Dr. Katherine Goldey and Dr. Sari van Anders of the University of Michigan set out to test a straightforward hypothesis: The more choice women had over the pornography they watched, the more aroused they would become. Unsurprisingly, that prediction came true.
But something unexpected happened in their study, too. Women who freely chose their own erotica also experienced more disgust, guilt, and embarrassment than women who were given limited or no choice over their viewing material.
Their boost in arousal, it seems, had come at a shameful cost.
“We were initially surprised at the results, but when [we] discussed the findings, we realized that maybe we shouldn’t have been that surprised, given stigma surrounding solitary sexual activity for women,” Goldey, now a professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at St. Edward’s University, told The Daily Beast.
Their findings, now published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, came out of a broader study in which they examined women’s testosterone levels and self-reported arousal both before and after watching erotic films. The experiment measured the effects that choice of viewing material had on women’s identification (“[imagining] themselves as participants in the film”), as well as on their cognitive and emotional responses.
First, the researchers randomly sorted their sample of 116 women—mostly heterosexual, 18- to 30-year-olds—into four groups.
The “high choice” group was allowed to watch any erotica from “their own sources” for about 10 minutes, skipping between scenes and videos at their leisure. The “moderate choice” group selected material from a library provided by the authors including films by women-centered erotic filmmakers like Erika Lust and Candida Royalle, which sex researchers recommended for use in studies with women. The “no choice” group was assigned a clip of one of Royalle’s films and instructed to watch it from beginning to end.
Lastly, women in the control group had a decidedly un-sexy experience: They watched “a travel documentary about the history of Scotland.” Ooh la la.
The participants were asked to watch these films in their own homes without masturbating. They also completed surveys measuring their arousal and identification, and provided saliva samples to measure their testosterone levels, which, for women as well as men, tend to increase with sexual activity.
As it turned out, giving women their pick of the litter wasn’t all good.
Yes, the “high choice” women experienced significantly more enjoyment and perceived physiological arousal than their peers. But choosing their own erotica “only marginally increased identification with the film,” and was accompanied by small but significantly higher amounts of guilt, embarrassment, and disgust than several of the other groups. It wasn’t as if the sample was particularly prudish, either, as the researchers had actively “recruited for participants comfortable with erotica.”
The “high choice” group’s ambivalence toward their freedom, the authors speculate, could speak to the paucity of readily available, women-centered pornography.
“One reason for this finding could be the quality of what’s out there,” Goldey said, noting that content analysis studies of online pornography show that the medium has significant issues with diversity, and tends to privilege penetration over other sexual acts. “This could mean either that there just isn’t much out there in terms of more ‘women-centered’ stimuli, or that what is out there is more difficult to find.”
In contrast to the researcher-vetted films watched by the other women, all of the women in the “high choice” group selected a video from the Internet, with PornHub as their most frequently reported destination. Many of these women later described the videos they chose as “fake” or “unrealistic,” hinting at some degree of dissatisfaction with their go-to sources.
“The participants who were given less choice were viewing erotica that had been ‘screened’ by researchers for use in sexuality studies,” Goldey said, “so material likely to elicit negative affect [emotion] was potentially more likely to have been eliminated.”
But the researchers suspect that their study doesn’t just speak to the questionable quality of mainstream Internet porn itself. They also believe that the negative emotions felt by some in their study could be related to a longstanding stigma against women watching porn alone.
“[I]t is possible that disgust, guilt, and embarrassment increased because women noticed themselves becoming physiologically aroused to explicit sexual stimuli, given the stigma surrounding pornography use for women,” they suggest in the study.
Troublingly but tellingly, all non-control groups of their study experienced marginally higher guilt and embarrassment with higher levels of arousal, not just the “high choice” women. This finding raises the possibility that their subjects may have felt mildly guilty, in part, for simply deriving pleasure from porn in the first place. A previous small study by Kinsey Institute researchers has hinted at this possibility, showing associations between negative emotion and women’s genital response when viewing certain kinds of erotic films.
The burden of choice, Goldey suggests, may only exacerbate a more general stigma.
“[C]hoice may add a sense of ‘responsibility’ for engaging in an already stigmatized behavior,” Goldey explained.
That is, as opposed to the “moderate choice” or “no choice” women who had specific guidance from the researchers, the “high choice” women may have felt as if they only had themselves to blame if their viewing material didn’t live up to their expectations. The added time investment and personal involvement required to choose a film, the authors observe, could have added to these feelings of guilt.
“Indeed, viewing erotica chosen by someone else (e.g., a relationship partner) may be more socially sanctioned for women than viewing erotica for the purpose of solitary masturbation or arousal, such that choosing erotica from one’s own sources exacerbates the guilt, embarrassment, and disgust already conditioned to this stigmatized behavior,” the authors write.
There was at least one silver lining from their study, however: Within the “high choice” group, women who identified more with their choice of film experienced less guilt and embarrassment, suggesting that women might feel better about mainstream Internet pornography if they could more easily visualize themselves taking part in it. Goldey believes that this data could help disprove the myth that women “just aren’t visual” with regards to sex.
“I think our findings suggest that an alternative or additional consideration is that women don’t strongly identify with the content of the porn that’s out there—that it might be the fakeness or ‘unrealisticness’ rather than the visual modality per se,” she said.
In other words, bad Internet porn, it’s not us, it’s you. And if mainstream porn gets better, women may feel better about watching it. In more ways than one.
