Hacker News Reader

Comment by amacbride | Hacker News Reader

My guess would be that because more people are on PrEP, fewer people are using condoms.

For the hacker news crowd, I think this would be a very interesting data mining project: correlate the prevalence of bareback gay porn with overall rates of bacterial STDs.

In the late 90s and early 00s, gay bareback porn was quite rare, and it was mainly "vintage" porn from before the AIDS epidemic. There were some studios around the mid 00s I think that focused on bareback sex, which caused lots of controversy in the time before PreP. Since PreP became widespread in the past couple years, bareback porn has become very common.

I don't think anyone consciously thinks "Oh, that porn star didn't use a condom, I don't need one either." But I think the overall change does tend to desensitize people into just making the negative consequences of barebacking easier to forget.

Doesn't this approach have the same issue as trying to correlate violent video games with actual violence?

While you could argue that, you could also argue that this activity is prevalent in a 'very similar' way in the consumer's life already. Not so much for violence.

Watching porn makes people horny. Watching violence does not make people aggressive and murderous.

I think both are in the same category. Being horny is like being violent. If you don't have access to a partner or a weapon then your just an angry dude in a dark room fapping into the abyss.

According to accepted psychological research ... it does. Well, not murderous, as that sort of research would never get approved.

But aggressive ? Certainly.

Why can't people accept this ? It's the very idiotically basis of how the human mind works: it learns. 99.99% of the time it learns by imitating something else. Give it something violent to imitate (no matter how artificial, fake, drawn, ...), and ... surprise ! It will come up with more violent answers in the future. How is this strange or unexpected in the least ?

And yes, I get it, you feel like you are in control of your own mind. By the way, how do you explain how advertising works if that were true ? Or the obvious influence mass media have ? Or why absurdly large groups of people keep coming to the same conclusion (from culture, to political "winds", to google searches ... all shows strong correlations between huge groups of people).

Now granted, this is results like 10% more likely to use minor violence in a "get something taken from me" situation among children (the other alternative generally being getting adult help, which may or may not cooperate depending on the study). None of those studies are saying Rambo turns toddlers into terminators. But objectively, measurably more violent ? Yes, yes it does. It does so heavily in the short term (hours), then the effect slowly dies down (but it's still significant 20 years after the exposure).

This has been incredibly thoroughly tested and yes, we are VERY sure this does in fact happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com