LOS ANGELES — Despite the well-funded War on Porn being waged by deceptive organizations like the religiously motivated Fight The New Drug — a Mormon Church front — and the pseudoscientific Your Brain on Porn, a new study has found that “porn isn’t the cause of problems in a relationship" and “porn consumption can even have beneficial effects."
The 2019 study, by psychologists Colin Hesse and Kory Floyd, is called “Affection substitution: The effect of pornography consumption on close relationships” and was recently published by the peer-reviewed Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
Yesterday, psychology professor David Ludden, summarized the article’s findings for Psychology Today magazine, attempting to find answers to the common therapy question, “Why do people in committed relationships use porn?”
According to Ludden, Hesse and Floyd “conducted their study within a framework known as ‘affection exchange theory.’ This is the proposal that all humans have a need for positive social interactions with other people, and this includes bodily contact as an important means of showing affection. Plenty of research supports the contention that social interaction and exchanges of affection yield all sorts of physical and psychological health benefits.”
Ludden then introduces the concept of “skinship,” used by Japanese psychologists “to describe interpersonal relationships that include bodily — and often skin-to-skin — contact.”
“It’s important to understand that skinship relations aren’t necessarily sexual,” Ludden writes. “Babies and young children especially need plenty of skin-to-skin contact with caregivers, which they get through being held, kissed, hugged, and cuddled. After puberty, we begin seeking sexual partners to help meet our affection needs. As we transition into long-term committed relationships, we come to rely on our spouse as the main source of affection—and the sole source of sexual intimacy—in our lives.”
Affection exchange theory, Ludden explains, “predicts that when our personal relationships don’t provide the level of affection we need, we experience a deficit and seek out substitutes. The feelings produced by an affection deficit are essentially the same as those experienced in loneliness.”
“When people experience affection deficit, they seek out substitutes that can help reduce feelings of loneliness,” Ludden writes. A coping mechanism is what he calls “a parasocial relationship,” defined as “an imaginary affiliation with a fictional person or a celebrity, and it’s speculated that engaging in these can lead to the release of the same pleasant and soothing hormones that real affectionate relationships do.”
In their study, Hesse and Floyd “ask whether people in committed relationships use porn —particularly for the purpose of masturbation—as an affection substitution. After all, pornography with its depiction of intimate sexual acts appears to lend itself readily to the creation of parasocial relationships. Furthermore, the resulting orgasm from self-stimulation leads to the release of affection-related hormones such as dopamine, prolactin, and oxytocin. Given these facts, it seems reasonable to suppose that people in committed relationships might watch porn in response to feelings of affection deficit.”
Hesse and Floyd concluded that “overall, there is some evidence that pornography consumption is used as a form of affection substitution (dealing with the perception of affection deprivation). However, there is no evidence of consumption being either adaptive or maladaptive when it comes to relationship satisfaction, closeness, and loneliness, although it is possibly maladaptive in terms of depression.”
For the full Psychology Today article by David Ludden, “Why Your Partner Watches Porn,” click here.
