Is porn really biologically beneficial for human sexuality? A response to popular conception

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[...] This is simply bad science: it is bad in that it involves a serious conceptual confusion and it is even worse in that it anthropomorphizes the behavior of objects that cannot be said to exhibit any sort of behavior at all, or at least not behavior describable with complex descriptors like “sperm winning a fertilization contest” or fastest swimmer.” Assuming that the phenotype/genotype distinction holds some water, the notion of a sperm's drive to compete is a phenotype in that the criterion for something “having a drive to compete” is not biologically reducible to sequences of base pairs; it is a complex behavior. [...]

[...] One of the causes is apparently bit of panda porn.” Researchers increased panda breeding by showing giant panda's “uninitiated males DVDs of fellow pandas mating.”[3] This AV approach to increasing mating amongst a species of animal is supposedly very natural in that it attempts to have captive animals view members of their species partaking in reproductive acts: all the acts are shown the wild.” Zhang Zhihe, a researcher who adopts this method, describes the AV approach as “trying to imitate nature better.”[4] But what really is the meaning of “viewing It is immediately clear that there is a disjunction between what it apparently means for pandas (“showing uninitiated males DVDs of fellow pandas mating”) and what it means for humans: pornographic activities are not restricted to mating in the sense of mating for a reproductive purpose. [...]

[...] Popular science conception of Popular science conception of sexuality MAINTAINS/GENERATES sexuality is CONCEALS/SILENCES Intends hetero-sexual the employment of normativity gender-specific language maintains assertibility the anthropomorphizing conditions of epistemic stock inherent in explanations of non-human and/or non-heterosexual behavior systematically silences the manufacturing of nature in alternative (and incommensurable) its imitation/representation theories of sexual behavior Fig My method then is to organize the critique of each article according to this schema. I'll begin with Siri Steiner's “Porn Helps Human Sperm Gear up for Competition” from Popular Science.[1] The article describes a study conducted at the University of Western Australia which looked at the link between viewing gender-specific pornography and sperm. [...]

[...] One can think of the normativity of male heterosexuality has a sort of epistemic stock: keep investing in it (i.e., keep assuming heterosexuality is really the natural state of things) and it'll pay you back with interest (i.e., it will progressively become immune to theories/explanations of sexual behavior that are not consistent with the idea of heterosexuality as natural). Here we have a combination of a and a maintaining of heterosexuality as natural while simultaneously stopping any other alternative account of increased sperm fertility. [...]

[...] The problem with the above alternative explanation, according to the scientific conception of sexuality, is that it isn't biologically grounded in the same way that competition, as a function of male activity in the effort to ‘win' over females, is grounded in its reproductive capacity. Strictly speaking, biological conceptions of sexuality cannot lend sense to a sort of female competition: females don't compete with males (after all, they aren't after the same thing, they are merely the vehicle of the end result offspring!) and they certainly don't compete with themselves (why would they, the means must justify the ends, and there's no end but a reproductive one!). [...]