Bound feet. This will become relevant later. Obviously all sorts of content warnings here, as the kids say. 

In the Friends episode “The One With Free Porn” Joey and Chandler accidentally start receiving free porn through their cable service, and don’t turn off the TV for fear that they’ll lose it. The running joke throughout the episode is that their sense of reality and expectations about sexuality in daily life are warped, being surprised and dismayed that the pizza girl just drops off the pizza and the bank tellers just deposit their money. 

Not to suddenly go dark, but on a related note over at sex researcher Twitter there was a recent fight in the past two weeks over a radical suggestion that, with the advent of completely photorealistic computer generated imagery, computer-generated child pornography should be made legal to protect children under the idea that it would allow pedophiles to vector their desires into pixels instead of real children. 

The argument was made by Aella, a prominent sex worker who is actually very handy with R and has become quite the numbers and sex research autodidact. (Apropos of nothing, her estranged father is also a prominent conservative anti-Mormon evangelical; fate has a weird way of smiting the antis :) Of course, whether her point is valid hinges on whether pornography causes people to act on what they see or acts as a substitute for the real thing as a vector.

However, as you might expect, the research on this is somewhat contested, and it is difficult to causally disentangle whether people get into something because porn or whether the porn simply responds to an appetite that was already there. 

For example, I was only superficially familiar with the porn-causes-rape literature and there is some evidence that violent pornography is associated with sexual aggression among those who are already offenders, so there is a preventative legal logic to regulating violent pornography at least even if causality is a little murky, but here I’m kind of more interested in what things we should frown on as a society even if we don’t make it illegal. To be completely honest, I’ve always been a little skeptical about the pornography-rape connection, and even wondered at times if it went in the opposite direction. Ecological fallacies aside, we’ve seen an explosion of pornography use at the same time as a concomitant decline in rape frequency. 

I hadn’t really thought this argument out to any great depth. However, in the Aella fracas, Lyman Stone, an excellent researcher who I will always listen to even if I do not always agree with him, made an argument that flipped me on this, arguing that the rape decline disappears once the size of the cohort of young men and other crime is taken into account. So while porn obviously doesn’t turn most young men into rapists, on the other hand there isn’t a lot of evidence that it reduces rape proclivity as some kind of an outlet for urges that would otherwise be manifested in sexual violence.   

But beyond the question of rape, it is clear that you can have sexual fashions and norms that are shaped by pornography (for example, my own research showed that anxiety over manhood size is much worse for men who view pornography), and that this is a bad thing given where porn is going. For example, pornography apologist and unabashed libertine Bill Maher bemoaned that pornography is getting “rapey.” At the same time, about quarter of undergraduate women report having been choked during their last heterosexual sexual encounter. In their excellent book-length work A Billion Wicked Thoughts Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam rank order which pornographic search terms are used most, and let’s just say that it gets…interesting really fast. We’ll keep this PG-13 rated, but “hot women in bikinis” or whatever else a curious, sweaty-palmed Deacon from 2000s Utah might Google is quaint. On the other hand, the earliest, silent pornographic films also had similar themes as those we see in pornography today, so there’s an argument to be made that the desires are always there under the surface, and not that pornography interacts with preferences and creatively builds on itself over time. 

However, on a third hand, it is clear that fashion and culture drives desire. In my intro class I occasionally teach I show the example of Chinese foot binding to show how culturally-driven aesthetic preferences are. For example, early Chinese erotic poetry would talk about the smell of broken feet as some sort of a turn-on, so it’s clear that while maybe not all sexual interests are learned, and the idea that sexuality preferences are completely hardwired from birth is also an oversimplification. Therefore, as a father of sons I am right to be worried about what pornography exposure might do to their sexual interests (speaking at the sub-orientation level, not saying it’s going to turn them gay). 

I want them to work hard at school and develop themselves so that they can appeal to the wholesomely attractive girl. That’s becoming much harder since at any time after a rejection they can go into a computer room and turn on the all-you-can-drink tap of the diet soda version of sexuality (whether through traditional porn or digital AI “companions”) without the real complexities that accompany human relations, and I would be terrified if I had daughters that were navigating a dating and marriage world where sexual expectations had been shaped by pornography that, again, makes James Bond seem adorably tame by comparison. 

Not to situate everything in the liberal/traditional debates, but it’s worth noting that the conservatives at least have an internally coherent schema for dealing with all of this, while the relationship of the progressives to pornography has always been as clear as mud, with rival pro-porn and anti-porn factions that I suspect correspond strongly with gender. Iceland came close to regulating pornography while under a lesbian Prime Minister, but I frankly just don’t see the same perspective coming from non-asexual men on the left, or at least men with average sociosexuality levels. While the secular left may adopt a sort of “let’s just not talk about it” attitude since they themselves are divided and it runs alongside concerns that their cultural enemies on the right have, the fact is that in 2025 some guy in his mother’s basement with no options with real women in a sense has more sexual options than ancient emperors and, frankly, secular liberals don’t have a good response to this when old timey religion sort of does, with no compelling reason from left-liberal principles while a woman’s ick factor for pornography should set norms for men who are naturally inclined to indulge. (Sidestepping the issue of legalization, and yes women watch pornography too but not nearly on the same scale or the same type–by and large this is a War of the Sexes issue.) The traditionalists have a framework for calling out the proverbial Guy in his Basement while the secular liberals really don’t. 

And as the options and sexual marketplace become more and more driven by pornography that itself is becoming less and less like your grandfather’s porn, this gendered tension is going to come to a head. In the past sex was connected to struggle for improving one’s self and station in life, but with digital and other such options through AI and VR quickly developing we’re quickly seeing what life is like when everybody is given a shortcut to an all-you-can-have access simulacras that never age, have their own emotional needs, tire, or, and this is the crux, never feel uncomfortable with anything asked of them. So if I were to make a hypothesis, while pornography and its increasingly customizability, frequency, and realism will undoubtedly shape expectations and norms, including in some cases into unsavory directions, it will at the same time displace the old-timey, quaint sexual relations of yore between a man and woman who like each other.