Could Porn Be One Explanation for Sexual Predators Like Louis C.K.?

Much has been made in the past week of Louis C.K.’s public apology for exposing himself and masturbating in front of women. While most of the attention has been focused on the imbalance of power—the fact that the comedian could make or break the careers of these women and so they felt they had little choice in the matter—very little has been said about his rather bizarre behavior and its origins.

Some articles have quoted experts who say that this kind of behavior is about making women afraid. "Exhibitionism is not about sex. It's about purposely provoking shock and fear in a female," sex therapist Dr. Alexandra Katehakis, clinical director of the Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, told NBC News. According to Christian Joyal, a neuropsychologist at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres, “This type of sex offender has what we call narcissistic traits; usually not a disorder, but strong personality traits, enough to make them believe that they are untouchable.”

But neither of these explanations seem to fully explain Louis C.K., who wrote in his public apology: “At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my d**k without asking first.” The women confirm this as well. Unlike Harvey Weinstein, who kept surprising women with his manhood, C.K. seemed to assume that a woman he just met would genuinely want to sit there and watch him play with himself. Otherwise, why would he have asked?

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but this seems to fall into the same category as men who like to send women pictures of their genitals. It is very rare to find a woman who appreciates these. Most find them pretty disgusting or at best absurd. This article going around Facebook accurately summarizes many women’s sentiments.

So where would men get the idea that women would really like a giant closeup of their nether regions? The answer is obviously pornography. These men seem to imagine that women are going to look at pictures or at the real thing and be overcome by its appearance alone.

As sociologist Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker write in their book Premarital Sex, some men have become so used to watching pornography that it is easier for them to handle matters on their own. These men don’t need actual physical contact with a woman—having her sit on the other side of the room works just fine.

Regnerus, who is more recently the author of Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, told me in an email that:

reading some of the accounts of Weinstein's behavior does seem to square with particular pornographic scenarios (e.g., the massage that becomes sex). And the account of Weinstein’s raping Annabella Sciorra seems straight out of a common pornographic script... I've heard [these scenarios] used, too, in descriptions of consensual interactions in data collection interviews [with men who view porn].

Like me, Regnerus wonders why no one seems to be discussing this. For one thing, we live in a culture where no sexual preference or fetish is viewed as better or worse than any other one—as long as it is consensual. No one, it seems, wants these men to be embarrassed for their sexual proclivities—just for how they used them against the women they had power over. If they had simply found willing participants who didn’t work for them or with them, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

And maybe the notion that some of this behavior is coming from the ubiquity of pornography in our culture is largely irrelevant to some people. Maybe, the thinking goes, there’s no going back. So why worry? For one thing: Even in a culture where consent is the only consideration in sexual encounters, it is still useful for men and women to have reasonable expectations of one another. And just as most men probably don’t want to be compared to porn stars, most women don’t want to be treated like them.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a columnist for the New York Post. Her most recent book is The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians. 

Editor’s Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.