Article on our Lowlands Science ‘Pornfessions’ project in New Scientist NL

‘Confess for Science!’ so reads the headline on a new article on our Pornfessions project in the 2024 Lowlands Science project. Do you want to know why we ask festival participants to confess about their porn habits in pursuit of science? You can read the original article (in Dutch) authored by Eline Kraaijenvanger here.

Some highlights in English follow below.

Author: Samira van Bohemen

Date: June 18, 2024

Photo: New Scientist

Highlights:

At Lowlands Science, festival participants can anonymously ‘confess’ about their pornographic preferences to one of our proverbial ‘porn-priests’ within our ‘Pornfession Booths’;
Goal of this research is to learn more about pornographic stereotypes around gender and how they become part of our sexual desires and embodied responses to pornographic content;
Head researcher, dr. Samira van Bohemen, explains how stereotypes are internalized by people as part of their socialization and likens it to how people also learn to be attracted to particular forms of music and how this affects people’s physiological responses to music;

“When you like a musical piece, your skin expands, your heart rate increases… But ultimately, these are all things we’ve learned. We’ve learned to find certain tones and musical narratives beautiful or ugly, cheerful or moving. The same applies to watching porn.”

Samira also explains why the research is conducted by a large team of scientists from various disciplines, spanning cultural sociology, psychology and neuroscience;
Integration between these scientific fields is necessary to study this complex social phenomenon and its physical ramifications, requiring theoretical insights from sociology to be combined with methodological advancements from psychology and neuroscience.