The Problem With Male Porn Virgins: New Study Doesn't Say Much, but Sure Is Fun to Write About

by Barbara Kantrowitz

Is there a man alive who hasn’t been exposed to pornography? A Montreal researcher says no, and has made headlines around the world for this questionable revelation.

Simon Louis Lajeunesse, a postdoctoral student at the Université de Montréal, wanted to find men in their 20s who had never been exposed to porn—he called them porn virgins. But after an extensive search failed to turn up any innocent souls, he concluded that porn virgins are as rare as unicorns. (Maybe so, but it’s hard to imagine that any red-blooded Canadian guy would ‘fess up if he really had never glanced at a skin mag or X-rated flick.)

In any case, Lajeunesse apparently decided to make lemonade out of a lemon of an idea by studying how the porn-consuming habits of 20 university students affected their sexuality and shaped their relationships with women. He found that most started looking at X-rated material by early adolescence (around the age of 10, when they are most sexually curious), and generally rejected anything offensive like bestiality or violence. Lajeunesse’s subjects consumed 90 percent of their pornography on the Internet (just what every parent fears) and another 10 percent from video stores. On average, he found that single men watch pornography three times a week for 40 minutes while those in relationships watch it about half as much.

Perhaps the most interesting result was his conclusion that the subjects’ sex lives were pretty conventional, similar to their parents. Exposure to porn, he said, did not make them any more perverse than the previous generation.

Ordinarily, this kind of pseudobreakthrough wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—merit much attention. There were only 20 subjects, a tiny sample, and the results of the study itself are less than startling. What actually drew the attention of newspapers from as far away as India was the failure of Lajeunesse’s original idea: to study young men who had never seen porn.

If he had simply reported his findings without passing on the results of his futile original search, no one would have cared. But who could resist the opportunity to write headlines like “Porn-Loving Men Ruin Sex Study” (The Sun in the U.K.), “Porn Professor Strikes Out” (iAfrica.com), or “Porn Study’s Premature End” (Tasmanian Mercury).

Lajeunesse reports that all of his test subjects claimed to support gender equality. What else would they say? All 20-something guys know that there is only one politically correct answer—and beyond their own testimony, there was no measure of how much their actions supported those claims. Lajeunesse also says the subjects know the difference between the “fantasy” sex presented in pornography and real life. “Men don’t want their partner to look like a porn star,” he told reporters. (That roar you hear is the collective laughter of cosmetic surgeons across America.)

Despite the snickering headlines, pornography is actually a serious subject worthy of legitimate scholarly research. Too bad this isn’t it.