A few years ago The Washington Post published a ridiculous propaganda piece by anti-porn activist (and feminist sociology professor) Gail Dines, “Is Porn Immoral? That Doesn’t Matter: It’s a Public Health Crisis,” tagline, “The science is now beyond dispute.” Sure. Health crisis. No dispute. 100% bullshit.

This is an oft-cited source now in what has since become a growing movement by Christians and feminists to demonize and outlaw porn. Quixotic of course; they can’t topple a mainstream billion dollar industry in this day and age. But they can do a lot of cultural damage by spreading their toxic ideology and lies about science. And like most conservative bullshit, their efforts to induce panic, shame, and oppression rather than actually make the world better will only result in resources being diverted to useless ends rather than the far more productive end of simply making the porn industry better. But the latter would require taking a healthy attitude toward it. Instead we get sex-abhorring, pearl-clutching demagoguery.

Since I’m sure porn consumption is going to adorably spike in coming weeks as people shelter in place and socially distance themselves to slow an unfortunate pandemic, I thought I’d write two articles on the subject. The first, this, on why the anti-porn panic is just a pointless, factless hysteria, one that exhibits the same abuses of science and logic as any other toxic ideology; and the second, on what we could actually be doing to address the real problems with porn, artistically and culturally. The latter I hope to publish in early April. For now, let’s see if Dines has anything worth saying. After all, when you get platformed by none other than The Washington Post, you should probably be bringing your A-Game. This surely must be the best these pearl-clutching nutters have to offer.

First: The Fundamental Fallacies

Dines’ motivation was to cheer and signal boost Utah’s House of Representatives declaring porn a national crisis. No laws passed mind you. They just harrumphed—at porn. And promptly forgot about it. See Christina Cauterucci’s delightful take on this in “The U.S. Will Never Ban Porn. Thank Goodness.” Porn acceptance is on the rise among the public. That doesn’t bode well for the anti-porn crusaders. There is still enough anti-porn sentiment that they can get token bullshit declarations from conservative legislatures. But when it comes to real action, they are losing. The public is already heading in the other direction.

But just in case their disease starts to spread, you need to be on guard against their rhetoric and demagoguery. Critical thinking is your intellectual condom. Step one is catching some fundamental fallacies at the base of every argument they make.

The first is, of course, the standard conservative (and liberal extremist) conflation of morality with legality. According to the Biblical God, eating shrimp and pork are immoral. Yet Christian conservatives would fight to the death against any attempt to outlaw them. Understand why, and you’ll see the fascism inherent in anti-porn activism. Any attempt to use force to compel people to adhere to your personal ideological beliefs is fascism by definition. Which is why they invent this “public health crisis” lie: they know they have no legitimacy if there’s no honest reason for state action; so they have to make one up. But once we clear that away, all we have left is a subjective ideological judgment, precisely what the first amendment was written to ban from government. If you think porn is immoral, don’t watch it. Or write tracts to persuade people to do the same. But don’t force others to agree with you. Force is violence, whether it’s the violence of police jailing you or seizing your money and property, or the violence of a torch-wielding mob on the street. “I’m in favor of violence” is not what anti-porn activists want you to hear. But it is the subtext of everything they are saying.

The second is the common fallacy also deployed by panic brigades both left and right: the conflation of any negative effects of a behavior whatsoever with the conclusion of its immorality. Which would render nearly every behavior immoral. It’s hard to even think of anything humans do that doesn’t sometimes have some negative consequence somewhere. Want to talk about traffic deaths from driving? Or the injuries caused by regular exercise? Or about how letting Republicans say whatever they want about trans people has violent results? Or how every food you eat has killed someone? Or the death toll of solar panels? Swimming? Boating and fishing? Sports? Hell, even merely owning a bucket is killing kids. If all you think you have to do is find “some bad thing” sometimes happening in order to condemn a behavior, you profoundly suck at moral reasoning. Obviously morality follows from a much more complex and nuanced analysis of costs and benefits, an assessment of risk levels and mitigations and acceptance of responsibility, and even then we don’t jump straight to “immoral” but to “not following sensible safety procedures when you are doing it is immoral.” And if that’s what we do with everything else, should it not also be what we do with porn, if even it had any negative results we could dig around to find? It then takes a lot more than that to soundly argue all the way to “no, damn and ban it all.” Anti-porn activists never engage any of this reasoning. That’s how you can tell they are full of shit before you even look at any facts.

Which leads to a third fundamental fallacy, particularly common in conservative thinking: confusing superficial symptoms with the actual causes of problematic behavior. Think of drinking, gambling, even internet use: people who become destructively irresponsible in these pursuits have an underlying problem that needs to be addressed. To instead focus irrationally on the mere superficial trivia of whatever pursuit they irresponsibly obsess over is to completely miss the actual cause, and thus what actually needs to be done to make them, and the world, better. That there are alcoholics, and that there are people who will irresponsibly drive drunk, is not an argument for outlawing alcohol or even restricting “everyone’s” access to it or even declaring “all” drinking immoral. Irresponsibility is immoral. Drinking responsibly is not. Alcoholism is a disease. Drinking alcohol is not. If you can’t tell the difference, you will inevitably only ever make the world worse, by always irrationally trying to treat the symptoms rather than the disease, and punishing the innocent rather than only the guilty. Indeed, with alcohol, and all other forms of prohibition of vices, we’ve discovered the hard way that the conservative’s superficial approach never makes things better, but always worse. Teaching people to be responsible drinkers, and intervening only against those who abuse it, has proven far more effective. Likewise gamblers. Likewise internet users. And anyone else, with anything else.

This is particularly apt with whole industries like porn. Abusing porn, like abusing alcohol, is a symptom of an underlying problem—that wasn’t caused by porn. But merely consuming porn, like consuming alcohol, is not “abusing” it. If you can’t tell the difference, you will only make things worse. You are part of the problem. Please shut up and go away. But there is a lot more we could talk about. There are legitimate issues regarding the porn industry, how it could be more just and humane, just as with all other industries: there is plenty of worker exploitation and predatory abuse and public health dangers and both real and intellectual property theft and every other thing you can think of, in the restaurant industry. Does that warrant declaring restaurants immoral and outlawing them? Obviously not. It warrants activism toward the improvement of the industry. The porn industry is no different. Nor is any industry. Trying to dominate and control women’s and men’s bodies, suppressing free expression, denying people their autonomy, is not a moral solution, any more for porn than food service. Feminism should be about empowering, not controlling women. And men deserve the same.

There are also legitimate issues regarding social and cultural messaging in porn, including valid complaints over mere aesthetic quality. Just as we have with every other creative industry, from corporate marketing to the publishing, television, theatre, and film industries. The solution to which is informed criticism, and advocating for more artistic quality, in both the art and the values conveyed. The same issues of problematic messaging surround both the film and video game industries, for example. The correct response is not outlawing them, or condemning the entire enterprise, but using cultural critique and voting-with-the-dollar to mold the market toward more just and enlightened and beautiful results. Just as we have slowly been reforming the meat and dairy industries toward more humane treatment of animals, so we could, and should, do the same for porn. But that would require accepting porn, indeed even liking it, being a customer. Or indeed even an artist or producer of it! The bettering of porn requires accepting and embracing it. Not fleeing, shaming, and denouncing it.

Finally, another repeated fallacy at the heart of all anti-porn activism is confusing “all porn” with “some certain specific kinds of porn” and then using the latter as an excuse to damn or police the former. And often, ignorantly, like every bigot, as an outsider stalwartly disinterested in learning anything about what they wish to condemn. There is a genre of violent rape porn, for example. It’s quite rare. But you can find it. There are people making it. But it’s meant to serve a very narrow niche of kink, which actually does exist, called consensual nonconsent. Yes, rapists will enjoy it. But generally it isn’t produced for them. In similar fashion, our cinema is full of violent revenge fantasies (from The Matrix to John Wick). None of it is actually made for mass murderers. And hardly anyone foolishly believes those movies cause mass murders. And there is no evidence they do. But even if you are “alarmed” by the enduring popularity of murder fantasies in American cinema (an American affectation Dutch director Paul Verhoeven repeatedly made fun of), it is an obvious fallacy to say “murder movies are bad, therefore all movies are bad.” Yet anti-porn activists do this all the time. They use extreme, in fact unusual examples of what they abhor in order to raise a panic with exaggerated declarations of public danger, in an effort to grab and use the state’s monopoly on power to force compliance.

Which is all indeed the common recourse of the fascist. “Some Mexicans are rapists; ban Mexicans!” “Some pot smokers are criminals; ban pot!” “Eminem said ‘bitch’; ban rap!” “Someone who played Dungeons & Dragons committed suicide; ban all Role Playing Games!” This is folly of the first order. It only makes you look like a terrified fool. Stop. If you think porn is sending the wrong message somehow, that we could have better porn displaying better values, then do what you would do for any other creative industry, from video games to filmmaking: make your own, better product; or support and fund those who will; or put out a public call for either using informed public criticism. Get informed. Get involved. Actually do something. Use freedom, not oppression, to achieve your goals. The very secret to progress lies in increasing degrees of empowered freedom.

On the side matter of anti-porn activists’ attempt to suppress women’s rights by controlling what they can and cannot do with their bodies, how they can and cannot express themselves, how they can and cannot make money or run a business, I’ve already written up all that needs to be said on the matter of sex work’s actual morality and against its legal oppression in Sexy Sex Sex! The kind of matriarchal patronizing of sex workers Dines concludes her piece with I already deal with there. Likewise on the broader issue of “sexual objectification” I’ve already covered that subject in Sexual Objectification. And I said women above, though plenty of men are being attacked with such tropes too, because usually the anti-porn brigade are really only interested in dominating women; the gay porn industry and male porn workers are usually all but ignored, at most thrown in as an afterthought. And while male directors and producers might be maligned as “big bad men” to evoke a “patriarchy is bad” narrative, female directors and producers almost don’t even exist in their distorted vision of the world. But I hope those distortions require no further debunking here.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Some really good take-downs of the latest anti-porn ideology are Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s “5 Myths That Anti-Porn Crusaders Keep Repeating” at Reason magazine (2019), Melinda Wenner Moyer’s “The Sunny Side of Smut” with Scientific American, and Christopher Ferguson & Richard Hartley’s “The Pleasure Is Momentary…the Expense Damnable? The Influence of Pornography on Rape and Sexual Assault” in Aggression and Violent Behavior 14 (2009), which Ferguson mentions and expands on in his editorial “Anti-Pornography Campaigners’ Pseudo-Scientific Treadmill” for Quillette (2019). All four are full of data and links or bibliographies supporting their every point. I highly recommend them.

Here I’ll dive even deeper. The Dines piece first laments the massive increase in the availability and consumption of porn and “panic drops” a bunch of links and headlines about that. This of course is not an argument for this development being bad. But it is designed to raise the panic of anyone already sure it must be, or who might be persuaded by the lies and propaganda to follow. The irony is that by using this tactic, Dines actually immediately refutes the entire thesis of her article. How, you might ask? The central lie of Dines’ piece is her subsequent statement that “After 40 years of peer-reviewed research, scholars can say with confidence that porn is an industrial product that shapes how we think about gender, sexuality, relationships, intimacy, sexual violence and gender equality—for the worse.” This is completely, 100% false. No such thing can even be said now, much less “with confidence.” Researchers have not succeeded in proving porn even affects people—at all, much less in any fashion actually “for the worse.” It may do, but clearly not much, and no science has ever discovered how much. I’ll get to demonstrating that in the next section. But first, let’s consider how what Dines said cannot even possibly be true—before we even look at any science of the matter.

“The statistics on today’s porn use are staggering,” Dines winges. Yep. Everyone is watching it now. Porn use has spread and skyrocketed. And this is what actually proves the opposite point Dines wants. Because while access to and use of porn has indeed increased nationwide, “Violence Against Women Is on the Decline.” Indeed, “sexual violence in the United States, whether measured by arrest or victimization” has “declined by over 50 percent over the last 20 years.” For example “from 1995 to 2010, the estimated annual rate of female rape or sexual assault had declined by 58%.” And that’s taking into account the under-reporting of such crimes to police, since the National Crime Victimization Survey anonymously polls a random sample of tens of thousands of U.S. residents. Since 2004 the rate of such crimes per 100,000 residents has hovered between 1.1 and 1.6.

True, there was an uptick to 2.7 in the last year recorded, 2018. But I wonder what thing happened in 2017 that might have caused a small rise of sexual violence in 2018? It can’t be any new access to or rise in porn use. So Dines’ thesis is out. What, then? Maybe, say, someone being elected to the Presidency who openly endorsed sexual assault and oversaw a rise in misogynistic mass murder? I mean, if we are going to randomly pick correlations as causation, that has a better claim than porn, right? Whatever the case, the evidence proves that even in 2018, the rate of sexual violence against women was still almost half what it was in 1995, long before the rise of easy access to internet porn. Even focusing specifically on “intimate partner violence,” that also substantially declined in the very same period as porn’s rise. Likewise, even the recent increase in domestic homicide (for both male and female victims) has been slight and only back to 2000 levels, again well below its peak in the 1990s.

As the Ferguson and Hartley study concluded, “Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships.” The same can be said of sexual assault and domestic violence. Ferguson later went on to cite evidence that “cross-nationally, more permissive attitudes toward pornography are correlated with steep declines” not only in rape but “other kinds of violence toward women,” and contrary to Dines, “some evidence suggests that pornography consumption may actually be related to greater egalitarianism,” the exact opposite of Dines’ thesis. Again.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown adds:

People who commit rape appear to consume less porn than the general population. In the U.S., rape rates declined faster in states with early internet access. And research has suggested that online “erotic services” marketplaces like Craigslist are directly linked to a decline in female homicide rates. Studies “have also reported positive associations between pornography use and egalitarian attitudes,” according to 2015 research from the University of Western Ontario.

As Martha Kempner points out in “Pornography Is Not a ‘Public Health Crisis’,” there is in fact “a large body of research that suggests pornography does not broadly increase rape or sexual violence.” This includes “Research in countries as diverse as the Czech Republic, Japan, and Hong Kong,” which all “compared periods of time when there were strict laws against pornography to later periods when those laws were relaxed.” Guess what? “Each study found that as access to pornography goes up, rape and sexual violence goes down.” She notes studies show the same for the U.S. This doesn’t mean porn access caused these effects (though the evidence is compelling, as these are all “before-after” studies). But it certainly means porn cannot possibly have been causing the exact opposite effect as Dines insists. So we know it’s impossible any science could be showing a contrary effect—before we even look at any studies she cites.

In just the same way, Dines’ claim that porn has increased sex and deviancy among teens is refuted by publicly accessible data. As Brown puts it:

The proliferation of online porn and minors’ easy access to it has coincided with … significant drops in just about every negative outcome connected to young people and sex. Teenagers have been waiting longer before losing their virginity. When they do have sex, they are using condoms and contraception more often. And they are having fewer unintended pregnancies.

Moreover, “studies dating back more than half a century show that growing up in an atmosphere of sexual repression and shame is more likely to predict anti-social sexual attitudes and actions than is exposure to pornography” (referring to the first federal study of pornography in 1969; the subsequent, politicized one against porn commissioned by Reagan in the 1980s was panned by actual experts, e.g. Douglas Mould, B.L. Wilcox, and Linz, Donnerstein, & Penrod). In fact, those early studies found growing up among household hostility to sexuality is more correlated with subsequent sex criminality. And that’s more like a demonstrated causal sequence, not mere correlation. In other words, it is Dines’ own ideology that increases sexual victimization of women. Which by her own reasoning establishes that her beliefs are not only immoral, they’re a public health crisis. Maybe she should do something about that.

So What Does the Science Say?

In Dumb Vegan Propaganda: A Lesson in Critical Thinking I pointed out how statistical science is lied about or misused to push an agenda, and there linked to several other articles where I’ve shown the same, each illustrating various ways you have to be on your guard against this. Common themes there apply here: always read the original studies cited for any dubious claim (what do they actually say, based on what actual data?), always put those studies back into context (are they obsolete, have they since been refuted or replicated?), always look at the actual effect sizes being claimed (as they’re often so small as to be worth disregarding, especially when they have speciously large confidence intervals), and always avoid correlation fallacies (what actual evidence of causation is there, and in what direction, and what if any confounding variables are there?).

Of course Dines first throws in a fallacy of false equivalence, arguing that the porn industry has a “well-oiled public relations machine” and is therefore (she implies) hiding all the evidence of porn being bad just like the tobacco industry did. I do wonder if she therefore agrees smoking is immoral and should be outlawed, and puts more energy into fighting that—a thing that really is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year and ruins millions of lives with debilitating diseases that its victims (and often their children) suffer for decades. One could make a far more secure public health case for that than for porn. But whatever. Dines presents no evidence of anything the porn industry has successfully hidden from the public. So she has no argument here. That leaves only one thing left: her appeal to “science.”

Psychological and social science is among the most prone to generating false results in line with ideological and other biases. Their studies are extremely unreliable. Which means independent replication is even more important in those fields. Their error rate is as high as two in every three published studies. So if you pick a few studies that support your ideology, and ignore the fact that most other studies challenge or refute those, you are a propagandist—a liar—not an honest reporter of the state of the given science. And if the few studies you cherry pick are themselves demonstrably dishonest in their description of their own data, or what conclusions actually follow scientifically from them, then we have a clincher: your position is not only not supported by science, it’s only supported by pseudoscience, and refuted by all actual science. This is Dines.

In fact, as the BBC recently reported, “porn science” may well be the most biased and unreliable of any in the literature. When the UK children’s commissioner asked scientific experts to review the merits of published studies on the effects of porn on adolescents, “They used a weight of evidence approach to rank the quality and relevance of the papers,” and of more than 40,000 papers, “only 276 met their criteria” of being unbiased and not methodologically flawed. That’s a failure rate of over 99%. That’s flabbergasting. Peer reviewers agree. “Forensic psychologist Miranda Horvath and her colleagues were shocked” by the poor “quality of the research.” We’ll see in Dines’ propaganda piece several examples of what they were talking about. (Of the studies she cites, only one, by Brown & L’Engle, passed the UK commission’s peer review.)

“Using a wide range of methodologies,” Dines claims, “researchers from a number of disciplines have shown that viewing pornography is associated with damaging outcomes.” Have they? Or is she just cherry picking the most biased and unreliable studies and completely ignoring all the studies that refute them? Oh right. She does the latter. Let’s take a tour.

• CLAIM: “In a study of U.S. college men, researchers found that 83 percent reported seeing mainstream pornography, and that those who did were more likely to say they would commit rape or sexual assault (if they knew they wouldn’t be caught) than men who hadn’t seen porn in the past 12 months. The same study found that porn consumers were less likely to intervene if they observed a sexual assault taking place.”

This is a lie. Indeed, a whole litany of lies. Dines is talking about a 2011 study by John Foubert et al., “Pornography Viewing among Fraternity Men: Effects on Bystander Intervention, Rape Myth Acceptance and Behavioral Intent to Commit Sexual Assault,” published in Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity. Note Dines hides the truth by changing “fraternity men” into “college men,” doesn’t mention this was no randomized study but simply polled fraternity members at a single university, barely half of whom even agreed to participate. Which left fewer than 500 test subjects; a mere 83 of whom “claimed” not to have viewed porn “in the last 12 months.” So we’re not off to a good start.

Of course this study is demonstrably biased. But more importantly, it produces no usable results. Foubert et al. describe the existing literature dishonestly or misleadingly (just compare their description with mine and the others I cite here; and we all use exact quotes from the same literature where they do not). They also lie about their findings, claiming the “results of this study showed many effects of fraternity men’s exposure to pornography.” Nothing in the study was capable of showing any such causal relationship, and they made no attempt to find one. Using the word “effects” is therefore lying. I’m shocked that passed peer review. Worse, they describe these “effects” they didn’t really find as “significant.” Another lie. Just look at their table of results (on page 221): each variable was measured on a 1 to 7 scale (e.g. “likelihood to commit rape,” “rape myth acceptance,” and so on), yet they failed to find a difference of even a single point on any scale. For instance, for “likelihood of raping” the difference was only a mean answer of 1 and 1.19. Think about that. The scale didn’t even include values between 1 and 2. So even those willing to admit they watch porn were so far close to scoring a 1—the lowest score possible—as to make no meaningful difference.

None of the other scales ever approached a difference between the two groups of even a single point. All groups (whether they admitted to watching porn or not) scored a mean below 2 (and thus effectively just a 1), except for “bystander willingness to help,” where both groups scored between 3 and 4, with a mean difference between them of less than a third of a point; and “rape myth acceptance,” where both groups scored a mean just below 3! In fact, the difference between the two groups on that measure was a mean of 2.66 and 2.61—a difference of less than a tenth of a single point. Porn thus didn’t even cause a significant increase in rape myth acceptance. In short, this study failed even to find a meaningful correlation with porn, much less a causal one. For crying out loud, on “rape myth acceptance” even those admitting to watching rape porn scored a mean of 2.96, barely three tenths higher. Of course, one might imagine why already-existing rapists would thus be caused to like and consume rape porn—so no causal relationship the other way is established here. But it’s worse than that: they found watching rape porn had virtually no effect on almost all men’s rape myth acceptance scores. In other words, even if we assumed causation, their own data demonstrate even rape porn had essentially no causal effect on that measure (and barely any effect on any other measure).

The sole measure that wasn’t on a 1 to 7 scale but a percentile scale, “bystander efficacy” (how likely they report a willingness to intervene if they witness a crime), didn’t even vary at all between those admitting to viewing mainstream porn and those claiming to have seen no porn (78.65 and 78.95, respectively). The largest variance was between, again, those who do and don’t admit to watching rape porn: a whopping 76.54 vs. 79.02! Christ almighty. A difference of not even three percentiles? Really? Only a liar would ever call that “significant” and imply they meant meaningful. Again, that some men who are already rapists would both be more likely to watch rape porn and score “slightly lower” on bystander efficacy is already a certainty. There is therefore no possible way to claim porn the cause here. It’s the effect, at best. And hardly even that.

I’m fairly sure Foubert and gang are exploiting the public’s science illiteracy to promote an ideological position here. The public does not understand the difference between “significant” (meaning, only, statistically significant, as in, a result unlikely to be random noise) and “meaningful” (as in, large enough to even matter). And the Foubert report not only doesn’t explain this difference, it exploits the confusion to push assertions in their conclusion that don’t align with any of the data or results they present. As I’ve explained in articles before on how not to be deceived by people like this, you should be sure to understand that minuscule effect sizes can be statistically significant but not meaningful. That the difference in numerous measures of “rape-y-ness” between men who admit to watching porn and men who don’t was insignificant in this study. They all effectively scored the same, with less than a single point or percentile variance. And even that microscopic difference found can be entirely explained in the most obvious way: rapey guys are slightly more likely to watch porn than not-rapey guys.

Big surprise.

Okay. So that’s a crap paper. Next?

• CLAIM: “In a study of young teens throughout the southeastern United States, 66 percent of boys reported porn consumption in the past year; this early porn exposure was correlated with perpetration of sexual harassment two years later.”

This is misleading. Dines’ link is broken, but you can tell from the URL and her description that she means Jane Brown & Kelly L’Engle, “X-Rated: Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors Associated With U.S. Early Adolescents’ Exposure to Sexually Explicit Media,” Communication Research (2009), reporting a study that was actually conducted between 2002 and 2004. A more recent (and thus more important) metastudy (Jochen Peter & Patti Valkenburg, “Adolescents and Pornography: A Review of 20 Years of Research,” The Journal of Sex Research 2016, which post-dated the UK commission’s peer review but built on a series of studies published by Peter & Valkenburg that did pass) only concludes “the available evidence suggests the relation between pornography use and the perpetration of sexual aggression may be stronger among boys than girls,” but the effect size is “small” and “causality unclear.” And that’s pretty much their finding for every study they reviewed. They found “various methodological and theoretical shortcomings, as well as several biases in the literature” and considerable inconsistencies in reported results, which “currently precludes internally valid causal conclusions about effects of pornography on adolescents.”

Even for this one point about an aggression correlation Peter & Valkenburg only cite Brown & L’Engle, who found roughly twice as many harassing boys had viewed porn by age 14 than non-harassing boys. Which sounds startling until you notice they classified 60% of all boys as harassers—because their definition of harassment was absurdly broad, including even just making fun of someone’s clothes or appearance, using offensive words, or telling sexually themed jokes—whether to boys or girls. They were asking this of kids…seriously. No wonder they found most boys reporting at least one such behavior. They haven’t even grown up yet. Since this study conflates sexually open and ribald discourse with actual harassment, its results are pretty useless. Obviously kids who view porn are going to talk more about sex and use sexual themes more often in their discourse. This doesn’t tell us whether they will grow out of that childish behavior, much less that they get it from porn, rather than such permissiveness driving them to porn.

So Dines has no argument here either. Her cited paper simply does not show what she claimed. Brown & L’Engle did not actually identify anything other than that adolescent porn viewers include sex more often in their childish behavior and discourse. It demonstrated nothing about how they grew up (before or later), nor demonstrated anything about why they acted that way. Brown & L’Engle didn’t even ask, for example, whether family environment caused both porn consumption and an inclination to sexualize behaviors and discourse—after all, we should expect adolescents who are better behaved, more oppressed, or less interested in sex will conjointly do neither, thus explaining all their data. And as I noted already, wider statistics show that whatever is happening, porn is actually correlated with decreasing abuse of women in society. Which means either these harassing boys are learning to behave by the time they reach adulthood, or are dwindling in number. Either way, abusive boys or men clearly are decreasing in number at the same time porn access is increasing; porn is therefore not creating them.

So this doesn’t get us anything. Next?

• CLAIM: “A recent meta-analysis of 22 studies between 1978 and 2014 from seven different countries concluded that pornography consumption is associated with an increased likelihood of committing acts of verbal or physical sexual aggression, regardless of age.”

This is a lie. Dines is referring to a paper by Paul Wright et al., “A Meta‐Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies,” Journal of Communication 2015. This paper does over-state its conclusion, asserting it proved causation when absolutely nothing in their report is even evidence of causation. All they did was survey studies pointing to correlation between porn consumption and sexual aggression. And the effect size they found was again small: between 0.24 to 0.32, which if credible would mean violent people are maybe 24% more likely to admit to consuming porn than anyone else.

But even that result is extremely dubious. For example, in calculating this they include Ybarra et al., “X-Rated Material and Perpetration of Sexually Aggressive Behavior Among Children and Adolescents: Is There a Link?,” Aggressive Behavior (2011), which only studied children and adolescents, and reported a correlation between consumption and misconduct of 0.384, which Wright et al. “correct” to 0.427, hugely skewing their overall results, yet that correlation was only for violent porn. Ybarra et al. in fact found no correlation with mainstream porn (“exposure to nonviolent x-rated material was not statistically significantly related” to any aggressive behaviors). At no point is this corrected in Wright et al.’s analysis. Likewise, Ybarra never claimed causation, only correlation. Note Ybarra 2011 passed the UK commission’s peer review. Wright et al. did not.

Since we already know violent people will prefer violent porn, mere correlation cannot establish any more of a relationship than that. Worse, this not being a study of adults, but children and adolescents, skews the conclusion. A child’s interest in consuming violent porn is more often indicative of pathology. And indeed Ybarra et al. only found 5% of the over 1000 children and adolescents they studied to have even reported violent behavior at all. That’s basically the same percentage of any 1000 people who are sociopaths (Bill Eddy, “Are Narcissists and Sociopaths Increasing?” and Grant et al. 2004). So are these kids violent because they consumed porn, or because they are sociopaths? The latter seems far more likely. After all, if these 5% of offenders are not the sociopaths in their sample, Ybarra et al. just discovered an extraordinarily peaceful and law-abiding sample of sociopaths. Clearly, interpreting their results as finding anything other than sociopaths is folly.

The same faults arise when you dig into every study Wright et al. aggregate. They are simply being dishonest about what those studies say or are capable of proving, and thus are combining disparate studies that can’t really be fitted together this way. Their results are therefore useless. As further evidence of their dishonesty, their paper includes statements like “that nonviolent pornography consumption was associated with sexual aggression is consistent with the results of prior meta-analyses,” and then ignores all the studies that found otherwise (like Ybarra et al.), and cites only three studies in support of the point: two by Allen et al. way back in 1995 and only one recent study, Hald et al., “Pornography and Attitudes Supporting Violence against Women: Revisiting the Relationship in Nonexperimental Studies,” Aggressive Behavior (2010). Which is the next paper Dines cites.

• CLAIM: “A 2010 meta-analysis of several studies found ‘an overall significant positive association between pornography use and attitudes supporting violence against women’.”

Here Dines falls victim to (or dishonestly exploits?) the equivocation fallacy between “significant” and “meaningful.” Hald at least is the more reliable study discussing this, being the more recent, and explicitly correcting the Allen studies (a fact Wright et al. neglected to mention). So that Hald contradicts Wright is telling. What does the Hald meta-study actually say? “The average correlation between pornography consumption and attitudes supporting violence against women using a fixed effect model was significant” but small, only 0.14 to 0.22. Which means violent people are maybe 14% more likely to admit to consuming porn than anyone else. Hald et al. immediately point out that “a failed test of heterogeneity and inconsistency across studies was found indicating the likely presence of a moderating variable,” thus undermining any claim of causation. They did find about the same correlation for nonviolent porn, but likewise the same problems of inconsistency across studies.

To understand why this matters, let’s walk through some hypothetical math. Imagine that 100 out of every 1000 men hold “attitudes supporting violence against women” and that 80% of those 900 other men are porn consumers. There will be 720 nonviolent porn consumers. The Hald result would simply tell us that instead of 80 violent porn consumers (what we’d find if the same percentage of misogynists viewed porn as normal men do), we can expect to find about 91 violent porn consumers (91% being 14% more than 80%). An increase of only 11 men. But still eight times more men who watch porn won’t hold “attitudes supporting violence against women” than do. That’s how trivial the “effect” of porn is, if we even were to regard it as an effect. Now add in the observation that when porn availability immensely increased, actual violence against women more or less halved. Meaning that those 100 men became 50. Still, yes, 91% of them watch porn—so, 45 guys or so, while still 80% of the now 950 other men watch porn, which is now 760 men. The men watching porn who don’t hold “attitudes supporting violence against women” increased by 40, while the men watching porn who do hold such views decreased by over 40. In what world would you observe this and conclude porn causes an increase in violent attitudes toward women?

The same comes out no matter what you do to change these numbers, as long as you don’t contradict observed facts. The number of men inclined to violence against women is simply, indisputably, a minority of men; and violence against women did simply, indisputably, decline precisely in the same two decades as porn access skyrocketed; and all men simply, indisputably, watch porn to very high percentages. Put those three facts together, and there is no logically possible way to get Dines’ conclusion. All her citing of correlation is logically meaningless in the face of this information. Because it doesn’t matter how strong a correlation you find between violent men and porn consumption, you always get the same result: that men inclined to violence against women are also declining in number exactly as porn consumption increased.

For example, suppose we found that 100% of violent men consumed porn (a correlation factor of 0.25 if 80% of nonviolent men consume porn, which would be roughly comparable to what even the unreliable Wright meta-study claimed). Run the numbers. Those 100 violent porn consumers will still drop to 50 and the nonviolent porn consumers will still increase to 760. Porn still cannot be claimed to have caused an increase in violent men. Even with the most extreme correlation we could possibly find in that situation, porn viewing corresponded to a reduction in violent men and increase in nonviolent men. That’s why all these correlation studies are useless data. Dines is abusing public science illiteracy, and falsely equating “more violent men watch porn” with “more watching of porn produces more violent men.” Those two statements are not mathematically equivalent.

As Hald et al. themselves say, “it has been consistently found that an association between pornography consumption and aggression is particularly likely for men who score high on other risk factors for sexual aggression.” In other words, we already expect violent men to be more obsessed with porn. There is no evidence the porn is making them violent. They already were that way. If porn could cause these violent tendencies, there should be way more men driven to violence and hostile or negative views of women among those watching porn, particularly as societal porn consumption has risen. That there isn’t, but in fact as porn consumption rises all measures of violence decline nationally, completely destroys any claim that porn is causally dangerous. No correlation study can ever counter that fact.

So here we see Dines cites one meta-study (Wright et al.) that is so methodologically flawed it’s a wonder it ever passed peer review and that still didn’t find any causal effect of porn on violence, but a mere increase in violent-minded men who like porn (claiming maybe 24% more do than nonviolent men). Then immediately Dines cites a more reliable meta-study (Hald et al.) that contradicts that one, showing an even smaller correlation (of only maybe 14%). But neither of these numbers matter. It makes no difference how many more violent men like porn than nonviolent men do: the number of violent men still declined precisely when porn increased. It is therefore impossible that porn causes men to be violent. By contrast, the evidence that playing football causes substantial increases in domestic and other violence and criminality is very strong. Instead of violence in the football-playing population halving as they take up playing, it increases by 30-50%! If porn did that, Dines might have a point. Instead, if porn even does anything, it’s the opposite. Hmm. Maybe Dines should drop her stupid crusade against porn and address her energies against an actual public health crisis: football. You know, just thinking out loud.

• CLAIM: “A 2012 study of college-aged women with male partners who used porn concluded that the young women suffered diminished self-esteem, relationship quality and sexual satisfaction correlated with their partners’ porn use.”

Another lie. This refers to “Young Adult Women’s Reports of Their Male Romantic Partner’s Pornography Use as a Correlate of Their Self-Esteem, Relationship Quality, and Sexual Satisfaction,” by Destin Stewart & Dawn Szymanski, published in Sex Roles in 2012. All this study found is that some women don’t like it when their boyfriends watch porn. In fact, it found this held only for what these women defined as “problematic” use of porn (such as “excess frequency”), not just any use of porn. So this study did not find that “male partners who used porn” caused these effects on their female partners (never mind the total erasure of gay relationships here, as with most porn studies). It only found that men who problematically used porn had this effect on their partners (and even then, not all the time).

Imagine a study that found a significant correlation between women’s “self-esteem, relationship quality and sexual satisfaction” and the frequency of their partner’s spending time watching sports—or drinking. Should our conclusion be “sports are therefore immoral and must therefore be outlawed” or that “drinking is therefore immoral and must therefore be outlawed”? Or should it be “men who act like that might have a problem in need of treatment” or “women should not date men who act like that”? The answer is obvious. Good lord I would hope a sociology professor would be able to understand this. Dines clearly doesn’t. Yet not understanding that is dangerous. No further rebuttal here is required.

Next?

• CLAIM: “Meanwhile, a 2004 study found that exposure to filmed sexual content profoundly hastens adolescents’ initiation of sexual behavior.”

This one is really funny. News to Dines: the age of initiation of sexual behavior has been steadily rising since that study was published, exactly as access to porn increased. Thus disproving that study outright. Oh well. There is a reason two out of every three studies in the social and psychological sciences reports false results. Dines, please update your bibliography.

What’s doubly funny, though, is that that study was not even about porn at all. It simply studied the correlation between beginning any sexual activity with viewing any depiction of sex on ordinary television in any fashion. Imagine a teenager in 2001 who was not allowed to ever see even a single sex scene on TV. Do we really need to explain why this teen would not be allowed to engage in any sexual activity? All our correlation is accounted for here. We can only, after all, be talking about a teenager abusively controlled and policed by toxically conservative, sex-phobic parents. And we are holding up that horrible parental environment as a model to follow? This exposes the toxic cultural threat posed by the likes of Dines. Yes, progressive parents let their kids watch TV and have sex when they feel they are ready. The world has been a better place ever since. Anyone who thinks otherwise is an ignorant reactionary whose ideas can only make the world worse.

• CLAIM: “The average age of first viewing porn is estimated by some researchers to be 11.”

We can tell Dines is running out of steam here. This isn’t even an effect. So it’s not even capable of being an argument against porn. She’s just trying to stir up panic with more crazy “won’t someone think of the children” pearl clutching. Never mind that I could find absolutely no evidence her claim was true. That some dude said it, is about all she has here. So much for science I guess. In all the actual studies Dines’ own sources cited of adolescent consumption of porn, pretty consistently the average age of first viewing is around 13, not 11. As to be expected. That’s the onset of puberty and thus of sexual interests and feelings. Being freaked out by that is like being freaked out by nipples. Or masturbation.

• CLAIM: “In the absence of a comprehensive sex-education curriculum in many schools, pornography has become de facto sex education for youth.”

Hey, do you know what we should actually do about that? It’s either “ban porn” or…gosh…what could the other option be? Real stumper.

And that’s it. That’s all she’s got.

Content Freak Out

Then Dines goes into all her hand-wringing about all the weird stuff that happens in porn. This is again not an effect. So it’s not an argument. And yes, that she thinks consensual spanking is evidence of violent aggression against women is pretty funny. And she doesn’t seem to know that porn has changed since the study she cites, or that there is a kind of porn available to every taste, even total vanilla beans like her. But more to the point, notice how easily one could make the same list of evils for mainstream movies: for extreme degrees of gore, violence, scariness, emotional intensity, depictions of suicide or abuse, pick your concerning adult content.

Your kids could actually watch Saw or Saving Private Ryan or The Passion of the Christ when you aren’t home. Is that a valid argument for outlawing those movies or even declaring them immoral? Much less the entire movie industry? If that doesn’t make sense for mainstream media, it doesn’t make sense for porn. There is content for mature audiences. In all media. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. There’s plenty of kiddy entertainment for you. I hear TikTok is entertaining. If you’re that into lamestream media.

Actually, much of the content of porn she is concerned about, teens are actually highly critical of (confirmed even in the UK study), fully grasping it’s as unrealistic as car chases and kungfu and gunfights in movies. And even what one could still raise issues with, the correct response to that is advocating for changing the art, same as any other creative industry. If we have a problem with the way Asian people are depicted in movies, we don’t call for outlawing movies. We advocate for improved treatment of the subject. And generally, when we do that, we get it, however slow that progress is. So people who actually have a problem with only “certain things” about porn (and thus who are not, actually, a toxic, bigoted, sexphobic fascist), should respond the exact same way they do to problematic content in any media whatever.

But you’ll have to stay tuned for what I have to say about that in my followup article.

Conclusion

Anti-porn propaganda is consistently contrary to actual science and well-documented facts. It is therefore some of the most dishonest propaganda still out there. There is no evidence of any causal relationship between porn consumption and violence against women or any negative outcomes for teens or anything else. To the contrary, the data pretty uniformly show tremendous improvements in those measures as access to and use of porn rose, state by state and nation by nation. Whereas anti-porn attitudes might be more generative of such negative outcomes. Everything from STD rates to teen pregnancy rates to age of first sexual experience worsens in correlation with the prevalence of conservative ideologies.

As Milton Diamond’s survey “Pornography, Public Acceptance and Sex Related Crime: A Review” found for the International Journal of Law & Psychiatry (2009):

There [has been] no detectable relationship [between] the amount of exposure to pornography and any measure of misogynist attitudes. No researcher or critic has found the opposite, that exposure to pornography—by any definition—has had a cause and effect relationship between exposure to [Sexually Explicit Material] and ill feelings or actions against women. No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women.

That was true as of 2009 and has remained the case since. Can we find anything wrong with porn?

One might fret over a slight uptick in STD rates in the U.S., but that is small, doesn’t correlate with porn use, and has better known causes. “Increases in reported cases and rates” of chlamydia “likely reflect the continued expansion of screening efforts and increased use of more sensitive diagnostic tests” and confirming this interpretation is the fact that “rates of gonorrhea remained relatively stable” in that same period, rising only later. Though gonorrhea rates have gone up, they remain a fraction of what they were in the 1970s and 1980s. Syphilis was a scourge in the 1940s and 1950s. Today it falls well below the levels recorded even in the 1980s. Herpes-2 and HIV remain in steady decline and are at the lowest levels ever recorded. So really, only syphilis and gonorrhea have gone up, and that only very recently, and in very small degree, all of which accounted for by “cuts to public health funding” resulting in poorer access to testing and treatment and a decline in condom use by gay and bisexual men—not hetero guys watching porn.

Even the claim that porn has increased problems in human relationships is contradicted by the data. Correlations, again, aren’t causation. Much will be made of studies linking porn viewing to decreased sexual interest in one’s partner, for example, when obviously, the causal direction here can be in either direction, e.g. loss of interest in one’s partner, causing increasing recourse to porn. So mere correlations tell us nothing. We have to look for actual effects—or the absence thereof. And when do do that, we see completely different results. Exactly as porn consumption and access rose, divorce has been on the decline. Promiscuity and teen pregnancy are on the decline. The number of people who are in a relationship at any given time hasn’t significantly changed since the year 2000 and is higher than it was in 1986 (those reporting “no steady partner” counted 51% in 2000 and 49% in 2020, error margins overlapping; it was 63% in 1986). Roughly half of all Americans maintain stable relationships for more than ten years and “single motherhood is at its lowest point in more than 50 years.” And single parenthood numbers aren’t indicative anyway, as they don’t tell us how many adults in a household are actually participating in child care. And all signs are, it’s increasingly more than one. So we can find no decline here either. So…where is the public health crisis?

Please.

Let’s stop the bullshit.