© Mischenko83/shutterstockA new study titled "Til Porn Do Us Part" suggests that adding pornography to a marriage doubles the likelihood of divorce.
There's an oft-quoted rule on the internet: "If it exists, there is porn of it." Even if that's an exaggeration, there's no question that men and women have been consuming more sexually explicit content since the world went online. Now, a new study looks at how this consumption might affect marriage in the United States. The study, a working paper presented this week at the 2016 American Sociological Association's annual meeting, suggests that
men and women who begin to consume pornography partway through their marriages are more likely to get a divorce than their non - porn-consuming peers.The study has not been peer reviewed, but it raises "no major methodological flags" and does a good job of considering alternative explanations for the findings, says pornography expert Ana Bridges, a psychologist at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, who was not involved in the work.
Previous studies on porn and marriage have suggested that consuming sexually explicit material isn't good for marital health. But many of these studies have been based on cross-sectional data that give only a snapshot of porn use and marital happiness. Now, researchers have been able to analyze how pornography impacts marriage over multiple years.
The new paper uses data from the 2006 - 2014 General Social Survey, a regular poll that asks thousands of Americans for their opinions on everything from national spending priorities to morality. Because the same people are polled several years in a row, researchers can track how attitudes, behaviors, and lifestyles change over time. To measure pornography use, the survey asked respondents—who also reported their relationship status—whether they had watched an X-rated movie in the past year. "There's no perfect pornography question, but this one comes closest to the kind of question you ask that carries over time," says study author and sociologist Samuel Perry of the University of Oklahoma (OU) in Norman. Out of 5698 respondents, 1681 said they had watched an X-rated movie and 373 reported viewing one for the first time during the survey period.
Analyzing the data, Perry and his OU colleague Cyrus Schleifer found that
people who started watching porn were more likely to split with their partners during the course of the survey. For men, the chance of divorce went from 5% to 10%. For women, that number jumped from 6% to 18%.
Comment: See also: U.S. housing watchdog says it's time to hold industry accountable for lead poisoning