor as easily accessible as the average smartphone; the criticism that the average homebody today has seen more vaginas and variety in vaginas than Gengis Khan or a Roman emperor is mostly true (modulo the variety of all of that goat-and-swan stuff). But in addition to being a more complex explanation than porn at all, this largely pushes matters to just the last twenty years, and for most a shorter time period. And that doesn't really match this chart.
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No kidding. It's just leaps and bounds better now. In the 1970s you had to go to a theater to watch porn. By the 1980s you had videotapes which you had to buy/rent from a store. Remember the curtained-off back area of the video store? By the 1990s you could download image from the internet, where you'd sometimes wait multiple minutes as the image gradually loaded on your screen. In the late 1990s you could visit a site with a gallery of thumbnails, and then you'd click the ones that looked interesting.
We are absolutely the first society that has had easy access to porn.
in the 70s theaters existed solely for watching porn, alongside pg-friendly venues, and people by in large were fine with that. yes, let that sink in. I think the 60s and 70s were as depraved, even more so, compared to today. Drug use, of all kinds, was so common . Social media, the culture wars, and the always-on media means that everything is scrutinized. In the past, the depravity went unnoticed but it was there.
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Even if we say we've had "easy" access to internet porn since...the early 2000s, things have arguably gotten worse (or better) because porn companies are - just like their social media equivalents - getting better at the algorithms.
I also feel like porn delivery has changed. It used to feel much more ad hoc to go browse something random to jack off to. If I go to a big site today I really get the "Youtube" feel where I can see how it's sucking me down rabbit holes with recommendations in a much more effective manner
The "stepsister" fad probably wouldn't have spread during the early days of my porn viewing (from like 2005 on)
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