Episode 10: Deadly Sexual Sin #5 (According to the Church): Don’t Watch Porn, with Cayte Castrillon, Part 1
Welcome back to the Seven Deadly Sexual Sins (According to the Church). We continue with Deadly Sexual Sin #5, especially geared toward men: Don’t Watch Porn. After all, we know that women don’t watch porn.
Or do they?
We invite Cayte Castrillon, sex therapist and PhD student, to share her research about how women consume porn, what porn teaches women about their own bodies and sexuality, and the observations that women make about the ways that male partners are influenced by porn.
Cayte discovers that approximately two thirds of college age students are using porn to masturbate (10:00). She reflects, “Women are challenged so often to be more assertive, but in order to assert your needs, you have to know and at least be on the path to understanding what those needs are.” (18:40)
Cayte conducts in interviews with dozens of college women, centers around three questions:
How did pornography impact your body image, both generally and sexually? (15:00): Cayte summarizes that women commonly explore pornography, “just out of curiosity of what's happening out there. What am I, what's capable? What are the possibilities of what I can engage in? So as far as masturbation, that's the selection process I think then that women are engaging in: Does this make me feel sexual? Does this arouse me? Does this make me feel uncomfortable?
How did pornography impact the development of your sexual self? How did it impact your interest in sex and specific sexual acts? (21:00): Cayte talks about the ways that porn exacerbates the process of women comparing themselves to the bodies of other women, specifically regarding their breasts and vulvas. However, Cayte describes the common response of porn “giving a place to go to explore not only my masturbatory responses to pornography, but it also giving me permission to be a sexual person, to harness that, to say, oh, there are women that are really in seeming to enjoy sex, whether or not it's performative or not.”
How do you think pornography potentially impact your male partners, if you have engaged in sexual activity with male partners? (28:00): This question required some hypothesizing, as most participants did not have conversations with their male partners about this. However, the participants observed, “their partners saying, I know my penis isn't as big as such and such, and feeling uncomfortable if there was a performer that had an especially large phallus or extremely masculine muscular physique.”
Next week, we will talk about the implications of Cayte’s research, such as exploring when the current status of porn caters to the socially conditioned fantasies of men, what does that say about whose bodies are deserving of pleasure and whose sexuality is most important in our country? And we’ll share our own vulnerabilities regarding talking about porn in our own partnerships.
Let’s heal together!