Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users.
But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it.
“We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn’t find any.”
This was a small and poorly designed study. They only interviewed 20 men, and only men in their 20’s. It is still a wonder that they didn’t find men who had become addicted to porn.
Or did they? Perhaps all 20 were addicted, and this is the new ‘normal’,
Just watch. Someone will latch onto this study to proclaim that porn is harmless.
I was curious as to their parameters of study too. Firstly, they were vague on what they considered “pornography,” and secondly they did not seem to factor out accidental exposure. Despite your best efforts, you get intrusive ads and views on the internet occasionally by accident. Some of those pop up ads are no holds barred.
It is a rather odd study, to be sure. But there are several things that struck me.
First is what definition of “pornography” was used.
Second was simply the “average age” when the men started using porn. Ten seems awfully young. When I was ten I think I was just barely beginning to be aware of sex.
Third, the source of the porn. In 1947, when I was ten, there was no Internet and hence no Internet porn. If there were video stores, I was totally unaware of them. I think my earliest contact with porn would have been around the age of 13 and it was in the form of a pulp magazine I found discarded. I hardly used it. I looked at it and discarded it.
Fifth, the time used does seem much more than those I knew in the late 50s in college.
Probably the earliest use would have been when I was away from home in college, where [i]Playboy[/i] was pretty standard fare among guys in the dorm. Does the [i]Playboy[/i] centerfold count in the study’s definition of porn? In seminary we bought [i]Playboy[/i] for the articles. 🙂 (You know, the “moral theology” articles by Bishop Pike.)
There may be something else involved. It seems to me that among adolescent boys in the 50s “porn” consisted more in the fifties was more in the imagination and sexual fantasies than in actual material and it was often more verbal (talk, reading) than visual. Perhaps this (assuming I’m not imagining it) reflects something of a radical cultural shift that some have noted quite apart from porn–a shift from the verbal to visual, brought about more by television than the Internet. That change has been noted by others in recent years, and is one of the factors behind the decline of American education.
In the 40s and 50s we exercised our imaginations reading and even listening to the radio. The mental exercise was verbal rather than visual.
Some 20-odd years ago I had a rather amusing porn experience in a hotel not far from Montréal. The Stanley Cup hockey championship was in full swing and as I cycled through one channel after another trying to find the game … all I got was porn, more porn, and still more porn.
I checked all the channels on the guide and still, nothing but porn, but the only thing I wanted was hockey. So I called the front desk for help, and they may [i]still[/i] be laughing about the clueless Anglo. It turns out there were two cables coming into the set, and a small switch (on the back of the set) to change between them. Problem solved.
Based, however, on the little bit of porn I saw as I flipped frantically between channels … I have absolutely no idea why [i]anybody[/i] would waste his time watching it. To say nothing of actually studying it.
Hmm. And what does the phrase “consumed pornnography” mean?
Having taught school (4th and 5th grade) for 21 years, my experience is that children are exposed to pornography at increasingly early ages. While the study is small and may be flawed (difficult to make a judgment based on a newspaper article), it seems accurate to say that we are faced with a serious ethical and moral problem when our children are immersed in a perverse understanding of sexuality every day of their lives–and I’m specifically speaking of a perverse understanding of heterosexual relationships at this point.
#1, were they looking for men who had not used/been exposed to porn, or men who were not *addicted*?
I can easily belive they couldn’t find any who had not perused it. I finder harder to believe that all the men in the study were addicted.
Scott, suppose, say as many as 5% of men in their 20’s were addicted. I assume in their terms this would be a “pathological” symptom. Their sample is too small to be reliably detected, for that would be, on average, 1 out of 20 men. Similarly, their sample size is too small to draw reliable conclusions about the average age of first use, etc. It does suggest, however that few in their 20’s have not been exposed to porn. “All Men” in the headline is patently false.
I cannot quite remember where, but I remember a Professor of English (himself of mature years) lamenting that young men today could not understand literature where the female was the personification of beauty. The ubiquity of porn had removed all mystery and left instead very earthy images.
That is not really shocking due to the presence of different types of media. I was just sad to know that there are people who don’t see it as a sensitive topic. Well, the influence of media is very strong and I guess no one could stop it. Only that it should be explained to men that they should not talk about it on crowd. And I have to agree to Perez Hilton on what his remarks from the Playboy Interview make [url=http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2010/02/10/john-mayer-racist-playboy/]John Mayer racist[/url]. this made him a bit of a pig, and because he decided to open his mouth, especially about his relationships with Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Aniston, they also make him…well, lacking much of an inner censor, which is ok but it does tend to make one look like a fool.