Why Do Men Watch Porn? A Feminist and Queer Analysis
The dominant neuroscientific discourse on male porn addiction is underpinned by a moral pedagogy that tacitly assumes a normative sexual baseline: that the brain’s reward circuits, genitalia, and arousal systems were designed by evolution for heterosexual intercourse aimed at reproduction, and that any deviation (such as pornography consumption) constitutes a pathological distortion of this natural purpose. This framing casts porn as a supernormal stimulus that hijacks a reward system supposedly fine-tuned for reproductive sex, generating addiction by overwhelming circuits evolved to motivate biologically adaptive sexual behavior.
It is true that heterosexuality, in its basic reproductive form, emerged as a likely consequence of evolutionary pressures. The division of reproductive labor between gamete types (sperm and egg) gave rise to morphologies and behaviors that facilitated mating between these differentiated forms. From this, what we call heterosexual mating arose as a functional adaptation: it was a way to ensure the union of gametes and thus the continuation of the species. In other words, heterosexuality, as a reproductive pattern, was favored because it enabled successful gene transmission.
However, to say that heterosexuality evolved in this way is not to say that it was the goal or intended end of evolution. Evolution does not work like a designer or engineer crafting an organism toward an optimal plan. Instead, it works through incremental tinkering, drift, and adaptation to local conditions. As a result, the material systems that emerged are flexible, overlapping, and “messy” in their functional range. The genitalia, hormonal flows, and neural circuits that happened to support gamete union are not rigidly bound to that purpose. They constitute a biological infrastructure that is general enough to support multiple possible forms of stimulation, pleasure, connection, and arousal.
Thus, the biological infrastructure of sex functions as a pure potentiality. Once these systems came into being, they are capable of being actualized in countless ways that go beyond the reproductive logic that initially selected for them. The penis and clitoris, for example, are richly innervated and capable of producing pleasure through a wide variety of forms of contact, not just penetrative heterosexual intercourse. Sexual arousal can be activated by objects, situations, and fantasies that have no direct link to reproduction. The hormonal and neural architecture that evolution sculpted to favor reproductive encounters also became the substrate for non-reproductive sexualities, aesthetic pleasures, fetishistic investments, and symbolic desires.
This is because evolution supplies no telos or final cause to these capacities. It simply generates traits and systems that are good enough to persist; what happens beyond that – how these capacities are organized, invested, and mobilized – depends on contingent historical, cultural, and personal factors. Thus, while heterosexual mating was a crucial actualization in evolutionary history, it represents just one path carved from the open field of material potential supplied by sexuation.
The neuroscientific moral discourse on porn addiction erases the structure of material potentiality by treating heterosexual reproductive sex as the telos of sexual desire and reward circuitry. It constructs a normative baseline where sexual arousal is assumed to be naturally directed at certain stimuli (typically those associated with real-life partners and reproductive acts) and treats any divergence as pathological. Porn, on this view, becomes dangerous because it supposedly short-circuits the evolved function of the reward system, flooding it with artificial signals that displace “natural” sexual motivations.
Consider the American writer and anti-pornography campaigner Gary Wilson. He insists at the outset that he is not advocating a moral panic or defining what is “natural” in human sexuality. Yet, his narrative continually constructs certain sexual preferences as troubling, pathological, or signs of moral and masculine failure. The invocation of brain plasticity becomes a means of describing morphed or shifting sexual preferences as evidence of neural corruption: porn-induced rewiring that supposedly pushes young men toward “unnerving” or “disturbing” desires, be it transgender porn, fetishistic imagery, or homosexual scenarios. Thus, under the banner of evolutionary science and neurobiology, what is really advanced is a pedagogy of anxiety about non-normative sexualities and the loss of gendered control.
Wilson’s framework relies heavily on evolutionary psychology to ground its claims: men, he argues, are biologically wired by ancient reproductive imperatives to seek variety and novelty in sexual partners, driven by dopamine to “serve their genes.” Women, by contrast, are presumed to seek stability and a singular mate. This deterministic view sets up a rigid sexual economy, where any deviation from the naturalized script of male heterosexual conquest and female monogamy signals dysfunction. Pornography, in this story, becomes dangerous not merely because it rewires neural circuits (a feature of all learning and experience), but because it reveals or generates desires that fall outside the sanctioned evolutionary norm. The “morphed” sexual preferences Wilson laments (whether attraction to transgender people, fascination with fetishes, or even ambiguous arousal at scenes involving other men) are portrayed as threats to the integrity of heterosexual masculinity and its neurobiological foundation. Porn, in this sense, is seen as a corrupting force that undermines the natural teleology of male sexuality.
What neuroscientific moral pedagogies mistake for pathology is, in fact, a manifestation of the same potentiality that makes human sexuality irreducibly multiple. Pornography does not hijack a pure, reproductive instinct; it activates the same plastic infrastructure that could be actualized in countless other ways. The moralized language of “hijacking” or “rewiring” conceals the fact that there was no original wire, no singular, correct path for desire to travel. There is only the historically contingent organization of material capacities that evolution left radically underdetermined.
If there is no originary, natural baseline whose sanctity is violated by porn, how can we pass a normative judgement upon its effects? The answer lies in what exactly porn does to the pure potentiality of our sexual infrastructures. Amia Srinivisan’s critique of porn foregrounds the constrictive impact it has upon our “sexual imagination”. As she writes, “porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains.” It “etches deep grooves in the psyche,” producing repetitive associations between sexual arousal and specific, often hierarchically gendered, visual stimuli.
Filmed pornography, for Srinivasan, is particularly potent because of its medium. Drawing on the unique affective force of the moving image, she observes that it “harnesses the power of the most ideologically potent entertainment apparatus of all: the moving picture.” Unlike books or still images, which require some imaginative elaboration from the viewer, the pornographic film “needs nothing from us – no input, no elaboration.” This passivity is crucial to her argument. The viewer is not a co-creator of erotic meaning but a consumer of already-structured sexual imagery. She remarks, “in front of the porn film, the imagination halts and gives way, overtaken by its simulacrum of reality.” The implication is that so long as desire is funneled through the screen’s logic, it remains trapped in mimesis, endlessly recycling pre-inscribed forms.
When the sexual imagination becomes a “mimesis-machine,” it just passively receives the images of total satisfaction transmitted by pornography. The logic of this sexual desire can be explicated through Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this theoretical framework, the act of sex is seen as inextricably bound to the logic of the partial object (partner’s voice, gaze, or a particular body part) that functions as the cause of desire. Far from being a means of attaining full satisfaction or union with the Other, sex, in its ordinary or phallic form, is structured around the failure to achieve such wholeness. The partial object becomes the focal point of erotic investment, the fragment through which the subject seeks access to enjoyment. In sexual relations governed by phallic jouissance, the partner is effectively reduced to this fragmentary element, to what triggers and sustains desire rather than to the Other in their irreducible subjectivity. The enjoyment extracted from the partner is therefore not directed toward the otherness of the person, but toward the narcissistically fantasized object, which both promises and withholds satisfaction. This structure ensures that the act of sex, when confined to phallic jouissance, is marked by a fundamental disappointment: the Other is always missed, and the satisfaction derived is always incomplete.
The partial object plays a structural role in sustaining this economy of desire within the sexual act. Because desire takes shape through language, and language always involves a gap between the words we use and what we actually mean or want, there’s an unavoidable mismatch between what we say we’re after and what actually satisfies us. The way we express our desire never lines up perfectly with what would truly fulfill it, so we’re left chasing something that always slips just out of reach. This structural gap means that no act of sex, no matter how intense, can fully coincide with the satisfaction it promises. The subject may pursue the Other through the partial object, but the Other remains beyond reach, barred by the same structure that generates desire in the first place. Phallic jouissance thus remains tied to the failure inherent in the sexual relation, a failure that is not contingent but constitutive. In the sexual act, the subject encounters not the fullness of the Other, but the echo of its own lack, mirrored in the elusive partial object that it seeks to enjoy.
Angelita Biscotti’s reflections on situational fuckability offer a more concrete lens through which to revisit the aforementioned Lacanian concepts. Biscotti identifies fuckability not as a stable, intrinsic attribute lodged in a person’s body, but as something animated by context, by shifting arrangements of power, attention, and fantasy. The bartenders are not hot in themselves; they are hot because of the scene: the exchange of drinks, the calibrated attention, the tacit promise of withholding or giving. Here, fuckability is circumstantial, contingent on a network of glances, gestures, and roles, much like Lacan’s description of phallic jouissance, where the Other is approached through partial objects, fragments that spark and sustain desire but ultimately fail to deliver fullness. The barroom encounter, charged by the bartender’s capacity to supply or deny, mirrors the structure of phallic jouissance: it feeds on distance, on the gap between want and fulfillment, and on the partial, fleeting satisfaction that always leaves a remainder.
This phallic jouissance is the organizing template not only of porn but also of patriarchal behavior. Whenever a man engages in creepy actions – voyeurism, groping, harassment etc. – he turns female body parts into consumable objects that promise total satisfaction. However, because language shapes desire through a built-in gap between what is said or imagined and what is truly fulfilling, these sought-after body parts (the breast, the ass, the thigh etc.) inevitably disappoint. They never match the vivid, idealized image the man carried in his mind. The structure of language ensures that the promise of full satisfaction tied to these parts can never be kept. This is why phallic jouissance, while driving endless consumption and pursuit, is always haunted by dissatisfaction: the real never lives up to what the fantasy led him to expect, and so the cycle of seeking, consuming, and failing continues without end.
Biscotti’s account gestures toward the terrain of another mode of enjoyment that exceeds this circuit of lack and consumption. She moves beyond the transactional erotics of circumstantial hotness to describe moments of tenderness, quiet observation, and shared vulnerability: a man carrying a child down subway stairs, the weight of a spoon offered by someone who cooks well, the resonance of a musical scale, a finger trailing down an arm. These moments do not depend on the logic of the partial object or the failure of signification. They evoke a different register of arousal and pleasure, one that is not premised on the pursuit of a missing part, nor on the phallic economy of having or not having. This is the domain Lacan associates with the Other jouissance: a mode of experience that cannot be fully articulated or seized in language, that ex-sists rather than exists, and that emerges in the folds of the everyday, where meaning gives way to presence, rhythm, and sensation.
Biscotti’s reflections on the tenderness of the quotidian, the quiet charge of small gestures, and the arousals discovered only after their arrival capture this Other jouissance’s ineffable quality. It is not the conquest of the beloved as object, nor the consummation that dissolves distance, but a kind of being-with that suspends the need for conquest altogether. A being-with that doesn’t chase after an impossible goal of total satisfaction but enjoys the very process of interacting creatively with the other. It is important to note that this alternative sexual enjoyment does not and cannot abolish the logic of the partial object. In the words of Paul Verhaege:
[T]he drive never works on the whole body but is always focused on fragments or on individual activities. The drive does not need a whole body; it is always one particular part of the body that is involved, together with an activity related to this, which can be either active or passive. These parts of the body are always the points of interaction with the outside world: the genitalia, anus, mouth, eye, ear and nose, together with the related activities of smelling, listening, looking, sucking, penetrating.
Yet, through the sacrifice of phallic jouissance and the shift toward a mode of love that no longer aims at the mastery of the partial object, the sexual act may be reoriented. Such a reorientation does not culminate in a harmony between self and Other, but in a different mode of relation, one that acknowledges the Other as divided, as lacking, as subject, rather than as a collection of fragments for immediate, satisfying consumption. In this way, love does not remove the partial object from the scene of sex, but it does mark a break with the endless circuit of desire organized around it, opening the possibility of a different kind of encounter with the Other.
In this sense, the act of sex, when approached through the lens of the Other jouissance, ceases to be the culmination of desire aimed at an object and becomes instead a space where speech, touch, and shared time generate a satisfaction not governed by the failure of signifiers. The circumstantial fuckability that Biscotti names reminds us of desire’s fickleness and the inevitability of frustration in phallic jouissance. But her evocation of moments that slip past language and entitlement, that bloom unexpectedly and cannot be reproduced on demand, point toward the possibility of sex as a poetic, open encounter, where the Other is not reduced to a fragment, but encountered in their opacity and their unknowable presence. The crux of this new jouissance is beautifully expressed by Srinivasan’s question: “Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas? Or are we first attracted to ways of being in the world, including bodily ways, which we later learn to associate with certain specific parts of the body?”
Having explored this alternative mode of enjoyment, we can now return to the neuroscientific moral pedagogies with which the article began. Insofar as there is no natural normality that is waiting to be freed from the shackles of pornography, the only way to counter the restrictive effects of porn and associated patriarchal behavior is to institute new ways of being-in-the-world. If pornography addiction and the associated objectification of women are produced and reinforced through the plastic reorganization of neural circuits (circuits that come to privilege certain patterns of attention, reward, and arousal) then overcoming these patterns requires transforming the neural architecture itself. Put differently, it is not enough to exhort individuals to be “aware” of a supposedly natural baseline. Instead, interventions must work at the level of neural reconditioning: establishing new patterns of attention, pleasure, and engagement that rewire the circuits which have been shaped by repetitive exposure to objectifying stimuli. This neural re-wiring has to establish an open-ended sexual sociality in which consumption of objects is replaced by an inconclusive, creative fascination with the Other (which, as have seen, preserves the sexual presence of partial objects).
How does this neural re-wiring occur? In my opinion, Indian social activist Periyar provides the most succinct formulation: “If a man has the right to kill women, a woman should also have the right to kill men. If there is a compulsion that women should fall at men’s feet, then men should also fall at women’s feet. This is equal rights for men and women.” Periyar asserts that the very structure of patriarchal desire, particularly as shaped and reinforced by pornographic culture, depends on the smooth availability of the female body as an object to be seen, touched, possessed, and disposed of at will. Periyar’s radical reversal forces this structure into view by imagining the unthinkable for patriarchy: the female body as a site of sovereign agency, capable of turning the circuits of domination back upon their source.
In other words, feminist activism is not simply a demand for rights or equality in the abstract; it is a material intervention that disrupts the neural architecture of patriarchal-pornographic masculinity. When women act to make their bodies non-consumable, when they resist, refuse, speak back, organize, or even simply assert opacity, they interrupt the smooth pathways of objectification that have been etched into the masculine psyche through repeated exposure to the consumable female form. The female body ceases to function as a seamless object of use; it becomes, instead, what Lacan might call a Thing, an opaque presence that cannot be fully grasped, consumed, or mastered. This resistance forces a recalibration of the circuits of attention, desire, and arousal that have been habituated to expect submission and availability.
Neural re-wiring, in this reading, is not an internal, voluntary act on the part of men, nor can it be achieved by moral exhortation alone. It is catalyzed by the political and social actions of women that block, frustrate, and derail the circuits of patriarchal desire. The non-smooth female body, the body that no longer fits within the slots carved out by pornography or patriarchal fantasy, acts as the necessary shock to a neural system that has grown lazy on the repetition of consumption. In encountering resistance, the neural architecture that expects ease and compliance must reconfigure itself or confront its own impotence. Periyar’s radical symmetry dramatizes this: the point is not that men should fall at women’s feet or be subject to women’s violence, but that only through such a reversal does the masculine neural economy confront the contingency of its imagined supremacy.
Thus, feminist activism reshapes the conditions of perceptual and libidinal possibility. By making the female body non-consumable, it opens space for new circuits of attention, engagement, and pleasure that are no longer tied to domination. Neural re-wiring is hence inseparable from collective struggle: it is triggered and sustained by women’s refusal to be what patriarchy has trained men to expect them to be. It is in these feminist structural shocks to manhood that we should be searching for a post-pornographic, post-patriarchal future.
No comments:
Post a Comment