Unlike my recent posts about members and masturbation and abortion that leveraged the 2015 Relationships in America Survey with a relatively large subsample of Latter-day Saints, a lot of ink has already been spilled on the issue of Latter-day Saints and pornography use.  

The Mormons-as-hypocritical-pornography-users canard started with a single, early (2009) study that showed Utah was the number one pornography using state. However, that was one study using a particular dataset drawn from a particular paid subscription company when the vast majority of porn is freely available, so it probably wasn’t representative; additionally, when the data was broken down by county it became difficult to argue that it was a Mormon thing.

As additional datasets have become available it has become increasingly clear that Utah is one of the lower pornography using states per capita. I’m not going to rehash the whole history of the pornography-using Mormon boogeyman, but this is a good summary, and at this point you kind of have to want it to be true to still think that Latter-day Saints consume more porn than other people. Like how the age of fossils doesn’t rely on one dating method but multiple that all confirm each other precisely, various forms of evidence all point towards Latter-day Saints consuming less porn than average. 

However, to my knowledge nobody has tested Latter-day Saint pornography use using self-report. The Relationship in America Survey asks “When did you last intentionally look at pornography?” For frequency questions it’s been shown that the “when did you last do X” is a more accurate way to gauge frequency than a direct “how often do you do X” question, under the premise that sure, you might have just looked at porn for the first time in years yesterday, but all things being equal the last time you looked at it is probably strongly related to how frequently you do. 

So what do we find? 

Pornography Use by Gender and Latter-day Saint Status (%)

This is one of those inkblot test results. One can easily look at this and say “ha, 3/4 of Lattter-day Saint men have intentionally looked at pornography at some point in their life!” And that would be true. However, one could also point out that Latter-day Saint men watch pornography much, much less than their non-Latter-day Saint counterparts. Specifically, while more than half of non-Latter-day Saint men have intentionally looked at pornography in the past month, about half as many Latter-day Saint men have. If we say that somebody who looks at porn every day or two is a porn addict (fine, fine, “problematic compulsive use” if the phrase “porn addiction” triggers you), then that’s probably about one out of ten Latter-day Saint men.

Of course, a quarter of Latter-day Saint men in the past month, and one tenth as more habitual users isn’t great, but it’s clear that the narrative that pornography use is caused by religious repression doesn’t really pan out (honestly, people coming up with convoluted psychoexplanations for why men view pornography are way overthinking it).

Of course, women look at pornography too. (Occasionally you run into people who are uncomfortable with the fact that female sexuality is different, but it is, and there is a cartload of evidence for that fact, it’s not all just gendered double standards and response bias). Still, here about one out of seven non-Latter-day Saint women have intentionally looked at pornography in the past month, while for Latter-day Saint women it’s about one out of 25.

So, while there is obviously too much pornography use going on among members (especially men), like masturbation it’s not ubiquitous like some like to imply, and the Church’s anti-pornography messaging and emphasis is probably leading to less pornography use, and not, in some weird Freudian reaction, more.