In general, pornography use trended downward over the pandemic, for both men and women; problematic pornography use trended downward for men and remained low and unchanged in women

Porndemic? A Longitudinal Study of Pornography Use Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Nationally Representative Sample of Americans. Joshua B. Grubbs, Samuel L. Perry, Jennifer T. Grant Weinandy & Shane W. Kraus. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Jul 19 2021. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-021-02077-7

Abstract: Of the many changes in daily life brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing efforts and governmentally mandated lockdowns were among the most drastic. Coinciding with these changes, popular pornography websites made some previously premium content available for free, spurring dramatic increases in traffic to these websites. This increase in time spent at home and reported increases in traffic to specific pornographic websites led to some speculation that pornography use might generally increase over the course of the pandemic and that problematic use might also increase. To test these speculations and quantify the effects of the pandemic and its associated restrictions on social behaviors on pornography use, we analyzed data from a longitudinal sample of American adults. Baseline, nationally representative data were collected in August 2019 via YouGov (N = 2518). Subsequent data were collected in February 2020 (n = 1677), May 2020 (n = 1533), August 2020 (n = 1470), and October 2020 (n = 1269). Results indicated that, in May 2020, immediately following the height of the first wave of pandemic-related lockdowns, more people reported past-month pornography use than at other follow-up time points, but less did so than at baseline. Among those who reported use in May 2020, only 14% reported increases in use since the start of the pandemic, and their use returned to levels similar to all other users by August 2020. In general, pornography use trended downward over the pandemic, for both men and women. Problematic pornography use trended downward for men and remained low and unchanged in women. Collectively, these results suggest that many fears about pornography use during pandemic-related lockdowns were largely not supported by available data.

Discussion

At the outset of this work, we sought to examine whether or not there was evidence that pornography use had increased in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions on social behavior. Using a longitudinal study that started with a nationally representative sample of adults in the U.S., we examined the extent to which pornography viewing frequency and PPU changed from August 2019 to October 2020. Below, we summarize our findings and discuss the implications of the present work in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns.

Pornography in the Pandemic

As we noted earlier in this work, the world’s largest pornographic website made claims of increased pornography use at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic during the height of the first wave of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders (Pornhub Insights, 2020). These increases in pornography use occurred in tandem with this same website offering a range of incentives for increased use. Similarly, analyses of internet search data suggested that interest in pornography peaked during the early stages of the pandemic (Zattoni et al., 2020). Collectively, this led to speculation in popular media (Grubbs, 2020) and peer-reviewed journals (Király et al., 2020; Mestre-Bach et al., 2020; Sinclair et al., 2020) about the possibility for pornography use to increase over the course of the pandemic. However, the present results indicate that, overall, changes seen in pornography viewing during the first several months of the pandemic were generally minimal and impermanent for both men and women.

Over the course of data collection, we found that the majority (86%) of our sample reported either decreases or consistency in their pornography use during the height of pandemic-related lockdowns (i.e., May 2020). It is important to note that a minority of our sample (5% of our May 2020, follow-up sample; corresponding with 14% of those who viewed pornography within one month of our May 2020, wave; 14.6% of men, 13.7% of women) did report increases in pornography use during the first COVID-19-related lockdowns. However, even for this group, by August 2020 and continuing into October 2020, their use had returned to levels indistinguishable from levels of those who reported decreases or that their use had stayed the same. Although a greater percentage of participants reported viewing pornography within the past month in May 2020 than did so at any other follow-up (38%), the percentages of people reporting past-month use in August 2020 (23%) and October 2020 (20.6%) were substantially lower than prior waves. Moreover, though May 2020 demonstrated the highest pornography use of any follow-up, rates of use were still lower than baseline rates in August 2019. In short, although it seems that, in May 2020, more people did indeed view pornography within the past month than at other follow-up points, this is better characterized as slight deviation from an otherwise clear downward trend.

Results from our LGC analyses generally support the above findings. Across five time points, we found no evidence that general symptoms of depression and anxiety trended either downward or upward, but rather remained stable over the course of our study. We found clear evidence that pornography use frequency trended toward less use over the course of the pandemic for both men and women. With regard to self-reported PPU, we found that it trended downward for men. For women, PPU neither increased nor decreased, on average. That is, PPU among women remained low and consistently flat without any fluctuations over the five time points.

In sum, although concerns were raised that pornography viewing (and possibly PPU) could increase during the early part of the pandemic (Grubbs, 2020; Turak, 2020), our results do not fully support this conclusion. That is, the above findings suggest that pornography use generally decreased for both men and women over the 15 months of data collection, and, even among those who experienced initial increases in pornography use, such increases were temporary. The general trends for both pornography use and PPU were downward, particularly for men, with little change in PPU for women who started with already low levels of PPU.

Implications

Despite the public-facing concerns that many public outlets, activists, and even some academic researchers shared, there is little evidence to support the notion that widespread increases in pornography use were a problem among U.S. adults during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns. Although it is certainly possible that individual experiences may vary (i.e., some people may have experienced increased PPU), the general trend was for both pornography use and self-reported PPU to decrease over the course of this study. We suspect that the novelty effects of viewing pornography, even with a premium subscription offered to entice new viewers by Pornhub, likely wore off as people adjusted to new routines and allocated their time to working from home or taking on new demands caused by the pandemic (e.g., online schooling for children, caring for family members). Perhaps more simply, as promotional offers of free premium content expired, people may have simply stopped consuming as much pornography. Additionally, as the initial lockdown periods expired and the weather became more amenable to outdoor activities across the U.S., it is also possible that people were spending less time alone at home. Such conjecture is consistent with the previously discussed literature noting that boredom often motivates pornography use and suggests that, as people found alternate ways to spend their time, boredom-motivated pornography use likely decreased.

We have largely framed the results of the present work in the context of mandatory lockdowns, rather than in the context of the pandemic itself. Specifically, though lockdowns and restrictions have largely eased in the U.S. since their initial peak in April and May 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has spread at a much greater rate in the times since those lockdowns expired. Accordingly, it is important to note that the trend of pornography use decreasing over the course of this work has occurred as the objective markers of the pandemic itself have increased. This suggests that, whereas lockdowns, restrictions, and stay-at-home orders in the Spring of 2020 did coincide to more people reporting pornography use in May of 2020 than at any other follow-up, pornography use has trended downward even as the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 has trended upward. In short, although speculative, the effects of the pandemic and associated social distancing measures on pornography use seem to have occurred as a result of lockdown efforts (i.e., more boredom, increased free time), rather than responses to the virus itself (i.e., increased use of pornography to cope with fears about the virus).

Of the many explanations for the trends described above, a particularly obvious explanation is that use of pornography trended downward because people were, in general, less likely to have time alone to view pornography. Although some people do report using pornography with their partners, pornography use is most often a solitary activity (Kraus & Rosenberg, 2014) and quite often hidden from partners (Willoughby & Leonhardt, 2020). Additionally, among individuals who live with others (e.g., family, roommates), some level of privacy is typically required for one to use pornography. That is, the majority of people are unlikely to regularly view pornography in the company others, particularly when those others are not prospective sexual partners. Given that social distancing measures and travel restrictions led to people spending more time at home with others, it is quite possible that such measures also led to general downward trends in pornography use, though our data do not allow us to directly test this hypothesis.

Finally, we note that pornography use decreased from baseline measures in August 2019 to February 2020 (before the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S.), suggesting that downward trends in use may have happened without the pandemic. In general, it may be that people use less pornography over time. Although we examined pornography viewing over five time points, we did not measure individuals’ motives for viewing pornography (e.g., enhancement of dyadic sexual activity, assistance in solitary masturbation, alleviation of boredom or stress); it is possible that individuals’ motives for viewing pornography may have changed or shifted throughout the pandemic, particularly as people have found themselves under growing stressors due to recent economic, employment, health, and caregiving challenges attributed to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions on activity.

Limitations

Although results in the current study are novel and shed light on unanswered questions around the possible effects of COVID-19 on pornography viewing behaviors among U.S. adults, they are not without limitations. First, we used a short measure, the Cyber Pornography Use Inventory-4 (CPUI-4; Grubbs & Gola, 2019), to assess for PPU in the current study. The use of a brief PPU measure for a longitudinal study is advantageous (i.e., reduces burden and time for participants), but it also lacks the diagnostic accuracy of a clinical interview or clinically validated measure. Further work using a validated clinical measure of PPU, such as the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale (Bőthe et al., 2018), would likely provide a better diagnostic picture of PPU. Second, although it is beyond the scope of this paper, further work is also needed to identify factors (e.g., demographic, clinical, personality) that can predict the development of PPU or changes in PPU status over time, particularly during periods of significant stress or unrest due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Third, we did not examine the possible effects of moral incongruence on self-reported PPU as noted in prior works (e.g., Grubbs, Lee, Hoagland, Kraus, & Perry, 2020), which suggests that religiousness can moderate the relationships between pornography and self-reported PPU. Fourth, we did not examine the potential effects of pornographic content consumed or whether or not individuals felt as if their preferences in pornographic content shifted or became problematic over the course of the pandemic. We also note that our measure of symptoms of depression and anxiety, the PHQ-4, although widely used as a general screening measure of such distress, is not a diagnostically precise instrument and only briefly captures symptoms of depression and anxiety. Symptoms of loneliness, feelings of boredom, COVID-19 specific anxiety, and general stress levels associated with pandemic-related lifestyle changes were not assessed and may have demonstrated different trends than what we observed in PHQ-4 scores. More simply, general depression and anxiety may not have been the best measure of pandemic-related distress.