Why Porn Can't Cure Boredom

In a short story written in 1989, Umberto Eco outlined just how to recognize whether or not the movie you are watching is pornographic: "If to go from A to B, the characters take longer than you would like, then the film you are seeing is pornographic." [i]

Clearly, he is highlighting the lack of plot-driven action in a typical pornographic movie. And it’s true that we find things that drag on to be boring. But there may well be more important reasons that pornography can—despite its obvious function to titillate—be boring. Or at the very least, a poor solution to feelings of boredom.

We’ve argued elsewhere that boredom is a threat to our sense of agency. When we’re bored, we feel as though we are not being very effective agents in the world. We want to be engaged with some meaningful activity but struggle to launch into any available option. And yet, there is evidence that for some of us, there are readily available options for easy, passive engagement that we turn to out of boredom—our smartphones, social media, mindless games, and slot machines. What each of these outlets has in common is that they successfully captivate our attention while rendering us into passive vessels. We get all the bells and whistles but fail to fully exercise our agency. Porn is no different.

Of course, this feels more than a little counterintuitive. Pornography is designed to be tantalizing, stimulating, and pleasurable—hardly a recipe for boredom. But as a passive viewer, you are robbed of your agency and when your engagement with porn is over, that need to be agentic remains, with any failure to satisfy it accompanied by a pervasive sense of meaninglessness and boredom.

The need for agency here is of course tricky. In our real-life sexual relations, the one-sided application of agency is undesirable at best and characterizes sexual assault at worst. This highlights one potential driver, particularly for men, of the consumption of pornography. Here we get an illusion of control—we decide what to click on. But that is the only agency we exert. Once selected, we become passive consumers. So, if the consumption of pornography is driven in part by the need to control sexual experiences, just like the drive to eliminate boredom, the solution is illusory.

There is another inherent challenge that boredom lays bare that is reflected in the explosion of pornography on the internet. When bored, people often seek out novel experiences, something distinct from whatever it was they were just doing. But this is an unsustainable response to being bored. Constantly seeking novelty may well lead to habituation to the very notion of novelty itself. More problematic is the challenge that a barrage of novelty poses for meaning-making—if everything is constantly new and changing, how can we extract meaningful information to guide our interactions with the world?

The porn industry seems to have recognized this appetite for novelty, even as it fails to appreciate the conundrum it produces. The internet makes easily accessible all kinds of sexual acts and fetishes at the touch of a button, with ever more niche categorizations. A cornucopia of sexual novelty. But ultimately this leads to a kind of flatness to the media, a sameness that can’t help but become unengaging. The same acts are performed with the same body parts, over and over, ad nauseam. This sameness—coupled with Eco’s insight into plotless, time-dragging scenes—is what renders porn boring. [ii]

The sameness of the portrayed acts also renders them mechanistically—what is happening on screen seems to matter less than how. Camera angles close in for views more medical than sexual, to ensure the viewer knows precisely how A fits into B. Here we are robbed of our imagination. Again, we are unnecessary as agents in this interaction with pornography, passively consuming what is shown to us with nothing left to the imagination. At least in romance novels more is left unsaid, leaving the reader to conjure their own images.

So porn is boring on a number of levels. And yet, many turn to it out of boredom. We would argue that this engenders a vicious cycle that ultimately fails to alleviate boredom in the long term.

As already mentioned, the way in which we consume porn subverts our need for agency. By analogy, we can appreciate photographs of nature, but experiencing it in person inspires awe and is beneficial for our mental well-being. What we watch may capture our attention and occupy our minds in much the same way social media and slot machines can, but ultimately, we are not being agentic.

So what drives the consumption of porn in the face of its inherent boringness and the dilution of our need for agency? Clearly, many consume porn for pleasure, but it is also true that boredom is a significant driver for some. A common underlying motivator, one evident for the highly boredom prone, is the desire to suppress or distract oneself from unpleasant emotions. For example, one recent study showed that the highly boredom prone consume porn to avoid a sense that their lives lack meaning. That is, boredom represents an existential threat, signaling that our life is meaningless and driving the boredom prone towards hedonic outlets to avoid that negative feeling. But this can lead to a vicious cycle.

Pornography Essential Reads

Treatments for Problematic Pornography Use

Do Accessibility and Anonymity Lead to Problematic Porn Use?

Much like the problematic relationship between boredom proneness and unhealthy engagement with our smartphones, social media, and problem gambling, turning to porn out of boredom provides only a short-term solution with the potential for longer-term challenges.

Clearly, pornography has been with us for centuries and is not going away any time soon (abolition would be an abject failure anyway, as it was with alcohol in the 1930s). What seems clear to us, is that turning to porn in the hopes of eradicating boredom is highly unlikely to succeed.