I didn't get married until I was 40 (in 2001.) In the mid 1990s, it was noticeable that a lot of men were suddenly watching a lot of online videos of hardcore porn. I noticed in several boyfriends who watched a lot of porn that they didn't seem to be able to have what is now viewed as "vanilla" sex. Honestly, I cut off these relationships in part because of this. After this, I deliberately sought out a partner who hadn't watched a lot of porn and married him.
Porn can work in the opposite direction that men intend: they end up with less real sex.
I started having sex in 1997. At that time, there was certainly misogyny and lots of casual sex, but none of it was violent... I remember a couple of guys trying to push for anal sex, but there wasn't any of this choking stuff. I never felt pressure to do weird or violent stuff, I never felt like there was any expectation of body perfection or hairlessness... To me things have changed a LOT for young women today, in terms of expectations and what is viewed as 'normal'.
Just catching the edge of what young people my daughter's age (late teens, early twenties) are talking about now, there's actually a move afoot to question hook up culture (in coastal California.) Don't know how broad based this is, but I suspect it is a growing conversation.
Regarding body perfection, I did get one guy in the late 1990s who gave me a lecture about the Jockey underwear I had been wearing. I think he expected designer French underwear or something. He definitely picked the wrong girl. There was a move afoot toward body perfectionism in the 1990s, but it was more of a mix of expectations. No one ever asked me to do weird or violent stuff.
I suspect that many young people are pushing back on these asks for violent sex. Still, now, there is a huge contingent of men who expect it. There is also a growing contingent of men who seek out sex with underage minors.
I remember that most guys back in the 1980s would accept a "no, I'm not interested". Now, if you look online, there is just so much anger from men around sex (or the lack thereof).
I was at the California state legislature in Sacramento a couple of weeks ago to hear California State Senator Shannon Grove make the final push for SB 14 to add trafficking of underage minors to a list of "serious crimes" in California. More than twenty formerly underage trafficking victims got up and told their story to the California safety commissioners. It was shocking. About half the members of the audience were crying. Shannon Grove herself was crying. One woman, who had been a trafficking victim, told us of how her sister was also trafficked and then killed. California has one of the highest rates of underage sex trafficking on North America. Most of the victims who are trafficked into the sex industry are poor and underage. I have no doubt that the porn industry is driving some of this (directly and indirectly).
Just raising any questions about porn immediately ends up with an accusation that the "Christian right" is excessively imposing their value system on the majority. Many people are very reflexive about it.
Don't know where all this is going, but it seems sad that the current incarnations of porn have taken our culture to such a dark and lonely place.
Yeah, on Twitter the men responding to me (Twitter tends to have a lot of porn fans, as opposed to my specific readers here, or listeners) all chalked up shame to 'religion'. Of course the men I talk to in my personal life are not Catholics. I barely even knew any religious people until recently, on account of my work. Certainly many of the men I speak with on a personal level are progressives...
I've noticed this "you must be a Christian conservative" reaction on porn and other issues for the last decade or so. I find this reaction to be rigid and anti-intellectual. There's kind of a self-congratulatory superiority to it.
It would be a good idea to interview one who has studied sexual neuroscience, on the subject of the use of pornography. Someone with the educational background necessary to begin to answer some of the questions you're putting forward. Why not interview Dr. Debra Soh?
Let's be brutally honest about one thing: Monogamy is not natural for our species, or at least not entirely so for most people as it falls on a spectrum. At best, it's a kind of social technology. Or more accurately, as history and anthropology has shown, there are really three kinds of monogamy: strict, lifelong, and universal. Pick two out of three, basically.
(That is true for BOTH genders, by the way. In fact, some studies suggest that women are even less suited to monogamy than men are.)
Porn is basically a giant workaround. And yet, those who seek to eradicate it are rarely (if ever) the same people who endorse even a fraction of the ideas in "Sex At Dawn" by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. Quite the paradox.
That's not to say that porn itself doesn't have a dark side. It obviously does. But as the legendary Dr. Marty Klein has famously noted, whenever there is conflict that appears to be about porn, most of the time, it's not really about the porn. Usually it goes much deeper.
I'm not sure it's true that monogamy isn't 'natural'. It seems as though there are powerful evolutionary strategies in place to keep men and women attached for the sake of creating families/reproducing? Part of the problem might be that we were never meant to live that long and our expectations for love/a relationship have probably changed?
I suppose the jury is still out on to what degree it is natural or social technology. And it most likely falls on a spectrum. "Sex At Dawn" (2010) provides some good insights I think. Interestingly, according to that book, lifespans were not quite as short as one may think in the Stone Age. High infant mortality rates weighed the average down for life expectancy at birth, but if you survived to age 5 or so (no small feat back then!), you would likely live into your 60s or even 70s, believe it or not.
Of course, that was all before the advent of patriarchy. In fact, matriarchy (to one degree or another) was most likely the norm until the Bronze Age.
And finally, if monogamy (of the strict variety, that is) really were so natural, it wouldn't really need to be in any way "enforced" (to use Jordan Peterson's own words) on anyone, now would it?
Yeah. I think this might be one of those more than one thing can be true situations. I think there are evolutionary reasons for monogamy and that humans like to partner. But also men are programmed to 'spread their seed,' as it were, so there are mechanisms in place to get them to stick around. For women, we get bored of sex with the same man after a while, and our libidos wane, so in that way monogamy isn't natural, because LIKE MAGIC our libidos return with a new man. But I don't, at the same time, think women particularly get much out of casual sex, for example.
Another thing I was thinking about while on this topic was about the underlying sexual politics of the whole Covid regime, particularly lockdowns. Interestingly, it was men (even the most macho conservative men) who were first so gung-ho about the lockdowns, albeit briefly, while it was women who wanted the lockdowns to continue in some flavor or another beyond the first couple of weeks. There are likely a number of reasons for this, but this conversation got me thinking, it was most likely men's (wander)lust that finally brought lockdowns to an end. In contrast, anecdotal evidence suggests that women may have supported continued lockdowns and especially antisocial distancing as a stealth Lysistrata of sorts, but that may be me overthinking things of course.
While more specifically, for the school closures, mask mandates for kids, and especially the jab mandates for kids, it was mothers who ultimately (and thankfully) put an end to that. For very obvious reasons, as they had the most skin in the game.
Men's acute initiation of the lockdowns was basically a perversion of men's "hero instinct", which was quickly superseded by their (wander)lust, while women's support of more chronic lockdowns was basically a perversion of women's "caregiver instinct".
(I keep planning on writing a long article about "the sexual politics of lockdown", but I keep forgetting to do so.)
Hmm personally I felt like I was dying for lack of human touch/sex so idk. I think women go along with this stuff because they tend to like to go along... In my personal life, though, I feel like just as many men were nutso about Covid lockdowns as women.
Thank you for your insights, Meghan. I was thinking some more about this as well, and I would like to also add the following.
Not only Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, but also Daniel Bergner as well as Wednesday Martin have a lot to say about this topic as well. Though the latter author, though otherwise good, unfortunately seems to endorse a sort of "reverse double standard" where it is OK for women to cheat on men and otherwise have multiple partners, but not the other way around. (Something Oprah and Dr. Phil seem to have tacitly endorsed to one degree or another as well.) The extreme form of this maxim is the idea that men even *thinking* about other women is practically a thoughtcrime, but not the other way around, even when it goes beyond that.
Some may attempt to justify that reverse double standard by saying that "a man cannot serve two masters, but a master can have many servants", but that would be reverse patriarchy, not matriarchy, the latter of which being a fundamentally different paradigm altogether from the former. Ditto for arguing that the shoe is on the other foot now.
One thing is certain: there has never been hard evidence of any society where women have sexual freedom but men do not, not even in the most matriarchal societies. There have of course been societies where 1) both genders have had sexual freedom, 2) neither have sexual freedom, and 3) men have sexual freedom but women do not. Why is that? Probably because of the massive "collective action problem" and "black market" that results from attempting to do so. So societies are ultimately left with only two realistic options: either 1) restrict women's freedom in order to control men indirectly, which is part of the reason why patriarchy does so, or 2) simply accept that we (both genders) are all horndawgs with a pair of roving eyes to one degree or another, and then try to integrate that into a healthy society. I would personally much prefer the latter, even if, hypothetically, I knew that I were to die tomorrow and be reincarnated as a woman. I like to use that thought experiment as my yardstick for what I think the future world should be like.
(The ancient Amazons may have been an exception, but they only had a tiny number of men who were kept as literal slaves, so that is not generalizable or universalizable.)
As for what you said about casual sex, I suppose that depends on one's definition of "casual" as well as one's definition of "sex".
I think part of the 'double standard' w/r/t women cheating vs men is that men are more commonly the 'womanizers'. They have generally been the ones to behave like dogs behind their partners backs and who feel entitled to do so. Speaking from observation and personal experience, women don't tend to go out to the bar or strip club looking to cheat. They don't hire prostitutes behind their partners' backs. Yes, women have affairs, or perhaps they make a mistake one night, but the patterns to my observance are quite different.
Historically, that has certainly been the case, by and large. Though in very recent years, the pendulum does appear to be swinging in the other direction to some extent, at least in some circles.
I do not oppose sexually explicit videos or imagery between two consenting adults (husband/wife/significant other, etc.) However, I am very much opposed to commodifying, commercializing, and normalizing pornographic content.
In addition, porn, in my opinion, should be treated much like guns wherein if it is registered to you (you are the creator or “actor”) you are responsible for it. If someone walked up to your 11 or 12 year old child and whipped their dick out they would be arrested. Yet children are exposed to far worse online and everyone pretends it’s not happening or even worse it’s considered “normal.”
Right. Like if you want to make a video of you and your partner, for yourselves, fine (though it's a dumb thing to do as it will likely get out), but to sell/profit from that stuff changes the whole situation exponentially.
Have you or any other anti-porn campaigners consulted anyone in sex addicts anonymous: https://saa-recovery.org? I reckon there is a wealth of relevant info and insight amongst the fellowship. But the Twelve Steps traditions tell SAA groups not to engage in any discourse about anything outside the fellowship. That is a lacuna and a missed opportunity, I think.
Separately, re: “But of course it isn’t only single, lonely men who use porn. Men with partners are avid users as well.” Hmm, you know the old joke? Q: What do you do if you want to stop having sex? A: Get married.
I didn't get married until I was 40 (in 2001.) In the mid 1990s, it was noticeable that a lot of men were suddenly watching a lot of online videos of hardcore porn. I noticed in several boyfriends who watched a lot of porn that they didn't seem to be able to have what is now viewed as "vanilla" sex. Honestly, I cut off these relationships in part because of this. After this, I deliberately sought out a partner who hadn't watched a lot of porn and married him.
Porn can work in the opposite direction that men intend: they end up with less real sex.
I started having sex in 1997. At that time, there was certainly misogyny and lots of casual sex, but none of it was violent... I remember a couple of guys trying to push for anal sex, but there wasn't any of this choking stuff. I never felt pressure to do weird or violent stuff, I never felt like there was any expectation of body perfection or hairlessness... To me things have changed a LOT for young women today, in terms of expectations and what is viewed as 'normal'.
Just catching the edge of what young people my daughter's age (late teens, early twenties) are talking about now, there's actually a move afoot to question hook up culture (in coastal California.) Don't know how broad based this is, but I suspect it is a growing conversation.
Regarding body perfection, I did get one guy in the late 1990s who gave me a lecture about the Jockey underwear I had been wearing. I think he expected designer French underwear or something. He definitely picked the wrong girl. There was a move afoot toward body perfectionism in the 1990s, but it was more of a mix of expectations. No one ever asked me to do weird or violent stuff.
I suspect that many young people are pushing back on these asks for violent sex. Still, now, there is a huge contingent of men who expect it. There is also a growing contingent of men who seek out sex with underage minors.
I remember that most guys back in the 1980s would accept a "no, I'm not interested". Now, if you look online, there is just so much anger from men around sex (or the lack thereof).
I was at the California state legislature in Sacramento a couple of weeks ago to hear California State Senator Shannon Grove make the final push for SB 14 to add trafficking of underage minors to a list of "serious crimes" in California. More than twenty formerly underage trafficking victims got up and told their story to the California safety commissioners. It was shocking. About half the members of the audience were crying. Shannon Grove herself was crying. One woman, who had been a trafficking victim, told us of how her sister was also trafficked and then killed. California has one of the highest rates of underage sex trafficking on North America. Most of the victims who are trafficked into the sex industry are poor and underage. I have no doubt that the porn industry is driving some of this (directly and indirectly).
Just raising any questions about porn immediately ends up with an accusation that the "Christian right" is excessively imposing their value system on the majority. Many people are very reflexive about it.
Don't know where all this is going, but it seems sad that the current incarnations of porn have taken our culture to such a dark and lonely place.
Yeah, on Twitter the men responding to me (Twitter tends to have a lot of porn fans, as opposed to my specific readers here, or listeners) all chalked up shame to 'religion'. Of course the men I talk to in my personal life are not Catholics. I barely even knew any religious people until recently, on account of my work. Certainly many of the men I speak with on a personal level are progressives...
I've noticed this "you must be a Christian conservative" reaction on porn and other issues for the last decade or so. I find this reaction to be rigid and anti-intellectual. There's kind of a self-congratulatory superiority to it.
It's been leveled at me for about ten years now, yeah... It is so lacking in imagination...
It would be a good idea to interview one who has studied sexual neuroscience, on the subject of the use of pornography. Someone with the educational background necessary to begin to answer some of the questions you're putting forward. Why not interview Dr. Debra Soh?
Shame is a very good sexual turn on for a lot of people.
Ironic as it may sound, that is true nonetheless.
Let's be brutally honest about one thing: Monogamy is not natural for our species, or at least not entirely so for most people as it falls on a spectrum. At best, it's a kind of social technology. Or more accurately, as history and anthropology has shown, there are really three kinds of monogamy: strict, lifelong, and universal. Pick two out of three, basically.
(That is true for BOTH genders, by the way. In fact, some studies suggest that women are even less suited to monogamy than men are.)
Porn is basically a giant workaround. And yet, those who seek to eradicate it are rarely (if ever) the same people who endorse even a fraction of the ideas in "Sex At Dawn" by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. Quite the paradox.
That's not to say that porn itself doesn't have a dark side. It obviously does. But as the legendary Dr. Marty Klein has famously noted, whenever there is conflict that appears to be about porn, most of the time, it's not really about the porn. Usually it goes much deeper.
I'm not sure it's true that monogamy isn't 'natural'. It seems as though there are powerful evolutionary strategies in place to keep men and women attached for the sake of creating families/reproducing? Part of the problem might be that we were never meant to live that long and our expectations for love/a relationship have probably changed?
I suppose the jury is still out on to what degree it is natural or social technology. And it most likely falls on a spectrum. "Sex At Dawn" (2010) provides some good insights I think. Interestingly, according to that book, lifespans were not quite as short as one may think in the Stone Age. High infant mortality rates weighed the average down for life expectancy at birth, but if you survived to age 5 or so (no small feat back then!), you would likely live into your 60s or even 70s, believe it or not.
Of course, that was all before the advent of patriarchy. In fact, matriarchy (to one degree or another) was most likely the norm until the Bronze Age.
And finally, if monogamy (of the strict variety, that is) really were so natural, it wouldn't really need to be in any way "enforced" (to use Jordan Peterson's own words) on anyone, now would it?
Yeah. I think this might be one of those more than one thing can be true situations. I think there are evolutionary reasons for monogamy and that humans like to partner. But also men are programmed to 'spread their seed,' as it were, so there are mechanisms in place to get them to stick around. For women, we get bored of sex with the same man after a while, and our libidos wane, so in that way monogamy isn't natural, because LIKE MAGIC our libidos return with a new man. But I don't, at the same time, think women particularly get much out of casual sex, for example.
Another thing I was thinking about while on this topic was about the underlying sexual politics of the whole Covid regime, particularly lockdowns. Interestingly, it was men (even the most macho conservative men) who were first so gung-ho about the lockdowns, albeit briefly, while it was women who wanted the lockdowns to continue in some flavor or another beyond the first couple of weeks. There are likely a number of reasons for this, but this conversation got me thinking, it was most likely men's (wander)lust that finally brought lockdowns to an end. In contrast, anecdotal evidence suggests that women may have supported continued lockdowns and especially antisocial distancing as a stealth Lysistrata of sorts, but that may be me overthinking things of course.
While more specifically, for the school closures, mask mandates for kids, and especially the jab mandates for kids, it was mothers who ultimately (and thankfully) put an end to that. For very obvious reasons, as they had the most skin in the game.
Men's acute initiation of the lockdowns was basically a perversion of men's "hero instinct", which was quickly superseded by their (wander)lust, while women's support of more chronic lockdowns was basically a perversion of women's "caregiver instinct".
(I keep planning on writing a long article about "the sexual politics of lockdown", but I keep forgetting to do so.)
Hmm personally I felt like I was dying for lack of human touch/sex so idk. I think women go along with this stuff because they tend to like to go along... In my personal life, though, I feel like just as many men were nutso about Covid lockdowns as women.
Indeed, I myself hated the lockdowns from the very start as well. You are probably correct overall.
Thank you for your insights, Meghan. I was thinking some more about this as well, and I would like to also add the following.
Not only Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, but also Daniel Bergner as well as Wednesday Martin have a lot to say about this topic as well. Though the latter author, though otherwise good, unfortunately seems to endorse a sort of "reverse double standard" where it is OK for women to cheat on men and otherwise have multiple partners, but not the other way around. (Something Oprah and Dr. Phil seem to have tacitly endorsed to one degree or another as well.) The extreme form of this maxim is the idea that men even *thinking* about other women is practically a thoughtcrime, but not the other way around, even when it goes beyond that.
Some may attempt to justify that reverse double standard by saying that "a man cannot serve two masters, but a master can have many servants", but that would be reverse patriarchy, not matriarchy, the latter of which being a fundamentally different paradigm altogether from the former. Ditto for arguing that the shoe is on the other foot now.
One thing is certain: there has never been hard evidence of any society where women have sexual freedom but men do not, not even in the most matriarchal societies. There have of course been societies where 1) both genders have had sexual freedom, 2) neither have sexual freedom, and 3) men have sexual freedom but women do not. Why is that? Probably because of the massive "collective action problem" and "black market" that results from attempting to do so. So societies are ultimately left with only two realistic options: either 1) restrict women's freedom in order to control men indirectly, which is part of the reason why patriarchy does so, or 2) simply accept that we (both genders) are all horndawgs with a pair of roving eyes to one degree or another, and then try to integrate that into a healthy society. I would personally much prefer the latter, even if, hypothetically, I knew that I were to die tomorrow and be reincarnated as a woman. I like to use that thought experiment as my yardstick for what I think the future world should be like.
(The ancient Amazons may have been an exception, but they only had a tiny number of men who were kept as literal slaves, so that is not generalizable or universalizable.)
As for what you said about casual sex, I suppose that depends on one's definition of "casual" as well as one's definition of "sex".
I think part of the 'double standard' w/r/t women cheating vs men is that men are more commonly the 'womanizers'. They have generally been the ones to behave like dogs behind their partners backs and who feel entitled to do so. Speaking from observation and personal experience, women don't tend to go out to the bar or strip club looking to cheat. They don't hire prostitutes behind their partners' backs. Yes, women have affairs, or perhaps they make a mistake one night, but the patterns to my observance are quite different.
Historically, that has certainly been the case, by and large. Though in very recent years, the pendulum does appear to be swinging in the other direction to some extent, at least in some circles.
I do not oppose sexually explicit videos or imagery between two consenting adults (husband/wife/significant other, etc.) However, I am very much opposed to commodifying, commercializing, and normalizing pornographic content.
In addition, porn, in my opinion, should be treated much like guns wherein if it is registered to you (you are the creator or “actor”) you are responsible for it. If someone walked up to your 11 or 12 year old child and whipped their dick out they would be arrested. Yet children are exposed to far worse online and everyone pretends it’s not happening or even worse it’s considered “normal.”
Right. Like if you want to make a video of you and your partner, for yourselves, fine (though it's a dumb thing to do as it will likely get out), but to sell/profit from that stuff changes the whole situation exponentially.
Helpful and credible, thank you, Meghan.
Have you or any other anti-porn campaigners consulted anyone in sex addicts anonymous: https://saa-recovery.org? I reckon there is a wealth of relevant info and insight amongst the fellowship. But the Twelve Steps traditions tell SAA groups not to engage in any discourse about anything outside the fellowship. That is a lacuna and a missed opportunity, I think.
Separately, re: “But of course it isn’t only single, lonely men who use porn. Men with partners are avid users as well.” Hmm, you know the old joke? Q: What do you do if you want to stop having sex? A: Get married.
I believe it haha