One of my more conservative, straight and cisgendered female friends posted a link to this on her Facebook timeline yesterday evening with comment noting that science had gone ahead and proved what she’d long suspected.
I’ll be the first to admit that I know fuck all about science and research methods. But conceptually, it seems to me that this experiment was structured in such a fashion as to produce the desired results–namely: to prove that an increase in time spent viewing porn facilitates negative neurological consequences.
I cannot access anything more than the study abstract but it seems to me that there were 64 male participants. Beyond their cis-gendered-ness, nothing is mentioned about their sexual preference. The only concern seems to be their self-reporting the amount of time they spend every week consuming pornography.
Already–this is in and of itself–problematic: it assumes a standard heteronormative experience of sexuality in relationship to presuppositions about pornography. Additionally, there is no mention of whether or not a preference for specific kinds of porn were reported. If the participant has a preference for MILF or Asian creampie material, this will skew the test results in favor of the end the experiment is trying to prove. (Also, who curates the clips shown to the participants. What were the criteria for the curation? We each of the 64 participants showed the same footage?)
To me it seems logical that those who consume more porn would–at the very least have a clearer understanding of what they enjoy seeing whereas those who consume less porn are more goosed by the novelty (for lack of a better way of putting it). I know that in my case, unless someone curated the clips I was going to watch based around my particular interests, then I’d be bored as fuck. (I’m hardly an expert on neurology but I suspect that could easily register as a decrease in motivation.)
Also, to what degree was the material shown to the participants low-budget, sloppy, sexists garbage? Can we run another experiment where we show the participants episodes of fucking Friends and compare the results? What about repeating the same experiment with straight, cisgendered women?
Or, maybe I’m just a neuroatypical nutbag who over thinks everything including the porn I consume…
Researchers Find Association Between Porn Viewing And Less Grey Matter In The Brain
Acetylene Eyes 