Porn - Any scientific data

[ALovingSpirit]

Like the Brexit debate the perennial MN porn debate seems to always descend into its bad v it’s ok with the same old arguments axiomatically wheeler out

I’m wondering if anybody has any recent, peer reviewed, scientific papers on the subject?

Specifically

1. Most porn female actresses are doing it against there will
2. Porn is extremely damaging to relationships
3. Porn is damaging to society
4. Porn is damaging to men

Pretty much all discussions are based on anecdotes rather than hard, scientific research. If anyone has links to papers I’d be interested to see them.

🤦‍♀️

"I guess it’s a “watch this space” until the link is proven?"

Translated......

I like porn. I don't want to give it up. I also don't want to feel like I'm bad for using it. I'll make everyone try to prove to me it is, and then dismiss them.

Cognitive dissonance is your friend here.

I guess it’s a “watch this space” until the link is proven?

Or

I guess it's 'keep on wanking to women's degradation' until the link is proven?

Yes. Yes it is.

*Thanks for all of the replies. From what I’ve read there doesn’t seem to be any causality proven between porn consumption and society?

I think the MDPI Behavioural Studies paper is the most interesting. It suggests a string link but nobody has proven one yet.

The rise in ED is certainly interesting data, but it could be caused by the same issues that have caused a rise in food allergies too.

I guess it’s a “watch this space” until the link is proven?*

🙄 Not sure what positives you got from the above in favour of porn, I don't see any. But I suppose denial is the first sign of the problem.

@Deathgrip what support groups did you join?

Porn addiction kills relationships. End of story. I'm not against using porn when you're in a relationship, but a porn addiction is a completely different ball game.

I think there is a lot of peer reviewed research out there talking about porn addiction and the negative consequences of this. However, not all porn viewers are addicts, not by a long shot. It’s clear to see how a porn addiction would be damaging to the individual and their relationships. But for the occasional user / non addict, no peer reviewed research has been posted in this thread in relation to the OPs questions. There is a lot of anecdotal discussion.

The most recent studies seem to show that the problems experienced by some viewers of porn are more to do with their unhealthy religious beliefs than their viewing habits (after all, nothing messes up your sex life more than an imaginary friend who hates sex and hates you.)
There has always been 'bad' porn in the sense of stuff made by exploiting, ripping off and mistreating performers: there is a lot going on at the moment by way of making porn while treating performers well, making it more diverse and interesting etc. But it's a bit forward and backward, because the latest government bullshit is going to hit the indie producers hard again while giving more space and money and clout to the worst of the big companies.

Of course not all porn users are addicts, just like not all cocaine users are cocaine addicts and not all drinkers are alcoholics. But porn is as addictive as those substances and frequent use plus normalisation can be damaging in itself and lead on to addiction.

RLEOM unfortunately the groups I used are mostly defunct now as this was quite a few years ago. I can recommend the Laurel Centre if you’re in the U.K., and NoFap on Reddit is a good place to start. You do have to be careful as many of the support group type services are faith based and can preach some pretty crazy stuff so do your due diligence before getting involved.

You’re so right SGB - when men experience difficulties after years of getting off to women being humiliated, degraded and abused, it’s definitely their religious upbringing that’s to blame.

🙄

And what niche indie producers do is pretty irrelevant since it has no impact on mainstream production and never will because the majority of porn consumers either don’t realise the impact of what they’re consuming or (more often) don’t give a shiny shit.

Youll be waiting a long time for a paper that shows causality in a study on sexual behaviour.

It's a strange question to ask when you are clearly an intelligent person capable of doing your own research. Do you have access to any databases? It wont take long to find what you are looking for if so. Although I would be skeptical of anyone claiming to find a strong causal effect.

Also, anecdote is incredibly important when you are talking about the reality of trafficked and abused women who form a part of the porn industry.

Also, Fight The New Drug is ridiculous pseudoscience with a superstitious basis, and seems to have some sort of connection with the woman-hating wingnuts in the 'manosphere'. Oh, and Jordan Peterson.

But then anti porn, prescriptive, authoritarian 'feminism' has always been good at cosying up to rightwingers.

Jesus Christ. I would love to have had experiences of this stuff so different to mine that I could be so dismissive of anti-porn commentary.

Prescriptive? Authoritarian? Give me a fucking break. I’m assuming from your stance that you’ve seen a lot of mainstream porn? Anyone who has and who thinks it’s not damaging to those who watch it and their partners is close to delusional IMO.

And the accounts of the women who’ve been able to get out of the business - how do you dismiss those?

It's as simple as this. People who use porn don't want to hear about the damage it causes because they don't want any of it on their conscience.

It's a very selfish outlook and they will argue in its favour viciously, because if they accept the reality of it, it might mean accountability and giving it up.

Porn is fast becoming an epidemic and only when it inevitably effects the porn user they will change their stance.

Until then debate is futile with a porn user.

My OH's obsessive porn use over many years has permanently damaged our marriage. We have stayed together as friends but no sex.
He finally had a road to Damascus experience and stopped using it.
Too late very sadly.
I can't debase myself any more and even if I did I doubt he could perform adequately.
Porn caused him erectile issues physically and nasty, unrealistic views of women mentally.
I have largely addressed the mental aspect with him but the damage is done.
I will never see him the same way again. I will never trust him fully.
I have gotten over the self esteem issues I ended up with but it took me years to realise it was not I who am inadequate.
I stay with my OH because in all other areas we have a strong bond.
Pornography destroyed our sexual connection.
It's a huge shame because my husband is kind, generous, hard working and gentle.
Porn is the one evil thing that he got hooked on and I hate it. I hate my OH for his weakness and self indulgence and unwillingness to truly listen to me about the dangers of his behaviour until it was too late.
I was in tatters for years. It makes me very sorry for myself when I think of what I've lost and now go without because my OH let pornography take precedence over a real relationship.
I still love my OH and appreciate all the good he does. But I'll always have this bleak aspect of our marriage to contend with.

@deathgrip (lol)

just lol really

....no still lol

It takes a very special person to come on to a thread where someone has outlined the abuse, sexual assault snd rape they’ve experienced and laugh at them.

What part of my experience and resulting view of porn is so funny, I wonder?

Wow deathgrip I have no fucking clue what you said to deserve the response above^^
Beyond weird

After years of posting on threads like this, I really shouldn’t be surprised at the vigour with which some people will defend something so objectionable, and yet I always am.

Let’s break it down:

• Boys accessing hardcore porn at a young age

• Girls feeling pressured into sex acts popularised by pornography, or removing all of their pubic hair, or sending naked photos of themselves

• Normalising filming sexual encounters between young people and these being shared, by those too young to fully understand the consequences of this

• Nearly half of boys saying that porn had given them ideas about the type of sex they want to try

• Repeated viewing causes densensitiation

• Massive increase in erectile dysfunction among young men, alongside loss of sensation, loss of interest in partnered sex, delayed ejaculation, lower levels of arousal, etc

• Extreme / gonzo porn becoming mainstream

• Being able to access hardcore porn 24/7

• Being able to search very specifically for specific acts and specific types of women; to find an enormous amount of content that plays into exactly what you want to see, and to do this as often as you want (this I think is the most damaging and dangerous part)

• The fact that porn is accessed generally way before first sexual experiences, and frequently (see chart from NSPCC)

• The fact that much of the content seen is about male enjoyment at the expense of a woman’s comfort and autonomy

• The misogynistic nature of most mainstream porn, and the fact that a woman’s humiliation / degradation isn’t just present but is actually the aim in many cases

• The fact that female pleasure, orgasm, sexual acts performed primarily for the enjoyment of women don’t feature in mainstream porn

• Users who don’t understand that porn is not a requirement for masturbation

• Women who get divorced and start OLD reporting that choking, spitting, face slapping, facials, anal sex etc are expected or even done with no prior warning or discussion

• Stories of women who’ve left the industry which demonstrate that at least some of the content people are masturbating to is footage of intoxicated women being abused, tortured and traumatised

• Not being able to tell if you’re wanking to footage of a woman who’s enjoying her job or one who is being abused, drugged, trafficked, and not using it anyway

• Increasing amounts of vocal misogyny online and in the real world

All these factors taken together, how can you possibly deny that there’s a problem?

This is not the porn that was available on VHS tapes hidden under a dad’s bed when I was younger. And even if it were, being able to watch that 24/7 probably wouldn’t have been good either. I believe it’s the easy access to very hardcore content at all times, as often as you wish, that’s the biggest issue.

I had a brief relationship with a guy who watched a lot of porn. He told me that he didn’t like “fake tits” and didn’t want to watch porn with women who had them, but they’re sort of ubiquitous.

In order to find porn containing women with unenhanced breasts, he had to search for “saggy”
In order to find porn containing women who weren’t extremely thin, he had to search for “fat”
In order to find porn containing women who had some pubic hair, he had to search “hairy”

He told me - in order to find porn featuring women who looked like me (I was 20 and a size 10 and waxed my bikini line at that point in time) he was searching for saggy, fat and hairy.

Porn is undoubtedly reshaping the way we view women and their bodies, sex, relationships between the sexes. I don’t believe anyone who’s seen it can believe that’s not the case.

Thank you for that summary @Deathgrip - your user name says it all. I am sorry for what you have been thru.

If you'd like a source giving and going through some of the pile of evidence on the negative effects of porn - and includes links to all the papers she cites and discusses - that isn't feminist (in the slightest) or specifically anti-porn, I'd recommend Aydin Paladin's series Porn Paradox and . Obviously NSFW or kids or much else.

Her end conclusion is that while she's still anti-regulation (not surprising as she's right-wing libertarian-ish), the evidence that it is damaging is not really in dispute by anyone researching this and, while the strongest causality evidence isn't possible as it's practically impossible anymore to have a large enough portion of the population that hasn't already seen porn in some form by the time they're 18 and there are now a few issues that would likely not get past the ethics stage, acting like it's even possibly just harmless to individuals or society does not line up with the data. How we deal with things that are harmful is a social and individual issue, there are plenty of harmful things that are entirely legal and sometimes even encouraged, but one would need a pretty ideological framework to frame porn as anything other than something that has an individually and socially negative impact.

In order to find porn containing women with unenhanced breasts, he had to search for “saggy”
In order to find porn containing women who weren’t extremely thin, he had to search for “fat”
In order to find porn containing women who had some pubic hair, he had to search “hairy”

I think he was wrong. A quick search found that "natural" is a good search term for unenhanced, there are plenty of non-extremely thin women after a basic scan of the front page of a site, and "chubby" also seems to be a search tag, but both "chubby" and "fat" throws up what you'd expect, and plenty of the women on the front page had some hair, so I'm not sure what your ex was up to, but I get your point in general.

Maybe now - this was over 10 years ago now, I think the sheer volume of porn that’s been produced in the last decade and the increasingly sophisticated porn sites means that there are more searachable classifications.

No one is denying that there are problems with some aspects of the porn industry (exploitation and mistreatment of performers being the main one). However, attempts to address exploitation by clinging on to the idea that porn is the root cause and/or the only thing that needs to be addressed are always going to go wrong: those people objecting to porn on feminist grounds all too often find themselves happy to stand alongside wingnuts who hate sexuality, hate women and LGBTQ people etc. (You get pockets of anti-choice argument among feminist anti-porn opinion: that abortion is a Bad Thing because it means men are having sex and ... and... penis WAAAAH!)

It's a big mistake to look at porn in isolation. The insistence that it;s all about 'degrading women' is no more true now than it was in the 90s: there's always been a range of interesting stuff available, plus the fact that interpretation of entertainment media remains subjective.
Over the past few years, though, media in general seems to have got, well, crueller. Look at all the poverty-bashing, humiliation and exploitation of desperate people in difficult circumstances for 'entertainment' on shows like Jeremy Kyle. Look at the awful, abusive working conditions many are expected to put up with in 'respectable' industries. And look at some of the antiporn rhetoric that pops up in and around the MRA crowd. Incels, for instance, absolutely hate both porn and sex work.

The fact remains that many people (not everybody, of course) enjoy looking at still or moving depictions of sexual activity. There is nothing wrong with this. Working conditions for performers need to be fair, safe and reasonable. As with any industry. All the rest is a matter of personal choice.

There has been some research published recently on teens and porn use that surprisingly showed no major negative effects. I’m a scientist and I work in sexual health, but not specifically related to porn so I haven’t read it and can’t say anything to the methodology. But there is lots of research in the social sciences particularly around queer porn, which is very interesting, and shows some positives of the queer porn genre both for performers and audiences. Queer porn is obviously a small segment of the market, but a really interesting one. It’s worth having a search for the literature in the area. I can’t cite any studies off the top of my head though.

That said, I’ve known a lot of porn performers in my personal as well as professional life due to the work that I due, and I’ve yet to meet one who anyone would describe as ‘exploited’. They are business people like anyone else and often quite savvy and empowered. That isn’t to say there isn’t exploitation in certain markets, but every industry has people who are exploited to be fair. Realistically, I would be much more concerned about the exploitation that goes into producing your handbag than the porn you or anyone else might consume.

Nothing "anecdotal" about it at all, my marriage is in shreds because of porn, as well as countless other women's here too.

Your marriage is likely in threads because your husband had no control over his watching. Not every man is addicted to the point they'd let it destroy their family.