+1 to this, not to mention being rather one-sided.
A quote "The regions of the brain that are active when someone is viewing porn are the same regions of the brain that are active while the person is actually having sex. Marco Iacoboni, a professor of psychiatry at University of California Los Angeles, speculates that these systems have the potential to spread violent behavior." in particular seems rather suspect since similar past speculation about a link between violence in gaming and violence in media and real-world violence seems to be generally understood as having been disproven for a while now.
Obviously, you can find any academic study to support your argument. The quality of the study matters. What is the counterpoint to studies saying that porn affects brain structure, pleasure, attraction, and executive function? Is it the oldie but goodie of "correlation does not imply causation?" I wouldn't be surprised if it's a correlation problem, especially with the violence claim.
Skim both pages and try not to be more confused than when you were started. Of course both websites have an agenda. The former was created in response to the latter.
I have another related question: is there any scientific consensus emerging on porn? All I ever see from medical professionals and psychologists are claims like "sexual repression is harmful" and "everything in moderation, but there's nothing special about porn." One would hope that's true. However, the lack of nuance is concerning. For example, there's a huge difference between the amount of porn that men and women consume. What if young men should generally watch a lot less porn, and the average woman wouldn't be harmed by more? When a gender & sexuality professor says "porn and masturbation are healthy!" is that true across both genders? Is it true regardless of where someone is on the "porn escalator?" If porn is anywhere near as bad as these guys are saying, then that message needs to be evangelized. It would truly be a public health crisis, especially among young men. Assuming no reporting bias, men watch almost double the amount of porn that women do.
"Everything in moderation" is weak/not convincing. If there's convincing empirical evidence, then scientists need to get on TV and state the average dose-response relationship. Something like "the average American man in his 20's watches X amount of porn, we show harm starting around Y hours, which is significantly less than X. Z% of American men need to significantly lower porn consumption, or else they face immense consequences spanning all areas of life" and vice-versa with opposite claims. Again, the "excessive porn is really bad" studies could be completely bunk. The people who spread the studies could be biased religous conservatives and hypochondriacs. However, people watch so much porn, and there is such a thick long tail of porn hours consumed, that it should be clear that the magnitude of average porn consumption among each gender is healthy. Magnitude is significantly underrated in any public discussion about scientific studies. Sub-population differences are also very underrated. For example, a lot of science is plagued by the overuse of male subjects, masking potential differential effects on women.
I'll close with my case for why porn addiction deserves more attention than things like hard drugs: hard drugs are not a click away. Hard drugs aren't consumed by nearly the same amount of people. Hard drugs aren't free.
Imagine the tragedy of the following scenario. In only 10 years, free, 16K resolution, multi-focal lightfield, 120 degree FOV VR porn will be available at your bedside, combined with hyperoptimized teledildonics, haptic touch, and hypersexually optimized deepfake ML anthropomorphs of all shapes and sizes - what if humans lose sexual attraction to one another as a result? Does the phrase "everything in moderation" prepare us for that future? Are we really that resilient? So much is at stake that the answer needs to be exceedingly clear. There was a researcher who artifically enhanced the tail length of widowbirds, for whom tail length is a secondary sexual characteristic. They were then released along with normal-tailed males to mix with female widowbirds. Female widowbirds were significantly more attracted to the artificially enhanced, supernormal males than normal-tailed males, even though supertails never occur in nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-tailed_widowbird#Andersso...
We better be sure that humans won't go the way of the normal-tailed widowbird.
For me there are two particularly important topics that concern me and that I think are worth a lot of research. The first is the effect of the smartphone (starting with the iPhone, I guess), and the second is easy access to porn.
When it comes to smartphones, I'm just amazed at how much it has changed how people behave not just on a daily basis, but apparently on 5-minute (or so) intervals. That's gotta have some significant consequence.
When it comes to porn, I'm slightly less confident that things have changed significantly, but it still feels like things are different enough to possibly have some kind of large-scale consequences. I mean, I remember a pre-internet and pre-smartphone time where porn was relatively difficult to have access too. The difference is less pronounced than the change to the 'internet-smartphone age', but considering how powerful sexuality is to us, I can't help but wonder how much easy access to porn is affecting us, for better or worse.
To add to the (dystopian?) scenario I painted at the bottom of my post, the VR sextelligence might make full eye contact and modulate their behavior to optimize for sexual excitation, as measured by the degree to which your eyes are dilated. That is completely plausible and is simply an extension of extant technology.
