 the rationale that is given for these types of law, these laws tends to be not necessarily that teenagers should never see a naked woman or something like that, but that there's something specifically wrong with online porn, the sheer quantity and volume of it, the lawmaker behind Louisiana's age verification ban, which is the one that really got the ball rolling on this to make online porn less accessible. Apparently was motivated by an interview that she heard with Billie Eilish, the popular singer that she gave to Howard Stern in 2021 about her personal experiences with online pornography. I'd like to roll that clip and get Eila's reaction to what she's saying about the effects that she thinks porn had on her. As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace. And I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was like 11. I thought that's how you learned how to have sex. I was watching abusive porn, to be honest, you know, when I was like 14. And I, you know, thought I was one of the guys and would talk about it and think it was really cool for, for, for not having a problem with it and not seeing why it was bad. And I think it really destroyed my brain. And I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn. I think that I had like sleep paralysis and these like almost like night terror slash just nightmares because of it. I think that's how they started because I would just watch abusive BDSM. I couldn't watch anything else, like unless it was violent, I like didn't think it was attractive. And I had, it was a virgin. I had never done anything. And, and so I let it led to problems where, you know, the first, the first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. And it's because I thought that that's what I was supposed to be attracted to. And I just, I am, I'm so angry that porn is so loved. And it's how so many people think that they're supposed to learn. It's how so many men think that they're supposed to be. And because in porn, there's no consent, like getting thrown around during sex. If you're not interested in being slapped and being choked, people are like, you're vanilla, you're soft, you're, that's not, you're boring in bed. And I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about women. Women are like, oh, I have to like being hurt to be thought of as good in bed. What do you think about the experiences she's recounting there that porn just, it warps your expectations to, of what sexuality could and should be? I'm slightly confused by her accounting. Like why, where did she get the idea that being hurt, like the abuse of porn was the cool porn? Like was she around a bunch of other like preteens being like, Hey, did you watch this violent BDSM? Like I, I've, I just, I'm legitimately confused. Like maybe it's possible that there's whole cultures out there. Like when I first, when she first started talking about it, I'm like, Oh, she's just into it. And then like, hasn't come to terms with the fact that she's kinky. But then she said she didn't actually find it attractive. So I'm like, why are you, it takes quite a lot of like cultural force in some way to like make people regularly watch porn that they're not aroused by. Like, have you ever tried watching porn? You're not aroused by, like ever, right? How much have you done that, right? Like, so this is why I'm just confused. Again, I'm not saying that like, that she's like incorrect or something. I'm just, I'd noticed that something's not adding up here. Yeah. I mean, I know you have written about the, about violent porn. And, you know, the way the way she's laying it out there is the is it's like it makes men want to engage in really rough violent sex. And then women feel like they have to like that too. You're writing on this and your research seems to show that it's actually women who have a preference for more violent pornography. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like to pump our intuition here, you look at women's romance novels. There's a lot of like pretty aggressive men who are not that interested in consent. And this is like written by women for women. The Fifty Shades of Grey, the most popular selling women's novel. And I don't think that it's because women are desperately trying to please men so that they go and make this novel so popular that like most men don't give a shit about. And basically every, yeah, like the thing that you pulled up, I did a survey where I asked people, partially my audience and partially people I paid who are random have no association with me. And I asked like men what to predict what they thought that women would like in bed like, hey, let's say you try. Oh wait, actually, oh, this might be a different, I forget. I wrote a couple different blog posts so I get them mixed up. But I've got a couple of your graphs here that maybe we could talk about that will be a way to talk about it. This is the one where you asked how often do you read or watch erotic content for the purposes of arousal. And it shows that overall, unsurprisingly, cis men watch and read more erotic content than women. But then you ask how much of the porn you watch is violent. Cis men, there's, you know, over 30% said none. For women, that number is lower 25%. So it's the, you know, the absolute number of men watching porn unsurprisingly is higher, but of the women who do watch porn, they are more likely than men to watch violent. Yeah. And like the theory where it's like, oh, a pressure from men is causing women to want, like maybe you could be like, oh, women are reporting that they like violent porn because they're trying to please men. But like, let's say we're in a world where we have like say 40% of men really like violent porn and like in truth, only 10% of women do. And then we have a bunch of cultural pressure from the men, like, oh, more women should like violent porn. I wouldn't expect to the number of women that like violent porn to get shot up that, that degree. Like, maybe I would see some inflation, like, oh, now it's like 15% or 20% of women are reporting it. But like the fact that now more women than men are reporting interest in violent porn, like that just doesn't seem to be really consistent with this theory. Yeah. I want to get a little bit, a few more of your, your findings on human sexuality, because you know, you, you have these huge samples, like how do you remember off the top of your head about how big that your, your survey was where you're drawing this data from? It's still coming in. Now it's 622,000 cleaned, but more than that uncleaned, depending on how you clean it. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, that's a huge sample. And I was looking through some of it, some of your results in preparing for this. One was this, what women say they like versus what men predict women will like, because it's, you know, the, the idea that Billy Eilish is putting forth in that clip is that porn sort of warps men's brains to make them think women want different things than they actually want. But if you look here, I mean, it's like the, the, the, the most popular answer on both sides, you know, like call her beautiful and sexy, kissing, cunnilingus, missionary with legs up, like it's matching almost, it's not a perfect match, but it's, it's pretty close. I mean, was that were those kind of results at all surprising to you or what do, what do you make from that data? I mean, the fact that they're closest and like overall close is not that surprising. I try to have like a broad spectrum from like extremely vanilla and like everybody likes it to like extremely bad and like very few people don't like it. So like the lowest one here is like, like tell her she's called her ugly or like shove her head in a toilet. Both sexes agree that that's not that's not exactly you. That's another one that is just, you know, not quite catching on just yet. No. But, but so yeah, there's, there doesn't seem to be, there don't seem to be a lot of men answering that, you know, you should, that they think shoving a woman's head in a toilet or like pissing on her face is the. I asked that one because once the guy shoved my head into a toilet and I was like, huh. Wow. It was interesting. I don't think it's like I'm glad to have experienced it. I mean, you know, the water or like how far in did your head? No, very close to the water. I thought that I thought he was going to try. Would that change your appreciation of it, of the experience? I don't think so. I think, I mean, I would prefer not having my head shoved in any more toilets. But I like it's just, I don't know. It's like interesting to go through that experience because like, when do you ever get the opportunity to have your head shoved in a toilet? Very infrequently in my daily life. Unfortunately. Sorry. I'm a journalist, so I have to ask the important follow up questions. Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for digging into that one. You know, it's like a problem that we run into often in 2023 America is like anytime there's a potential downside or harm to some products, whether that's porn or drugs, there's like almost an assumption that therefore state prohibition or at least regulation is the remedy. And I think all of us in this conversation reject that notion. None of us are for banning porn, even if some of us think kids shouldn't have, you know, unmitigated access to it, or that porn might be bad for some people. I think though, that if we want to move towards a freer society where we leave more responsibility with individuals to moderate themselves, instead of relying on the state to nanny us, it's going to require honest discussion about downsides or pitfalls. We don't have to like something or celebrate everything to tolerate it. And I just want to give that preface before we talk about a little bit more about some of the major criticisms of the online porn industry, many of which were raised in this article for Skeptic Magazine called How Porn is Messing with Your Manhood, which was authored by three writers who've written full books on what they see as the scourge or the downsides of online porn. And I just want to bring up a couple of these with you, Ayla, because they're criticisms you hear commonly. And I want to know if you think there's much to them. And if so, if there's anything that can be done realistically to mitigate this other than trying to implement a porn ban that certainly won't work. One of these ideas is what the author calls sexual anorexia. And he bases a lot of this argument off an Italian survey that found that by sexual anorexia, he means difficulty having sex with a real partner. So the researcher, Professor Carlo Forrester, explained that the problem worsens when young men's sexuality develops independently from real life sexual relationships. He said viewers who watched a lot of porn, especially if they started early 14 years old, became less responsive first to the porn itself, and then their libido dropped and finally becomes difficult to get an erection. And there is some, you know, wider empirical data showing the rise of erectile dysfunction among younger men worldwide in America as well. We can't directly link that to porn, but it's a phenomenon. But what do you, is that something you've observed or have anything to say about the idea that men can become reliant on porn for sexual release and then don't know what to do in a real life situation with a woman? Yeah, there's some, some like a professor friends I have that say that like sex porn addiction isn't a real thing. And I am not sure that I find that convincing. You just need to find like one person who like a good introspection who reports like, hey, I feel like this is damaging my life. And you can get addicted to so many things. It just feels weird to be like, you can't just put like a pin on one end of it. But on the other end, it's like difficult for me to like trust a lot of the research on this because it's so motivated in both directions. People are really personally offended by pornography. And there's a lot of incentive for self insight to go awry here. Like if you are, say for example, having erectile dysfunction problems for other reasons, like that might be health related, it might be very easy for you to try to find a causal thing that you're aware of like, oh, maybe it's the porn that's doing it. We see this with fetishes all the time. A lot of my data doesn't support that childhood experiences correlate with fetishes. And yet we constantly have narratives like, oh, I think I'm into this thing because you know, I was spanked as a child or I wasn't spanked as a child or something. So I just am like very up and close and personal all the time to the way that we can like make stories connect with our lives in ways that turn out to be completely fake. And I'm not saying that they're always fake. I'm just saying that like when I'm reading people making like causal claims about this, it's just something you have to be super, super careful about. We have to really pick through the study and like try looking at different questions to try and coordinate like triangulate what the answer might be. I think a lot of the discussion around porn addiction is misguided for this reason. I would be surprised if it were all true. But again, I would be surprised if none of it were true. So my guess is that porn addiction is like a legitimate problem where it is fucking some people up. My guess is a smaller number of people than a lot of this discourse currently is claiming. On the issue of fetishes, that was another topic that they raised in this article that because on these porn sites, you can effortlessly click from scene to scene in genre to genre to boost your arousal. It's like you've put yourself in a scanner box. Like the change means that you can just condition, they say condition your arousal patterns to an ongoing escalating and ever changing novelty. So thus users are conditioning their sexual arousal template to everything associated with their porn use, their brains then expect these things during sexual arousal yet none of these attributes of online porn match sex with the real person who cannot compete with the buffet provided by porn. So the argument boils down to it's giving you porn brain. You get sucked down these very specific fetish rabbit holes. Is there anything to that? Have you observed that either in your survey data or dealing with real life clients? This is the thing I'm much more sus about. Like the other thing is like maybe porn runs your life, maybe. But this I'm like, I just feel so much more skeptical. Like in my theory currently, which to take with a great assault, I may come back and be like, actually I've updated this based on more data. But currently my theory is that there's like kind of two categories of like ways that you can have a fetish. And one is that it has early onset and it is quite strong. So like you typically people in this category remember their fetish is happening like some of their earliest memories just like an intense fascination with this thing. And now this thing as an adult is quite central to their sexuality. And then secondly, you have late onset and this is due to some kind of conditioning and it's usually much milder. So it's kind of like guy whose girlfriend puts her hair up on a ponytail every time she gives him a blowjob and now he's out and he sees a girl put her hair on a ponytail at a grocery store and he like gets a chub. Like that's what I would consider to be like conditioned sexuality. And but usually they're not like fetishes in the classic sense that we think of that term, like they're not super strong. But I think the way most fetishistic sexuality works is very similar to sexual orientation. Some people like latch on to feet, some people latch on to like being gay. Honestly, I think blotching on to being straight is like the default one. I don't think that these are meaningfully different. But and we know how well gay conversion camps work. We know what happens when we try extremely hard to recondition people's sexuality in the terms of orientation. It's basically incredibly ineffective. And so this is why I have quite a bit of doubt when it comes to reconditioning like deep sexuality in other regards. Like if you can't make somebody attracted from penises to vaginas, like you're not going to be able to make somebody become that level of attracted to like feet or bondage or something. You can do like the conditioning thing, like your girlfriend puts her hair up on a ponytail, but there's no way you can change a fetish on the level of like this happened early and it is deeply central to my sexuality. No way. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Ayla about porn laws, the sexual revolution and the freedom to browse the internet privately and speak anonymously. You can watch another clip right here or the full conversation over here.