Personally I find it kind of anthropologically fascinating that society has a natural impulse to record the reproductive act and view such recordings as a leisure activity.
Once you have kids you'll see what I mean. Last Monday night you'd think it was a camera technology convention, not a little league baseball game.
For better or worse, its only residual cultural Puritanism that stops my wife from showing everyone a video of when our kids were conceived, much as she has video of seemingly everything else involving them. (including when they were born, and I'm not kidding about that)
Have you also noticed that besides "the reproductive act" it records and views ALL kinds of acts as a leisure activity?
From war stories, to horror stories, political stories, court drama, to adventures, to comical incidents, stories about actual events, to a guy doing stupid things to himself (Jackass)?
Why would "the reproductive act" by any different?
Not to mention people rarely watch the actual "reproductive act". They watch sex. Including anal, blog jobs, tentacle porn, all of which are anything but "reproductive".
Because reproduction employs just one case of the total of sex expression / porn material, doesn't mean it has anything to do with it.
Porn is about control. A person tells themselves a false story about their sexuality (even if they can't articulate it or form it into words) that goes something like "I am not satisfied with my current sexual experiences, but if I find the right type of images/videos/fetishes and watch them, I will be satisfied" -- The person fulfills their sexual desires through porn use, but then it doesn't satisfy and they are back for more the next time.
You can't control a real person as easily as porn and so the user continually goes back to porn. Over time the user prefers porn to the other person in the relationship (usually a woman). Women especially, will try to compensate for the gap by comparing themselves to the women in the porn videos, but to no avail and the woman feels more and more dejected.
Heavy porn use also leads to erectile dysfunction and other issues (even if not in a relationship). Some helpful info is here: http://yourbrainonporn.com/
Obviously you should work on finding a consensual partner that shares your sexual interests, but in the absence of such a partner, I'm not convinced viewing pornography in moderation is destructive.
Then so is food, tv, computer use, and anything else that can create compulsive behavior. You're telling a very particular story about porn but it isn't the whole story.
>Porn is about control.
Which is why women find it so threatening. Sex is about control too. If your partner is giving out sex like they're dog treats for "good behavior" how is your position in life any healthier? In that context maybe porn isn't so bad after all depending on your relationship to it.
I would add that women also don't understand it because they don't operate visually as men do (with respect to sexual images).
Now, I'm not sure that's the best way to put it but the fact is that there is only a fraction of porn for women vs. porn for men. No market apparently?
If there was an innate need in women for porn and sexual images there would be a market created for it and there would be much more porn targeted to the female market.
Back in the day there was pretty much only 1 printed magazine with images of naked men "Play Girl". And some would argue that that was actually read quite a bit by gay men as opposed to women. But there were dozens of magazines which a man could buy. On a newstand at least.
If women were stimulated the same way as men someone would have exploited that, right? But they didn't.
Same with the internet. (Wouldn't want to guess at the ratio if anyone knows please post.)
If women were stimulated the same way as men you wouldn't have to cater to women. With that said, the number of women watching porn is astronomical. Stars like James Deen and Manuel Ferrara have gained a huge following because they are able to cater to female markets.
I do think more women avoid porn/erotica due to this 'disgust' towards porn in society.
Any remaining gap, I would assume is genuinely due to women having a lower libido.
If that's what you really think, then you have a really fucked-up relationship to sex.
Unless you're coming at it from a religious moral angle, porn has less potential for destruction than sex. Porn doesn't lead to STDs and unexpected pregnancy.
Erectile dysfunction is a physical dysfunction, not merely the lack of desire for sex. Stop giving men anxiety about their erections simply because they don't want sex all the time.
The first thing I noticed is that most of the front-page articles are testimonials. Fortunately there was an article written by the author right at the start, however as soon as I started reading I noticed another problem. Almost every reference is to other articles on that same site, which themselves link deeper into the site. Occasionally I'd hit some articles from psychology today (psychology magazine, not a journal), and other popular media sources. I did not find any references to proper scholarly articles though.
A quick search of Google scholar turns up no articles to back up most of the major assertions he makes on here. Now that's certainly not enough to dismiss the site outright, but it's certainly enough to make me question what exactly he found, and how well he is interpreting the existing results. I have no trouble accepting the existence of porn addiction, but I do believe that making a case as strong as the one you seem to be making requires much stronger evidence than what you have presented.