J Happiness Stud (2011) 12:51–75 DOI 10.1007/s10902-009-9175-0 RESEARCH PAPER

The Demand for Pornography Fabio D’Orlando

Published online: 20 November 2009  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract The market for pornography acquired great economic relevance in the 1970s with diffusion of the videocassette recorder, and went onto gain increasing relevance as from the 1990s, with the ICT revolution. Nonetheless, it has been totally ignored in economic investigation. The present paper focuses on the demand side of this market, with the main aim of proposing a preliminary theoretical assessment of the behaviour of pornography purchasers and its recent evolution in response to the Internet revolution. In this respect, certain contributions on hedonic adaptation have proved particularly useful, whereas addiction models have proved less useful than might have been expected. Keywords

Sex  Pornography  Escalation  Sexual addiction  Hedonic adaptation

1 Introduction The market for pornography acquired great economic relevance in the 1970s with the diffusion of the videocassette recorder, and this relevance has shown progressive increase as from the 1990s, with the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution. Moreover, if economic relevance were not enough to attract the interest of economists, study of this market is also intriguing from a theoretical viewpoint, since it implies addressing a number of problems that can be solved only by using the traditional economic tools together with less traditional ones. The theoretical relevance of the topic is further confirmed by the interest shown by scholars of other disciplines, from psychology to sociology, who consider the sex market particularly important for an understanding of the evolution of contemporary customs and have accordingly dedicated growing attention to it. Nonetheless, studies on pornography both in economics and in disciplines other than economics still fail to do justice to the true relevance of the topic. And in economics the situation is undoubtedly worse than in the other disciplines: to the best of my knowledge only one article on pornography has so far found its way into the economics journals. The F. D’Orlando (&) Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Universita` di Cassino and CreaM, Cassino, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

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present paper represents an attempt to cast light on the topic, focusing on pornography consumer behaviour, with the principal purpose of proposing a preliminary theoretical assessment of the demand side of the pornography market since the ICT revolution. To this end some contributions on hedonic adaptation have proved particularly useful, whereas contributions on the theme of addiction have proved less useful than might have been expected. In the following pages theoretical economic discussion is preceded by a description of the main characteristics of the pornography market and a survey of the state of art of research on pornography in disciplines other than economics, focusing in particular on the crucial role of the Internet and of the ICT revolution, which have reinforced and partially modified some characteristics of the phenomenon. A final point to be stressed here is that moral considerations of whatsoever type will be outside the purview of this paper (sex will be considered as an industry like any other, albeit—obviously enough—of a somewhat particular type). This explains why externalities are not discussed. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 defines pornography, describes the market for pornography and indicates the most relevant among the recent innovations that have affected this industry. Section 3 describes the state of art of the research on pornography in disciplines other than economics. Section 4 proposes some preliminary theoretical considerations to account for the behaviour of pornography purchasers. Finally, Section 5 sums up the main results and draws the conclusions.

2 Pornography, the Market for Pornography and its Evolution Over Time Like any other market, the market for pornography, too, can be split into a supply (production) side and a demand (consumption) side. But even focusing theoretical attention on one side of the market only, as in the present article (with the focus on demand), description of how the market actually works as a whole affords useful insights for single side study. Survey of the recent evolution of the pornography market, and quantitative data, may help to single out some stylized facts serving for theoretical purposes. However, before describing the actual structure of the market and showing how this structure (together with the behaviours of agents operating in it) has changed in recent years, it is necessary to provide a summary description of the commodity traded in this market, i.e. to explain what pornography is—a task by no means as easy as it might appear. 2.1 What is Pornography? The etymology of the term is uncontroversial: pornography comes from the Greek term ‘‘pornographos’’, which could be translated into ‘‘writing about prostitutes’’. Nonetheless, the literature on the theme (see e.g. Kendrick 1997; Rea 2001; Ciclitira 2002; Manning 2005 and, as the only contribution by an economist, Cameron 2005) is unanimous in recognizing the difficulty of defining pornography, since ‘‘different definitions and genres of pornography have been employed in research studies, thereby complicating a coherent synthesis of key findings’’, and ‘‘the operationalization of terms, or the lack thereof, has been a common critique and limitation of many studies’’ (Manning 2005, p. 3). The main problem with defining pornography, and with differentiating pornography from erotica, is that the historical, social and cultural context does in fact matter: the perception of what pornography is and what is not changes over time and across cultures,

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so that images considered pornographic 10 years ago (or are still considered so in a certain country) are no longer considered as such today (or in another country). Furthermore, the perception of what is or is not pornography is often linked to an individual’s cultural, moral and religious beliefs, so that different people in the same country and in the same epoch come up with different definitions. Finally, since various groups (feminists, conservatives, religious figures, etc.) put up a fight against pornography, the definitions are strongly influenced by the different cultural traits of the different groups and by the motivations behind their attacks. As a result, no uncontroversial definition of pornography exists and all of them are ‘‘too vague to be useful in a court of law’’ (Rea 2001, p. 130). And what is true of a court of law is certainly true of economics. According to Rea (2001, p. 123), the definitions of what pornography is fall mainly into six different types, namely: (i) those that define ‘pornography’ as the sale of sex for profit, (ii) those that define it as a form of bad art, (iii) those that define it as portraying men or women as, as only, or only as sexual beings or sexual objects, (iv) those that define it as a form of obscenity, (v) those that define it as a form of (or contributor to) oppression, and (vi) those that define it as material that is intended to produce or has the effect of producing sexual arousal. Definitions in the latter three categories are by far the most prominent. Rea (2001) investigates in depth the limits of each of these definitions, concluding that ‘‘the most pervasive definitions in the literature on pornography are those that hold that the defining feature of pornography is that it is intended to produce sexual arousal or in fact has the effect of producing sexual arousal’’ (Rea 2001, p. 132, italic in the original). For the purposes of the present paper, this definition suffices, even if the similar, but less stringent, operative definition used today by Internet sites when distinguishing between ‘‘hard’’ and ‘‘soft’’ images would be equally valid: pornography, or ‘‘hard’’ material, is the representation (through any medium) of non-simulated, fully evident sexual acts with the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewers. Such a definition is coherent not only with the actual reality of the internet, but also with the reality of the pornographic film industry: according to Jaehne (1983, p. 9) ‘‘‘Porno’ is the term for those ‘one-day wonders’ with a strong emphasis on explicit sex acts, so that no matter how scratched the print may get, the audience will get off’’. It remains to describe the physical (or virtual) objects to which the term pornography (and/or the term erotica) can refer to. Historically, in chronological order, we have had pornographic novels, pornographic pictures and pornographic movies; less important, but also playing their part, are pornographic cartoons, pornographic telephone calls and pornographic live sex shows.1 2.2 The Qualitative and Quantitative Evolution of the Pornographic Market The evolution of the pornographic market in the last few decades has seen a progressively reduced role for the traditional media through which pornography was once brought to the final consumers, and the rapid rise of new media. Simplifying a little, until the 1970s pornography was brought to the public mainly by pornographic journals displaying pictures, from the late 1970s by videocassettes sold on newsstands and in sex shops 1

The term pornography applies to the depiction of sexual acts, and not to sexual acts themselves. As a consequence, strictly speaking live sex shows are not included in the category of pornography.

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(substituted from the late 1990s onward by DVDs) and finally by the Internet (initially displaying pictures and later movies), on both PCs and, nowadays, cellular phones (Kalman 2008, p. 595). Pornographic journals coped with the circulation of videocassettes and DVDs in one way or another, mainly by packaging movies together with the journal, but they could not cope with the Internet. It is generally recognized that the pornographic journal sector suffered most from the development of this new medium, even though videocassettes and DVD movies are also being progressively crowded out. Nowadays purchasers of pornographic material (pictures or videos) can choose to buy it at a newsstand, in a sex shop or directly at home on the Internet. Over the Internet customers can buy (or get for free) a greater variety and quantity of pornographic images with greater privacy. Since pornographic images are generally used as masturbatory tools, the possibility to purchase and immediately watch pornographic material directly at home without interacting with other people determines a crucial preference for the Internet. However, sales of pornography over the Internet have also been affected by the technological revolution. Initially it seemed that the new peer-to-peer file sharing software platforms (such as eMule, Kazaa, BitTorrent, etc.) and YouTube-like web sites www.youporn.com, www.pornotube.com, www.xtube.com, etc.), which furnish a huge quantity of free pornographic material to consumers, could drastically crowd out the demand for pornography from pay sites. But over the Internet things go in strange ways. It is certainly true that the amount of pornography available to consumers at no charge has grown, but this free material has not crowded out pay pornography. On the contrary, the possibility of providing users with a greater amount of free pornography has been exploited by producers of pay pornography to advertise their products and so stimulate demand for them (the typical example being posting on free sites short pornographic videos containing the Internet address to buy the full movies). And the main impact of the new technologies for the furnishers of on-line pornography has not been reduction of revenues on sales, but reduction of the costs in acquiring pornographic material: nowadays many sites collect material from consumers for free and furnish it to other consumers for pay (as in the x-tube case). An interesting extreme example of this strategy is Redclouds (www.redclouds.com), which has over a million members paying $25 (or €25) a year to view material entirely posted (for free) by the viewers themselves. This site has, together with the pay part (redclouds), a free soft-core part www.voyeurweb.com) a pay hard-core video part www.homeclips.com) and a pay past-archives part (www.funbags.com): a structure that confirms the tendency to use free material to advertise for pay material, also within the same site. It is easy enough to describe roughly how the characteristics of the pornography market have changed in recent years, but greater problems arise when attempting to provide quantitative figures, since it is almost impossible to find estimations that clearly state their methods and their sources. As far as general pornography is concerned, Manning (2005, p. 19) cites 2005 estimates according to which the sector generates globally 57 billion dollars revenues for general pornography and 2.5 billion for Internet pornography; more recent data (http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html) put the global 2006 revenues from pornography to 97 billion. China (27 billion dollars), South Korea (26), Japan (20) and the United States (13 billion dollars, 3 of which generated by Internet pornography) generate the majority of pornography revenues. Manning (2005, p. 49) concludes that: ‘‘[p]ornography revenue is now greater than the combined revenues of all professional football, baseball, and basket franchises and is almost twice the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC’’.

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The Demand for Pornography Table 1 The economic dimension of Italian pornographic market (euros)

55

Subsectors

%

Movies

224,000,000.00

17.23

Television

360,000,000.00

27.69

Erotic telephone calls

89,000,000.00

6.85

Journals

10,000,000.00

0.77

Internet (commercial web sites)

304,000,000.00

23.38

Night clubs and sex bars

306,000,000.00

23.54

Erotic fairs Source: elaboration on D’Orlando (2008) data

Revenues

TOTAL

7,000,000.00

0.54

1,300,000,000.00

100.00

To have an idea of how these figures can be split among the different subsectors that make up the pornography market reference can be made to data from Italy, which can be found in D’Orlando (2008) and are set out in Table 1. From these figures it is immediately evident that, even if Internet pornography is the future, there is still room for more traditional media and products (apart from journals), which cover about three-fourths of the market. As for Internet pornography, according to Manning (2005, pp. 49–50) ‘‘[p]urveyors of online pornography […] have an increasingly impressive assortment to choose from. As of July 2003, there were 260 million pages of pornography online—an increase of 1,800 since 1998. By the end of 2004, 420 million pages of pornography existed[…] According to figures from Nielsen//NetRatings, in the United States during the month of April 2005 […] 34,376,000 unique users (23.68% of all Internet users) visited pornography websites and viewed an average of 239 pornographic web pages each’’. Similarly, Cooper (2004, p. iv) found that 20–33% of American Internet users go online for sexual purposes. And in Italy, according to D’Orlando (2008, p. 10) the number of visitors to pornographic web sites is about 4,680,000, 26% of total users. Different data report, for year 2006 and the whole world, 4.2 million pornographic web sites (12% of the total number of web pages existing on the net) and confirm 420 million pornographic pages, whereas 244 million web pages exist in the USA (http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html). Even if the above estimations may not be particularly accurate, they nonetheless confirm the huge dimension of the phenomenon, with regard to both pornography in general and Internet pornography. 2.3 Amateur Pornographic Production Another side effect of the ICT revolution of the early 1990s that has had a huge effect on the market for pornography, and is therefore important to discuss here, is the development of amateur pornographic production. The ICT revolution has lead to the possibility of fully digitalized information, and so to a great number of important technological innovations, such as digital cameras, camcorders, the Internet, etc. which ‘‘have also given birth to the ‘amateur’ photographer’’ (Kalman 2008, p. 595). With these new technologies couples have become important producers of pornography in their own right, and unlike the old Polaroid pictures this material can be shown on the Internet to the whole world. The importance of this innovation has recently found full recognition in theoretical analysis: according to Ritchel (2007, p. A1), ‘‘Inexpensive digital technology has paved the way for aspiring amateur photographers, who are flooding the market, while everyone in the

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industry is giving away more material to lure paying customers’’. However, while amateur couples in general have become an important source for erotic but not-so-hard material, swinger couples have become the main source for amateur pornographic images, since they have the possibility, and very often the desire, to engage in sexual acts of any kind, with more than just one couple taking part, and to show their performances to the world, both for exhibitionistic purposes and to attract other swingers with whom to engage in sexual intercourse. It is worth noting that ‘‘[s]winging is by no means a new phenomenon. What is new today is its acquired mass dimension, with hundreds of thousands of swingers in many countries, swinger clubs in all the major cities, continuous presence in the mass-media, etc.’’ (D’Orlando 2009, p. 2). Indeed, it is difficult to assess the number of swingers, even though some studies exist for the USA and for certain European countries including, in particular, Italy. It is, however, evident that this number is huge: on average, according to the above-mentioned studies, one to four percent of all couples have engaged in swinging activities at least once.2 So, when this huge phenomenon met the new technologies swingers found with the Internet a great stage upon which to exhibit themselves, with the result that the supply of free amateur pornographic production over the net has increased at a striking rate, and some of the market characteristics have in consequence been modified.

3 Studies on Pornography in Other Disciplines 3.1 A Scarce (and Partial) Theoretical Interest Disciplines other than economics, such as medicine, psychology and psychiatry, and also various social sciences including sociology itself, have dedicated a number of studies to the theme of pornography (a fairly complete assessment of these studies is proposed in Manning 2005). Nonetheless, in these disciplines, too, pornography has failed to attract the theoretical interest that its social and economic relevance would deserve. As a result, it is a generally agreed conclusion (see on this point Griffiths 2001; Fisher and Barak 2001; Manning 2005; Kalman 2008) that the amount of empirical data collected (and in particular the quantity of clinical descriptions) is indeed small, in particular for pornography in its more recent and relevant aspect, i.e. Internet pornography. Pornography thus appears a huge, growing but under-studied topic. Furthermore, the analytic and psychiatric literature seems to have dedicated scant space to the theme (even though a number of studies on noninternet pornography were conducted in the 1980s and 1990s): according to Kalman (2008, p. 607) ‘‘in general, the topic of pornography does not much appear in analytic (or 2

In the United States, for example, ‘‘[e]stimates of the size of the swinging population vary widely. Research provided by North American Swing Club Association (NASCA) (McGinley, 1995) found that 15% of couples in the U.S. have at some point incorporated swinging into their marriage. More conservative estimates are offered by studies which are unrelated to NASCA. Hunt (1975) and Weiss (1983) estimate that two to four percent of married couples have engaged in swinging at least on an occasional basis. Bartell (1971) found the figure to be one percent and Cole and Spaniard (1974) found, based on a small college community sample, that 1.7% had experienced swinging at least once’’ (Bergrstand and Williams 2000, p. 2). In Italy, according to Federsex (2007) the number of swinger couples should be around 400,000, so that 800,000 people should share this lifestyle out of a population of about 60mln. These data are confirmed by a sampling study carried out by www.morenasex.net (Morenasex.net 2007), which estimates about 370,000 swinger couples in Italy. Considering that Italy, is a somewhat conservative country in matters of non-conventional sex, the fact that more than 1% of its population engages in swinging activities is particularly significant.

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psychiatric) literature… and few analytic papers even address the role of the cybertechnology in current practice’’. The scarcity of studies, and the reasons for this scarcity, have been commented on by Sigel (2005, p. 5), according to whom ‘‘[s]cholars who examine pornography do so at their own risk. Grants, funding, promotions—the bread and butter of academic life—are generally not supportive of the study of pornography. And few other topics are at once so nebulous and heated’’. Apart from their scarcity, studies on pornography in disciplines other than economics show a number of weaknesses that limit their usefulness for our purposes. First of all, medical, psychological and psychiatric studies focus on the impact of pornography on a subset of subjects, i.e. those so addicted to pornography as to have to consult specialists to cope with their problems, and not on the general pornography consumer. Furthermore, the aim of most studies is to ascertain whether viewing pornography generates negative psychological effects for the spectator and/or deviant social behaviours which can harm other people; the effects on the consumption of pornography (in terms of quantity and type) are discussed incidentally and are not at the centre of theoretical interest. Finally, the conclusions reached in many studies are often scientifically weak, due to small samples jeopardizing statistical robustness (Manning 2005, p. 5; Kalman 2008, p. 597) and reverse causality is a standard finding (the typical conclusion that people who watch pornography are more inclined to violent sexual behaviours—say, aggression, rape, etc.—can equally be read as: people inclined to violent sexual behaviour are more likely to watch pornography). The problems described above, together with the difficulty of defining pornography, help explain why, although studies on pornography ‘‘offer significant conclusions regarding the effects of pornography exposure’’ (Kalman 2008, p. 597), ‘‘the scientific community has not reached a consensus regarding pornography’s effect’’ (Manning, 2005, p. 5). This conclusion is all more valid with regard to the (relatively) recent development of Internet pornography, since ‘‘no clear consensus has emerged… regarding the amalgam of pornographic content and cybertechnology and its impact on individual mental health, interpersonal relationships, or personal sexual health and satisfaction’’ (Kalman 2008, p. 598). Furthermore, there is a certain degree of disagreement, on the one hand, among psychiatrics and psychologists, who emphasize the negative effects of pornography and, on the other hand, sociologists, who are more likely to believe that some of the conclusions reached by psychiatrics and psychologists, such as the very existence of sexual addiction and sexual compulsivity, are subjective and socially oriented (see e.g. Levine and Troiden 1988). 3.2 The Effects of Pornography In spite of all the above weaknesses, disciplines other than economics have reached some rough, albeit far from definitive, conclusions on the effects of both general and internet pornography that can be useful for the purposes of this paper. As far as the effects of general pornography are concerned, the most relevant contributions are by Zillman and Bryant (1982, 1984, 1988). Even if these studies have often been questioned with respect to their methodology (see e.g. Davies 1997), they nonetheless represent the state of the art for research on pornography before the Internet era. Building on these contributions and on Drake (1994), Manning (2005, pp. 5–6, italic added) views the effects of pornography as being mainly represented by: ‘‘(1) increased callousness towards women; (2) trivialization of rape as a criminal offence; (3) distorted perception of sexuality; (4) increased appetite for more deviant and bizarre types of pornography (escalation and addiction); (6) decreased satisfaction with partner’s sexual performance,

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affection, and physical appearance; (7) doubts about the value of marriage; (8) decreased desire to have children; and (9) viewing non-monogamous relationships as normal and natural behaviour’’. Apart from the theoretical limitations of the analysis, and the fact that sociologists are far from considering all of these points free from value effects (see again Levine and Troiden 1988), for economic purposes the most interesting effect appears number 4, ‘‘escalation’’ and ‘‘addiction’’, which we will discuss in Sect. 3.3. However, it is still to be ascertained whether these effects remain the same in the internet era. The development of the Internet, and of amateur/swinger Internet pornography, has increased not only the quantity of sexual material conveyed to users but also the speed of delivery and the privacy (anonymity) enjoyed by users, as well as reducing the costs (both monetary and psychological) of acquiring pornography and increasing the range of potential purchasers. Subsequent to the seminal contribution of Cooper (1998), theoretical analysis has referred to this phenomenon as characterized by the ‘‘‘Triple A Engine’ effect’’ of accessibility, affordability and anonymity. According to Manning, (2005, p. 4), ‘‘[t]he ‘Triple-A Engine’ effect, in particular, is widely accepted as the primary reason why many pre-existing problems with other forms of pornography have been exacerbated in the last decade, and why many individuals have been drawn into problematic pornography consumption that otherwise would not [have] been involved with this material prior to the advent of the Internet’’.3 It is generally shared conclusion in the existing literature on the topic that all the effects of general pornography on pornography purchasers are emphasized in the case of Internet pornography. In particular, consumers rapidly increase their consumption of pornography over time and appear surprisingly quick in discovering a growing interest for viewing ‘‘more deviant and bizarre’’ (i.e. ‘‘harder’’) sexual acts they were not interested in before: to put it another way, sexual addiction and escalation become more and more important. According to Carnes (2001, pp. 68–69): One of the most stunning clinical shifts required of therapists is to appreciate how quickly cybersex exploitation alters arousal. The amount of time devoted to sexual exploration expands dramatically with a wide variety of sexual behaviours becoming stimulating. Patients frequently report how fast their cybersex addiction started and how they were doing things sexually, or obsessing about things, that were never a part of their sexual repertoire until the point. […] Patients typically report this rapid escalation of sexual activities happens only through the internet. […] As part of the escalation process, patients report that they become obsessed and preoccupied with new behaviours never before even known about. Suddenly Asian women or girls who smoke or uncircumsized men become a sexual focus that is difficult to dislodge from the patient’s thinking. Kalman (2008, p. 600) exemplifies the above described process with a clinical case, in which a patient ‘‘described the development of a ‘tolerance’ to the arousing effect of any particular material after a period of time, which was followed by a search for new material with which he could achieve the prior, desired level of sexual arousal. […] He also noted that he now could be aroused by pornographic material that he once had no interest in using.’’ As far as Internet pornography is concerned, the key effects are hence sexual addiction and escalation.

3

On this point see also Kalman (2008), pp. 609–610.

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Sexual addiction is a phenomenon which includes tolerance, withdrawal, the unsuccessful desire to cut down the sexual behaviour, a negative impact on other activities (work or social and affective activities), etc.4 We have already seen that the very existence of sexual addiction is disputed (see Sect. 3.1 above); however, scholars who believe there is such a thing as sexual addiction, and in particular sexual addiction deriving from pornography, often conclude that Internet pornography is faster and stronger in generating it than general pornography. According to these believers, and even if ‘‘the vast majority of internet pornography viewers do not develop any significant problems related to [pornography]’’ (Kalman 2008, p. 614), sexual addiction is a quantitatively relevant problem: experts in the field of sexual addictions estimate approximately 3–6% of the US adult population has a diagnosable sexual addiction, or in other words approximately 6,534,000–13,068,000 people. In 1992, Coleman estimated 5% of the population met the criteria for sexual compulsivity, and the previous year Carnes estimated 3–6% of the adult population was sexually addicted. How these estimates were arrived at is not clear; however, additional research by Cooper, Delmonico, and Burg found that out of 9,265 respondents to an online survey, 17% scored in the problematic range for sexual compulsivity. Therefore, from available empirical indicators, it is reasonable to suggest that sexually compulsive and addictive behaviour is a substantial problem in the US and that estimates provided by experts in the field are close to the mark. Furthermore, if 3–6% of the US adult population is indeed struggling with this condition, it is possible there are more Americans adults dealing with a sexual addiction than have been formally diagnosed with diabetes or are living with HIV’’ (Manning 2005, pp. 36–37).5 As we will seek to show, escalation is even more important. In the Internet era the consumers, aware of the existence of almost infinite pornographic material on the net, are led on in a ceaseless search for ‘‘different’’ and ‘‘harder’’ sex. This phenomenon is clearly helped by the perception of the virtuality of the process, and hence by the perception that 4

‘‘Sexual addiction is a maladaptive pattern of sexual behaviour, leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as manifested by three (or more) of the following, occurring at any time in the same 12month period: (1) Tolerance, as defined by either: a. A need for markedly increased amount or intensity of the sexual behaviour to achieve the desired effect or b. markedly diminished effect with continued involvement in the sexual behaviour at the same level of intensity. (2) Withdrawal, as manifested by either: a. physiological symptoms that are manifested upon discontinuation of the sexual behaviour or b. the same (or a closely related) sexual behaviour is engaged into relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms. (3) The sexual behaviour is often engaged in over a longer period, in greater quantity, or at a higher level of intensity than was intended. (4) There is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control the sexual behaviour. (5) A great deal of time is spent in activities necessary to prepare for the sexual behaviour, to engage in the behaviour, or to recover from its effects. (6) Important social, occupational, or recreational activities are given up or reduced because of the sexual behaviour. (7) The sexual behaviour continues despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the behaviour.’’ (Manning 2005, pp. 35–36).

5

For the differences between sexual addiction and sexual compulsivity, see Manning (2005, p. 37). On Internet addiction, and in particular Internet pornography addiction, see also Kalman (2008, pp. 598–599).

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these behaviours are harmless, but may well translate into reality, since consumers may continue their escalation by passing from virtual sexual acts to real sexual acts, i.e. ‘‘may move to prostitution and may find themselves using prostitutes compulsively’’ (Carnes 2001, p. 70). Summing up, the advent of the ICT revolution has reinforced certain characteristics of pornography purchasers’ behaviour which were already present but less notable in the past. In particular, the combination of full privacy in obtaining pornographic material, the almost infinite quantity of different representations of sexual acts, the increase in the speed of delivery and ever cheaper Internet connections have contributed to the development of compulsive attitudes among consumers and to faster escalation paths. These developments have led some psychologists and psychiatrics to hold that Internet pornography is more prone than general pornography to generate addiction and escalation effects (see e.g. Kalman 2008, pp. 598), even if the evidence from empirical data and clinical cases is too scant to obtain statistically reliable conclusions (Kalman 2008, p. 599), and the very possibility that pornography addiction really exists is a matter of controversy. 3.3 From Other Disciplines to Economics: Addiction or Escalation as Stylized Facts for Theoretical Analysis? The above conclusions can be considered as the stylized facts from which to start in developing theoretical economic analysis. In other words, research in other disciplines, and in particular in psychology and psychiatry, together with the description of the market for pornography and its recent evolution, can be used to single out regularities and key elements in consumers’ behaviour and, on these bases, to propose a preliminary theoretical assessment of the pornography market demand side. In this respect, sexual addiction and escalation appear as the two major stylized facts upon which to build our interpretative framework. Moreover, a point that appears particularly useful for economic theoretical analysis is that, according to some sex therapists, addiction and escalation can be considered as the first two stages of a definite path (followed by purchasers of pornography), the last two stages of which are ‘‘desensitization’’ and ‘‘acting out sexually’’ (see e.g. Perrin et al. 2008, p. 13). However, as already noted, the correctness of using the term ‘‘addiction’’ in referring to the increase in the consumption of pornographic material over time on the part of pornography purchasers, and in particular in referring to the compulsive use of the Internet, is disputed among doctors, psychologists and sex therapists.6 Furthermore, some believe that non-chemical addiction is impossible (see Griffiths 2001 and Levine and Troiden 1988 for a discussion). As we shall see, the use of the term addiction in pornography consumption is also disputable from the point of view of economic theory. In medical terminology addiction implies that the body relies on a substance for normal functioning, with the consequence of developing physical (or even psychological) dependence, compulsive consumption, obsession, etc., which harm other aspects of life, from work to affects. The economic definition of addiction relies less on unobservable elements and more on measurable events so that, according to standard economics, ‘‘a person is potentially addicted to c if an increase in his current consumption of c increases 6

On this point see e.g. Bradley (1990); Miele et al. (1990); Mitchell (2000); Holden (2001); Shapira et al. (2003), in particular pp. 208–209. And for a review of the different opinions, see the on-line debate on WebMD at the URL http://men.webmd.com/guide/is-pornography-addictive?page=1.

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his future consumption of c.’’ (Becker and Murphy 1988, p. 681). For economists, addiction is hence a phenomenon which affects intertemporal consumption choices: an addicted subject increases his/her level of consumption of the addictive good over time. With reference to pornography, this latter definition of addiction would imply, as indeed is the case, that pornography consumers tend to increase their consumption of ‘‘hard’’ material over time. The economic argument thus appears to confirm the conclusion of the sex therapists who see pornography as able to determine the same kind of addiction as tobacco or drug abuse. But theoretical problems arise if we consider this phenomenon together with its twin in pornographic consumption, i.e. escalation. We have seen that, according to Perrin et al. (2008, p. 13), escalation represents the second stage of pornography consumption, with consumers beginning to search for pornography of different types. In the vast majority of cases escalation takes the form of a search for the representation of more ‘‘deviant and bizarre’’ sexual acts (see e.g. Manning 2005, p. 5 and Kalman 2008, p. 600),7 but may also take the form of a search for pornography of higher technical quality (e.g. from pictures to movies). With escalation, pornography consumers hence search for ‘‘harder’’ pornographic material and when they get it, initially they seem satisfied, but soon begin searching anew for ‘‘harder’’ pornographic material. And so on, without end. This attitude on the part of consumers also accounts for the way websites are built, so as to stimulate progressive access to higher levels of pornographic material at higher price levels: pictures contained in the pay part of the site are also accessible in the free part, but in very low resolution or with genitals blurred; or, alternatively, access is given to pictures but not to movies, or to soft-core but not to hard-core material. Access to higher quality material means paying higher prices and for this reason each site is multi-level. The paradoxical consideration is that the speed of change in consumers’ desires is encouraged by the distributors of pornographic material to induce customers to pay more to have more, but cannot be matched by them: the customers are thus ever dissatisfied in their increasingly intensive search for more, and tend to abandon the distributors who cannot change production at the same rate as demand, so that lock-in phenomena are less common than one might expect given the distributors’ strategy. This latter circumstance is confirmed by the Eurispes (2005) study (pp. 41–42) relative to the Italian pornographic market, according to which purchasers prefer to subscribe to many different web-sites for short periods rather than to a single site for a long period, even if this choice is more expensive. From an economist’s viewpoint, in fact, addiction and escalation must be considered as two opposite and incompatible phenomena. In other words, addiction, as understood by economists, cannot exist in the presence of escalation: addiction implies increasing the consumption of a good (pornography, in this case), while escalation implies reducing the consumption of a good (a certain type of pornography) to zero to begin consuming another good (another type of pornography). Obviously, one cannot increase and reduce to zero consumption of the same good at the same time. The compatibility of the two phenomena is ensured only by the circumstance that two different goods are concerned: pornography purchasers increase their consumption of pornography in general over time, and in the meanwhile they progressively stop consuming ‘‘softer’’ pornography and begin consuming ‘‘harder’’ pornography. In this scenario it is the difficulty in finding new pornographic material that forces pornography purchasers to consume more pornography: when 7

For an analysis of how exposure to pornography affects the brain of subjects, so that they come to like viewing sexual acts which they found distasteful before, i.e. how sexual tastes can be acquired, see Doidge (2007, pp. 102 ff).

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searching for the ‘‘harder’’ material they need, people have to scrutinize an ever-greater quantity of pornography to find what they want. Actually, most of the time by far that people spend watching pornography is wasted in glancing at and then discarding images/ movies that are not ‘‘hard’’ enough (or that do not conform to the needs of the viewers). This also happens when pornography purchasers subscribe to a new site which seems to suit their desires better than the previous one. They rapidly discover that even the new site offers a lot of material that is not exactly what they want, so they have to search through all the material on the site, and searching implies consuming a lot of pornography. The ‘‘harder’’ the material they are searching for, the greater the difficulty in finding it and the more pornography they have to search through. This peculiar behaviour of pornography consumers differs from the behaviour of tobacco or drug addicts, who increase consumption of a given type of cigarettes over time (addiction) or buy ever-stronger drugs (escalation) but do not consume more cigarettes or drugs in the attempt to find stronger substances in these greater quantities. In other words, unlike the case of standard addiction, it is escalation that determines the increase in the consumption of pornography over time, since a greater amount of pornography has to be scrutinized to achieve escalation. In the next section we will see that this peculiarity of the demand for pornography is fully borne out with theoretical analysis: the economic models of addiction have little to tell us about the increase in pornography consumption.

4 Some Theoretical Considerations on Consumers’ Behaviour in the Pornography Market 4.1 The Theoretical Assessment With the one exception of Wongsurawat (2006) (which, however, focuses on a very specific topic, i.e. the relationship between the abundance of private post office boxes and consumption of pornography), to the best of my knowledge no article on pornography has appeared in economics journals. And, outside the journals, economists have discussed the issue in very few and by no means exhaustive contributions (Posner 1994; George 2001; Cameron 2005), limiting themselves to the generic consideration that the studies on addiction pioneered by Becker and Murphy (1988) could be useful in assessing the theme and discussing the (assumed) negative externalities generated by pornography (see e.g. Evans and Winick 1996; Cameron 2005; Wongsurawat 2006).8 In the absence of any assessed empirical and/or theoretical economic analysis, several models could in principle be used to study the behaviour of pornography purchasers: contributions on the theme of addiction (see e.g. Pollack 1970, 1975; Winston 1980; Thaler 8

The initial attitude towards the externalities of pornography has seen rapid change. To begin with it was somehow assumed (see e.g. George 2001) that pornography generates negative externalities in terms of increase in sex crimes, but further studies have shown that ‘‘there is little evidence of any substantial externality effect, in terms of recorded deviant behaviour, from pornography’’ (Cameron 2005, p. 172; for a similar conclusion, see also Wongsurawat 2006, p. 186); moreover, there might be ‘‘social benefits of pornography’’ (Cameron 2005, p. 188), such as the stimulus for technological advance (camcorder, VHS, pay-per-view TV, etc. were pioneered and developed by pornography producers) and the positive effect of ‘‘soft’’ porn movies which could be used by couples ‘‘to revive their relationship’’ (Cameron 2005, p. 190). In any case, externalities are a somewhat controversial issue and attempts to prove their existence are often based on veiled moral considerations; for this reason they are not discussed in this paper.

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and Shefrin 1981; Becker and Murphy 1988; Becker et al. 1994; Gruber and Koszegi 2001); contributions on the theme of hedonic adaptation (see e.g. Brickman et al. 1978; Frederick and Loewenstein, 1999; Diener et al. 1999); contributions on the theme of weakness of will (see e.g. Elster 1985 and, for the pornography context, George 2001); contributions on the theme of novelty in consumption (for a survey, see Bianchi 1998); and lock-in models (see e.g. Zauberman 2003; Barnes et al. 2004; Murray and Haubl 2007). To single out which are the most useful among these models entails evaluating how the key characteristics of pornography purchaser behaviour, and in particular the increase in the consumption of pornography over time and the search for ever-harder material, fit with each model. According to the existing literature, addiction models appear to be the most promising candidates for our purposes (see e.g. Cameron 2005, pp. 182–183), but we will argue that hedonic adaptation models fit better with the empirical data. It is worth noting that what the models have to fit with is the behaviour of the average, representative agent, so that we must focus on general regularities, ruling out the behaviours of the tails of the statistical distribution. This option has the major implication of ruling out not only the behaviours of particularly deviant fragments of the pornography purchaser population, but mainly of ruling out the behaviours of female pornography viewers. In fact, the female pornography purchasers’ behaviour differs from that of the males, but women represent only a small minority (according to Perrin et al. 2008, p. 13, only 23% of pornography purchasers are female) and hence their behaviours are to be disregarded when searching for empirical regularities. In Sect. 3.3 above we discussed the difficulty of considering, from an empirical viewpoint, consumers of pornography as affected by the same kind of addiction characteristic of, say, drug or tobacco addicts. The doubtful compatibility of the demand for pornography with addiction is furthermore confirmed by theoretical analysis. According to the rational addiction approach pioneered by Becker and Murphy (1988),9 addiction implies that past consumption increases the marginal utility of an addictive good: ‘‘…in a model with utility-maximizing consumers … past consumption of some goods influences their current consumption by affecting the marginal utility of current and future consumption. Greater past consumption of harmfully addictive goods such as cigarettes stimulates current consumption by increasing the marginal utility of current consumption more than the present value of the marginal harm from future consumption’’ (Becker et al. 1994, p. 396). This increase in marginal utility (i.e. the right shift of the marginal utility curve) represents the main theoretical problem that addiction models face in dealing with pornography consumption. If the marginal utility of a certain type of pornography actually increases with past consumption, as required by the rational addiction condition to hold, in no way is it possible to explain why people stop consuming this type of pornography and begin searching for other types, i.e. it is impossible to account for escalation: only a decrease in the marginal utility of a given type of pornography (or an increase in the marginal utility of other types of pornography) can account for the phenomenon. This result appears consistent with both the escalation mechanism and the empirical finding that pornography consumers prefer many shortlasting subscriptions to different web-sites rather than a long-lasting subscription to a single site. The escalation mechanism and the empirical findings imply a sort of ‘‘habituation’’ that reduces the overall utility of pornography after it has been viewed for 9

Although other models of addiction do exist (see e.g. Pollack 1970, 1975; Winston 1980; Thaler and Shefrin 1981; Gruber and Koszegi 2001), the Becker and Murphy approach, apart from being the most famous, is the most theoretically robust and the only one based on fully rational agents.

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some time, and appear hence incompatible with the phenomenon of addiction as depicted by the rational addiction models. Moreover, the very use of the concept of marginal utility with reference to pornography is disputable. The first derivative of utility of pornography with respect to the viewed quantity varies greatly depending on how excited and close to orgasm the viewer is, and falls to zero after orgasm. Furthermore, ambiguous results may arise from considering the interaction between this erratic evolution of marginal utility with respect to the quantity viewed and the shifts in the marginal utility curve originated by past consumption. A measure of the overall day wellbeing deriving from pornography appears much more appropriate for theoretical use. As a general conclusion, rational addiction models cannot explain the increase in the consumption of pornography over time that sex therapists call ‘‘addiction’’ if escalation is to be explained in the meanwhile. In Sect. 3.3 it has been suggested that the increase in pornography consumption over time, rather than being a consequence of addiction, can be a side effect of the phenomenon of escalation itself: consumers search for ever ‘‘harder’’ pornographic images but, to find these ‘‘harder’’ images, they have to search through more and more pornography and subscribe to more pornographic web sites. Hence, escalation also accounts for the increase in the consumption of pornography over time that had erroneously been imputed to addiction. Preliminary economic analysis appears to confirm this conclusion. The task remains to single out a theoretical approach able to explain escalation. Generally speaking, escalation could be the result of the consumers’ desire for novelty/ variety, a desire that can, in the course of time, affect the wellbeing deriving from the different choices: after a while consumers become bored with a certain type of pornography and search for other types. However, the peculiarity of pornography purchasers’ behaviour is that they do not simply search for ‘‘different’’ images but in most cases search for ‘‘harder’’ images. Why is this so? Why don’t people escalate to ‘‘softer’’ images but mainly to ‘‘harder’’ ones? One possible explanation rests on the circumstance that ‘‘harder’’ images include ‘‘softer’’ ones: an orgy or a gang-bang includes oral intercourse, manual intercourse, anal sex, etc., while the opposite is not true. Escalation to ‘‘harder’’ pornography thus guarantees to consumers the possibility to enjoy pornographic material that includes a greater variety of sexual acts new to them. As a consequence, natural curiosity and desire for novelty/variety may be taken to be at the basis of the escalation in pornography consumption in much the same way as they underlie, say, the choice to listen to music which includes two or more instruments on the part of people who had so far appreciated only music played by a single instrument: when they suffer habituation (i.e. become bored) with a certain instrument they escalate. And we will see, starting from an instrument (‘‘softer’’ images) and then escalating (to ‘‘harder’’ images) is a maximizing strategy. Another possible explanation for escalation to ‘‘harder’’ pornography rests on the circumstance that, as in beneficial addiction, for certain goods consumption increases people’s consumption skills, enabling them to extract more wellbeing from goods they had previously discarded:10 skiing on green (easy) slopes for some days will allow me to enjoy the red (more difficult) slopes I had previously avoided since they were too difficult and 10 Consumption skills were discussed in depth by Scitovsky (1976)—for a recent discussion of the role of consumption skills in Scitovsky’s approach see Bianchi (2003). Scitovsky’s approach has been extensively applied in theoretical analysis of happiness (see e.g. Bianchi 2007), of the Art (see e.g. Hutter and Shusterman 2006 and Chartrand 1987), of the Sport (see e.g. Gratton and Taylor 2000), of Fashion (see e.g. Corneo and Jeanne 1999), of Tourism (see e.g. Richards 2001), of Gastronomy (see e.g. Richards 2002), etc.

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scared me. In such a context, the desire for variety/novelty arises as a consequence of an increase in the wellbeing deriving from the alternative choices, and not from a reduction in the wellbeing deriving from currently undertaken choices, as in the preceding explanation. With reference to the demand for pornography, it is the wellbeing deriving from ‘‘harder’’ pornography that increases while consuming ‘‘softer’’ pornography, and not the wellbeing deriving from ‘‘softer’’ pornography that diminishes. It is also possible that the two explanations (habituation and skill accumulation) may combine: having skied for a long time on green slopes I get bored with (habituated to) them and have also accumulated enough skill to enjoy skiing on red slopes. However, in the case of pornography, the first explanation seems relatively more relevant, since watching pornography does not appear to require particular skills. Our task now is to single out the best way to modelize escalation. In general, traditional economic theory can explain the shift from consuming A to consuming B, made by a consumer that had already preferred A to B, only on the basis of a change in the relative cost or in the relative contribution to wellbeing of the two goods. If the cost remains unchanged, the consumer will shift from A to B only if the relative contribution to wellbeing of A falls with respect to that of B. This is exactly what happens in the case of escalation: consumption generates habituation (and/or skill accumulation) which reduces the relative contribution to wellbeing of A, so that satisfying consumers’ desire for novelty/variety by shifting to consumption of B, whose relative contribution to wellbeing has increased, becomes a rational, i.e. maximizing, choice. Now, if escalation can be based on the desire for novelty/variety and the desire for novelty/variety finds its main theoretical explanation in a reduction in relative wellbeing caused by repeated consumption acts, the whole process can easily be accounted for with the phenomenon of habituation described by the hedonic adaptation framework. Indeed, the search for novelty/variety in consumption can be considered an exterior manifestation of hedonic adaptation, since agents desire novelty due to the fact that they are habituating to the old situation: habituation reduces the wellbeing generated by currently undertaken consumption choices and hence makes consumption alternatives more attractive, inducing a shift from the old to the new choices. Skill accumulation, when relevant, reinforces the whole process. The hedonic adaptation framework is founded on the empirical finding that people adapt to life events: ‘‘[l]ife events such as marriage, loss of a job, and serious injury may deflect a person above or below [his/her] setpoint, but in time hedonic adaptation will return an individual to the initial setpoint’’ (Easterlin 2003, p. 1). Hedonic adaptation is sometimes called ‘‘habituation’’, and the existence of a baseline level of wellbeing towards which actual wellbeing tends to return is a crucial characteristic of this approach. Subsequent to the seminal (and controversial) paper by Brickman et al. (1978), the strong empirical evidence on hedonic adaptation has been an object of discussion in psychological journals (see e.g. Diener et al. 1999; Frederick and Loewenstein, 1999; Oswald and Powdthavee 2006), even if it is still disputed whether adaptation is complete or incomplete, i.e. whether life shocks have a permanent effect on the long-period level of agents’ wellbeing.11 Recent theoretical contributions on hedonic adaptation in economics include Clark and Oswald (1994), Clark (1999), Di Tella et al. (2003), Clark et al. (2004), Stutzer (2004), Layard (2005), Oswald and Powdthavee (2006), D’Orlando and Ferrante (2008, 2009). It is also

11 For discussion on the theme of complete or incomplete adaptation and the setpoint hypothesis, see Easterlin (2003) and Lucas et al. (2003).

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worth noting that the theme of hedonic adaptation is closely linked to the theme of habit formation and endogenous preferences (see e.g. Carroll et al. 2000). Applying such a framework to pornography, we have a situation in which pornography consumers search for ever ‘‘harder’’ pornographic material (escalation), and when they get it, initially enjoy an increase in short-period wellbeing, but the novelty soon wears off, they suffer from habituation and fall back towards their baseline level of satisfaction. Hence they begin searching again for ‘‘harder’’ pornographic material, i.e. for pornographic material able to furnish a new increase in wellbeing. Finding this material is ever more difficult, and requires a greater amount of pornographic material to be viewed. However, having finally found this ‘‘harder’’ material, and having actually obtained the expected increase in wellbeing, users soon begin suffering from habituation and falling back to their baseline level of satisfaction once again, and again are forced to seek newer and better material. And so on, without end. Summing up, the hedonic adaptation approach appears able to explain both the increase in pornography consumption through time and the progressive shift from ‘‘softer’’ to ‘‘harder’’ pornography that characterizes pornography consumers’ behaviour. It also has the incidental advantage of avoiding explicit reference to marginal utility. 4.2 A Preliminary Formalization Within a hedonic adaptation framework, escalation can be formalized as follows. Suppose that during year t = 0 the subject is not acquiring any pornographic material, so that his/ her level of every-day wellbeing corresponds to the baseline level BL.12 Furthermore, suppose that the subject considers consuming pornography in year t = 1 unable to generate negative (or positive, but we have seen that literature focuses on negative) future effects on his/her levels of well being from year t = 2 onward. In year t = 1 he/she will acquire pornographic material if consuming this material will increase his/her net wellbeing for year t = 1, i.e. if13 Y X

1

Y X

1

UPos;t¼1  CPot¼1 þ cÞs1 Y X 1  SSt [ BL: ð1Þ s;t¼1 s1 s1 s¼1 ð1 þ cÞ s¼1 ð1 þ cÞ P In relation (1) Y = 365 (days); Ys¼1 ð1þc1Þs1 UPos;t¼1 is the (discounted) sum of gross wellbeing the consumer assumes he/she will get from pornography in each of Y days of year PY t =1 1; CPot¼1 is the (ex-ante paid) year cost of acquiring pornography; s¼1 ð1þcÞs1 SSts;t¼1 is the (discounted) sum of non-monetary, psychological costs the consumer assumes he/she will have to pay on each of Y days of year t = 1, which mainly s ¼ 1 ð1

BL þ s1

þ cÞ Y X 1

s ¼ 1 ð1

12 In relation (1) above wellbeing is consumer’s each day overall satisfaction and the baseline level is the overall satisfaction deriving from the activities (other than consuming pornography) the consumer is already engaged in. It is to be borne in mind that wellbeing is different from the marginal utility of (a dose of) pornography. 13 According to standard economic theory, in choosing among alternative activities (and/or goods), and also in choosing among different kinds of pornographic material, the consumer will acquire the activities (and/or the goods), and the pornographic material which maximize his/her intertemporal net wellbeing. In relation (1) the assumption is implicitly made that the pornographic material under consideration is that which furnishes the maximum net wellbeing per euro of expenditure of the many that are within the budget constraint of the consumer.

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include social stigmatization;14 and ð1þc1Þs1 is the discount factor (c is the subjective time preference: the greater c is, the more the consumer prefers present to future consumption). A naı¨ve consumer will assume that each day s of year t = 1 both wellbeing UPos;t¼1 he/ she gets from pornography and psychological costs SSts;t¼1 he/she pays will be constant, i.e. that UPos;t¼1 ¼ UPosþ1;t¼1 ¼ UPot¼1 8s and SSts;t¼1 ¼ SStsþ1;t¼1 ¼ SStt¼1 8s, whereas a fully rational consumer will know that UPos;t¼1 and SSts;t¼1 are decreasing magnitudes due to hedonic adaptation: for the sake of simplicity I will assume that consumers are naı¨ve.15 It is worth noting that nowadays (but things were not so very different before the Internet era, when the consumer could subscribe to pornographic journals), acquiring pornography mainly takes the form of subscribing to an Internet web site which, for a year’s flat-rate access fee, guarantees free access to pornographic material, so that CPot¼1 is the flat-rate cost of the year’s subscription to the site. Thus, if (1) holds in year t = 1 the consumer will acquire the pornographic material. By purchasing this material the consumer’s wellbeing actually rises above its baseline level. For example, on the first day (s = 1) of year t = 1 his/her net wellbeing WB1;t¼1 may correspond to point A in Fig. 1. Now, a dynamic process starts. Slowly the novelty of the pornographic material he/she has acquired disappears, and his/her wellbeing begins declining. The dynamics of this decline may be represented by the following difference equation:   ð2Þ WBs;t¼1 ¼ WBs1;t¼1  ks  as;t¼1  WBs1;t¼1  BL With fs : 1\s\Y þ 1g; WB1;t¼1 ¼ BL þ UPot¼1  SStt¼1 ; 0\as;t¼1 \1 and as;t¼1 ¼ 1 if WBs1;t¼1  BL þ e, with e close to zero, to account for the circumstance that people consider the baseline level of wellbeing reached when they are close enough to it, so that the dynamics is not asymptotic; ks ¼ 1 each day the consumer accesses the site, and ks ¼ 0 each day he/she does not access the site. It is worth noting that in this dynamics CPot¼1 can be considered as a sunk cost, that social stigmatization costs are a decreasing magnitude due to hedonic adaptation (social stigmatization costs do not explicitly appear in relation (2) since they are included in the dynamics of WB), and, finally, that WBs;t¼1 represents net wellbeing in day s of year t = 1. For the sake of simplicity let us assume that our representative customer accesses the pornographic web-site every day, so that ks ¼ 1 8s. In such a framework, in each day s consumer’s wellbeing is given by the previous day’s net utility deriving from consuming pornographic material WBs1;t¼1 , minus the progressive  loss of utility deriving from habit-forming as;t¼1  WBs1;t¼1  BL . Over time, the daily wellbeing tends towards its baseline level BL. However, in our framework the consumer does not necessarily fall back to his/her baseline level of wellbeing in a 1 year time span. At the end of year t = 1 the consumer’s wellbeing can still stay well above his/her baseline level (point B in Fig. 1), but he/she must nonetheless decide whether to renew the subscription to the web site subscribed to in t = 1 or to subscribe to another web site (or to another sector of the same web site) which offers a different (‘‘harder’’) quality of pornographic material. It is easy to ascertain that, if the wellbeing deriving from the old subscription has diminished (due to hedonic 14 The non-monetary, psychological costs of buying pornography, such as social stigmatization, are considerably reduced by purchasing pornographic material over the Internet (or, before the Internet era, using private post office boxes, as discussed in Wongsurawat 2006). 15 Assuming that consumers are naı¨ve does not affect the main conclusions of the model since, as we shall see, consumers who behave naively will nonetheless maximize their intertemporal wellbeing. As a result, sophisticated consumers and naı¨ve consumers will behave in the same way.

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F. D’Orlando net well-being, WB

A

D

C

B baseline level, BL

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time

quality index

price (CPo)

quality index

price (CPo)

1

Fig. 1

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Acquiring pornography in the internet era: the dynamics of well being when price is constant

adaptation) and the level of wellbeing from the new subscription has increased (due to skill accumulation), it can happen that: Y X

1

Y X

1 UPos;t¼2  CPot¼2 ð 1 þ c Þ ð 1 þ cÞs1 s¼1 s¼1 Y 2Y X X 1 1  SSts;t¼2 [ WBs;t¼1  CPot¼1 : s1 sðYþ1Þ ð Þ 1 þ c s¼1 s¼Yþ1 ð1 þ cÞ s1

BL þ

ð3Þ

In such a circumstance it is convenient for the customer to shift from the old subscription (that of time t = 1) to the new one (that of time t = 2), since he/she can obtain an increase in wellbeing by acquiring better-quality pornographic material and reaching point C in Fig. 1. It is worth noting that in Fig. 1 skill accumulation is assumed to compensate fully the initial difference in levels of wellbeing, net of habit forming (i.e. before the depletion caused by the loss of novelty), of the different subscriptions.16 On the contrary, renewing the subscription to the ‘‘old’’ web site (or to the same sector of the ‘‘old’’ web 16 If skill accumulation did not fully compensate the initial difference in levels of wellbeing, point C would have a lower ordinate than point A (as it is, for different reasons, in Fig. 3) and point D would have a lower ordinate than point C; if skill accumulation more than fully compensated the initial difference in levels of

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site), the net wellbeing would have continued its descending path below point B. However, habit-forming also applies to this second year, so that from C a new dynamics starts, and the consumer once again begins falling back towards the baseline level. And so on, year after year. 4.3 Three Different Long-Period Scenarios As far as the long-period impact of the above-described short-period dynamics is concerned, three different scenarios are possible. Before the Internet era, acquiring pornography implied high psychological costs, since privacy was seriously at risk and social stigmatization was therefore a problem to reckon with. This circumstance, increasing SSt, lowers net wellbeing for any step in the dynamics. Moreover, before the Internet era, it was difficult for the consumer to have sufficient knowledge of all the alternatives to his/her current subscription, and these alternatives were few and difficult to access (different pornographic productions were accessible only from particular shops, many of these productions were from other countries, etc.). In such a situation it could happen that the customer, before realizing the convenience of shifting to other pornographic sources and/or before actually succeeding in shifting, was forced to renew the old subscription, so that his/her wellbeing could easily fall to the baseline level and stay there for a while (such a scenario is depicted in Fig. 2, where the hypothesis is also made of a slight increase in the monetary price of ‘‘harder’’ pornographic material in each time t—a situation consistent with reality and with the absence of competition in the market). In the Internet era, on the contrary, the customer immediately realizes the convenience of a shift, being aware of the existence of a great number of alternatives, and can immediately succeed in shifting since these alternatives are easy to access. Thus he/she can stay well above his/her baseline level of satisfaction. Moreover, in the Internet era acquiring pornography implies more privacy and hence entails lower psychological costs. This latter circumstance lowers SSt and increases net wellbeing in the whole dynamics. But two alternative scenarios correspond to this ‘‘Internet era’’ situation. In the second scenario, depicted in Fig. 3, the monetary price of ‘‘harder’’ pornographic material is higher, so that the customer, albeit shifting from one subscription to another, if skill accumulation is not particularly relevant suffers a constant reduction in net wellbeing (utility less cost) and, in the long period, falls back towards his/her baseline level of satisfaction. However, this scenario does not take into account two important characteristics of the Internet era that lead to a third scenario: first, a continuously growing number of swinger and exhibitionist couples has submerged the net with ‘‘amateur’’ pornographic material, ever ‘‘harder’’ and of constantly increasing quality (due to better quality cameras and videocameras), either free or very cheap; second, competition between pornographic sites over the Internet has grown stronger. Even if acquiring certain specific, high quality pornographic material still implies paying higher prices, in the vast majority of cases the above circumstances have prevented price differences from arising for different types of pornography. And, if the prices remain roughly constant, albeit constantly tending to the baseline level of wellbeing in the long period, the consumer will always succeed in keeping above it, as is shown in Fig. 1. Footnote 16 continued wellbeing, point C would have a higher ordinate than point A, and point D would have a higher ordinate than point C. In both cases nothing would change in the logic of the model.

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B C baseline level, BL

quality index

Fig. 2

1

2

3

time

1

2

3

time

price (CPo)

Acquiring pornography before Internet: the dynamics of wellbeing when price rises

4.4 Four Implications On the basis of the above considerations, four main implications emerge. First, for pornography purchasers it is perfectly rational to begin from ‘‘soft’’ pornography and subsequently, when hedonic adaptation has reduced the increase of wellbeing over the baseline level close to zero, shift to progressively ‘‘harder’’ pornography. By so doing they maximize their intertemporal wellbeing. Doing the opposite is inefficient, due to the circumstance that the ‘‘harder’’ pornography includes the ‘‘softer’’, so that shifting from ‘‘harder’’ to ‘‘softer’’ pornography does not increase wellbeing (‘‘softer’’ sexual acts are no novelty) and, moreover, given the fact that ‘‘harder’’ pornography can be appreciated only after having accumulated enough consumption skills watching ‘‘softer’’ pornography. Our theoretical analysis thus fully explains escalation, i.e. actual behaviours. Second, although hedonic adaptation inevitably drives pornography purchasers back to their baseline level of wellbeing, consumers can delay this decline by discovering (and purchasing) ever different types of (‘‘harder’’) pornography. Creativity can increase intertemporal wellbeing.

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net well-being, WB

A C

B baseline level, BL

quality index

1

2

1

Fig. 3

time

3

2

3

price (CPo)

time

Acquiring pornography in the Internet era: the dynamics of wellbeing when price rises

Third, the reduction of social stigma (connected with the greater privacy generated by the ICT revolution) and the increasing supply of pornographic material furnished by swinger and exhibitionist couples have raised expected net wellbeing by reducing both the monetary and psychological costs of pornography, with the result of an increasing number of people for whom the returns exceed the costs of pornography. This helps explain why the ICT revolution has increased the number of pornography purchasers. Fourth, in the long run the wellbeing people obtain from pornography inevitably decreases, and this descent has been accelerated by the ICT revolution which, as we have already seen, has enabled pornography purchasers to realize immediately when it is convenient to shift from one type of material to another. This circumstance may lead people to stop buying pornography and to begin engaging with reality. The empirical findings confirm at least partially this dynamics, since desensitization is the third phase of the path that, according to sex therapists, characterizes the behaviour of pornography consumers, and acting out sexually is the fourth. In other words, pornography consumers begin to be ever less interested in watching and ever more in doing.

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5 Conclusions The point of this paper is that a significant psychological motivation able to influence the demand for pornography is the desire for variety/novelty, which finds its theoretical explanation in, or at least can formalized by, the hedonic adaptation approach. Even if other theoretical models might have a role in explaining some aspects of the phenomenon, the hedonic adaptation approach appears superior since it is able to explain all the four stages into which, according to some sex therapists, the effects of pornography on people can be divided: addiction, escalation, desensitization, acting out sexually. It is, in particular, worth noting that, by contrast, the economic addiction models come up against difficulties even in explaining the first stage, i.e. the stage sex therapists call addiction. According to the interpretation proposed in this article, when viewing pornography people suffer from habituation, which reduces the wellbeing they can extract from a given type of pornography, and (at the same time) enjoy skill accumulation, which increases the wellbeing they can obtain from other, ‘‘harder’’ material (which they had previously discarded). Hence pornography purchasers begin searching for this ‘‘harder’’ material (escalation), and in doing so they have to search through (‘‘consume’’) ever-growing quantities of pornography, since the ‘‘harder’’ material is also ‘‘harder’’ to find. Having purchased this new material, people actually achieve an increase in their wellbeing, but habituation soon forces them back, once again, towards their baseline level of wellbeing. Only creativity, i.e. the capacity to go on finding ever-new types of pornography, can offset habituation. However, in the long run hedonic adaptation inevitably drives pornography purchasers back to their baseline level of wellbeing, so that, to obtain other increases in satisfaction, they reduce their consumption of pornography, which has no novelty value, and begin acting out sexually. In a word, they stop viewing and begin doing. Besides recognition of the relevance of hedonic adaptation in the demand for pornography, the above conclusions are important for both policy design and model selection. In the case of policy design, they offer a basis to trace out the long-period behaviour of pornography consumers—a crucial element to be considered when designing policies for the pornographic market (with the aim of regulating externalities and/or taxing the industry), since it determines the long-period outcome of the policies. As for model selection (i.e. for evaluating which model best fits the realities of a specific case), our conclusions imply that addiction models, and in particular rational addiction models, must be used with caution when approaching phenomena which have a certain affinity with but are not identical to cases of substance abuse. Acknowledgments I wish to thank Marina Bianchi (Universita` di Cassino), Mimmo D’Antuono (Guide Edizioni), Daniela Federici (Universita` di Cassino), Alessio Liquori (Universita` di Cassino), Mariano (www.morenasex.net), Ornella Tarola (Sapienza Universita` di Roma), Maurizio Pugno (Universita` di Cassino), Alessandra Tonazzi (Autorita` Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato), various other people who prefer to remain anonymous and six anonymous referees of this journal. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at a seminar held in the University of Cassino. The usual caveat applies.

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