The Price of Free Porn

with John McWhorter

Pornography has been around pretty much forever, but there has never been more of it. The debates about the societal effects of porn that surfaced in the 1980s circulated around arguments between feminists, conservatives, and free speech advocates, the online proliferation of pornography has made it a society-wide issue.

In this excerpt from our most recent Substack subscriber-only Q&A, John and I address a parent’s concern about the effect that internet porn may have on her daughter and, indeed, generations of young people. Not so long ago, porn was relatively difficult to come by for teens. You had to find a way to procure it, find a place to consume it, and find a place to hide it, all while risking the embarrassment of discovery. If a teenager got their hands on porn, it usually required at least a little ingenuity. The cost—in money, time, and risk—was relatively high.

In the last two decades, almost all of those barriers to entry have disappeared. Anyone, no matter how young, can now access free porn on their computer or phone in less time than it took you to read this sentence. Plenty of evidence suggests that’s exactly what teens are doing. We don’t yet know the long-term effects of porn’s easy availability and quasi-normalization, but it seems unlikely that it will be a good thing. One could foresee more people becoming addicted to porn and fewer people pursuing relationships and starting families. With the cost of finding at least some kind of sexual satisfaction via porn so low and the cost of finding satisfying real-world relationships so high, the incentives around dating and marriage may realign in disconcerting ways. I don’t know if that will happen—I’m not an expert. But we may find that the real price of free porn is higher than we can afford.

---

This is an excerpt from a Substack subscriber-only bonus episode. For access to the full episode, plus early access to TGS episodes, an ad-free podcast feed, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

---

GLENN LOURY: Let's move on to another question then. All right. This is Kanishka.

Hi, John and Glenn. What advice would you give to a hypothetical son or a very real daughter coming of age in a time when unrestricted pornographic content is just a finger's touch away. With the current trajectory of further commercialization and cultural promotion of sex work, it's clear that pornography will only become more pervasive in the world that we will inherit. While pornography has positive attributes for society, I am scared by the lack of mature advice for individuals on dealing with porn.

As a part of the first generation with this access to internet porn, I have firsthand experience of its negative effects on myself and my peers. On the individual level, there is porn addiction and increased fetishism on a societal level and, much more worrying to me, many young men choose to not go out of their comfort zones to pursue relationships. They are instead content to passively wait for a relationship while they satisfy their biological urges with porn. What advice would you give to the next generation of men and women who will live in a world where the interaction between the sexes is forever changed by porn? 

Well, Kanishka, I'm gonna let John respond. It a tough question. You ought to know. At least I speak for myself. I'm not an expert on the subject here, and I'm in a way flattered but also kind of dismayed that you think I have some wisdom to offer on this question. But John can speak for himself.

JOHN MCWHORTER: My girls aren't old enough for this to be an issue quite yet. I'm not a porn person. Never have been. That that doesn't work for me. I just don't. What I'm really thinking is, remember all the noise that was made about pornography? And I think it was not just the kind that you could buy at the store, not just Playboy and Penthouse, but other stuff. There was a whole lot of talk about pornography and its effect on relations between men and women among radical feminists in the '80s, like an awful lot of the talk about feminism from Andrea Dworkin, from Catharine MacKinnon was about pornography. 

I was always a little perplexed. I was thinking, how important is pornography as opposed to other things going on? But apparently it was. And I'm way out of my lane here, but I'm under the impression that nobody ever proved that this pornography had a whole lot to do with making the world go around. What did it create that there hadn't been before?

I learned from one friend of a friend about 15 years ago—I don't partake of such things—but I learned that pornography is much more easily available online than I had reason to think. And folks, I mean it. It's just not my bag. I've never gone to look. But he showed me the screen where you can just press a button. And I thought, oh, so now you don't have to get a magazine or something. And he was saying, yeah. 

So I dunno how new this is. And I hear now and then that this online pornography affects relations between young men and women. But does it? I guess I'm thinking about my students at Columbia. Is there something different about the way they're having sex than anything that I've known in my life when I was a teenager? I genuinely don't know.

I mean, to be honest, I'm thinking that my older daughter can probably now press a button and see something. And yes, I can put certain guards on, but eventually that's not gonna work. Yes, she's going to see something that I couldn't. I don't know what effect that's going to have on her. I genuinely, I genuinely don't know. I'm a little naive about this. My inclination is that it won't matter, but maybe I need to think more about it. I don't know. 

GLENN LOURY: Actually, I think you do. I find your naiveté charming and, in a way, kind of sweet. Because all you have to do is go to pornhub.com. I mean, it's not hard to find, man, it really is not hard to find. And I'm not making any representations here about my own consumption habits of pornography, but I do know a fair bit more about it than John does, and it's very easy to find.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Do you have to pay for it, or is it just sitting there? 

GLENN LOURY: Well, if you want to get inside the room where the “good stuff” is, you have to pay. But if you're just surfing, there's a lot that'll just pop up. I mean, if you go to these sites, the ads and the teaser and the trailers and whatnot will be enough to get a kid excited who's going through puberty. And it's very easy to get. Everybody's got a phone, everybody's got a connection to the web, and it's just everywhere.

In fact, a former colleague of mine, Jesse Shapiro was his name, a very great economist who's at Harvard, he used to be at Brown. I like him a lot. And he works on media subjects, economics of media in the broadest sense. He's studied internet content, and he told me that if you just measure it by the amount of volume of stuff that people are downloading, porn is like half the internet. It's everywhere. 

---

---

You need a child psychologist or somebody who really knows what they're talking about to address the question of the adverse developmental effects of pornography consumption by adolescents. I'm not qualified to address that question, but I see the concern. I see the concern, and I've heard it given voice to in other venues that guys masturbate, basically, and they satisfy their sexual urges through these fantasy flights where they go to a site, they get these images of people having sex, and it arouses them and they have their ejaculation and they deal with their urgings in that way. And that's the sex life of, apparently, no small number of individuals.

And the idea that that way of responding to the promptings of nature could distort how it is that boys and girls, young men and women, interact with each other is certainly plausible to me. I mean, I give one example: “No means yes, and yes means anal.” That was at a college campus, I don't remember which one, this is probably going back 20 years. A chant from a drunken fraternity party in the face of people—#MeToo people—saying “No means yes, and yes means anal.” Where'd the “anal” come from? It came from porn. 

I don't know the answer to this questioner's question, because I'm not qualified, Kanishka. But I can understand why it would be of a concern. And we were asked what to do about it. How do I know what to do about it? This is Parenting 101. How do you talk to your kids about dangers in the world? Temptations, lures, snares, delusions, dead ends that are out there waiting to entrap you. And you have to navigate it. And I, your father, your mother, will not be there to make those decisions for you about how you deal with your time. 

There is one kind of answer to this, and it's spiritual. It refers to our convictions, if we are religious believers of one kind or another, or even if we're areligious or whatever, whatever the moral code might be. How living a dignified life challenges us. You know, the Bible says, don't spill your seed on the ground, or words to that effect, as an admonition against masturbation. And of course, to argue against masturbation in the modern day makes one sound like an idiot or a nutcase. 

On the other hand, what would a deeply satisfying relationship to my sexuality require of me? Saving myself for meaningful interaction with another human being as opposed to dissipating, et cetera, et cetera, could be a kind of argument you could make to a kid. But you need a framework. You need an ethical, moral framework around such an argument in order for it to take. I think parenting has gotten harder in the twenty-first century. A lot harder. Because kids are carrying the world, including the world of pornography, in their pockets. 

JOHN MCWHORTER: All right. I'm going back a little bit. I'm not that untainted, but I'm still not fully understanding. When I was a teenager, one, there were the magazines. And somebody always had a copy of one of them, or your father had them. And so teenage boys would see them. My father had a stash of porn videos that I discovered when I was about 14 or 15, and me and my buddies watched all of them many, many times over and were quite taken by them. 

GLENN LOURY: Excuse me. Your dad didn't know that you were watching them?

JOHN MCWHORTER: I don't think he ever knew, no, because we would do it when he wasn't around. And then there were these tacky little books that you could get at department stores and things. It was the Beeline series. There were these stupid little porn novels. I will openly admit that when I was 15 or 16, I bought several of them and shared them with my friends, and we used to quote lines. So I had that experience, even before the internet. 

Now, of course, I didn't have a thousand of those books. I didn't have a library of these films. But what I do know is, I never had any sense that what was going on in any of this had a whole lot to do with real life. It was just a kind of entertainment. Nor did I learn about what anal sex was from them. It was just around. It's what people talk about. I'm not quite sure what the harm is, although I've read here and there that there's something about the modern amount of porn that affects what men expect, et cetera. But I haven't followed that literature closely.

GLENN LOURY: Well, before we leave the subject, you mentioned it, let's not forget that the feminists in the '80s and onward who were inveighing against pornography were motivated by protection of the dignity of women. And the idea that, in appealing to the basis of male sexual instincts and in presenting women in a posture of easy availability and so on, it fostered an attitude toward women of disrespect and contempt and so on that rose to the level of causing some very serious people to question whether First Amendment protections ought to be extended to this kind of expression. So there is something there, just like there's something there with prostitution. 

As an economist, my knee-jerk reaction to objections to prostitution is “consenting adults.” It's a transaction. Somebody has something to sell, somebody wants to buy it. They didn't hurt me by by making the trade. Why should I have anything to say about it? On the other hand, as one might imagine, the institution of marriage could be undermined by the widespread embrace as normative of prostitution as a way of et cetera, et cetera. What women are being taught and what men are being taught about the role of women and the dignity of women is, I think, arguably undermined by the widespread endorsement of prostitution as a matter-of-fact transaction. So it becomes a harder problem once you take into account the spillover effects on the culture of the normalization of certain attitudes about sex, and so on.

I think I just wanted to mention that because I don't want listeners to think we're unmindful of the “danger” to women. But some people, I think plausibly, are concerned about that.

---