People often watch pornography out of boredom – watching pornographic videos or movies helps them temporarily suppress the sense of meaninglessness of life. Such a hypothesis was put forward by psychologists from the University of Limerick and the University of Essex, whose article was published in the journal “Personality and Individual Differences”.
How to deal with existential fears?
Previously, scientists concluded that when people are bored, they lose a sense of purpose and importance in their life. In order to suppress this unpleasant existential experience, people unconsciously start looking for sensual pleasures – they eat sweets, fatty food, have casual sexual relations and do not resist impulsive purchases.
Why pornography?
The researchers decided to find out if pornography is also part of the aforementioned pleasures – perhaps bored people watch pornography to suppress the feeling of uselessness. A survey of 179 adults from Ireland and England supported this hypothesis. People who agreed with the statement “I don’t have a clear purpose in life” also generally agreed with the statement “I often have trouble figuring out what to do to keep myself from being bored,” as well as the statement “Pornography gives me a break from life’s problems.”
It turned out that those respondents who were prone to boredom watched porn more often than those who were less bored. The more people felt worthless and like losers, the more often they watched pornographic content – using it not only to experience sexual pleasure, but also to distract themselves, to forget, and to introduce something new into their lives.