Is porn making men too picky?
“Why porn turns men off the real thing” tut-tutted a recent New York Magazine article written by feminist Naomi Wolf. By her reckoning, the increased usage in porn (a staggering 1000 new porn websites are created each day), is not making men into raging sexual beasts as once predicted but rather into the exact opposite: it’s making the blokes a little too picky.
“The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women,” she writes. “(It’s) leading men to see fewer and fewer women as ‘porn-worthy.’”
In other words, the more that men are subjected to abnormally large-breasted women with chiselled abs and perfectly manicured pubic hair, the more unrealistic their expectations of the average woman becomes.
And while I have yet to see evidence of this in the pub, (after all it’s not everyday you see Jenna Jameson trouncing around at your local watering hole), it seems Wolf’s theory does indeed have scientific legs.
Known by scientists as the “contrast effect”, apparently it isn’t only porn that does it …
Psychologists Sara Gutierres and Douglas Kenrick, both from Arizona State University, have been studying reactions to beautiful women for the last two decades and they’ve consistently come to the same conclusion: when men view images (both naked and fully clothed), their expectations of us average femmes climb accordingly.
Back in the 70s, in Gutierres’ and Kenrick’s very first study, they got men to watch an episode of Charlie’s Angels before rating photos of potential blind dates. And they quickly discovered that these blokes didn’t rate their dates as highly as the men who watched a different show.
Subsequent studies that they’ve conducted have also found - and here comes the biggie - that when men viewed pictures of Playboy centrefolds, they subsequently felt less in love with their partner/wife/girlfriend than they did before. No wonder women the world over are so adverse to their blokes getting a little visual stimulation! (Although ladies, a quick word of advice: never ever attempt to part a man with his porn. It just won’t work.)
Of course it’s not only the blokes whose opinions are swayed by what’s on the box. Women are often picked on for having unrealistic expectations of romance, love and sex, although ours comes in the form of Hollywood rom-coms, chick flicks and Dr Phil.
But no matter where the influence stems from, a psychologist friend of mine explained to me the other day that two most prevalent problems he sees in today’s relationships are the problems that pop up on this blog time and time again: unrealistic expectations and the “Too Picky” syndrome.
“Everyone complains about relationships not working, women not being able to find a decent man and men only interested in casual sex,” he explains. “But if we eliminated all the Hollywood gaff and the internet porn, we probably wouldn’t have these problems in the first place.”
Naomi Wolf concurs: “For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.”
