The possible relationship between misogynistic types of pornography and possible real world sexual violence is difficult to study for many reasons:
There's the-chicken-and-the-egg problem in trying to determine the direction of causality if a correlation between violent porn consumption and committing violent sexual acts is found. Perhaps violent men consume violent pornography? Or could it be that violent pornography creates violence in some men who wouldn't have been that way without it.
There's also the more general problem of how to pin down the impact of one cause (here the consumption of misogynistic porn) on general societal trends when so many other possible causes are changing at the same time.*
That's a preamble to my views about Olga Khazan's June article in the Atlantic Monthly which asks if online pornography is now operating as an extremely warped form of sex education, one which teaches young people terrible ideas about what women like in sex.
Most online pornography is aimed at the market of heterosexual men and boys. It's not in the market so that it can teach the customers about female sexual needs or desires, but for the most basic types of wish fulfillment where everything the man in the scenes does pleases the woman in the scenes**. Even if that would not be what the vast majority of women like in reality.
That might not be a problem for most grown-ups, people who have already had real world intimate relationships, with love and communication and so on. But it could be a giant problem for inexperienced teenagers if they get their sex education and the ideas what women are meant to want in sex from the pornography market aimed at heterosexual men:
In a recent study, Debby Herbenick, a professor and sex researcher at the Indiana University School of Public Health, found that nearly a quarter of adult women in the United States have felt scared during sex. Among 347 respondents, 23 described feeling scared because their partner had tried to choke them unexpectedly. For example, a 44-year-old woman wrote in that her partner had “put his hands on my throat to where I almost couldn’t breathe.”
Sex can involve consensual choking, but that’s not what’s going on here, as Herbenick explained to an audience during a panel at Aspen Ideas: Health, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. Instead, “this was clearly choking that no one had talked about it and it got sprung on somebody,” she said. Many sexual-assault cases among students at her university now center around nonconsensual choking. According to her research, 13 percent of sexually active girls ages 14 to 17 have already been choked.
The reason such young kids know about such a violent sexual act is likely porn, said Dan Savage, a sex columnist and the host of Savage Lovecast, who was also on the panel. And that’s not the only disturbing change that might be attributable to porn, added Kate Julian, a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of a recent magazine cover story on sexual behavior among young people. For her story, she talked with many women who said their male partners seemed to be taking a cue from what they had seen in porn, pounding away or penetrating then anally when they weren’t ready.
Julian also mentioned
...a university health center that was seeing women with vulvar fissures, something that’s typically a sign of sexual assault. Except these women hadn’t been raped. “They just had been having sex that they didn’t desire,” Julian said. “They didn’t know it was supposed to feel different.”I have written about my fear that online pornography might slowly become the source which young people use to learn about sex before. What is urgently needed (other than better sex education, one which corrects the warped messages of porn) are studies which try to measure how large this problem might be, what percentage of teenagers are now operating on the understanding that real world sex is what online pornography teaches them.
--------
* This is a problem that applies to many other cultural phenomena having to do with violence. Does playing violent video games make people more likely to commit violent acts or less empathetic when violence happens? What about general violence in films, books and so on?
The problem is that any changes that are taking place in, say, the violence of video games are not taking place in a laboratory, but in the real world where lots of other variables are changing at the same time. And all those other variables must be held constant to see what the variable we are interested in might have caused. This is easier said than done.
Note that researchers have carried out laboratory experiments to see how being exposed to violent misogynistic messages affects how the study subjects later answered various questions about their opinions on, say, women's rights. But those kinds of studies are, by necessity, of a very brief duration and tell us nothing about what the effects might be if the suspected cause persists for years.
** This, naturally, would not be true about the truly misogynistic types of pornography but about the kind of porn which some people call vanilla.