I covered this in the piece with the data that showed that misogyny was the only thing the research linked to violence (not porn nor a desire for casual sex). But this raises a good question: has misogyny really risen?
I don't believe it has over the long haul (say, the last 150 years), and believe it's gone down. In 1919, women couldn't vote. In 1960, women couldn't easily find work or open a bank account. They were shackled to their husbands who often abused them with impunity as law enforcement shrugged. Going back even further, women were second-class citizens, basically slaves in the Medieval and Renaissance eras, charged with long hours of grueling work. If they had any kind of sex the Church didn't approve of, you risked execution or being sold to slave traders. I've covered this slave trade of women in my piece Medieval England's Secret Police of Sex and Sexuality here. (1)
The word "blacklist" comes from a list of women's names that was posted in every pub in town and if those women were caught, a bounty was paid and they were kidnapped and shipped off to become sex slaves to populate the Americas for crimes like sodomy and sex out of wedlock.
Men have been utterly horrible to women throughout history. In ancient times, most sex was probably rape. Men conquered cities and took the daughters as sex slaves. It was awful beyond words. It's not like everything was cozy, and then, suddenly porn appeared in the late 1970s and men started treating women terribly.
More recently, I'd say misogyny has risen over the past 10 years from pre-Social Media. But that has more to do with transphobia, a backlash against feminism demanding rightful equality, and the rise of figures like Jordan Peterson, the person whose bogus, misogynistic claims I've spent more time debunking than anyone else, right here on Medium. (5)
In fact, I know it is because the people who are the loudest anti-porn crusaders are steeped in the same Manosphere misogyny and conspiracy theories that say awful things like, 'Women have it easy, they can just get naked on OnlyFans and make money and that it's really the men who have it hard," or, "Women should give back the right to vote." (2)
Dr. Nicole Prause, the UCLA neuroscientist mentioned above in my article, covered both of these things. She covered the fact that the anti-porn movement is steeped in conspiracy theories here on Medium. (3) Her research over the last few years found that the greatest predictors of being in an anti-porn movement like NoFap or Morals in Media was misogyny.
From her research: (4)
Participants reported that NoFap forums contained posts that were misogynist (73.7% of participants), bullying (49.1%), anti-LGBT (42.9%), antisemitic (32.0%), instructing followers to harm or kill themselves (23.5%), or threats to hurt someone else (21.1%).
73.7% of all participants in these groups said misogynistic things and—stop me if you've heard this one before—most of them blamed women for their own actions (when they used the very porn they disapprove of). Remember the Atlanta Massage Parlor Shooter who blamed women for "not being able to control his urges" when he tragically shot several women? This kind of rhetoric is identical to what's being said in right-wing anti-porn forums every day.
It's not the pro-porn people who are the misogynists, it's the anti-porn people.
I had Dr. Prause on my podcast and we talked about this for over an hour. (6) She explained that porn is neither harmful nor addictive, that when both couples consent, porn helps build intimacy (rather than detracting from it), (10) and that a major predictor of people who self-identify with porn addiction is "a conservative upbringing so that you have shame around your viewing." She discusses this on YouTube here. (7)
And she's not alone.
Every study to date that has explored "porn addiction" has found that self-described porn addicts always watch less porn than the average person. Joshua Grubs, Ph.D., researched further and found that it was "moral incongruence" that was at the center of the problem. (8)
Sex researcher and psychologist Dr. David Ley, Ph.D., also came on my podcast to dispel these myths and correct the record. (9)
When people *think* they have a porn problem, they're almost always morally against porn. In other words, when sex is stigmatized and people are taught from the time they're kids to feel shame about their sexuality, as they often are in highly conservative, usually religious homes (but not always, it can happen to secular people as well), so any amount of sexual behavior is too much. When the goal is absolute zero, any amount becomes too much.
Porn "addiction" isn't real, it's a right-wing movement masquerading as a cause, just like the LGBTQ bans that are pretending to be porn bans. A lot of this stuff is propaganda to force a highly misogynistic, right-wing agenda down our throats, unfortunately.
1. https://medium.com/history-of-women/medieval-englands-secret-police-of-sex-sexuality-2e9d379089d
4. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13634607231157070
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w6BlHa54gw
