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Pornography
Do Accessibility and Anonymity Lead to Problematic Porn Use?
"Affordable, accessible and anonymous" doesn’t explain problematic usage.
Posted November 26, 2023 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Key points
- An old theory proposed Internet porn would be addictive, because it's free, anonymous and easy to access.
- Newer research points to more individualized and internal factors such as narcissism and moral conflict.
- Efforts to address porn use should focus on people and social attitudes, and less on the Internet
In the early 2000s, a well-known early researcher of the growing phenomenon of Internet pornography proposed what he called “The Triple-A Engine” of presumptive pornography addiction. Al Cooper was a psychologist and researcher whose hypothesis about Internet pornography has been cited thousands of times, though tested only a few.
Cooper proposed that because Internet pornography was affordable (free), accessible (via computer, or cell phone today), and anonymous, these three factors would combine to lead to high rates of abuse, or addictive use, of Internet pornography. Cooper’s theory is intuitively appealing, simple, and has been used extensively as an explanation for why Internet pornography can be so problematic. Unfortunately, the Triple-A Engine theory has been so broadly accepted that few have stopped to question it, and even fewer have subjected it to critical examination.
In 2004, just a few years after Cooper proposed the Triple-A Engine theory of “turbocharged” online sexual activity, a small group of Ontario researchers did put the model to a test. They proposed that if affordability, accessibility and anonymity were driving and increasing online sexual activity, then: 1. People better at using the Internet would access more sexual material online (accessibility); 2. People with control of their own private computers would access more sexual material online (anonymity); and 3. The more a person feels anonymous and private online, the more sexual material they’d view (anonymity). The researchers couldn’t directly test whether free access to pornography made a difference, but they did identify whether real-world pornography (magazines, typically purchased) correlated with online viewing of sexual material (affordability).
With a sample of 443, drawn from a college student population (yes, I know, but this is the only study so far) they found that hours spent online did predict increased viewing of sexual material online. But privacy and anonymity did not, and neither did skill at using the Internet. Using non-internet pornography was positively correlated with viewing sexual material online. So, it appeared that accessibility did increase use of online sexual material, but anonymity and affordability didn’t. If having access to free porn led to many more people viewing it regularly, then non-Internet pornography and Internet porn use would have been negatively related. Instead, it appeared that the people who look at porn online tended to be the same people who purchase it to look at it in the real world, as an expression of their trait levels of libido and sexual desire.
Spending more time online (for work, school, and socializing), according to the Ontario researchers, likely led to participants becoming more comfortable online, and to then integrating their sexuality and eroticism into their online lives, as being online became more natural. Their results suggest that "contemporary society’s pattern of sexuality, not its Internet technology, will be the dominant determinant of our future sexual patterns,” and that “Our study suggests that the ‘Triple-A Engine’ is not producing sexual change” in human behavior.
And yet, years later, the Triple-A Engine theory continues to be cited as accepted, unquestioned fact. In May 2023, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly, Morality in Media) put out a tweet that read: “Pornography’s more accessible than ever before – it’s only seconds away anytime, anywhere. Combined with Internet porn’s affordability and anonymity, this has unleashed online sexual consumerism, supplied endless sexual novelty, and created an ethos of instant sexual gratification.”
Have things changed, as the Internet has grown, and as smartphones have broadened access to electronic sexuality? Recent events and studies support the research from Ontario, and suggest that accessibility, anonymity and affordability are probably not the main contributors to what is now known as “Problematic Pornography Use” (PPU).
Affordability. Oklahoma researcher Samuel Perry examined an intriguing aspect of the “free” side of pornography: whether access to “low-cost sexual gratification” (watching pornography or having casual hook-up sex) made men less interested in getting married. Perry didn’t state this, but essentially he tested the “don’t give milk away free, no one will buy the cow” theory our grandmothers often trotted out. The results? Both masturbation frequency and casual sex were statistically unrelated to desire to get married. But frequency of watching pornography was robustly and linearly related to desire to get married. In other words, the more that men watched porn, the more they wanted to get married (and invest in that dairy farm).
During the COVID-19 pandemic, you might remember a funny event that occurred: Pornhub offered free premium access to people in lockdown areas. If free porn drove problematic porn use, we should have seen huge surges in those areas specifically. But while visits to Pornhub did increase in those areas, other regions without such free premium access still saw comparable increases between 4% and 24%. Following the pandemic, researchers looked at data on porn use, and found that about 14% of people (collected from nationally representative samples) reported an increase in porn use during the pandemic. But by August 2020 (before the vaccine was even available), those people’s porn use had returned to pre-pandemic levels. In general, people’s porn use during the pandemic trended downwards, regardless of whether it was free or not.
Accessibility. 2005 research by Buzzell found that the technology which led to the greatest increase in ever having viewed pornography wasn’t the Internet, but the VCR. Being able to cheaply and easily purchase or rent a pornographic video to watch at home led to more people seeing adult material than did the advent of the Internet. More recent studies find that younger generations (94% of men and 87% of women) have seen more pornography than older generations, and tend to look at it more frequently, largely thanks to smartphones. It does turn out that most people who view porn, men or women, do so via free sites. These changes might reflect technology changes, but may also reflect generational changes in sexual attitudes.
Anonymity. Over recent years, we’ve seen a frightening increase in cases of online “sextortion,” in which people are blackmailed and threatened with exposure of their viewing and making of online sexual images and videos. Sadly, deaths and suicides have resulted. Most of the fear and anguish here comes not directly from the loss of anonymity, but from the shame and embarrassment of having one’s private sexuality exposed. In today’s world, increasingly, online anonymity is a thing of the past. In contrast, there have been numerous people (a few include Miley Cyrus, Jeff Bezos, Jennifer Lawrence), blackmailed over nude photos and porn, who simply chose to go public with the images and their sexuality, and reject the shame.
Conclusions
Does the Triple-A Engine theory of online sexual problems hold up to scrutiny? In small part, perhaps. There are mild indicators that affordability, accessibility, and anonymity do contribute, at some levels, to people’s use of online sexual material. But there’s no evidence that these are major driving factors of problematic use. Instead, modern research on online sexual behaviors indicate that factors such as moral incongruence; desire discrepancy in relationships; libido; narcissism; sexual sensation-seeking; desire for sexual novelty; and emotional dysregulation are all factors which appear to contribute far more to problematic pornography use.
None of these highly important factors are accounted for in the Triple-A Engine theory and sadly, interventions based on this theory focus on changing the nature of Internet porn, making it less anonymous, less cheap, and harder to access. Instead, those of us supporting people dealing with pornography problems need to focus inside the person, their lives, and their relationships to address the internal conflicts that are truly driving these problems.
