Monday, November 23, 2015

Porn: Friend or Foe?

From my perspective as a college student, porn has become so normalized that males unabashedly  proclaim their habits and even some females are coming forth with their tales. However, it is obvious that it is a male-centric industry, catered for the men and boys who use it when they’re bored, stressed, pent up, curious, horny, and pretty much any other excuse in the book. This “addiction,” as some might say, to the porn world has caused a fair amount of concern as well, causing reason for studies such as Jochen Peter & Patti M. Valkenburg’s, “Adolescents’ Exposure to Sexually Explicit Internet Material and Sexual Satisfaction: A Longitudinal Study.” They found that adolescents’ sexual satisfaction would decrease if their exposure to SEIM increased, an alarming thought for the sake of real-world relationships and experiences.

Cue Don Jon, (what I considered to be) a headache of a movie filled with overdone accents, too much heavy breathing, and a plethora of porn viewing. Don Jon the porn addict and Barbara, his incredibly hot girlfriend, struggle through making a relationship work when she was raised on old-school values and he…well, we see what made him on the home front. Despite having incredible sex with his girlfriend, he can’t escape his world of porn and everything else in his life appears lesser. It creates a huge divide between them as he constantly reverts to his fantasy land, raising worries regarding the effects excessive porn viewing might have on sexual satisfaction and in turn, a relationship, as the above study found that “Exposure to SEIM exerts a consistent negative impact on sexual satisfaction" (Jochen and Valkenburg, 2010).



However, I am faced with two contradictory theories regarding the effects of this movie. Jochen and Valkenburg also found that “The negative effect of SEIM on sexual satisfaction became weaker as adolescents’ level of sexual experience increased and effectively no longer existed for adolescents with great sexual experience.” Don Jon was certainly not lacking in the field of sexual experience, which would refute the argument that his exposure to SEIM was causing a decrease in his real life sexual satisfaction. Therefore, I am left with contradictions that I am not sure how to reconcile.


References

Peter, J., & Valkenburg, P. M. (2009). Adolescents' exposure to sexually explicit Internet material and sexual satisfaction: A longitudinal study. Human Communication Research, 35(2), 171-194. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2958.2009.01343.x

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