Porn Makes Men Think Women Will Do Just About Anything

2018-08-29

Taxi-driver themed porn makes men think women will have sex with strangers on their commutes, a new study suggests.

en who watch certain porn genres tend to think that women are more likely to engage in unprotected, rough sex with strangers or co-workers, according to a new study. Many prior studies had examined “the association between porn use and various attitudes,” co-author on the study Daniel Miller of James Cook University in Australia told Fatherly. “However, the nature of these studies made it hard to determine causation.” Until now.

Indeed, past research has demonstrated a correlation between violent ideas and a preference for violent pornography, but it is hard to say whether porn influences attitudes. It could be that porn causes men to have colder attitudes towards women, or that men who already felt that way are more likely to consume that type of porn. More concrete studies have shown that men who watch porn in which condom usage is not depicted are less likely to use condoms themselves.

Miller and colleagues added to this body of research with a study of 418 men, conducted online to allow for more candor. “Coming into a lab and watching porn while a researcher is present is a very weird situation,” Miller says. “Porn watching is a private activity.” Participants were surveyed on their porn use over the past six months, and then shown either a 22-minute video of taxi driver-themed porn (where a driver propositions a woman for sex) or a 22-minute non-pornographic educational video. Then men were asked to evaluate how likely a woman was to except a sexual proposition from a taxi driver or her boss.

They found that viewing the taxi-themed porn did not influence how men evaluated women’s willingness to have sex. But past exposure did. Men who had watched taxi-themed or boss-themed pornography within the past six months were more likely to think that women would be interested in having unprotected, rough, porn-like sex with a stranger or manager. “I was surprised by how many participants indicated that they had watched taxi-themed porn in the past,” Miller says.

“I was expecting it to be a little more obscure than that.”

Miller acknowledges that participants were not randomly selected and are not likely representative of all men as a result — older, and less educated men, are unlikely to respond to online surveys. Miller recommends follow up research look at the effects porn has on the propensity to have one-night stands, and how it influences how men interpret women’s willingness to have sex. “If you are a porn user — and according to surveys, very large segments of the population are — it might be worth considering if porn has had an influence over your thinking, even at a very basic level,” Miller says.

“Are there men who just assume the over-the-top, oftentimes rough, sex depicted in pornography is the norm, even among two people who just met? This study would suggest that this is quite possibly the case.”