The Porn Conversations #18

In an earlier post about nude beaches, I mentioned in passing that psychologists describe porn in levels — level one being the mildest, level five the most explicit. I gave it one sentence and moved on. My inbox did not move on. Enough of you wrote asking what that actually means that I owe you a fuller answer.

So here it is. A map. The one nobody gave us growing up.

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The first attempt at a classification system came from William Rotsler in 1973. He subdivided the existing X rating into three tiers: X for comparatively cool, suggestive films — what we’d now call softcore. XX for simulation, content that appears explicit but isn’t. And XXX for actual hardcore. That three-tier system lodged itself in American culture so deeply that people still use it, even though the official ratings board abandoned it decades ago.

Modern researchers have refined the spectrum considerably. The way I understand it now, porn runs along six rough levels.

Level one is nudity without sex — topless beaches, Playboy-style photography, the kind of thing that would once have been confiscated from a teenage boy’s locker. 

Level two is erotica and art film: Emmanuelle, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, arthouse cinema where sexuality serves a larger aesthetic or emotional vision. 

Level three is softcore proper — simulated or artfully obscured sex, some production value, a story that earns its place. Henry & June. Sirens. Films where desire builds through atmosphere and suggestion, where the camera looks away at exactly the right moment and leaves your imagination to finish what it started. 

Level four is what researchers call “features,” the Golden Age of the 1970s and early 80s: actual explicit sex integrated into genuine narrative, with real cinematography, scoring, character development. The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Films that were reviewed by mainstream critics and screened in actual theaters.

Level five is modern gonzo — the dominant form today, accounting for roughly 95% of current production. No story. No sets worth mentioning. Wall-to-wall explicit sex, close-up camera work, performers talking directly to the viewer. 

Level six is extreme gonzo: degradation and intensity as the entire point, content that makes regular gonzo look restrained by comparison.

Most people who grew up in evangelical culture assume they live somewhere at the prudish end of this spectrum — and then feel confused, or ashamed, when their fantasies say otherwise.

This is where Dr. Justin Lehmiller’s research becomes one of the most useful things I’ve ever read.

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Lehmiller is a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and a former Harvard faculty member. His landmark survey of 4,175 Americans — the largest of its kind — produced a finding that should be tattooed somewhere visible in every church that ever preached purity culture: the more moral and political restrictions placed on a person’s sexuality, the more intensely they fantasize about breaking free of them.

Read that again.

Religious people fantasize more — not less — about acts their tradition labels sinful. American evangelical women report more explicit fantasy lives than their European counterparts, who grew up in cultures far more relaxed about nudity and sex. People from strict backgrounds tend to have the most elaborate inner erotic lives. The repression doesn’t eliminate desire. It pressurizes it.

And when that pressure has nowhere healthy to go, it finds somewhere else. Josh Duggar — eldest son of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, the hyper-religious family who built a reality television empire on their nineteen children and devout Baptist faith — was convicted in 2022 of receiving and possessing child sexual abuse images and sentenced to twelve and a half years in federal prison. Then, in March of this year, his younger brother Joseph Duggar, 31, was arrested and charged with molesting a nine-year-old girl during a family vacation in Florida — charges he admitted to when confronted by the victim’s father, and again when police monitored a subsequent phone call. Their sister Amy Duggar King told People she wasn’t surprised by the allegations, describing a “deeper systemic issue” at play in the family. Two sons. The same household. The same theology of total sexual suppression.

This is Lehmiller’s finding made flesh, and it is tragic. Repression doesn’t purify desire. It deforms it.

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I have tried to honestly assess my own porn preferences and land on an accurate answer. At this point in my life, I have so much fulfillment in my real-life sexual adventures that my porn usage is rare, close to nonexistent. This is happening at a time when I have unlimited freedom — no wife forbidding it, no job monitoring it, no religion condemning it. I am free to watch whatever I want, whenever I want. That freedom, it seems, is exactly what reduced the appetite. During my previous decades of fundamentalism, the strict prohibitions seemed to feed the fire of desire to consume porn. Lehmiller had it exactly right.

My honest preference is level three. I want a story. I want people I can believe in, desire that builds, sex that earns its place in the narrative. Henry & June. Emmanuelle. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Sirens. The artful obscuring, the suggestion rather than the display — that withheld moment is not a lesser version of sexuality. It’s a different erotic language, one that requires my imagination to complete the circuit. When the camera lingers too long on the mechanics, it pulls me out of the fantasy rather than deepening it. Too literal. It replaces imagination with documentation.

Which raises the question Lehmiller’s research made me ask myself: if repression intensifies desire and drives people toward the forbidden, why didn’t thirty years of evangelical sexual shame send me straight to level six? Why suggestion and story instead of extreme transgression? Or is it not a matter of level at all, but of desire to shatter the rules and the chains that held us?

I think a partial answer is that shame worked on me both aesthetically and morally. Beauty was the category I used to process everything — art, music, architecture, faith. When desire finally broke through all that prohibition, it followed the same channel. It went looking for beauty. It wanted a story worth being inside. And perhaps my overactive imagination — the same one that spent decades constructing vivid inner worlds, that now finds its way into the novels I write — pulled me toward suggestion rather than explicitness. My mind has always wanted to finish the story itself. The church told me sex was ugly and base and animal. So when I finally let myself want it, I wanted the opposite — human, complex, made with care.

The repression shaped me. It just sent me toward beauty.