consuming sex

How male ‘porn superfans’ really view women

Paul J. Maginn, University of Western Australia; Aleta Baldwin, The University of Texas at San Antonio; Barb Brents, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Crystal A. Jackson, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

In 2007, the pornography website Pornhub averaged 1 million visits per day. By 2018, this had increased to 92 million visits per day – or 33.5 billion views over the course of a year.

As an interdisciplinary group ofsexademics,” we’re interested in porn’s cultural role and impact. A common question we hear is whether this growth in porn consumption is good or bad for society.

Of course, the honest-but-unsatisfying answer is: It depends. But sometimes studying various aspects of porn consumption can change the way we think about it.

You might have heard, for example, that porn fuels misogynistic attitudes and sexual violence.

If this were the case, you would think that people who consumed a lot of porn would hold particularly negative views towards women.

So we decided to study a group of men whom we’ve dubbed “porn superfans” – those who are so enthusiastic about porn that they’ll attend the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. We wanted to compare their attitudes about gender equality to those of everyday Americans.

Profiling the superfans

Our study was inspired, in part, by the journalists and politicians who have said that porn consumption is at epidemic levels – so much so that it constitutes a public health crisis.

They write and speak of the perils of porn addiction and objectification, how porn encourages “hatred of women” and “sexual toxicity.”

Would this play out in the results of our study?

The 294 expo attendees we surveyed certainly differed from the general population in a number of ways.

Their average age was 44 years old. Almost half – 47.3% – indicated that they watched porn “less than once a day, but more than once a week.” Over one-third – 36.1% – indicated they watch porn “every day.” In other words, over 80% of the attendees in our sample watched porn multiple times a week. Only 34.1% of them were married, but they were highly educated: 60.5% had a college degree or higher.

A scene from the 2017 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. Paul Maginn, Author provided

We compared these results to the results from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey conducted every couple of years that charts social trends.

This survey only asks whether people have seen an X-rated movie in the last year, and 37.6% of the men indicated that they had. Just over half of the men in the General Social Survey sample were married, while just 28.7% of them had a college degree or higher.

Misogyny unmasked?

But we were most interested in comparing the gender attitudes of each group. So we asked the expo attendees the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with four statements from the General Social Survey:

  1. “A working mother can establish just as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work.”
  2. “Most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women.”
  3. “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”
  4. “Because of past discrimination, employers should make special efforts to hire and promote qualified women.”

After parsing the results, we discovered that male porn superfans actually expressed more progressive attitudes towards gender equality on two of the questions. For two others, they indicated just as progressive – or, said another way, just as sexist – attitudes as the general population.

Over 90% of porn superfans – compared to just over 70% of the GSS sample – agreed that working mothers can have just as warm and secure relationships with their children than non-working mothers.

For the statement that men and women should hold traditional gender roles within a family, 80% of porn superfans disagreed. Nationally, 73% percent of respondents disagree with this statement.

A similar proportion – 80% – of AVN Expo attendees and General Social Survey respondents disagreed with the statement that men, rather than women, were more emotionally suited for politics.

Although a majority of porn superfans and General Social Survey respondents – 72.4% and 74.5%, respectively – agreed that women, due to past discrimination, should get special preference in the workplace, this was the least supported statement we tested. Notably, however, this level of support is higher than a recent national poll indicating that 65% of Americans support affirmative action for women.

Porn crisis or moral panic?

These findings challenge what porn scholars call the “negative effects paradigm,” which sees porn as an inherently bad thing that cultivates harmful attitudes.

Our survey isn’t the only one that upends this way of thinking. A 2016 study based on General Social Survey data found that male porn consumers held more egalitarian views on women in position of power, women working outside the home, and abortion than those who didn’t view porn.

And while most porn is produced and consumed by men, a growing number of women – straight and LGBTQ – are producing porn and consuming different genres of porn, a trend that’s largely been ignored.

For now, it’s probably best to pump the brakes on the idea that pornography causes negative attitudes toward women. The evidence just isn’t there, and much of today’s rhetoric about pornography seems to be more of a moral panic than public health crisis.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]The Conversation

Paul J. Maginn, Associate Professor of Urban/Regional Planning, University of Western Australia; Aleta Baldwin, Assistant Professor of Kinesiology, Health and Nutrition , The University of Texas at San Antonio; Barb Brents, Professor of Sociology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Crystal A. Jackson, Assistant Professor of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Welcome to my world!

I have to say it! The admittedly clichéd, but sincere, desire to “change the world” drives my sociology. My work before tenure sought to understand the power dynamics that create laws, particularly the role of business and economic institutions, in creating social policy. I have always sought to be an activist, by putting these insights into practice, both inside and outside traditional political institutions, in the community, in teaching, and in research.

Prof Barb Brents

Prof. Barb Brents, UNLV Department of Sociology

But, my sociology has been profoundly affected by living in Las Vegas, where the objectification of women seems so blatantly transparent, yet complex and contradictory inequalities, tied to sexuality and gender, beg for fresh examinations. My feminism, activism and scholarship have turned to research on sexual commerce. Sexuality has been relatively ignored by political and economic sociology, yet it has become an important part of our economy and a powerful force for social change. Both my teaching and my research examine how struggles surrounding sexuality reveal contemporary forms of race, class and gender inequalities. I, now, see my work as at the forefront of a small, but growing, number of scholars interrogating the political economy of sexuality.

For the last 15 years, I have been involved in research, exploring the politics, culture, organization and labor, in Nevada’s legal brothel industry. Despite their uniqueness, I was surprised at how little research had been done on the brothels. Kate Hausbeck and I began a large ethnographic project, collecting data and doing early analysis, which culminated in several publications. The article ‘Violence and Legalized Brothel Prostitution in Nevada’, in Journal of Interpersonal Violence, is much cited for our finding that there is little violence in legal brothels, lending credence to the conclusion that legal indoor sex work is relatively safe for sex workers, and that legalizing prostitution may be a way to challenge global sex trafficking. The article ‘Marketing Sex: American Legal Brothels and Late Capitalist Consumption,’ in Sexualities, analyzes sexual consumption and furthers the argument that adult-oriented businesses are using mainstream, traditional forms of business organization and marketing. This article was reprinted in the most recent edition of Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader, by Stombler, et. al.

state of sex book cover

The State of Sex

The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland (Routledge Press), is the culmination of a decade-long research study of Nevada’s legal brothels. As far as I know, it is the largest and most comprehensive study of legal prostitution. Co-authors, Crystal Jackson, Kate Hausbeck and I, look at the context, history, organization and work in the brothels. The study of prostitution has been highly contentious, debating primarily whether prostitution is work or necessarily coercive. Our comprehensive approach shifts the focus from individual women’s choices, and puts it on the economic dynamics that drive gendered inequalities, gendered politics and gendered work, in this particular arena of consumption. We find that while prostitution may be unique in some ways, for good or for ill, the organization, consumption and work is much more similar to late capitalist interactive service businesses, touristic consumption and work than we typically believe.

I am now working to extend these insights and further use the sex industry as a site to understand the intersections of culture and economics. Recently, collaborative research, with British scholar Teela Sanders, resulted in the article ‘The Mainstreaming of the Sex industry: Economic Inclusion and Social Ambivalence’, in Journal of Law & Society, comparing Las Vegas, Nevada, and Leeds, UK, to show how neoliberalism effects the mainstreaming of sexual commerce. Other works in progress include studies of: the construction of ‘market morality’ in political debates around sexuality; the relation between tourism, consumption and sexuality; heterosexuality in the sex industry, the emotional and bodily labor of selling sex; and consuming sex. I am building on collaborations overseas and with other UNLV scholars, on a longer-term interdisciplinary project, for the study of globalization and sexuality.

Barb Brents Researching on Location

Prof. Barb Brents with Kate Hausbeck and Crystal Jackson

My academic research on sex work, sexual markets and sexual politics extends past work on social policy, political violence, and social movements. An article with colleague Robert Futrell ‘Protest as Terrorism: The Potential for Violent Anti-Nuclear Activism’, in American Behavioral Scientist, analyzes the potential for violent activism among protesters, drawing on my own research and activism, in anti-nuclear movement. I also include, in this dossier, an article written with graduate student Deo Mshigeni, ‘Terrorism in Context: Race, Religion, Party and Violent Conflict in Zanzibar’, in The American Sociologist, drawing on his research with a potentially violent youth wing of the minority political party in Zanzibar, where globalization and Islamic fundamentalism have impacted racial identity.

Las Vegas aka 'Sin City'

Las Vegas aka ‘Sin City’

I am also engaged in collaborative work on the political economy of contemporary culture, through a multi-year study of sustainability and community, in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Area Social Survey is a collaborative project, with the LVMASS team (graduate students and two other Sociology faculty), the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Commission, and the City of Las Vegas. The project gathers neighborhood-level data on the attitudes, knowledge, and opinions of Las Vegas residents on neighborhood, environmental and social sustainability issues.

~Prof. Barb Brents

Connect on Twitter and subscribe to my YouTube channel.