3 What Is the Sexual Revolution Doing
to Men?
Peter Pan and the Weight of Smut
The number of blogs, columns, books, essays, and articles
in recent years dissecting the perpetual adolescence of
the American male is far too high to count-as is the
even higher number of e-mails, texts, women's television
shows, and porch conversations dedicated to that same
theme. Ubiquitously, it seems, those who were once husbands and fathers and providers have traded in their ties
and insurance cards for video games and baseball hats worn
backwards. It is a message that the popular culture also
broadcasts nonstop-from vehicles for women like Sex in
the City and The View to those popular among men, including such commercially successful examples as the jackass
franchise, the Spike channel, and just about every comedy
about idiot males to issue from Hollywood in recent
memory.
Even so, the question of why this sea change has come
about has for the most part escaped critical attention-with
a few notable exceptions. In a searching essay written several years ago, for example, Joseph Epstein analyzed "The
Perpetual Adolescent and the Triumph of the Youth Culture", ultimately attributing the phenomenon to postwar
prosperity; "[eJarlier," he theorized, "with less money around,
54
\,,. -'VJ J..::;r_.,...,,..., ._ _,,_.'-'11' I
- ••:,p,-.. - - ••-•- ...-• • - ......
Peter Pan and the Weight of Smut
le were forced to get serious, to grow up-and fast." 1
i~ I
0
55
Diana West considered the same question in her
forthrightly titled book The Death of the Grown-Up: How
007
,
America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.2 Like Epstein, she cited affiuence as one cause, adding also the sexual revolution and a generalized vanishing
of adult standards of conduct. Kay S. Hymowitz, in her
previously mentioned 201 I book Manning Up, offered another
nuanced answer, citing women's higher performance in education and a job market requiring more years of schooling
as causal factors in the rise of the "child-man" .
Yet while these and like-minded thinkers have obviously
each got a part of the truth, it is surely the sexual revolution that is the prime mover of the phenomenon they all
describe. This seems so for at least two reasons. First, it has
led to an atrophying of the protective instinct in many menbecause many have nothing to protect. The powerful maj ority desire for recreative rather than procreative sex has led
not only to a marriage dearth, but also to a birth dearth;
and as the old saying correctly goes, "Adults don't make
babies; babies make adults."
Second, and as a related matter, what might be called the
consumerization of love-the way that many people now
go shopping for sex and romance much as they do for inanimate commodities-has had a rather major unintended consequence. It has led to more discerning consumers in an
area of life where heightened discernment appears inimical
to long-term satisfaction. In other words, the perpetual and
1
Joseph Epstein, "The Perpetual Adolescent and the Triumph of the Youth
Culture", ITTekly Standard, March 15, 2004, http:/ /www.weeklystandard.com/
co~te~t/ public/ articles/ ooo/ ooo/ 003 / 82 5grtdi.asp.
Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up : How America'.5 Arrested Development Is Brinoino
Down TH
. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007) .
6 o
Yvestern c·IVI·1·1zat1on
,
What Is the Sexual Revolution Doing to Me n.~
often successful hunt for sexual novelty ultimately wo k
r s to
the detriment of longer-term romance. This is nowhe
re as
obvious as in recent research on another aspect of the childman of today: his use of smut, or what might otherwise be
called the paradox of declining male happiness in an age
glutted by sexual imagery.
Let us approach this paradox by way of an analogy. As
any number of impressively depressing cover stories have
lately served to remind us all, the weight-gain epidemic in
the United States and the rest of the West is indeed widespread, deleterious, and unhealthy-which is why it is so
frequently remarked on, and an object of such universal
public concern. But while America is on the subject of bad
habits that can turn unwitting kids into unhappy adults,
how about that other epidemic out there that is far more
likely to make their future lives miserable than carrying those
extra pounds ever will? That would be the emerging social
phenomenon of what can appropriately be called "sexual
obesity": the widespread gorging on pornographic imagery
that is also deleterious and unhealthy, though far less remarked
on than that other epidemic-and nowhere near an object
of universal public concern.
The term "sexual obesity" comes from Mary Ann Layden, a psychiatrist who runs the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She
sees the victims of Internet-pornography consumption in
her practice, day in and day out. She also knows what most
do not: Quietly, patiently, and irrefutably, an empirical record
o~ the harms .of sexual obesity is being assembled piecemeal
via the combmed efforts of psychologists sociolog· t ddi
.
· }"
'
IS S, a
CtIOn spec1a ists, psychiatrists and other auth . .
'
ont1es
Young people who have been exposed to P .
h
ornograp
y
.
I
are more ikely to have multiple lifc t'
e ime sexual partners,
Peter Pan and the Weight of Smut
57
more likely to have had more than one sexual partner in
the last three months, more likely to have used alcohol or
other substances at their last sexual encounter, and-no surrise here- more likely to have scored higher on a "sexual
permissiveness" test. They are also more likely to have tried
~isky forms of sex. They are also more likely to engage in
forced sex and more likely to be sexual offenders. As for
the all-purpose cop-out that "all this shows is correlation",
it can be refuted as Dr. Johnson famously refuted the
inunaterialism of Bishop Berkeley-by kicking a stone. No
one who is reasonable would doubt that there is a connection between watching sex acts and trying out what one
sees-especially for adolescents, who rather famously and
instantly ape the other influences on their lives, from fashion to drug use and more, as has also been copiously studied by academic experts and nervous parents alike throughout
the ages.
And this list is just one possible way of starting a conversation about the consequences of the novel obesity that
the sugary smut of the Internet has induced. There is also
the question of what the same material does to adultsabout which another empirical record is also being amassed.
Pornography today, in short, is much like obesity was
yesterday-a social problem increasing over time, with especially worrisome results among its youngest consumers, and
one whose harms are only beginning to be studied with
the seriousness they clearly deserve.
The parallels between the two epidemics are striking.
Much like the more commonly understood obesity, the phenomenon of sexual obesity permeates the populationth0ugh unlike regular obesity, of course, pornography
consumption is mostly (though not entirely) a male thing.
At the same t·1me, ev1.dence also shows that sexual obesity
r-1
58
What ls the Sexual Revolution Doing to Men?
does share with its counterpart this critical common de
.
.
nominator: It affhcts the subset of human beings who form th
first generation immersed in this consumption, many 0;
whom have never known a world w~thout it-the young.
Consider some of the newly available data about the
immersion of young Americans in pornography. One 200 s
study focused on undergraduate and graduate students ages
eighteen to twenty-six across the country found that more
than two-thirds of men-and one out of every ten women
in the sample-viewed pornography more than once a
month. 3 Another study, in the Journal of Adolescent Health,
showed that first-year college students using sexually explicit
material exhibited these features: increased tolerance, resulting in a turn toward more bizarre and esoteric material;
increased risk of body-image problems, especially among
girls; and erroneous and exaggerated conceptions of how
prevalent certain sexual behaviors, including risky-todangerous behaviors, actually are.4
In 2004, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reported that 65 percent of boys ages sixteen and seventeen reported having
friends who regularly download Internet pornography 5 and, given that pornography is something people lie "down"
3
J· S· Carroll. et al ·•
"G enerat1on
· XXX : Pornography Acceptance and Use
~:,°~g Emergmg Adults", Journal of Adolescent Research 23 , no. 1 (2008) :
30
4
D. Zillman "Influence f u
· d
cents ' and You~
, . o . _nrestrame Access to Erotica on AdolesHealth 27 (2000)~ ~~~:~ D1spos1t1ons toward Sexuality" , Journal ofAdolescent
s The National Center on Addi t"
University, "National Su
f Ame i_o n and Substance Abuse at Columbia
,...,
rvey O
encan Attitud
ieen Dating Practices and S
al A . .
es on Substance Abuse IX:
ct1V1ty" A
exu
mary see C. C. Radsch "11
,
, ugust 2004 , p. 6 . For a sumDrink" , New York Time/ A eenagers Sexual Activity Is Tied to Drugs and
, ugust 20, 2004 , p. Aq .
"'' ,,
,,
I
.. -
Peter Pan and the Weight of Smut
59
·
veys as well as in life, it seems safe to say those
about in sur
.
'
.
nderest1mate todays actual consumption, pernumbers u
even significantly. And to connect the dots between
haps
do" , a 2004 stu dy 1n
. ped.ia tncs
.
"
and
"monkey
ee
"monkey s
conducted by several researchers ~rom _the Rand Corpora. an d the University of Cahforn1a at Santa Barbara
uon
in the words of its title, that "Watching Sex
repor ted ,
.. .
on Television Predicts Adolescent In1t1at1on of Sexual
Behavior"-surely a problematic finding for anyone wanting to argue that we are not much influenced by what we
see.6
Of course all the social science data now accumulating
cannot answer a question almost as ubiquitous as pornography itself: So what? Why should people who are not part
of that consumption even care about it? Pornography indeed
may be wrong, many of those people would also say (and
of course major religions would agree), but, apart from the
possible damage to the user's soul, if you even believe in
such a thing, what really is the social harm of smut?
This lackadaisical attitude-this entrenched refusal to look
seriously at what the computer screen has really wrought-is
widespread. Religious people, among other people simply
disgusted by the subject, understandably wish to speak in
p~blic of almost anything else. Consumers of pornography
will probably already have stopped reading these words- or
any others potentially critical of their chosen substancefor reasons of their own; such complicity is probably the
deepest font of omerta on the subject. And chronic users
above all have th eir
. own fi1erce reasons for promoting the
6 Rebecca L. Collins et al
"W: h.
..
.
lescent ln'f •
·,
ate mg Sex on Televmon Predicts Ado1 iat1on of Sexual B h . " p d. .
e avior , e tatncs I I 4, no. 3 (September 2004) :
e280-e 2s9.
r
60
What Is the Sexual Revolution Doi
ng to Men1
anything-goes-as-long-as-it's-private patter-a . ·
phenomenon about which more will be said fun Interesting
.
~~
And yet this hands-off approach to the matter
on.
.
h.is unwitting
. . co11 usion
. of disparate inte of sexua1
o besity-t
.
.
.
rested p
ties masquerading as a social consensus-remains
ar,
Wrong
Consider a 2009 document signed by fifty academic ·
..
.
.
fi
and
other authonties representing various 1elds and distilli
just some of the recent empirical evidence. 7 Called
Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and
Recommendations", it is not the work of one or two but
rather scores of people. Most of them academics and medical professionals, they represent a true rainbow coalition of
the spectrum: left and right, feminism and conservatism,
secularism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is a collective attempt to render for the public good just some of the
accumulating academic and therapeutic and other evidence
of the harm and devastation now traceable to pornography
"TJ
abuse.
Bursting through the academically neutral language of the
report-the studies, the survey data, the econometrics and
the rest-were the skin and bones of the very human stories that went into it all: the marriages lost or in tatters; the
sexual problems among the addicted; the constant slide, on
account of higher tolerance, into ever edgier circles of this
hell; the children and teenagers lured into participating in
various ways in this awful world in the effort to please romantic partners or exploitive adults. This report, in sum, like
the conference that preceded it, answers definitively the libertarian question of "So what about pornography?" with a
solid list of "Here's what"-eight documented findings about
7
Full disclosure: the document in question, "The Social Costs of Por:ography: A Statement of Findin~ and Recommendations", was co-drafted
Y Mary Ann Layden and me (Prmceton, NJ. : Witherspoon Institute, 2010) .
Peter Pan and the Weight of Smut
61
· g the sexual template with pornographic
. ks of warpm
the ris
imagery.
t uths about this subject today that are belied
Of all the un r
.
al record, let us focus here on JUSt three of the
b the factu
Y . fl ntial and reckless.
mo st in ue h use is just a private matter. Perhaps the queen
Pomograp
y the subject, th'is is
. a1so the easiest
. to take
. bout
bee of lies awhile consumption of the substance may be prido\\m· For t as airline travelers and library
.
patrons and othvate (or no '
. the public square have lately been learning), the fallout
ers 1n
. is
. anyth'mg but.
e of that consumption
m
from so
.
Consider just a few examples from recent studies on people younger than eighteen. Several separate studies have found
among adolescents a strong correlation between pornograhy consumption and engaging in various sexual activities .
~dolescent users of pornography are more likely to intend
to have sex, to have sex earlier, and to engage in more
frequent sexual activity. 8 The exceedingly well-documented
social costs of adolescent sexual activity, alongside the health
costs now accumulating, alone torpedo the refrain that Internet pornography use today is "private" .
Now consider a few more findings concerning adults rather
than adolescents. At a November 2003 meeting of the America~ ~cademy of ~atrimonial Lawyers (comprising the
nat1ons top 1,600 divorce and matrimonial-law attorneys) ,
More likely
to intend to have sex: see K · L · L'E ngle, J. Brown, and K
"
Kenneavy, The Mass Media Are an Important Context fo Ad l
;
S al B h · " J
r
o escents
1
_e ~ . . ~ avior , ourna of Adolescent Health 38 , no. 4, (2006) · 186
E
lier 1mt1at1on:J. Brown and K. L'Engle, "X-Rated: Sexual A . .
---92 . ar1ors Associated with U.S. Early Adolesc t ' E
tt1tudes and Behav. ,,
en s xposure to Sexuall E 1· ·
Media ' Communication Research 36 (200 .
.
y xp lClt
1
more frequently: L'Engle et al "M M9)d.. ,7 9 5 i . Havmg sexual activity
"E
.,
ass e la See als G w·
xposure to X-Rated Movies a d Ad l
.
o . mgood et al. ,
Related Attitudes and Behavio ,,n p d' o ~scents' Sexual and Contraceptive
rs , e iatncs 107, no. 5 (2001 ): I I 16-19.
8
62
What Is the Sexual Revolution D ·
oing to Men;i
62 percent of the 3 50 attendees said the Int
·
. d.
d .
h 1
ernet had I
a ro1e 1n 1vorces unng t e ast year. 9 DiVi
Payed
.
.
orce, as
one knows by now, 1s associated with a variety
every,
financial and other outcomes as well as with p obfl adverse
ro e.rns fc0
children and adolescents affected by it. To the e
r
Xtent th
pornography use increases the likelihood of marital bre at
b h . . 1 .,
.
akup
.
sueh private e av1or 1s c eany exactmg public costs.
'
Pornography use is a guy thing. It o~ly _hothers women. In
fact, some of the saddest and most nvetmg testimony on
this topic concerns exactly this: the harm that pornograpb
consumption can do to men immersed in it.
y
Consider the research of Pamela Paul, a former reporter
for Time magazine, who interviewed in depth more than
one hundred heterosexual users of pornography-Bo percent of them men-for her 2005 book Pornified: How Pornography ls Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our
Families.10 This book-the best yet written in laymen s terms
about the impact of Internet pornography on users
themselves-is remarkable for several reasons. Just one is
the unforgettably sad portrait that emerges, sometimes unwittingly, from habitual users themselves. "Countless men",
she summarizes from the interviews, "have described to
me how, while using pornography, they have lost the ability to relate to or be dose to women. They have trouble
being turned on by 'real' women, and their sex lives with
their girlfriends or wives collapse. " 1 1
9
Reported by Pamela Paul, "The Porn Factor", Time, January 29, 2004.
Paul, Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our
Relationships, and Our Families (New York: Times Books, 2005) .
I I Pamela Paul, "From Pornography to Porno to Porn: How Porn Became
the Norm ", in 11ze Soda/ Cost ef Pornography.·A Collection ef Papers, ed. James
R . Stoner Jr. and Donna M. Hughes (Princeton, NJ. : Witherspoon Institute, 2010) , p. 6.
I o Pamela
Peter Pan and the Weight of Smut
oint has been echoed by medical authori-
The same P
'd
d
. 1· .
.
d'ng N orman D01 ge, a octor specia izing m
. inc1u 1
ues,
hiatry and author of The Brain That Changes
.
neuropsyc·es oif Personal Tnump
. h firom the Frontiers
. oif Bram
.
Itsel:if St ort
.
.
•
12 Treating men m the early to mid- I 990s for
Science.
.
rnography habits, he found it a common refrain
po
.
hat many were no longer able to have intercourse
twith their own wives.
·
"Pornograp h ers " , h e cone1u des,
" romise healthy pleasure and relief from sexual tension,
b~t what they often deliver is an addiction, tolerance, and
an eventual decrease in pleasure. Paradoxically, the male
patients I worked with often craved pornography but didn't
their
13
.
l1.ke 1't"
But self-loathing is hardly limited to the most extreme
cases. In 2010, the widely followed conservative website
National Review Online ran an anonymous and widely
discussed piece called "Getting Serious about Pornography". Its author, a mother of five, detailed and deplored
pornography's role as she saw it in the destruction of
her marriage. The result was an outpouring of impassioned e-mail-including from some people exploring their
own use of pornography and its impact on their own lives.
Perhaps most poignant of all was the testimony of users
themselves whose lives had been made miserable by the
stuff.
As Roger Scruton has put the paradox about men and
pornography memorably, " This, it seems to me, is the real
risk attached to pornography. Those who become addicted
to this risk-free form of sex run a risk of another and greater
12
Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph
from the Frontiers of Brain Science (New York: Viking Adult, 2007) .
I
3 Ibid.,
p. 48.
64
What Js the Sexual Revolution Doing to Men?
kind. They risk the loss of love, in a world where on] 1
•
,, 1
Y ove
4
brings happiness.
.
. .
r j only pictures ef consenting adults. Unless 1t 1s co.zn
.1 11
•
nl
.
PUter
simulated, pornography 1s ~ever o Y a~o~t pictures. Every
single person on the screen 1s somebody s s1ster, cousin, son
niece, or mother; every one of them stands in a hu.zna;
relation to the world.
The notion for starters that those in the "industry" itself
are not being harmed by what they do cannot survive even
the briefest reading of testimonials to the contrary by those
who have turned their backs on it. It is a world rife with
everything one would want any genuinely loved one to avoid
like the plague: drugs, exploitation, physical harm, AIDS.
Nor can the "pictures" defense survive the extremely
troubling-or what ought to be extremely troublingconnections between pornography and prostitution. What
is now called "sex trafficking", for example, is often associated with pornography-for example, via cameras and film
equipment found when trafficking circles are broken up.
Plainl~ the reality of the human beings behind many of
those images on the Internet is poorer, dirtier, druggiera~d younger-than pious appeals to "consenting adults" can
withstand.
bli
Perhaps somewhere amon
ular" b .
. g our pu c crusaders against "rego esity, there will emer e
h
. g ~ person of stature who
can spare time for th·
•
is ot er epidenu t
A ~
ing though these dirty
c, oo. .n ..u.er all, uninvit1"
.
waters may b
h
ing this epidemic could b
e, t e reward for tacke profound. For amid th e squ al or,
'4 Roger Scruton " Th
°-( Papers: ed.
' N.j. . Witherspoon I
~nCol/ect'.'on
]:m~:u:t
of
.
.
The
Sex", in
Social Costs o
Stoner Jr. and Do
if Pornography:
nstitute, 2010), p. r 25 .
nna M . Hughes (Prince-
Peter Pan and the Weight of Smut
65
·ness and the rest of the bad news about sexual
he unhapp1
'
.
t . h bad news is not the only news there is-not at
obesity, t e
all."Where sin increased," as Paul's Letter to the Romans
·t "grace abounded all the more" (5:20) . The record of
has 1 ,
what pornography has wrought shows that kind of abundance too, though it may not yet be an issue of academic
study. After all, just look at the tremendous effort that goes
into attempts to break the habit. Look at the energy fueling all those attempts to repair the damage done-the turns
to counseling, the therapists, priests, pastors, and others working in these awful trenches to help the addicted get their
real lives back. Look at the technological ingenuity toothe new software, the filters, the countercultural and uphill
efforts here and there to thwart pornography's public crawl.
To survey that multifaceted record of struggle, fledgling
but growing by the day, against the also growing empirical
record of the beast's harms, is to grasp a truth about the
postrevolutionary male paradox that lies beyond the ridicule of the jaded or the vituperative recriminations of those
still in the pit. It is to see redemption. It is to spy hope in
a place where desperate people need it most-and plenty
of it, too.
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