Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (10 page)

Error Management Theory

Correspondence bias, however, cannot fully explain our results, because correspondence bias characterizes human nature (though in Western more than Eastern cultures), not male or female nature, uniquely. Yet, our results indicate that, on several dimensions, men seem more willing than women to infer sexual ecstasy from depictions of female porngasm. It is well known that people often attend to, encode, remember, and accept or criticize information in order to confirm what they want to believe.
¹⁸
But
why
would men be more motivated than women to believe that where there are moans and groans there is a person experiencing sexual peak?

Research by evolutionary psychologists Martie Haselton and David Buss on cognitive biases in mind reading is relevant here.
¹⁹
Their research shows that men consistently over-perceive sexual intent from a women’s friendliness. According to error management theory, men have always faced the daunting task of having to figure out if women were interested in them sexually. Given the difficulty of making such inferences, men are thought to have evolved a cognitive architecture that leads them to make systematic and predictable errors. Namely, men err on the side of inferring sexual interest in women because, even though uninterested women may respond to unwelcome come-ons with surprise, confusion, scoffing, or abject horror, these over-inferences may occasionally yield a sexual encounter. Conversely, erring on the side of under-inferring a lack of sexual interest where lustful intentions may be lurking is more costly, because it may lead to missed sexual opportunities with women.

Of course, inferring the degree to which the friendly woman at the office is sexually interested in you is different from inferring the degree to which porn star Mona is genuinely turned on by porn star Gary’s touch. Remember, though, that porn is evolutionarily novel and likely activates ancient evolved mechanisms.Thus, in terms of the brain regions activated within the minds of men there may not be much, if any, difference between judging porn star sexual pleasure, the sexual interests of a co-worker, or the genuineness of your lover’s orgasm.

Conclusions

We believe that watching porn may make some men bad lovers.The thrust (no pun intended) of our argument lies in the fact that most porn is suited toward male short-term mating pursuits. Porn is not designed to appeal to the sexual desires of women, which often involve clitoral stimulation and a broader emotional connection. Moreover, porn often focuses primarily on men’s sexual pleasure, whereas women’s sexual and emotional satisfaction are rarely considered. Nonetheless, our results suggest that men are more likely than women to believe that at least some female porngasms are real, female porn stars enjoy the sex, experience a high degree of sexual pleasure, and like their jobs. Additionally, both male and female participants, on average, agreed with the statement “Many people watch pornography to learn new sexual techniques.” To the extent that males’ perceptions of female porn star sexual enjoyment are biased or female porn stars are atypical in comparison to most women, these findings suggest that porn movies may misguide viewers about the nuances of female sexual satisfaction. Many adolescents watch pornography,
²⁰
and adolescence is a time for learning sexual scripts, developing sexual techniques, and forming sexual attitudes. Young males who rely on porn to learn about sex may form grossly inaccurate beliefs about how to satisfy a woman.

Clearly, more research is needed to assess the validity of our claims that female porngasms are usually faked, that watching porn may lead men to form erroneous beliefs about the causes of female orgasm, and that watching porn may make some men bad lovers. First, an anonymous and confidential survey of a broad range of porn stars concerning their experiences of orgasm and sexual pleasure is necessary. Second, research could expose male and female participants to the
same
depictions of female porngasm and assess their perceptions of porngasm genuineness. Third, men could be randomly assigned to watch a porn or a non-porn movie prior to having their perceptions of what leads to female sexual satisfaction and orgasm assessed. Fourth, research could examine whether an inverse relationship exists between men’s porn watching frequency and the sexual satisfaction of their female partners.

Several caveats, of course, are warranted. First, direction of causality is difficult to infer from correlational studies. Thus, even if watching porn is associated with men’s holding inaccurate beliefs about the nature of female orgasm or being relatively poor lovers, it could be that men who hold inaccurate beliefs about female orgasm or are bad lovers are more likely to watch porn. Second, our assumption that most female porngasms are fake is based on a prototypical image of porn movies.There are many types of porn movies and many types of porn stars; consequently, the frequencies of genuine female porngasm may vary widely. A content analysis of porn movies to assess how often female porn stars are depicted having orgasm from intercourse alone and as having multiple orgasms would be helpful in this regard. The more frequent these depictions the more confident we can be that most female porngasms are fake. However, to the extent that female porn stars are atypical vis-à-vis most women it remains problematic if men watch porn and think that what elicits porngasm (genuine or fake) will elicit orgasm in their partners.

Our conclusions may appear to be light-hearted. However, that watching porn may lead men to form erroneous beliefs about the causes of female orgasm, and consequently make them bad lovers, is a serious proposition. Most people consider a satisfying sex life to be an important component of a romantic relationship. Conversely, sexual problems can be a major source of stress within these relationships. Sex that does not fulfill both men’s and women’s desires can create conflict and undermine relationship satisfaction.

In closing, we think that a warning should appear on porn websites and porn DVDs that reads: “Watching porn may make you feel sexually inadequate, bored with your sex life, and, if you are a man, watching porn may make you a bad lover!” On the other hand, we believe that porn, like violent video games, may be unfairly scrutinized as a cause of society’s ills. For example, although it is difficult to find studies concerning the benefits of porn, they certainly exist. Under some conditions porn may enhance people’s sex lives or provide an inexpensive source of entertainment. Moreover, we see few studies in the psychological literature on the negative effects of women’s reading romance novels!

NOTES

1
Doug McKenzie-Mohr and Mark Zanna,“Treating Women as Sexual Objects: Look at the (Gender Schematic) Male Who Has Viewed Pornography,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
16, 2 (1990): 296–308.

2
Neil Malamuth and John Check, “The Effects of Aggressive Pornography on Beliefs in Rape Myths: Individual Differences,”
Journal of Research in Personality
19 (1985): 199–320.

3
Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, “Pornography, Sexual Callousness, and the Trivialization of Rape,”
Journal of Communication
32, 4 (1982): 10–21.

4
Douglas Kenrick and Sara Gutierres, “Influence of Popular Erotica on Judgment of Strangers and Mates,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
25 (1989): 159–67.

5
Vanessa Vega and Neil Malamuth,“Predicting Sexual Aggression:The Role of Pornography in the Context of General and Specific Risk Factors,”
Aggressive Behaviors
33 (2007): 104–17.

6
Mary Roach,
Bonk:The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

7
Cindy Meston, Roy Levin, Marca Sipski, Elaine Hull, and Julia Heiman, “Women’s Orgasm,”
Annual Review of Sex Research
15 (2004): 173–257.

8
Neil Malamuth, “Sexually Explicit Media, Gender Differences, and Evolutionary Theory,”
Journal of Communication
46, 3 (1996): 8–31.

9
David Buss,
Evolutionary Psychology:The New Science of the Mind
(Boston: Pearson Education, 2008).

10
Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield. “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers,”
Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality
2, 1 (1989): 39–55.

11
Randy Thornhill, Steven Gangestad, and Randall Comer, “Human Female Orgasm and Mate Fluctuating Asymmetry,”
Animal Behavior
50 (1995): 1601–15.

12
Todd Shackelford, Vivian Weekes-Shackelford, Gregory LeBlanc, April Bleske, Harald Euler, and Sabine Hoier, “Female Coital Orgasm and Male Attractiveness,”
Human Nature
11 (2000): 299–306.

13
Thomas Pollet and Daniel Nettle, “Partner Wealth Predicts Self-Reported Orgasm Frequency in a Sample of Chinese Women,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
30, 2 (2009): 146–51.

14
Juliet Richters, Richard Visser, Chris Rissel, and Anthony Smith, “Sexual Practices at Last Heterosexual Encounter and Occurrence of Orgasm in a National Survey,”
Journal of Sex Research
43, 3 (2006): 217–26.

15
David Buss,
The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating
(New York: Basic Books, 2003).

16
Donald Symons,
The Evolution of Human Sexuality
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

17
Daniel Gilbert and Patrick Malone, “The Correspondence Bias,”
Psychological Bulletin
117, 1 (1995): 21–38.

18
Ziva Kunda, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,”
Psychological Bulletin
108, 3 (1990): 480–98.

19
Martie Haselton and David Buss, “Error Management Theory: A New Perspective on Biases in Cross-Sex Mind Reading,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
78, 1 (2000): 81–91.

20
Shane Kraus and Brenda Russell, “Early Sexual Experiences: The Role of Internet Access and Sexually Explicit Material,”
CyberPsychology and Behavior
11, 2 (2008): 162–8.

THEODORE BACH

CHAPTER 4

PORNOGRAPHY AS SIMULATION

Consider the following scenario:
¹

Mr. Crane and Mr.Tees were scheduled to leave the airport on different flights, at the same time. They traveled from town in the same limousine, were caught in a traffic jam, and arrived at the airport 30 minutes after the scheduled departure time of their flights. Mr. Crane is told that his flight left on time. Mr.Tees is told that his flight was delayed, and just left five minutes ago.

Now answer the following question: Who is more upset, Mr. Tees or Mr. Crane?

Like 96 percent of people, I suspect your answer to this question is Mr. Tees. In this chapter I aim to convince you that the cognitive process you just underwent in order to generate this answer is the
very same
cognitive process that one employs in order to engage pornographic material. In fact, the parallel between what your brain is doing when it contemplates Mr. Tees’ scenario and what your brain is doing when it watches, say,
Debbie Does Dallas
, offers the only plausible explanation for how the porn industry managed to gross $97 billion in 2006.

Here is a more detailed description of the plan of this essay. In part one I discuss the everyday activity of “folk psychology” with particular emphasis on what cognitive scientists term “mental simulation.” In part two I describe how the consumption of pornographic material places the simulation heuristic in the service of a purpose that is radically different from that for which it was designed. The final part of the essay explores the implications of the pornography-as-simulation model and offers comparisons to actual sexual experience.

The Tools of Folk Psychology
²

Human beings are prolific psychologists. By this I am not suggesting that individuals typically interpret one another in clinical terms such as “projection,” “avoidant disorder,” or the “phallic stage.” The sense in which humans are psychologists is rather more pedestrian. What it means is that people have an ability to interpret others in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, etc., and people also understand something about how these mental states interact and cause behavior. For example, suppose you are in a betting parlor and witness Jones shake his head, crumple his betting stub, and toss the stub in the trash. Quite automatically you explain this behavior by attributing to Jones the desire that a certain horse win the race and also the belief that this horse did not win. Or, suppose you select for your Aunt Ginger a birthday card filled with puppy pictures because, attributing to your aunt the belief that all small cuddly creatures are wonderful, you
predict
she will enjoy it (note the recursive structure of folk psychology: Aunt Ginger will later
explain
why you chose this card by attributing to you the belief that she would like it).

Two competing proposals for how we perform this mind-reading activity are prominent in the literature. The first maintains that individuals mentalize on the basis of a
theory
about psychology. According to one version of this view, “beliefs” and “desires” are theoretical entities that we posit in order to explain behavior – in the same way that astronomers posit black holes to explain gravitational forces – and we know a set of theoretical principles that causally link these entities to one another and overt behavior.A common example of such a principle is the “belief-desire law”: if you desire
x
(beer), believe that doing
y
(going to the fridge) will bring about
x
, then all things being equal, you will do
y
(go to the fridge).

Mental simulation

Many philosophers and psychologists find the above “theory-theory” approach to folk psychology a bit too, well, scientific. This group favors what they believe is a more natural and parsimonious explanation of folk-psychological ability. Applying this second proposal – broadly called “simulation theory” – we simply imagine what
we
would do in another’s situation and then use the results of this exercise as the basis for a prediction or explanation of behavior. For example, if I want to figure out how Holmes will react to a decrease in the size of his pension, I simply “put myself into his shoes” in order to see how
I
would feel about it. After discovering that
I
would not be happy about a loss of retirement funds, I project the result back onto Holmes and predict that
Holmes
will not be happy. Note that I do not need a theory about how people react to decreases in pensions; I just need to figure out how I will react (and to do this I just
react
, I don’t have a theory about reacting that tells me when and how to do it).

The most widely accepted account of mental simulation is the “off-line” heuristic.
³
The heuristic begins with feeding “pretend inputs” into one’s practical reasoning system in order to engage the target’s perspective. The reasoning system then processes these inputs according to whatever principles and laws govern the functioning of the system, e.g., the belief-desire law.The process is off-line in the sense that the interpreter will ascertain the output of the reasoning process but stop short of converting this output into overt action. Instead, the interpreter projects the outcome onto the target in order to predict or explain the target’s behavior. Returning to the example of Mr.Tees, the process might go something like this: (1) generate pretend inputs for Mr. Tees’ situation (caught in traffic, arrived 30 minutes late to the airport, flight was delayed by 25 minutes); (2) feed these inputs into your reasoning system; (3) determine your reaction to this situation – e.g., recognize that you would be upset; (4) project this attitude onto Mr.Tees.

This process will yield accurate mind-reading data about Mr. Tees because your mind and Mr. Tees’ mind operate roughly the same. But more important for our purposes, the process is accurate because there is a correspondence between your mental states during an actual experience and your mental states when you simulate that experience. Off-line reasoning on the basis of
imagined
states produces approximately the same sequence of cognitive and affective states as on-line reasoning on the basis of actual experience.
⁴

The origin of simulation

Before we examine the pornographic appropriation of mind-reading skill, it is worthwhile to remark on the origin and purpose of mentalizing ability. Animals, with possibly the exception of a few primates, do not have the ability to think theoretically or simulatively about other minds.

While it is true that many species are social (just think of ants and bees), the interpretive skill that underlies this sociality is
behavior
reading and not mind reading.

Probably, natural selection favored the development of mind-reading skill for two reasons. First, it was advantageous for our ancestors to predict each other’s behavior more accurately than what was possible by behavior reading alone. Second, it was advantageous for our ancestors to avoid deception from adversaries and have the ability to return it in kind. Because deception involves exhibiting behavior that is at variance with true intention, a special “Machiavellian” mind-reading ability may have developed for the purposes of detecting deception. Supporters of the simulation account fill in the details of this story by claiming that natural selection first targeted forms of emotional contagion and empathy, and these basic abilities later developed into the cognitive simulation routine that we examined in reference to Mr. Tees. The implication is that the biological purpose of simulation – its
raison d’être
– is to predict behavior and avoid deception.

Enter the porn industry, which is perfectly yet unintentionally crafted to take advantage of mind-reading capacities.The porn industry, I’m quite sure, could care less about the phylogenetic history of porn-processing neurons.

The Modern Perversion of Mental Simulation

Why porn is like NutraSweet

It is not altogether uncommon for there to be some mechanism (M) that was designed for a job (J) but now regularly performs some different job (X). For example, the broken-down Ford Escort in my front yard was designed for traveling paved roads, but now it provides safe harbor for several mice and at least one nest of bees. More interesting is when a mechanism “runs normally” – functions mechanically as it ought to – but systematically achieves an end for which it was not designed.Technology is a regular manipulator of mechanisms in this respect. Consider what happens when you sip a Diet Coke.The biological purpose of your “sweettaste mechanism” is to indicate and encourage the ingestion of high caloric foods. How it does this is by sending pleasurable sensations to your brain in response to a sweet taste. However, non-caloric substitutes such as aspartame (NutraSweet) are specifically designed to trigger this same orosensory operation. Thus, when you drink Diet Coke your orosensory mechanism operates normally but works in the service of an end for which it was not designed.
⁵

I propose that something very similar occurs when the mind processes pornographic material. Pornographic material is designed to co-opt the simulation heuristic in the same way that aspartame is designed to co-opt the sweet-taste mechanism. This does not imply, of course, that porn-film directors have detailed theoretical knowledge about the simulative process. The creators of porn may have considerable know-how when it comes to invoking viewer simulation, but they need not have propositional knowledge about the process through which their films successfully highjack the specialized cognitive routine (similarly, the folk-psychological prowess exhibited on MTV’s
The Hills
does not command an advanced academic degree in psychology).

The idea that a medium of communication could act to stimulate an audience’s simulative involvement is not entirely new. Several researchers have advanced a simulationist approach to fictional engagement.
⁶
On a strong version of this view, when someone watches a film they simulate the perspective of the protagonist.This thesis has come under considerable fire, however.
⁷
A more tempered claim is that viewers simulate the perspective of a “hypothetical observer” of the narrative rather than the perspective of an actual participant in the narrative.
⁸
So instead of simulating Luke Skywalker, for example, we simulate someone who currently observes the inter-galactic events that comprise
Star Wars
(like some futuristic, quasi-omniscient news reporter).

How
not
to watch porn

Whatever the outcome of the debate over viewers’ simulative relationship to films rated by the Motion Picture Association of America, I maintain that the status of viewers’ simulative involvement in
pornographic
films is clear and definite. Before providing detail on the simulative model of porn consumption let’s first consider a non-simulative way to watch porn. For the remainder of this essay my discussion of the consumption of pornographic material will focus on the target porn audience and the dominant pornographic medium –
men
and
videos
(Internet and DVD format), respectively.

One method for watching porn is to objectively admire naked body parts and the sexual configurations and rituals they execute.This would be similar to the manner in which an artist thinks about a figure model. Such an artist might contemplate the relationship between a glancing shadow and the curvature of hips, or the angle at which hair falls across a back. In all probability the artist does not imaginatively reconstruct the perspective of the model or the perspective of someone interacting with the model. It is possible that a porn viewer could achieve a similar objectivity by taking a third-person perspective on the sexual players and events depicted on-screen. On this construal, there is no sense in which porn viewers think or imagine that
they
are involved in sexual activity.

Maybe some people watch porn this way. Or maybe most people occasionally watch porn this way. As with many psychological processes, individual differences must be taken into account. Any attempt to discover necessary conditions for porn consumption is therefore misguided. Instead, researchers should target a theory that explains the staggering popularity of pornographic videos. Such a theory would explicate the central dynamic between porn and its audience rather than the necessary dynamic. In this respect, the third-person explanation of porn consumption fails. It fails for the simple reason that people would rather have sex than watch sex. When people watch porn they do not actually have sex, of course. But if they
simulate
having sex then they recreate (to some degree) the cognitive and affective states that occur when they actually do have sex. Even if the simulated experience lacks complete verisimilitude, it is vastly closer in its approximation to actual sex than passive sex watching. I now develop this idea in more detail.