Emily: 00:00:00 This week we're going to talk about pornography in America and usually our episodes are pretty family friendly. This one is not. So if you have young people around, might be a good idea to put on a different episode. Thanks. Emily: 00:00:15 I'm Emily Kumler and this is Empowered Health. Pornography in the United States is a massive business. Close to $1 trillion in revenue1 is reported every year. To ​ give some context to this, if you think about the top websites that are visited2, number one, ​ Google, number two, Youtube, number three, Facebook, four is Amazon, five is Yahoo and six? Pornhub. When you take porn sites and you put them together and accumulative kind of way, they are viewed or consumed more than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined.3 So we know ​ this is something that people are consuming a lot of on a regular basis, but it's not something that people talk a lot about. And so we thought, you know what? Let's get into this. Let's look a little bit about how women consume porn, how it impacts their lives. And in the course of working on this episode, we've also really been struck by how this has affected our culture and how this disconnect between our ability to be able to talk about what people are consuming in their private intimate moments is directly related to some of the big cultural problems that we are trying to overcome. So we were curious, like could this be positive? Could there be some sort of thing with sexual freedom and a new kind of intimacy and we know sort of women being more sexual, could this possibly be a positive thing? And I sorta think we have to forget some of the like mores of the past and just sort of accept like this is really here. So like this is being consumed by most people on a regular basis. So what is it? What are they consuming, what are the parts of it that are potentially good and what are the parts that are potentially bad? And I think one of the things that we cannot separate is the idea that we are living through a moment of reflection on sexual assault. And that through the #MeToo movement through more women getting into power, we're all sort of looking at this culture whereby women have experienced a lot of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and that we as a culture don't really know how to deal with it or fix it. And the more we researched this topic, the more it seemed like there was a direct connection, at least for me, between the images that people see online. So the most popular pornography is often images of women being choked or strangled or gang-banged. And if you take those moving images and you look at them as stills, there is no way that you can separate the violence from the sex. And if we're telling kids as young as 11 years old, which is the ​ average age that boys are coming across pornography4 now, that this is what sex is about and then we're wondering why we have a problem with our rape culture, we're just being ignorant to these underlying messages which are flooding kids. One really important piece of information that I think we need to share before we get into any of the research is that most of the ​ pornography online today is of girls or women who look very young.5 So some of the most 1 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/things-are-looking-americas-porn-industry-n289431 ​ 2 https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states ​ 3 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/internet-porn-stats_n_3187682 ​ 4 https://digitalkidsinitiative.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Parent_Primer_Internet_Pornography-Revise d-September-2014.pdf 5 https://fightthenewdrug.org/this-years-most-popular-genre-of-porn-is-pretty-messed-up/ ​ popular sites are things like, don't worry, she's my stepdaughter or making some overture to incest and to children. And it used to be that there was a law that said that if a woman looked underage, even if she wasn't, she was not allowed to be in pornography. And in 2004 Attorney General John Ashcroft basically overruled, won the case, that overturned the child online ​ protection act on the grounds that it violated free speech.6 So we have a case whereby somebody has decided that your right to free speech overrules the protection of sexualizing children. And I mean I'm not being a hyperbolic when I say that is ridiculous. Like this is so dangerous. So we fast forward 15 years to today and child pornography is the fastest growing ​ sector of the porn industry.7 To the point where one study that we came across referenced it as one of the fastest growing online businesses of all businesses. So this is a massive problem that our society needs to deal with. It's like protecting women, protecting children. This shouldn't be so complicated. And yet our government has made it easier to entice people into seeing young looking girls as sexual objects. And I really don't think these things happen in isolation. And so then you look at like, okay, well if child porn is becoming such a big problem, how are we cracking down on it? And in 2009 there were 624,000 cases that were reported by law ​ ​ enforcement of people sharing child porn. Only 1% of those were investigated, gone after because there wasn't enough money in the budget to go after them. I mean, that to me is insane, right? So like we've created this marketplace whereby people want to see young girls in violent situations and then we don't allocate any money to go after when they start moving into children and child pornography. So I think that's really important to just sort of put out there before we talk to any of the people who are going to say like porn is great or it might be useful or this kind of porn is okay, but that kind of porn isn't because like I can't, I cannot emphasize enough that most of the porn people are looking at or searching for is young looking girls and they're putting them in situations that look very violent. So first up we're going to talk to a researcher who's one of the few people who's looked at how porn influences women in relationships. Professor Perry is going to break down the research for us. Samuel Perry: 00:06:40 I'm an assistant professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Oklahoma. And my areas of interest primarily are in transitions regarding kind of cultural definitions of the family, but also how religion intersects with that. And mostly I study conservative Christianity and how that particular subculture is trying to grapple with a rapidly changing demographic and cultural landscape. Emily: 00:07:08 I'd like to just get started by saying, it seems like some of your research indicates that women have a very different experience than men do in terms of viewing porn. Is that right? 6 https://www.aclu.org/cases/ashcroft-v-aclu-0 ​ 7 https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20050818005532/en/Illegal-Child-Pornography-Fastest-Growi ng-Internet-Businesses Samuel Perry: 00:07:19 Yeah. So, historically women view pornography a lot less than that ​ 8. That is changing with the advent of the Internet and smartphones. Women who previously would have been more embarrassed to try to access pornography– and that used to common joke, people don't remember this anymore, I'm not really young enough to have experienced it either or I'm not really old enough to have experienced either. But, people my dad's age, if they were going to access pornography, I mean, you had to go to a store, you had to, you know, Emily: 00:07:47 Rent it. Return it. Samuel Perry: 00:07:51 Right. You had to go to that part of the video store, the adult section or you had to get a brown bag and put a hustler or playboy in there. And it would be this kind of thing. Only men would have the boldness to do that or not only but largely. So, there were all kinds of social constraints that would have kept women from, who might've been interested in accessing porn from accessing it. Well with smartphones and the Internet all the privacy and anonymity and accessibility and affordability, it's completely free. A lot more women ​ have been accessing pornography than in years past to where it is becoming a lot more of a ​ noticeable thing and that is across different communities. So even secular women certainly have been doing that. But even in the research I've been doing9, even more religious, even ​ conservative Protestant women find themselves drawn to and more often now consuming pornography to where the gap between men's pornography consumption and women's pornography consumption is not near as stark as it used to be, Emily: 00:08:51 And so how do you measure that? Samuel Perry: 00:08:52 So you can measure this with various surveys. And so we different survey data that just shows that women who report having accessed pornography within the past year or charged in the past year, there's still a difference to be sure.