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Photos by Nick Clayborne and Ben Moeller

Pornography can be defined as any content that is “produced to elicit sexual arousal.” Long ago, it was usually in the form of intricate sculptures that doubled as art. According to ThoughtCo, the first solid documentation of this dates back to the year 79 AD, when the city of Pompeii was buried under lava. When the city was unearthed in the 18th century, a plethora of pornographic sculptures was found.

Fast forward to the late 1900s, and you might see someone taking a trip to the adult video store to get their fix. Today, porn can be easily accessed online through websites such as Pornhub and xvideos; the sites combined get about 10 million hits per day.

According to Alysa Mozak, a certified sexual health educator and adjunct professor at Grand View, the average age that one first views porn is 14. After that initial view, it tends to become habitual for those between the ages of 16 and 26, which sparks ripe discussion for college students and rests as part of the reason hook-up culture exists.

The tough part about studying a taboo topic such as pornography and sexual behavior is that outlets such as Pornhub only show the world what viewers want to see. No one wants to tune in to average sex, and the extremities shown in sexually explicit content are not usually what humans actually engage in, said Guy Cunningham, professor of psychology at GV and former marriage and family counselor.

“Depictions of ordinary human sexuality in the media are relatively rare,” Cunningham said.

So, what can we talk about instead? We can talk about the extremes, and we can talk about what makes “sex” such a hot seller.

Profiting from porn

“In American culture, porn is everywhere … There’s that whole ‘sex sells’ idea, and that can be damaging,” Mozak said.

According to the Huffington Post, this adult entertainment business generates almost $13 billion a year in the United States alone.

According to a Reddit forum board run by Pornhub’s community coordinator, the domain itself is worth trillions. 

Films such as “50 Shades of Grey” and adult-toy retailers such as Romantix are also beneficiaries.

“50 Shades of Grey” is a trilogy of books and movies about a heterosexual BDSM (bondage, domination, sado-masochism) relationship. According to Mozak, this psychological functioning is a completely different concept from porn.“50 Shades” gives BDSM a negative connotation because the main character and dominant member of the relationship, Christian Grey, has a history of physical abuse and mental health issues. These contribute to an initially damaging relationship with his submissive partner, Anastasia Steele, and gives BDSM the negative perception that it is always like this and never simple and fully consensual, Mozak said. 

At the least, the controversial trilogy has “shed light on it in an appropriate way,” said Mozak, referring to conversations about sex.

As for adult-toy retailers such as Romantix, there is often a stigma attached to those stores that makes us feel shame when we walk in, Mozak said.

“I would feel uncomfortable because that’s my private life, and I want to keep it private,” Grand View student Sarah McMurtry said as she described how she would feel entering Romantix or a similar adult-toy retailer. 

While media forms that show sex and porn as more explorative and less taboo are important, they can negatively affect romantic relationships.

Sexually explicit media often set gender roles for sexual relationships that create a power dynamic right off the bat. For example, movies containing intense sex scenes, such as “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Notebook,” tend to feature a dominant male who takes control of the female, such as pinning her against a wall or taking her clothes off first. These scenes also usually do not depict female pleasure as much as male pleasure.

This can lead to a sense of role assignment and make it difficult for females to talk about their own desires or pleasures.

“‘This is how I’m supposed to act or be as a partner’ is often what happens after viewing porn becomes a regular thing for someone,” Mozak said. This is an idea that could be reflected with any regular viewing or listening of sexually explicit media.

The idea of women lacking a voice in heterosexual relationships is enforced in songs as well, such as the lyrics in Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” The song was called “the most controversial song of the decade” several years ago by The Guardian in London with its repetitive lyric “I know you want it.” That line implies that a woman could say no to ‘wanting it,’ but the male knows she actually does. It may also lead to women feeling like objects rather than valued and autonomous human beings.

However, not all females feel the same about what these media, particularly movie scenes with a seemingly dominant male role, do to gender roles.

“If anything, it empowers women to be more dominant in what they want,” McMurtry said. “They see something, and they’re like, ‘I want that in my relationship,’ so they take that and tell the guy ‘I want you to do this,’ which really puts them in a dominant role.”

Drawbacks

When viewing pornography behind your partner’s back, relationships can suffer greatly. It can lead to feelings of dissatisfaction and instability among the partnership. It also leaves the person who doesn’t know their partner is watching porn with a feeling of mistrust. They might feel like they can’t compare to the person on the sexually explicit content being viewed.

As Cunningham said, the moment we start comparing our partner to anyone else, whether intentional or not, the less attractive our partner becomes.

“The more images we see of attractive other people, the less attractive our partner appears to us,” Cunningham said.

He said it damages intimacy and takes sexuality out of its context of being a fundamental part of a relationship with someone you care about.

Sex is about “intimacy, bonding, releasing of your neurotransmitters that make you connect with somebody on a different level,” Mozak said.

Too much pornography viewership can become extremely detrimental to humans in general because it gives them a shortcut out of emotionally connecting with someone in real life.

“We have to be willing to let another person affect us,” Cunningham said.

Through sexually explicit media, it’s easy to get some sexual release with no strings attached. It allows us to view the person in the video or image as nothing more than just that. We don’t have to let that person affect us in any other way.

Once we have that sexual satisfaction, there is less urgency to find a partner or even engage with our current partner on an emotional level.

Social apps such as Tinder and Snapchat can enforce this idea.

“These new apps allow everyone to seek momentary validation in the form of casual sex with a stranger,” said Mel Robbins, CNN Commentator, in an article about Tinder.

“College-aged students are trying to find who they are,” Mozak said. “They are independent for sometimes the first time, and they are more influential.”

By being more influential and more easily influenced, if they see someone else using Tinder or Snapchat to hook up with someone and nothing else, they are more likely to engage in it, too, Mozak said.

These apps are gateways to “laissez faire” sex, Mozak said, in a college hook-up culture that allow a user to get what they want and then potentially never interact with that person again via social media or in person. These effects are similar to those talked about earlier from too much porn exposure.

This keeps us from having to take the risk of building interpersonal relationships, which are needed in life to learn how to interact and avoid social isolation.

When it comes to the brain, according to both Mozak and Cunningham, the idea of sex addiction is not the same neurologically as other addictions. The brain chemistry of a sexually addicted human does not show the same signs as, for example, an active alcoholic.

Using the term ‘sex addiction’ is not even correct because it is not possible to be addicted to sex or porn in the same way one is addicted to cocaine, for example. This explains why the brain does not react the same way. 

According to David Ley, a clinical psychologist published on Psychology Today, sex addiction “reflects the behaviors of individuals with higher levels of sexual desire and libido, especially as those behaviors lead people into conflict with social values around sex.”

Regardless, when overuse of pornography happens, the effects can still be detrimental to college relationships, whether or not the brain’s chemistry shows it.