Study Warns of Porn's Deleterious Influence on Marriage

LOS ANGELES—A "shocking" study out of Germany's Institue for the Study of Labor portends a not-too-distant future in which marriage is irrelevant to a population of men whose libido has been hijacked by violent and misogynistic internet porn. The trend has already begun, according to the study authors. Already incapable of loving sex and delaying any interested in matrimony, men are on the path to becoming so asexually narcissistic that the world will eventually grind to an end as the world's population sinks to zero. Nice story; probably overblown. Reason thinks so, anyway. In a piece published Friday, Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes for reason.com that the marriage study is being misconstrued by conservatives, such as those at The Blaze, who conveniently and typically conflate correlation with causation. "So! It could be that bunches of young men find watching porn an acceptable, lifelong substitute for not just actual sex but actual human companionship," writes Brown, "However, it seems much more likely that: "a) bachelorhood makes watching a lot of porn and spending a lot of time on the Internet more possible or desirable than it is for people living with a wife and family, or "b) the kind of people who watch the most porn and spend the most hours online have certain personal characteristics or life circumstances that also make them less likely to want to marry or less appealing as a marriage partner (for instance, married men in the study were more likely to be employed and more likely to be religious, both factors which would seem to lend themselves to watching less pornography), or "c) married individuals are less likely to self-report ample pornography consumption, or "d) all of the above." We might add to her list the possibility that young people are delaying marriage for another far more common reason prevalent these days; namely, the inability to establish family-sustaining careers at anything close to the same age their parents did! OR, perhaps ... a refusal to bend to societal pressure to marry, just to be married. It should be emphazied that the study only queried men, so by definition it presents an incomplete picture of a straight marriage. But despite the fact that the list of possible reasons marriage rates have been falling is in fact enormous, the authors of the study do actually claim causation, and not just correlation. "We assert that increasing ease of accessing pornography is an important factor underlying the decline in marriage formation and stability," they state, without a hint of doubt. They may end up trying to walk that back, but it's there in black and white. Perhaps the reason they are so comfortable making a blanket statement like that is because they base their study on a very specific claim. "Traditionally," writes primary author George Naufal, "one of the reasons to enter into a marriage was sexual gratification. But as options for sexual gratification outside of marriage have grown, the need for a marriage to serve this function is diminishing." He continues, "Friedman (2000), among others, has suggested that one of the reasons that prostitution is so socially abhorrent is that it competes with women who seek a  stable marriage. While there is a small literature on the relationship between prostitution and marriage, there is almost no empirical work on the substitutability between pornography and marriage. This paper attempts to fill the gap." With assumption like that, it's no wonder that the conclusions of the study are equally exact. But there's is another, more problematic fly in their ointment; namely, the fact that the data used to justify the conclusions is not even relatively recent, but more than a decade old. The analyzed data comes from 1,512 surveys that were completed by American men aged 18-35 between 2000-2004. Here's why that matters. The subject of this study is about the allegedly significant influence not just of internet porn, but of internet use itself—which the authors claim is also "negatively associated with marriage formation"— so the age of the data being used is imperative. The manner in which people interact with the internet has changed so much in the last ten years that the experience is not even comparable. Also, the relative novelty of the internet, and porn on the internet in particular, during those early years of internet development, could easily have influenced how people self-reported its impact on them. It just seems to be too large a leap to make any conclusion on marriage trends today based on how people interacted with porn that long ago. Consider just this: Development of the iPhone began in 2004, when the data derived for this study stopped. No iPhone also means no iPad, and the profound changes in experiencing content that came with those developments and the concurrent increase in bandwidth speeds. Simply put, it was a totally different world. So The Blaze and other outlets can crow all they want about the "shocking" results of this study, which may in the end turn out to comtain some strands of truth after all, but not based on this data alone. Likewise, the bottom line for marriage in our modern society is not sex. It might be in some strictly religious cultures; indeed, one would be on much firmer ground with that argument with ISIS fighters! But unless you are talking about relatively isolated groups that impose strict religious guidelines on members, premarital sex no longer comes equipped with autoimatic shame. But even if sex were still one of the prime motivations for a person to consider marrying, the authors themselves admit up front that sex out of wedlock in all its varieties has long-since become a societal norm, stating, "The NIH reports that the fraction of 20 year-olds who have engaged in premarital sex grew by about 50% between the late 1950s and the late 1990s." That they then choose to put that fact to the side in favor of porn consumption as an alternative and equal substitute for marriage does not obliterate the facts. A second study, out of the United Kingdom, which will receive a fraction of the publicity that the "alarming" German one will continue to demand, concludes that British workers are so mortified about the extent to which they watch porn at work, that the shame beats out just about anything else, including having an office affair. Sponsored by a telcom company, it's the sort of "research" whose conclusions are of interest only to its sponsor.