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  7. Craig Duncan's avatar

The effects of the widespread Internet availability of hardcore pornography

Interesting article; an excerpt:

[H]ere’s the thing about the generation of 10-13 year old boys who came just after me – those born after, say, 1992 – and all 10-13 year old boys since: any one of them can see more naked women on their phone in 10 minutes than most grown men in history saw in their entire lifetimes. They can also, of course, see women performing acts most men in history would never have dreamt up, let alone witnessed. And unsurprisingly, in overwhelming numbers, this is precisely what they choose do. The government, slowly waking up to the issue, issued a cross-party report in 2012 that revealed one in three boys of this age had viewed explicit material online, with four out of five becoming regular uses by the time they were 16.

…[I]ncreasing numbers of men who have reached their early twenties having grown up on this diet of unlimited porn are reporting some draw backs, including a decreased interest in “real” sex, an inability to ejaculate during it and – worst of all for most – erectile dysfunction. At the same time, the young women they’re sleeping with are reporting their own problems, chiefly unrealistic expectations for things like anal sex, facials and general “porn star” behaviour: pressure to look and perform in ways they’re often not comfortable with….

On 16 May 2012, a video of a Ted Talk called “The Great Porn Experiment” was placed on YouTube, and has been watched two-and-half-million times since. In it, a retired physiology teacher called Gary Wilson claims: “The widespread use of internet porn is one of the fastest moving global experiments every conducted.”

His argument is that we don’t know what happens to young men when they can watch an unlimited amount of pornography – both in terms of volume and variety – before they’ve had any kind of real-life sexual experience, because it has no precedent in history. Only now are the “guinea pigs” of the internet era reaching the age where they can tell us.

Any philosophers working on this?  Any links to relevant empirical literature on these developments?

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3 responses to “The effects of the widespread Internet availability of hardcore pornography”

  1. Rae Langton has made related points, both in her written work, and on John Perry and Ken Taylor's Philosophy Talk. Pamela Paul's book Pornified provides empirical information on this issue that matches up with the work above.

  2. I’m not sure if he has followed up on this research, but Theodore
    Bach’s 2010 book chapter “Pornography as Simulation” predicts and
    explains several of the observations made in the Esquire article. Bach
    outlines how pornography consumption is simulative, recruiting the
    cognitive mechanisms involved in mental simulation, motor mimicry, and
    tactile empathy. He then shows how, given the proliferation of
    unsavory pornography categories as well pornography’s objectification
    of women, this simulative model predicts (among other things) greater
    disconnect between real sex and porn-induced simulated sex as well as
    greater real-life objectification of women.

  3. "The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Review of the ‘Pornography Addiction’ Model"
    http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11930-014-0016-8

    Ungated version:
    http://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/LeyPrauseFinn2014.pdf

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