Ep. 7 Pornography and College Sex

Porn. We know it's out there and we're talking about it. In this episode, Jordan has a conversation with Dr. Matt Ezzell, Associate Professor of Sociology at JMU, and two recent alum, Salma Basnet (JMU '20)  and Farah Schneider (JMU '20). Dr. Ezzell shares his research on pornography consumption in college and the effects it has on our own sexual selves, as well as our society.
So how do we go from pornography research to Karl Marx to OnlyFans? Listen to find out!

Dr. Ezzell's Research and Publications: https://www.jmu.edu/socanth/people/ezzellmb.shtml

A link to the transcript can be found here.

Be Well Dukes!

All episodes of Season 1 (2020 - 2021) were recorded  when The Office of Health Promotion or, The Well, was a part of the University Health Center and located in the Student Success Center. As of summer 2021, The Well no longer exists and we are now UREC Health Promotion. Check out Season 2 Episode 1 to learn more about these changes or visit JMU University Recreation's website.

Transcript

Well Dukes Episode 7: Pornography and College Sex

Links

Dr. Ezzell’s Research and Publications - https://www.jmu.edu/socanth/people/ezzellmb.shtml

Transcript

Intro  0:01  

Hi there! Welcome to Well Dukes brought to you by The Well. Each week you'll hear conversations from a variety of JMU staff and students that we hope challenge what you know, think or do in regard to your own health, and helps you be well Dukes.

Jordan McCann

Hello, listeners, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Well Dukes. I'm your host, Jordan McCann, and we are talking about pornography. I have a few guests with me today. We have our very own Dr. Matt Ezzell and two recent JMU alum. So, hello all. I'll allow you to introduce yourself to our listeners.

Dr. Matt Ezzell  0:45  

Hello. So my name is Matt Ezzell. I am an associate professor of sociology here at JMU. And this is my 12th year at JMU. And I got started in my professional life following an undergraduate degree in women's studies with honors in creative writing, by working in the rape crisis movement in the United States as a community educator and crisis advocate. And after doing that for three years, I decided to go-- continue my education and I pursued a PhD in sociology at UNC Chapel Hill, and finished up in 2009. In addition to broadly focusing on the sociology of race, class, gender inequality, my research team and I had been studying pornography exposure, pornography consumption, and sexual attitudes, desires and practices both nationally and internationally for a number of years.

Farah Schneider  1:38  

Hi, everyone, my name is Farah. I use she/her/hers pronouns. I have just graduated from JMU this past August, and I'm now pursuing my master's degree at University of Virginia's Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. My policy areas of interest include a lot of social policy. So I'm really interested in having this conversation with you all today. Because I think that this is a really important and somewhat taboo conversation that many shy away from.

Salma Basnet  2:09  

Hi everyone, I'm Salma. I'm also a recent JMU alum. I just graduated, and now in the work field working within the public health sector, and this is a very important topic to me, because of the people I've met along the way. When I heard this was happening, I knew this was something I wanted to either listen to or be involved in so I’m really excited to be here.

Jordan 2:30  

Farah and Salma, you both have been students of Dr. Ezzell’s, correct? 

Farah  2 :35  

Yes 

Salma

 Yes, mhm.

Jordan 2:38  

Well, yeah, thank you all again, for agreeing to do this. Farah, I love that you said, you know, it's, it's important to talk about because it is kind of a taboo topic. And um I'm excited to be putting this podcast episode out, especially just titling it “Pornography,” because if people are going to be like, “Whaatttt, what are they talking about here?” Um [Laughs] and uh, and really so what we're going to be getting into is the research that Dr. Ezzell and his team has done. So that's what majority of this episode will be, hearing about that research and kind of, the effects it’s had on sexual attitudes. We’ll be getting into - we'll be sharing - there'll be some statistics and facts. Um, but really, we also know that our listeners and JMU students, college students... that this is something that happens, we know that people of this age, do engage in watching porn, and, and especially coming from our office here at The Well, we've recently started talking about it because we know it plays a role in one: sexuality education, it's a component of sexuality. And but then also, where's the connection and prevention work that we do here too. So again, talking about preventing sexual violence, if there's any connection there, what can come out of it, but ultimately too, knowing that if you are someone that's watching pornography, or engaging in pornography consumption, we want you to be informed consumers. And so it's important to have this information to understand, you know, what all is going on with it and but kind of behind the scenes and the research done that shows how it can really affect someone themselves and relationships. So I want to just jump right in to hear about all of the really fascinating and interesting research that you've and your team have found, Matt.

Dr. Ezzell  4:41  

Okay, and I thought I might give a just a very, very quick version of how I even got started thinking about media as something serious, because so often, when I give, go out and talk about media literacy, one of the most common responses I get is that it's just fantasy or it's just entertainment. And it is that-- is that is one of the functions that media provide. But it is never just fantasy, or it's never just entertainment. But I started thinking about this originally, because someone very close to me struggled in childhood with a very serious eating disorder. And when I was in high school, I made the connection that although it was just one part of a broader mosaic of issues that are related to the disproportionate experience of eating disorders and eating problems that target women, and now we understand as well a higher incidence with amongst gender nonconforming and non binary folks within the context of patriarchal culture is media representation. And I started thinking seriously about the impact that media representation had on people's experience of their own lives and their own bodies, right, their subjective realities. And when I got into college and landed in a women's studies course, I just-- it just reaffirmed that this is a piece of that broader puzzle. And then when I really started thinking about it, and so Jordan, I'm so glad you brought up the the question of the link between pornography and prevention efforts in relation to interpersonal violence and gender based violence, power based violence, is that when I was working in rape crisis, with a number of the clients with whom I worked, had experiences that were connected to pornography in a range of different ways, right, either having pornography made of them as a component of the abuse, or being shown pornography as a component of grooming or a component of the abuse that they experienced, or even understanding that that their assailant, their abuser, their perpetrator had used pornography to choreograph the abuse that they had experienced. And so I just started thinking, there's more to this story, and it's worth taking seriously. So then when I got into graduate school, and, and then since graduate school, thinking seriously about what does it mean to engage in critical Media Studies, and specifically with a focus on sexualized media, right. And so some of the things that we know from our research and from the research that other folks have done is that the average age for exposure to pornography for young people in the United States today is 11, that almost 50% of boys at first exposure prior to the age of 13. And about a quarter of girls in our survey data had exposure first, prior to the age of 13. That for male respondents that 89.1% of them are active consumers, and that about 70% of them consumed daily to several times a week. And by the age of 17, 98% of boys in our survey and about 70%, well actually a little higher than 70, just over 70% of girls in our survey reported exposure, but then the overwhelming majority of boys are going on to be active consumers. For girls in our survey, it's... there is a growing incidence of consumption amongst women within the culture. So years ago, a decade ago, it was about 30%. And we found about almost 50%, it was 47% the biggest difference between male and female consumers. And our research does focus on folks who identify as men and women in our survey because we didn't have the numbers of folks who identify as non binary, trans or gender nonconforming to be able to have statistical power to run any regressions on that. But for male and female respondents, the biggest difference is in the rate of consumption. So whereas about 70% of male respondents, college aged male respondents, report daily to weekly consumption, only 1.2% of female respondents are consuming at that, at that high rate of consumption. For the women who are consuming at that high rate, the impact that the pornography has on them is very similar to the impact that we see on high-consuming male respondents. But that is a huge discrepancy, that is setting the stage for very different expectations of what might happen in a sexual encounter. So a lot of the- the incidence of sexual misconduct, the violation, the boundaries, the lack of an explicit enthusiastic consent is happening in- in the, the difference, the distance between these expectations of what's going to happen in a sexual encounter. So again, this, this needs to be a part of the discussion. It's not the only piece it's not directly causal, but it's a piece of that broader puzzle. So taking all that very high rates of exposure at early ages, for male consumers, particularly going on to very high rates of consumption. So by the time they get into college, some- some of the male consumers have had a decade of your daily consumption. And we also know that in the absence of real comprehensive sex and sexuality education in the schools, or the home, that pornography is the primary form of sex education for young people in the United States today. Because of that, because there isn't an alternative compelling script for what sex and sexuality can look like, what it can represent, what it can mean and the human experience, pornography has an outsized role in shaping those things. Now, you can counter that, and there's some things that mediate that impact. But for a lot of young people in the US today, that counter is not compelling or they don't feel like they have access to it. This is particularly powerful because 70% of first exposures are inadvertent. So it's not something that- that these young people are seeking directly to find themselves, it’s something that they shelter them, or they're clicking on the link that is supposed to be that should be completely safe, and it ends up being pornographic. I had a friend who was an elementary school librarian, and her students were looking at, they were doing a project on whales. And so they wanted a picture of some whales to put on their project. And so it's in their school library that had filters, they typed in whales to Google Images, and they went to images and what what pops up is pornography that it was, it was obese people in pools engaged in sexual activity. And this is a genre sub genre of the pornographic world. And nobody was looking for that, right, in that context, particularly, but they were exposed to that. And that's, that's the type of thing that can happen for young people who have that inadvertent exposure, who don't know where to go to talk about it. Because the majority of those first exposures that are inadvertent are also the folks who have them say that they're scary or confusing, that it doesn't set them up to be able to navigate and make sense of those experiences. And so that can, there's some consequences that can come from that as well. So what this all points to, again, is that sexualized media, whatever the form of it is, is more than just fantasy. And, you know, I can go, I just threw a bunch of numbers at- at the listeners here. I can, I'd love to sort of pause and hear other thoughts. Or I can go on and say, what, what else our research found, because that's sort of the scope of the patterns in terms of exposure and consumption. But then our research goes further than that, and looks at what are some of the associations? What are some of the consequences of those things? So I wanna make sure we get back to that. But we don't have to get into that right- right away.

Farah 12:02  

I think one thing that is really important is how you mentioned that the primary.... primary way of sexual- sexual socialization is largely through pornography. I think one of the most problematic parts of the industry is just the blurred line of consent. And how you mentioned that it's, I feel like sex or like in sex education. And like, at that age, if you said, students are getting exposed at all, as young as 11, like, that's not a conversation, this whole conversation around consent is just not a conversation that they're having. And so there's just no association between that word and what they're consuming. And I think that's incredibly problematic.

Dr. Ezzell  12:44  

It also speaks back to the- what the content of what is most likely to be found. Right. And so in content analysis of the most accessible the top selling the most downloaded pornography, enthusiastic consent is not a part of that picture. Right? The consent is assumed a priori, before the scene had even started, is this, like things have already started happening? And so you don't get to see if there was a negotiation? That's not part of what ends up on the screen. And so what it does is it primes the students to not just not be thinking about the process of ongoing negotiating, negotiating enthusiastic consent.

Salma  13:21  

And it's crazy at what young age young men are starting to learn, this stuff, like, if you're coming into college with a decade, you said, this, like information that you're watching, you just never learned anything like that. And you're coming into college and I'm like, “Okay, this is what I'm going to do.” It's no wonder that the rates of sexual abuse and any sort of sexual harassment is so high in colleges, and it makes you wonder, why and how, and then it's like, there's real study and real numbers that backs this up. And to be able to have all this information at your fingers at the age of 11. That just doesn't sit right with me. And I'm like, you know, you can't even vote until you're 18. But you're able to sit down and watch people do stuff that you don't, your brain isn't even mature enough to understand. And so it's and now, with the pandemic and everything and everything being online, the contents are increasing, but there's also more of it, you've got OnlyFans now, which is accessible to everybody. You've got PornHub that has free porn, if nothing is enough, like if you've got money, and if you've got a way to get money, you can get it all it's all with your fingertips. And that takes like minutes to download. So it's crazy.

Dr. Ezzell  14:41  

I mean, it's- it's one or two clicks away at most first for most young people, even if they're not actively looking for it. Folks within this literature call it the triple A engine - affordability, accessibility and anonymity. Right? And so it's- it is supercharged to have this type of thing. impact. And it's also in part because it's taboo or because it's controversial, because it's not something you're supposed to do. It's also exciting, even at this, at the same time that it can be scary and confusing. But this- this, it opens up a world that young people particularly often have not been given the tools to effectively navigate. So part of this is about a broader conversation about media literacy writ large, as well as and this is at that point that that you were just getting at fear of the importance of noting cultures of consent, and making that a normal part of our conversations, even with really young kids, right, like starting these conversations about your body is yours, you have a right to it. If you don't want to give somebody a hug, you don't have to, right? You don't have to hug Grandpa, if you don't feel like it right now. I'm just like, really respecting kids boundaries like that. That's something that is a broader conversation that we need to be having as well. So this is a- it's a piece of that broader conversation. But it's not the whole piece. But it is because of the absence of alternative and compelling scripts, it is an important part of the conversation for sure.

Salma 16:06  

Just if it wasn't taboo, or anything like, how much do you think would change within our society? If you know it was a conversation, we were all okay. And like fluid about having?

Dr. Ezzell  16:15  

I think it would, it would severely limit it would definitely mediate the impact that pornography has. And so within the effects literature, and the scholarship on this, and the way my research team and I approach it is through the rhetoric of heuristic scripts. And so what pornography does is it provides social scripts that give us an idea of what to expect from a given situation. And those scripts are not only guiding the way we think about things, they're actually guiding decision making. And so we were exposed to the scripts, we internalize the scripts, when we're faced with an encounter that is similar to what we have consumed, it calls to mind those scripts, and then it starts to guide decision making. And so within the effects literature, this is actually something that is seen as a causal component that the media is actively directing some of those choices, but it can be mediated, if there are compelling alternative scripts. So this is, if we lived in a culture where these other conversations were having and pornography looked the same as it does, then the impact would not be as intense, we wouldn't see the correlations being as significant as we do see in the literature. Of course, if we lived in that culture, pornography would not look the way it does, right? Like, it's sort of like the pornography is building the culture, is reflecting the culture that we have, it's also building that. So another way of thinking about media is that it is a mirror to social reality, as well as a shaper of that reality.

Jordan 17:43  

Wow. Yeah. Just some stuff to reflect on.

[Matt and Farah laugh.]

And think about.

Salma 17:51  

Like, wow.

Jordan 17:52  

Like I said, you didn't... I can't say- I'm just nod, nod- nodding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so many interesting things there. And for the sake of time, I will keep it moving. But um...

Dr. Ezzell  18:10  

Well, let me know if this is not a good place for this, feel free to let me know or move it, but let me highlight just some of the things that we are finding in terms of the impact of this, right. So we know we know the sort of the broad the context in which this has been encountered and consumed, we know that it will have an impact because of the absence of some of these other things, but then what are we actually finding like what is the impact of some of the things that we are finding is that for higher- higher rate consumption, that there is a significant correlation for male and female consumers, between things like the preference for pornography over sex with with a partner. The diminished enjoyment of sexually intimate behaviors like kissing, cuddling and talking? Right, which also speaks back to like the lack of enthusiastic consent, right? Because part of that is part of the process of actually negotiating these encounters. For male respondents, higher consumption is significantly associated with higher incidence of reliance on pornography to maintain sexual arousal. And so men are not able to achieve erections or losing erections. Unless they have access to a screen, or unless they're thinking actively about pornography, that's something that we see there's a significant correlation there. When I go out and give talks, I've been- been asked to give talks to more folks who are involved in counseling and wellness programs at colleges and universities because they're seeing increasing rates of college age men who are presenting with erectile dysfunction, and often asking for like form of pharmacological interventions, right. So they want to get Viagra or Cialis or, or Blue Chew or whatever, whatever they've seen ads for, but they often aren't thinking about what else might be going on in my life that might be contributing to this. Part of it is that the sexual response gets tied to the screen, right. And so there's an alienated experience of sexual- of your own sexual subject subjective self, right, that you're not even present for the encounter with a partner, because you're having to think about pornography that you've consumed rather than being fully, mindfully engaged in that act, right in that moment. So we see also a significant correlation between high frequency consumption and the tendency to sexually objectify people in public. Again, this is for male and female high rate consumption consumers.

And there's just a whole host of negative psychosexual and social consequences that are associated with this higher rate of consumption. So part of what was a real, sort of, red flag to me was just seeing that 89.1%, like nine out of 10, college aged men being active consumers, and then seven out of 10, of the- of the men who are consumers being daily to several times a week. And so it just highlights that the majority of men are engaged in that- in those... are more like, are setting themselves up to be a part of these negative, these potentially harmful correlations and associations that we see with high frequency consumption. We also know that they are in temporal research that is looking at the association between consumption of sexually explicit media and patriarchal misogynistic ideals of women as well as right supportive ideas, that we know that consuming pornography tends to precede the endorsement of those ideas and ideologies, and that having those ideas and ideologies predicts further pornography consumption. And so we are, we can see that there is a, the pornography consumption is often the first step in this process, and then it tends to build on itself from there. So again, we know, we know this is a part of the puzzle. It's also very telling that within our culture, that we have this sort of split consciousness around sex and sexuality, where it's all around us all the time, right, like explicit sexualization is everywhere, it is absolutely normative within our culture, to the extent that if you're not engaged in these practices, and particularly for boys, in the context of dominant conditioning, and the hegemonic ideals or dominant ideals of manhood, if they're not consuming pornography, it's like they're the one that is seen as having the problem or being weird. So that overt sexualization is just, it's normative. And I think that might have been the point that I was... that I was driving. This is it's just a normal experience of patriarchal cultures is is this even to the extent that, even for for female respondents who were not active consumers or not heavy consumers, even if they consume some, that they still had to reckon with the reality of pornography within the culture, because the often the, particularly if they were interested in dating men and the men that they were dating, that this has shaped their sexual subjective selves and what their sexual desires, that's another thing that comes out of our research is that we know that the more pornography men consume, and for women as well, that for high consumption is associated significantly with using pornography to script, the sexual encounter, right. So the heavy consumers often have like a laundry list of sexual acts that they want to check off. And often in our interviews with consumers, they often say that they feel like their sexual lives are incomplete until they checked everything off the list, even at the same time that a lot of the male consumers would say, but I don't think that my female partners would want to do that. They still wanted to do it. Right. So it's, again, it wasn't about, like, finding and negotiating, and like initially, sort of building a situation that was mutually consented and confirmed, negotiated that everybody was happy with. It's like, how can I get my partner to do this thing that I want to do, as opposed to find the things that they wanted to really get experienced together? And so that's another thing that came out of this is that when- when that luck when the the laundry list of sexual acts have not been completed, that in interviews, our male respondents would say that they would use things to try to talk women into it or wear them down to the point that they they would acquiesce to it, which isn't really full, freely given enthusiastic consent, either. Right. So another thing that this speaks to is, even in the absence of of like crossing lines and boundaries, and like violating consent is that there's also just a lot of bad sex happening. Right? So we can think about how can we make our sexual lives better?  And getting away from this very narrow, pornographic sexual script? I mean, it is so, so narrowly defined in terms of the bulk of what is being consumed. Right, you can find alternatives to the primary dominant model, but there is, I mean, it's virtually no, it almost doesn't have an impact on the broader picture of what's happening in the world of sexualized media because the bulk of the industry is still catering to a presumed heterosexual male gaze. Where the content is explicitly degrading towards women. And where enthusiastic consent are considered in any, any strive is not a part of the story that is being told.

Salma 25:10  

So I'm curious, did you ever ask these men if they thought watching all the porn sexual content? If they ever thought it would impact their relationship today?

Dr. Ezzell  25:20  

That did come up. 

Salma 

Okay. 

Dr. Ezzell 

The first thing that the men would say is, is that they were like, Oh, yeah, everything I've learned about sex I learned from porn. So they were very clear, like, yeah, this this way, is my guy. And then they would talk about previous relationships that had failed, often because of disagreements about what was happening with sexual lives of the couple, as well as thinking towards the future. And, and thinking about a common part of it was like, just again, checking off this laundry list of...

Salma 

A laundry list.

Dr. Matt Ezzell

 … to make sure they could complete.

Jordan 25:50  

Yeah, let's make me think too. It's even when they're like, Oh, I learned everything from porn. And, again, perception is reality. So if they're saying something like, “This guy looks awesome. They're causing orgasms all the time. So I must be doing the same”. I wonder how many times those young men ask their partner like, did you actually enjoy it? Am I good? You know, [Laughs] like, they don't want to do that self-reflecting on.

[Farah and Matt laugh]

Dr. Ezzell  26:15  

Again, that's like just this incredible experience of just bad sex where not arise satisfied, right? Not everybody's happy or pleased. And we do know from other research, like just on college hookup culture in general, but there is an orgasm gap on college campuses, right that a lot of male identified books are getting off and a lot of female identified folks are not getting off unless they're dating women.[Laughs]

[Farah laughs]

Dr. Ezzell

So there is this is this is part of that of that equation as well is like, where were folks learning this. And we also know from content analysis of the most downloaded best selling pornography, is that there's an over-representation of explicitly degrading content that targets women in pornography, and that the overwhelming majority, and the specific research I'm thinking of it was 95% of the women who were being aggressed against responded with either neutrality or pleasure. So it's also creating this context where a lot of men's expectation is that their female partners will respond in the way that they've seen the women in the pornography to where of course, this is where we're not really being “fantasy”, is fantasy, right? Because most women in the real world are not responding in orgasmic ways to the types of things that are being done to the women that are in this type of pornography.

Salma 27:31  

Most women are also not watching pornography. So they don't even know like a lot of them. I'm thinking like, I was recently watching this TV show, and she has a part of Euphoria. But one of the characters, it was like, she said, she watched porn, so she knew what to look like and what to do when she was having sex with her boyfriend. And he was trying out all these crazy tricks. But the entire time she was uncomfortable, she like it. She was doing what she thought she was supposed to do. And another character was like, well, I've never watched porn before. I don't even know where to start. And it's, it's crazy how women are so like, secret and like almost a little shameful. I don't like using that word to, like, say this, but like they are a little shameful that meant that they watch porn, or that they are watching it on. It's put men out here, like, I watched this show, I watched it this many times, and they don't. They tell all their friends, they'll tell the girls that they're around with too. And we shy away from it. And we're not like as open about our own experiences. Because I think in a way, like a lot of women have this mindset of like, one more what the guy you see at long term. Now the guy's more like, this is just an experience for me. And I think that's the big like, almost gap within the brains, if you will, like where we just idolize these men for one reason, while men are just kind of like, your checklist for me. So 

Farah 29:00  

I think there can be like a lot of empowerment found, even from like, from a woman's perspective, like, insects. However, when a lot of it like we were saying this orgasm gap, like a lot of the conversations are like how to please the man. And women aren't really taking care of themselves and like, they are like, faking it, if you will.

Salma 29:23  

Mm hmm

Farah 29:24  

Like what does that do for you? What does lying do for you nothing, but it's just a dress the man's ego, honestly. And so I think that that's a really odd idea because I know that it can be empowering and that we should find be able to find empowerment our bodies. But I think that that's a really strange dichotomy of like, I want I don't know like a focus on making the man feel better.

Dr. Ezzell  29:49  

This is one of the things that drives my interest in pursuing this line of research is it I sort of take a beat from Karl Marx, whose critique of capitalism in part was driven by his understanding that part of what alienated labor under capitalist modes of production did was alienates us from part of what made us human right, that our ability to create and loose is human, it’s part of what it means to be a human being. And if we're, that's taken from us, that’s one of the harms of a form of capitalism is that it's distancing us from our own humanity. And I think similarly, our sexual selves are part of what it means to be human and so much empowerment, personal empowerment, as well as collective empowerment, even if we were to think about it in that way, it can come from sexual exploration and intimacy through sex. That doesn't have to be about a long-term loving, committed relationship, it could be a one a one time thing, but approach with neutrality and consent, and open communication could be really affirming and revealing. But that's not what we're seeing in the context of our culture. Right. And some part of the harms of pornography, in my estimation, is that it is alienating us from part of what makes us human, right, our sexual selves. And so what really gets to me is that that correlation that we're finding in our research that when folks who are high consumers are engaged in sexual acts with a partner, that they're having to think about pornography to maintain their own sexual arousal, but they're not even there for it as if sometimes pornography will be marketed as sexual liberation. And I  about that, and I think, “but that's not liberation, like that's the opposite of liberation”. That's a sexual limitation. And that is think about if people figured out how to have sex before the world where everything I think it's a limitation on our sexual imaginations, right? It is literally giving a script to these these folks who are exposed to it at such early age and that are consuming for so long. And it could be so much better than it is right now. Sometimes when I go out and talk to folks, I'll talk about how, you know, like, David Essex has the promise to be so much more empowering and so much better, right? So much more pleasurable and revealing about ourselves and others and a form of connection as opposed to just something that you're doing to another person. So that's split of what I think of as what we might call feminist sex being something you experience with yourself or with another person. And then patriarchal sex, pornographic sex being something you do to another person, or something that is done to you, is a very different mindset about how to approach a sexual encounter even with yourself, right? There are so many young people today, who have no idea how to even be sexual with themselves unless they have access to a screen. And that is just so sad to me, like that is not a culture that is built off of sexual liberation.

Salma 32:44  

Well, and also porn stars themselves have been like, I don't know if you guys know, she has her own podcast. And she was listening to it to kind of like, think about like, topics to talk about. And she said, “When I have sex, I have to forget about my life as a porn star, because it wasn't real”. But he was like, “I can't do that. That's not me”. Essentially, he was like, “Nobody has sex that way and do that people forget that we are just acting. And it's all just a big film?”.  Lily. And she was saying how her boyfriend now like when she's having sex with him, it's just not like, she was like, Oh, he asked me to recreate something. She was like, I can't do that. I don't have like the budget and the Pete like, it just doesn't, it's not feasible. And it's not real. And I think that's what a lot of people forget.

Farah 33:39  

I completely agree with that. That's a really important point to make, but I think like, also, it's just as equally important to understand that the effects on the people on screen are incredibly real, like these. Just like, again, surrounding the conversation of consent. We don't really know everything that's on the internet. And it's a little it's incredibly scary. There's a lot of really scary stories but just because it's a movie, and it is true, I completely agree with what you're saying, what's on the screen is not what's necessarily happening. I think that you also have to understand there's a really fine line between what the actors I guess, if you will, right, are experiencing.

Salma 34:24  

And there's a difference between those porn stars who are making millions of dollars versus those when people use their stories are really heartbreaking. And they're just don't you never know, who is who and what situation. And also for the people that did get all the way up there. Their story didn't start off as like one day. The first movie I shot I made $3 million. Yeah, they were having a lot of hardship that goes through to be where they are today. Until you're completely right in that aspect. Like Everyone's story is different. And it's so sad. Just to hear from the girls and the men story and the Like, I can't imagine like, and then we're sitting here idolizing them for something that they consider to be the most dramatic thing that happened to them.

Dr. Ezzell  35:09  

That's the the stars who actually gain mainstream celebrity and notoriety for in some circles, but fame, the ones who are known are the exception. They're the extremists, then most of the folks who enter into the sex exploitation industry broadly considered, have a sort of, their time in the industry is between four and six months. And they might make between two and 400. films in that in that time or videos, right? There's definitely short videos and like full films. And then it's like, the longer they're in the industry, the more they have to do to get paid, right? They have to do more supposedly degrading things to stay relevant. And then they're often done. And they're not, they're sort of used up. So the ones who are able to have a little bit more longevity are often not. They’re atypical in that context. As well as we know that the experience of the folks who are engaged in explicit, like, within the porn industry is often different in the experience of sex workers, who are folks who get involved in this type of work, sort of a, “amateur” way, like the OnlyFans are really posting things on Reddit, right? There's all kinds of ways that people are doing this on their own. That experience is also not typical often of the folks who are doing this in the context of a survival strategy. And one things that we know for research on people within the industry is that the number one reason that they give for entering the industry is financial aid, right? So we know that economic origin is part of the backdrop for so many people's interests into this. And so this is often, as I said, a survival strategy. I is a coping strategy. And so for consumers, even in our interviews, we interviewed male consumers, who are graduate students who were social justice activists, and like, “yep, I know that I know that they probably wouldn't be there if they didn't have to be there because they couldn't pay the rent. But I still I shut off that thinking when I log on.” And so they often could understand that there were some ethical considerations that they just didn't they just mean the cognitive dissonance as such, they just sort of washed that down. We also know from research on women in the industry, that the longer the initial experience in the industry is often one of personal empowerment, because they can pay their bills. But the longer they're in the industry, the more that experience turns to one where they feel like they are being exploited and degraded. So even if we're thinking about, like promoting the rights of folks in the industry like that absolutely is something that we need to happen. We need to increase safeguards, we need to create the possibility for these folks to join unions to be able to act, collectively argue for their own rights and support themselves. We also think about me to think about the broader context of economic coercion that is driving folks in the industry to begin with, the choice to enter the sex exploitation industries is often not a choice that has being made from a range of positive options. It's often a very constrained choice. And that has to be a part of our conversation as well.

Jordan 38:04  

Yeah, that makes me think the documentary Hot Girls Wanted is what first introduced me to all of that information, especially as you're saying, you know, starting at a young age and the reasons going into it. And so I think that's a, if someone is interested in learning more about it, like that's a documentary watch, there's way more actual research done by I encourage, we've encouraged that for some people when they've expressed interest in it like, again, being an informed consumer and watch this documentary, and it might change your mind.

Dr. Ezzell  38:36  

Absolutely. And even, you know, thinking about, like OnlyFans, content creators exploded, starting in March is because we were losing their jobs. Right? Like, “I suddenly have time to do this thing I've always wanted to do” was like, and some folks right, or like, I think it was Bella Thorne who made like, 

Farah

Yeah

Dr. Ezzell

 weak right now, it's not the experience of most people. Again, that's atypical, but it is a way that people could could make some money. And we also have to ask, like, what does it say about a culture that particularly for women, who are the content creators, that the way that they can pay their bills in the context of an existing gender wage gap, which is a structural reality is by creating a space for primarily male audiences to have sexual access to their body and commoditizing that so all of those like, we often don't want to sort of have that deeper to be like really critically engaged consumers. But I think if we're serious about justice, these are some of the things that have to be a part of our conversation or relationship with these questions.

Jordan 39:35  

So I kind of want to take that in segway into, yeah, are kind of wrap up our takeaway of this episode. Knowing that it's very likely there will be listeners that, if not themselves, they know someone that is a daily consumer of pornography. If after hearing this, and they're you know, reflecting and they want to change their habits, what advice would you give them?

Dr. Ezzell  40:04

So I'll say one of the things that I started doing after we saw the research that 90% of college-aged men are active consumers I thought, “What's going on with that 10% that’s not?”. Like, they're the interesting ones in this context, right, because they're the ones actually pulled away from this incredible cultural trajectory. And so I sent out a bulk email and said, “If you are a male identified person who does not consume pornography, I would like to interview you about that” and I didn't get a single response. Now when I changed it, I sent another bulk email request and I said, “If you're a male identified student who is trying to reduce the amount you're consuming or trying to quit altogether. I would like to talk to you” and then I got a flood of responses. 

Jordan

Wow.

Dr. Ezzell

And so that really let me know that there's a lot of men, particularly in theme of consumers who are who have high rate consumers as well, when we're trying to pull back, right? The number one reason that men were trying to pull back is because they had trouble maintaining sexual arousal with a partner, and that was the number one reason that they gave. There was a smaller group of men who had identified as religious, and they saw this as something that was at odds with their religious identity. And then there was a smaller group of men who saw themselves as pro-feminist or feminist, and saw this as being politically disaligned with the world that they wanted to live in. For most of the men it was like, they had an experience of erectile dysfunction and they were panicked and tried to pull back and a lot of them have a really hard time doing that, which also speaks to another aspect of this, where these high, high rate consumers often have a habitual patterns of consumption, where they don't feel like they're in control of it, or if they want to pull back then they're not able to do that. So, the men who were the most successful were the men who were seeking space to talk about it, either through a therapist or with other men in their lives who could form and there were groups of men who had actually formed like an accountability group where kind of like with folks who are dealing with substance use problems will go to a meeting sometimes where I have a sponsor where if they're feeling like they want to use that substance they'll reach out and just try to get some support and that's definitely something that some men who had more success that I interviewed that they were doing. But outside of that I would say to get educated, to see like can you pull back, can you be successful in doing that, what are the things that are activating your desire to consume and for a lot of the men it was just mainstream culture because mainstream culture is so pourified, right? That these types of this imagery like the line between pornography and main stream culture is so porous that a lot of these men had trouble even sort of go or walk into the grocery store and walking down the aisle that has magazine covers right that that would be something that would sort of activate this desire, but find or trying to figure out what are those things and are there other ways that you could direct that energy, but just being honest with yourself, and then seeking out ways to talk about it, and to pull back. There are resources available online as well. I found a lot of those resources to not have a political analysis, right? So it was more about self-harming behavior in the sense of the erectile dysfunction that is associated with heavy consumption. And the other men in my research who had more success had a political analysis as well where they saw this as being at odds with the world they were trying to promote and that gave them a little bit more impetus to try to distance themselves from those patterns. And I don't know if y'all have any thoughts on that as well, like, what advice might you give to someone who has found themselves struggling with their consumption patterns and this is not about shaming people who are active consumers particularly given that the average age of exposure is so young and that this is a normative experience for so many people within our culture today, but for folks who do feel like they're not consuming in a way that they even want to. What might you suggest for them? 

Farah 43:57 

I think education is kind of like one of the most empowering routes to changing your patterns of consumption. I don't have any, really, advice beyond that, I think that once you understand the real life implications. It makes you think about the world in just a different way. Granted, like porn addiction is very much a thing. People do feel compelled to go to those resources in ways that I don't understand. But I do think that once you understand that there are, it can be really harmful. And I think that once you kind of understand that, it changes the way you frame your pornography consumption.

Salma 44:40

And I'm going to have to piggyback on that mainly because I really don't know a whole lot about something like that. I fall more into the latter of women who don't really consume porn or watch pornography in that sense. So I can't really sit here and say you know this is what you should do. But I think learning and educating yourself about other people's experiences, also can like give you so much perspective into the whole culture itself. And that might be a bigger turn off than you ever thought possible. 

Dr. Ezzell 45:16

So one thing that might be even, like, thinking about how withdrawing your reliance on pornography can also enhance your sex life, we actually find in our research that once the rate of consumption gets to once per month, that even at that level that sexual satisfaction overall in your life starts to diminish, right? So it's like once every 30 days is enough to make your sexual satisfaction be less than it could be. So sometimes that might be a piece of the education as well is thinking about like if you actually want to reclaim part of your sexual self, right? And the power that can come from that withdrawing our reliance on this product or, that is being produced from a multibillion dollar global industry is one of the ways that we can try to do that.

Jordan 46:09

Okay, so, to kind of just wrap up or take away our last question here, and I work at doing a lot of sexuality education and especially for college students. And so having this information and knowing that people are listening to it and it can be really daunting and hearing all of this like “whoa I was unaware and it can be scary”, but wanting to look at it from a hopeful lens and especially since I have an expert and then also young students here, so people that I like to work with in my field. What hopes do you all have in regard to how again the landscape and the culture around sexuality and pornography consumption, what hopes do you have for that changing?

Farah 46:59

I would love to see a world in which like women can be empowered by their sexuality and like take charge and exploring it, quite frankly. I think that Salma mentioned earlier that a lot of women are like scared to come forward or like a little nervous to come forward about their pornography consumption. And that doesn't really apply to men and I think that's just a really silly double-standard. I think it's really important that if there are negative effects to pornography that we're all willing to take part in that conversation and having women that aren't comfortable that doesn't allow for the full analysis of that or doesn't allow us to tackle that problem fully. 

Jordan 47:44

Great, thank you. Salma, do you have anything?

Salma 47:50

I’m going to say that I hope to see that in primary education when you're in like elementary school, I hope that this is something that they're able to talk about and it doesn't become a taboo topic and teach children at a young age to tackle something like this and how they're like, maybe hopefully change their perspective on it. 

Dr. Ezzell 48:18

I would say yes to both of those. And I would also say that, one of the first things that happens when you start talking seriously about media literacy is to gain an awareness of the reality that media are constructions, right, they're not natural. They don't grow on trees, they don't fall from the sky. They're always produced by human social agents who are acting in particular socio, historic and political contexts. And so as important and powerful as the media system is as an agent of generic sexual socialization. That is not a given. It's neither natural nor inevitable. And so the reality that we see is just one version of what is possible for the realities that we could create. And so if you understand that it is a construction that it could be deconstructed and reconstructed into something better is possible. So, even if it feels like at times that it's improbable, it is possible and that is really important to hold on to. It is that the pornography industry is huge. It is a multi billion dollar global industry. It's hard to imagine, creating a real shift in some of these narratives, but it is possible to do that and I think it starts with conversations just like we're having here. I think it starts with conversations between women and being open and honest about their sexual desires and their experiences. I think it starts with early discussions like Salma you were aligning with young kids talking about building cultures of consent from a really early age, including media literacy in the context of our sex and sexuality education, actually creating sex and sexuality education right in the schools like creating that space like that these could have a huge impact on our relationship to all of these questions and so it is absolutely thinkable that a different world is possible, and if it is thinkable, it's possible. 

Farah 

Hope is alive. 

Dr. Ezzell 

Absolutely.

Jordan 50:03

Yeah, well thank you all so much for talking about this. Great conversation, I think we could do many more and maybe there will be! So, thank you to the listeners also for staying with us, and having this great information. And be sure to stay tuned for next week's episode which will be on bystander intervention, and we'll have some guests talking about the program we have here on JMU's campus, called Green Dot. Remember, be well Dukes.

If you're listening to this episode for HTH100, the passcode is “fantasy”.