Religious beliefs and concerns about abuse/exploitation are among the key reasons for moral opposition to pornography in the United States, according to new research published in Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. The study found that the reasons for moral disapproval of pornography could be grouped into 14 different categories, suggesting that the reasons people have for objecting to pornography are diverse and varied.
Pornography is a widely consumed form of entertainment in developed countries, and there is ongoing controversy surrounding its use. Although there has been a significant increase in research on pornography use in recent years, there is limited work exploring the factors that contribute to moral opposition to pornography. The new study aimed to provide a more comprehensive understanding of these moral beliefs and their sociodemographic correlates by assessing the reasons for moral objections to pornography in a nationally representative sample of U.S. residents.
“My research advisor, Josh Grubbs, Ph.D., has focused a lot of his work on understanding moral incongruence over pornography use – that is, porn use by someone who believes porn is immoral — and how this moral incongruence may be a better indicator of self-perceived pornography addiction than pornography use itself,” said study author K. Camille Hoagland (@CamilleHoagland), a clinical psychology PhD student at Bowling Green State University.
“So, we were interested in this topic because we wanted to better understand why people believe pornography is immoral. Before this study, we knew that those who endorsed the belief that porn is immoral were often religious, but we didn’t know what else contributed to these beliefs.”
To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed data collected by YouGov opinion polling in August 2019. YouGov maintains a panel of over 17 million participants and used stratified sampling to ensure demographic representation based on age, gender, race, education, census region, income, and voter history. The total sample included 2,519 adult participants.
For the purposes of this study, the researchers focused on participants who reported moral opposition to pornography, which accounted for about 40% of the total sample. The demographic information of this subsample was analyzed, including gender, age, race, and relationship status.
The study employed several measures to assess participants’ views and behaviors related to pornography and moral opposition to it. Participants were asked about their frequency and recency of pornography use, as well as their beliefs about the moral rightness or wrongness of pornography. Of the entire sample, 1,020 participants who indicated some degree of moral disapproval of pornography were asked an open-ended question about the reasons for their belief.
The responses to the open-ended question were then coded into categories by the researchers. The coding process involved sorting through the responses, identifying themes, and developing categories that captured the reasons for moral objections to pornography. The researchers followed a coding process informed by thematic analysis methods and reached a consensus on the categorization of responses.
The researchers identified 14 categories of reasons for moral opposition to pornography. The most commonly endorsed reason was religion/spirituality, followed by concerns about abuse and exploitation, feminist stances, perceived negative impacts on relationships and families, and inaccurate portrayals of sex in pornography. Other reported reasons for moral opposition to pornography included moral dumbfounding (i.e., “it is just plain and simple wrong”), beliefs that pornography is addictive, and that it is disgusting.
“Overall, the main takeaway from our study is that there are several reasons people may believe porn is immoral, and the most commonly reported reasons were related to religion and harm,” Hoagland told PsyPost.
People who cited religious or spiritual beliefs, those who had a strong sense of moral disapproval without being able to explain why (moral dumbfounding), and those who felt disgusted by pornography were more likely to have a higher level of moral opposition to it.
In addition to exploring moral objections to pornography, the study also examined participants’ religiousness and political ideology. Religiousness was measured based on participants’ self-reported importance of religion in their lives, attendance of religious services, and frequency of prayer. Political ideology was assessed by asking participants to choose their political ideology from a set of options.
The researchers found that higher age, greater religiousness, and more conservative political ideology were associated with higher levels of moral opposition to pornography. Gender and marital status, however, were not a significant predictor.
The new findings provide insights into the factors that contribute to moral objections to pornography and the specific beliefs of those who hold these objections. But Hoagland outlined several unanswered questions that future research could explore.
“Because our study had the qualitative component where participants had the opportunity to report reasons for why pornography is immoral in their own language, people offered up all sorts of reasons, which prompted additional questions for us,” she explained. “For example, several people mentioned specific types of porn that they believed to be immoral, such as porn depicting sexual violence toward children or that which shows violent sex or rape toward adults (typically women). These types of responses beg the question of how specific genres of porn may be considered more or less immoral.”
“It may be interesting to assess how pornography users determine the morality of the porn they’re watching. I think it’s probably obvious for most of us that some porn is immoral without question — the child porn example comes to mind immediately for me — but what about more subjectively amoral content? And if someone watches a specific type of pornography that they deem immoral, what sorts of effects might we see?”
“I would also be curious if those who don’t typically fit the characteristics of someone that struggles with moral incongruence over their porn use (e.g., those that are not religious) may begin to experience that distress associated with moral incongruence when engaging with content that they find subjectively immoral,” Hoagland said. “As an example, some heterosexual-identified men may find it immoral to be aroused by homosexual male porn. Women with feminist ideals who enjoy porn that depicts violence toward women may also elicit the same sort of response. It’s definitely an avenue we want to explore further.”
The study, “Reasons for Moral-Based Opposition to Pornography in a U.S. Nationally Representative Sample“, was authored by K. Camille Hoagland, Halle L. Rotruck, Jace N. Moore, and Joshua B. Grubbs.
