Utah’s Mormon-run Brigham Young University is a known breeding ground for enlightened sexual discovery. Amidst the lectures on the importance of obedience in relationships and the crushing fear instilled within the student body of the damnation that awaits those who fail to get married, BYU’s social scientists are at the cutting edge of sex and pornography research with what feels like a new study making the rounds on the internet every few months. These studies, like this one from November 2022, are used as evidence to prove pornography’s supposedly devastating impact on society because of its threat to stable, monogamous and, you guessed it, excessively heterosexual relationships.
Published in The Journal of Sex Research, the study looked at 3,500 men and women in “committed relationships” around the country. Individuals answered questions about their pornography usage and their satisfaction with their partners to assess the “risk factor” that adult content might pose to relationships. The results? Agencies and policymakers are now “armed” with the “evidence” that “avoiding pornography is vital to developing a healthy and long-term romantic relationship,” as detailed in a press release from BYU News.
Turbo-charging my skepticism of the study is that it was conducted by researchers from the BYU School of Family Life — a program designed to, among other things, “foster commitment” to the principles of a 1995 manifesto published by the Mormon Church that claims “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.”
The Biggest Takeaway From Netflix’s Pornhub Documentary? Pay for Your Porn.
Sure, free porn is nice, but paying ensures that it’s ethical, consensual and safeIn 2017, another of the School of Family Life’s illustrative studies was released. It looked at the effect the belief of one’s own addiction to porn had on that person’s anxiety around romantic relationships. Psychology Today published a response that explained how “seeing oneself as addicted to porn is far more damaging than actually using pornography,” helping to explain why religious men who watch porn have worse self esteem than their secular counterparts, which was again a conclusion of BYU’s most recent porn study.
“Out of fear of rejection, many people keep their pornography use secret, particularly when they are from religious, and especially Christian, communities or backgrounds,” according to psychologist David J. Ley. Ironically, Ley found that BYU’s study supported the idea “it’s not porn use, but rather the belief in porn addiction and the conflict with religion, which predict porn-related problems.”
While the mainstream porn industry is undeniably rife with exploitation and abuse, the flattening of all porn to a demonic force of relationship-sabotaging smut seems to extend more from a disapproval of any sexual expression that exists outside the bonds of marriage between a man and a woman, rather than the ills of the for-profit, often misogynistic porn machine. On my list of people I would rather seek relationship advice from than the Mormon Church? Cole Sprouse, Stormy Daniels and all the drag queens in Florida.
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