A rallying point behind anti-porn rhetoric has long been that porn makes its viewers misogynist. Anti-porn personalities like Andrea Dworkin, Naomi Wolfe, and Gail Dines have touted facts and figures about how “violent” and “objectifying” pornography poisons the minds of consumers for decades. The panic these ideas have sparked has driven 16 states (to date) to declare porn consumption a “public health crisis” and an “epidemic,” with much of the outcry coming, supposedly, from fear for women’s safety in this environment of “sexual toxicity.”

And yet, so ingrained in the public consciousness are these ideas that very few people have actually studied the people who should, according to anti-porn logic, be the most vile sexist, woman-hating, violent people on earth: porn superfans. If the statistics about the effects of watching porn are legitimate, then these folks should be the epitome of misogyny. Right?

A self-described “interdisciplinary group of ‘sexademics’” from four different universities wanted to find out. Paul J. Maginn, Aleta Baldwin, Barbara Brents, and Crystal A. Jackson wrote for The Conversation that they “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.” 

They compared these 294 men’s answers to questions about the gender roles to the results from the General Social Survey, “a nationally representative survey conducted every couple of years that charts social trends.”

The results did not even slightly bear out the anti-porn agenda’s assumptions. In fact, the scholars wrote, “After parsing the results, we discovered that male porn superfans actually expressed more progressive attitudes towards gender equality” than the general population.

For instance, the survey respondents were far more likely to believe that working mothers can provide “just as warm and secure relationships with their children than non-working mothers.” They were also much more likely to believe that men and women need not perform traditional gender roles within the family. And they were just about as likely as the rest of the population to believe that women are just as suited to politics as men, and that “women, due to past discrimination, should get special preference in the workplace.”

Their conclusion? “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.”

And these researchers are not the first to find that porn doesn’t seem to poison people against women. A 2015 study also based on General Social Survey data found that male porn consumers held more egalitarian views on similar issues. This more recent one looked at a more specific subset of porn consumers—the superfans who admit to watching porn at least once a week and who love it so much they spent the money to travel to Vegas and show up at the AVN expo.

Study stock photo by Pixabay from Pexels