SAVAGE LOVE

BY DAN SAVAGE

DEAR DAN: A lot of studying is being done on pornography and what it does to our brain. My question: are there any studies being done on erotic writing? “Women’s Romance Literature” is absolutely exploding in the online self-publishing sector, and my wife is an avid consumer.

“Spice” is the euphemism they use but wow — romance lit is a hot dish. My wife consumes countless e-books and audiobooks, and there seems to be a huge community of readers like her out there. Erotic lit has been very good for our relationship; we listen to scenes together and I help bring my wife to orgasm with my hands or tongue. It’s a fun way to be intimate! And listening is definitely less intrusive when we’re “coupling” than watching other people go at it on a screen. Anyway, back to my question: There are lots of studies looking into the effect of porn movies and pornographic images on the brain. But has anyone studied the impact of erotic literature on the brain? It’s got to be the oldest form of titillating art we have. What’s it doing to us?

— Lessons In Titillation

DEAR LIT: “I haven’t come across neurological studies of erotic writing or literature,” said Dr. Kelsy Burke. “That doesn’t really surprise me since the questions scientists ask about sexuality usually reflect broader social and cultural interests — in this case, research on ‘porn’ is almost exclusively about it as a visual medium, not the written word.”

Dr. Burke is a sociologist and the author of The Pornography Wars, a terrific new book about the never-ending culture war over pornography. Suffice it to say, LIT, if Dr. Burke hasn’t run across studies into the kind of dirty stories your wife enjoys reading, those studies don’t exist. “There’s a lot more talk about pornography and the brain than there are definitive empirical studies,” said Dr. Burke. “And a lot of the talk stems from groups with a political or religious interest in opposing porn. Academic studies, on the other hand, offer mixed results and no definitive conclusions about how porn impacts the brain.”

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“Here’s what we do know: Our brains process visual images 60,000 times faster than text,” said Dr. Burke. “One of the better arguments, in my opinion, about the potential harm of internet porn — which is actually not exclusive to porn at all and applies to all video-streaming websites — is that the quick succession of videos and rapid processing of all of those images is what sucks us in, sometimes for longer than we would like.”

“And while we can have a huge queue of romance lit on our Kindles,” said Dr. Burke, “we aren’t likely to stay up all night binging one after the other, as we might do with, say, Netflix because our brains will tire from all that textual processing.”

“I doubt we’ll see a surge in research on what affect Roberts’ writing has on our brains, not only because banning books is purely political theater,” said Dr. Burke. And we may not see a surge in that kind of research because we ultimately don’t need it. “Neuroscientists already know that the stories in our heads are hugely important to our sexual pleasure,” said Dr. Burke. “These stories — our thoughts and feelings — can help or hinder our sexual experiences. It sounds like for you and your wife, it’s helping.”