Are People Who Consume Porn More Likely to Cheat?

Wait, does anyone not consume porn?

I’ve written before about an article showing that people who consume porn have more sex, and my overall attitude about it was, “Duh! We watch porn, among other things, because we like sex – so of course we partake in it as well, we don’t just watch it!”

But let’s extend the concept a bit further: if watching more porn makes you more likely to have sex (I still have a problem with the causality in that statement but I’ll let it go – for a minute), then what about married people? Are they more likely to cheat?

Yet another study, yet another HuffPo article, and here we are: People who consume more porn are more likely to cheat. And, if you extend that further, they’re therefore more likely to get divorced because cheating is a leading cause of divorce. From the HuffPo piece:

“If pornography consumption leads to more positive extramarital sex attitudes as the results of the panels suggest, pornography consumption may be a contributing factor in some divorces via extramarital sex behavior,” the study states.

But, as is so often the case, we’re probably confusing cause and effect here. Can we really say that watching more porn makes you want to have more sex, or, as I said in my previous post, is it that people who are more “obsessed” with sex are more likely to consume porn, since it’s an extension of their sex obsession? And similarly, can we say that watching more porn makes you more likely to cheat, or is it that people who are more likely to cheat are also the same people who are “obsessed” with sex, and therefore the porn consumption is related to that?

I can’t read the study (the link to it in the HuffPo article didn’t work for me), but my guess is that the study doesn’t actually include the concept of causality (though the quote above definitely makes it look like they do); they probably state that there is a relationship between porn consumption and cheating, without trying to say which is the cause and which is the effect. Researchers are usually careful about that kind of thing, whereas journalists feel no such need for accuracy, they’re happy to write a piece which shouts out, “Porn Causes Cheating!!!”

From what I’ve written here and in my previous post I’m obviously more on the side that “obsession” with sex probably leads to more porn consumption, rather than porn consumption leading to more “obsession” with sex, and I feel the same way about cheating: I think people who would be more likely to cheat would more naturally be drawn to porn, rather than porn consumption turning people into cheaters.

That is… that’s how I feel if we want to keep things nice and simple. But you know what? Life is more complicated than that. In general I’ll stick with my hypothesis, but that doesn’t mean that porn consumption won’t also impact our views on sex. Hell, I’ve written about that numerous times before, and will continue to do so.

So maybe you’re totally into sex, it’s all you think about, and that drives you to start consuming porn at a higher rate than your friends and family. (Yes, your family members consume porn. Deal with it.) And then you find that, to your surprise, you really start to enjoy porn that involves “the rough stuff.” You stumble upon it by accident but then you see a girl getting spanked or choked or something and it looks so damned sexy; the next time you masturbate that’s what you’re thinking about (giving or receiving, depending on your preferences); before long you’re incorporating rougher activities into your actual physical sex with real people. (With consent, I assume.)

In that scenario your initial consumption of porn goes along with my hypothesis, you’re consuming porn because you are obsessed with sex (rather than being obsessed with sex because you consume porn), but at the same time porn is also shaping your views on sex. You’re actually enjoying some things that you wouldn’t have otherwise enjoyed; beforehand someone might have talked about choking during sex and you’d have thought they were a monster, but then you actually see it in practice and not only is it not monstrous, it’s actually kinda… hot. (And just to make things even more confusing, sometimes it can be monstrous. There’s a huge difference between choking a girl who wants to be choked and choking a girl who doesn’t. If I were getting paid for this blog – I’m not – I’d want a bonus for every time I state the obvious; I could get rich from a single post...)

So what about this cheating thing? On the whole I still stick to my hypothesis: porn doesn’t drive people to cheat even though people who are more likely to cheat are also more likely to consume porn at higher rates. (How does one measure the “rate of porn”?) On the other hand, I do concede that things can get normalized when you see them over and over. We all know that adultery is a bad thing, and the reality is that people don’t cheat all that often (outside of soap operas), but in porn people cheat all the time. In fact I think it’s probably safe to say that about 99% of the time someone in a porno is depicted as being married that person is going to commit adultery. I might even be underestimating that; it might be 99.9%, or 99.999%. (Mini Contest: The first sexy female reader to write in and mention a pornographic movie in which one of the actors is married and doesn’t commit adultery wins a no-expenses-paid trip into my pants. The first male reader to write in and mention such a movie wins a no-expenses-paid trip to imagine taking such a trip into my pants, though I ask him not to share the details with me.)

Sorry, what was my point? Right: people in porn cheat all the time.

So obviously we know that cheating is a bad thing, and just because they’re doing it in porn doesn’t mean that we’re going to suddenly start thinking that adultery is OK. But the key word in that previous sentence was “suddenly.” We’re not going to watch a porno and change our minds on adultery, and even watching a dozen pornos isn’t going to change our minds. But what about two dozen? 50? A hundred? The point is, porn is a medium in which adultery is not only normal, it’s practically a good thing. In fact… sometimes it is a good thing in porn; I’ve seen a number of movies where the slutty wife cheats on her husband and when he finds out it turns him on that he’s got the slutty wife he always secretly wanted, so they become swingers or they make a deal to have an open marriage and fuck around openly or he starts accompanying her so he can watch her get fucked or whatever. So is adultery a bad thing? Not in porn, it’s saved countless pornographic marriages!

When you see the message over and over and over again that adultery isn’t so bad in the worst case and is actually a good thing in the best case, how long will it take for that message to take hold in your own belief system? You’re not going to expect your spouse to be OK with adultery (though it would be awesome…), but on the other hand neither is cheating so bad, people do it all the time. Wait… people do it all the time? Didn’t I say earlier that they don’t? Well, they do in porn – so what are you putting in your head? I don’t think you’re going to go as far as porn does in terms of saying adultery is perfectly natural and OK, but the needle on your moral compass might get pushed a bit in that direction.

It’s worth pointing out that I’ve just picked sides on a topic which is hugely controversial when it comes to videogames and violence: Do violent games contribute to violence in people? Does seeing violence in videogames over and over again – participating in that violence, in a way – normalize it for us? Some say yes and some say no. Not to point too fine a point on it, there is almost violent disagreement on the subject. (See what I did there?) And yet I, who am not a sociologist, have taken it upon myself to say that yes, seeing something over and over and over again in a positive light does tend to normalize it for us. You may very well disagree, and if you do you’ll have a lot of sociologists on your side. (Of course, if you agree you’ll have a lot of other sociologists on your side. It’s win-win.)

The sociologists might come back and say that the disagreement isn’t on whether it’s normalized in our heads it’s on whether belief leads to action. But I think that’s part of the same argument, isn’t it? If you start to believe that adultery isn’t so bad, and that it’s potentially even a good thing, then you’re at least one step closer to putting it into action; perhaps it’s your fear of getting caught which is now the only things standing between you and an adulterous encounter between the sheets of a seedy motel.

I can also make this more personal, since I myself cheat and consume a lot of porn. And I’ve been consuming porn since long before I was married (and therefore eligible to be an adulterer), so if there is a causality between porn and adultery I may very well be feeling those effects. But you know essentially what I’m going to say, because it’s been the hypothesis throughout this post: I don’t believe that my porn consumption is what drove me to cheat, or that it normalized it for me. I cheat because I like having sex with lots of sexy women, and I consume porn because I like thinking about having sex with lots of sexy women.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and…. ahem… “think about things.”