Feature: Porn and Narcissism
I Smell a New Jeff Foxworthy Bit in the Making?.
Somehow, Jeff Foxworthy’s exaggerated drawl doesn’t seem right for the line, although the syntax does invoke his long-running redneck bit: If you watch Internet porn, you might be a narcissist at least according to a small collection of academic eggheads who apparently have nothing better to do with their time than ask people questions about their online porn-viewing habits, and look for analogies between those porn-watchers and tragic figures from Greek mythology.
Granted, narcissism is a recognized psychological disorder and not just something I accuse my husband of every time he pisses me off, but when the diagnosis of narcissism flows entirely from the results of a 40-question personality quiz, and the survey population amounts to 247 respondents, I’d say it’s a bit of a stretch to put too much stock in the conclusions of the study except that in this case, I’m not sure the study came to any conclusions in the first place.
One of the authors of the research, Thomas Kasper from the University of Houston, says the data collected suggests that watching Internet porn makes people more narcissistic. This might be because pornography, at least as Kasper asserts things, is ‘limited to just pleasure or pleasure for ourselves.’
That’s interesting, because I’ve always thought that when I watch porn with another person, both of us were enjoying ourselves, and in at least some cases, the people performing the sex acts we watched were experiencing some pleasure, as well.
That’s the hope, at least, and when it comes to the survey data that has been collected by my friends over at Sssh.com, the number one thing that their members say they want to see more of in the porn they watch is mutual pleasure between all the on-screen performers.
Granted, I’m no psychologist, or researcher, but offhand, that doesn’t strike me as a particularly narcissistic perspective.
But hey don’t pay any attention to what porn viewers themselves say they want to see, or what they say they take pleasure in; there’s an academic speaking to us about narcissism here, and we all know that what really matters is what HE says about why other people watch porn because there’s nothing even remotely narcissistic about that notion, at all. He’s not just saying he knows better than the rest of us, he has three little letters next to his name that prove it! Besides, Dr. Kasper is just being clinical, factual and scientific, right? There’s no hint of prejudgment tainting his perspective on what motivates the act of watching porn, right?
Riiiight.
I have some questions of my own for the people who cooked up this little study on the connection between porn watching and narcissism.
Did anybody ask the respondents whether they watch porn alone, or is that just an implicit assumption? Did they ask respondents what they like about watching porn in the first place? Or did they just determine that these people watch porn, have them fill in the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, self-report their porn viewing habits, then line up the narcissism test scores with the self-reported porn viewing information and merrily draw their conclusions from there?
The bottom line, as Slate touches on in a post about this study, is that nobody can say with any certainty whether being a narcissist makes one more likely to watch porn, or if watching porn makes one more likely to be a narcissist or whether anything at all probative concerning causality can be said here, one way or the other.
For that matter, given that so much of the information here is self-reported including, crucially, the extent of one’s own narcissism and porn-viewing how reliable is any of the data involved?
Maybe some of the less narcissistic people were simply more reticent about being honest about how much porn they watch than were the narcissists. As near as I can tell, this study had absolutely no way of corroborating what the respondents self-reported, so any variety of lies or misrepresentations could skew the results in a heartbeat, particularly when the respondent pool is so small.
Honestly, it’s not that I find it hard to believe narcissists watch more porn than non-narcissists; what I find hard to believe is that a survey of 250 people is a reasonable means of drawing such a conclusion. To be fair, even the researchers allow for the fact that more research is needed before they can conclude anything anything other than the fact that watching porn is necessarily a solipsistic and selfish act, that is.
Having said all of the above, I’m happy to report that I’m still eager to read another of the articles from the same issue of the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy that featured the porn/narcissism study, namely the piece Female Sexual Subjectivity and Verbal Consent to Receiving Oral Sex.
I’m not sure what that means, exactly but it sure sounds like a page-turner!
