Straight Men Who Watch More Porn Are More Supportive Of Same-Sex Marriage: Research

From the Huffington Post:

Why? Exposure to porn may cause heterosexual men to be more accepting of "non-traditional sexual situations." As Wright explained to the Examiner, if people think "individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to have same-sex sex, they will also think that individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to get married to a partner of the same-sex."

The theory that porn causes men to favor marriage equality was also recently argued by University of Texas professor Mark Regnerus, who gained notoriety in 2012 for a now widely denounced study that found children of gay parents were worse off than those of straight parents.

Part of Regnerus' argument was that porn disassociates sex from procreation. "[A]dd to the sharing of bodies temporarily and nonexclusively a significant dose of alternative forms of sexual activity -- positions, roles, genders, and numbers -- and that's basically where porn presses its consumers today: away from sex as having anything approaching a 'marital meaning,'" he wrote.

More here.

Well, whaddaya know?  Porn is good for more than just getting off.  Probably.

I think the notorious Dr. Regnerus is probably not a sex-positive liberal, given that he assumes a link between marriage and sex: after all, marriage has been historically far more about property and controlling women than it has been about sex per se--the whorehouse, the mistress, and the concubine are just about as ancient as heterosexual marriage is, which makes Regnerus' assumption problematic, at the very least.  But he's got a good point, I think.  Porn shows people doing all kinds of crazy shit that you don't see walking down the street.  If you accept what you see on screen in the porn you're watching, it's only a hop, skip, and jump to conclude that you should accept gay people getting it on with each other, too.  And once you've done that, anti-gay marriage arguments become strictly academic, rather than burning with puritanical fury and irrationality.  

It's hard to say for sure, but I think my own porn consumption has played a role in my acceptance of gay people, too.  Of course, it's all a rich tapestry.  I got thrown directly into gay culture when I decided to study theater in college, and that probably had more of an effect than anything else.  But porn was there, too, and looking back, it's not easy to rule it out as the influence these researchers are saying it might have been for me.  I think they're definitely onto something here.

That is, watch more porn!  It makes you a better person.

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