Survey of research into the effects of pornography | Hacker News Reader

Survey of research into the effects of pornography

aeon.co

36 pointskawera10 comments

Solid article backed up with research put in context.

TL;DR: Almost everyone watches porn, and people are starting to watch younger and younger. However, almost all research shows it's not harmful. Porn is also a reflection of the viewer and society.

There is also a related and thoughtful discussion on Aeon's own website: https://aeon.co/conversations/is-it-wrong-to-watch-pornograp...

The referenced Newton episode is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PeQG61W4i0

The Scandinavian approach to sexual education goes a long way to ensuring children's confidence about their body and their feelings.

What are the chances someone interested in researching about porn is going to find that porn is harmful?

"More than 36% of the internet content is porn". Is this in terms of bandwidth, size of files, or some other metric? If it's size of files then of course porn in going to be a large percentage of files because video files are large.

Slight NSFW warning (blurred tits).

tl;dr: There is no evidence that pornography has ill effects, and a modicum of evidence that it can be positive. The (sometimes) conventional wisdom about porn -- objectification of women, its addictive nature, destructiveness in relationships -- is flatly wrong.

I read this as a single researcher (Prause) in a university with an agenda to push.

Sometimes conventional wisdom is conventional for a good reason.

You should look up Masters and Johnson. The first time any science at all was performed to test conventional wisdom showed conventional wisdom was mostly nonsense. Often nonsense passed down from one person to another with negative effects on people. That was mostly the physical stuff. Now, we need to know the psychological stuff.

As before, people's pre-existing beliefs and social structures make it hard to even test the conventional wisdom. Contradicting it is declared evil or foolish before-hand. Given history of "wisdom" in this area, it's right to test it in ways that might show contradictions. People have always been exceedingly foolish on these things when they cast judgment before collecting data. No reason to believe it will be different this time.

This article is based on research done by 11 universities in 6 countries; Prause's is just one of then.

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