looking for a good time ? call ...
"85% of those surveyed were male". So how do I get in contact with the other 15% ?
Paris for the obvious reason.
Habitual viewers of smut often mess up their lives, according to preliminary analysis of a new study conducted by University of Sydney academics, who believe the problem is caused in part by the ubiquitous availability of online video nasties that viewers can watch anywhere, with many devices. Dr Gomathi Sitharthan from the …
No, it would be like saying a percentage of habitual dope smokers have been in trouble with the law or lost their job as a result of their addiction.
Not the fault of the dope per se, but it's the element without which the result would not have happened.
Dope isn't addictive (unless you abuse the word addiction, as in "porn addiction"). We'd get a lot further with these debates if the distinction between habit and addiction was maintained.
The difference with dope is that it's illegal, so you can get in trouble with the law just by using it. Porn is not generally illegal, hence the connection to troubles with the law is necessarily more indirect.
Although, watching porn at work or smoking dope at work are equally likely to get you fired. I wouldn't know; being self-employed I can do both.
It's a chicken and egg problem. We know from biological studies that the endorphins released during sex are some of the most powerful and addictive that the human body encounters (just because they are natural doesn't make them safe). If that cycle is couple with an OCB personality, the results follow logically. Maybe the OCB would express itself differently if it hadn't encountered the sex endorphin cycle, but the sex endorphin cycle would certainly define that instantiation of the issue. Maybe it can be got at and resolved through other psychological methods, but I don't see that removing the sex component helps resolve the issue for the OCB patient.
Excessive anything is bad. Why be surprised that excessive porn users have problems, when we are not surprised excessive drinkers get drunk more often, and are prone to alcoholism, or excessive eaters are quite likely to be obese.
People use ?.
Some people over use ?.
Ban/control ?.
Once again, they're confusing correlation with causality. Dr Sitharthan says.”We are finding that people do understand that their excessive porn viewing is impacting on their lives and they want to change," so she clearly believes that porn causes bad things. But isn't it just as possible that people that have other problems, such as depression, unhappy relationships, or trouble at work, will turn to something like porn, drugs, alcohol, sports, reality TV, etc., to make themselves feel better?
Is it the porn causing the destructive behaviors, or the other way around? Maybe instead of judging porn users, these doctors should consider porn usage a possible indicator of a real problem and leave the moral judgements out of it.
Numbers are nice, but everyone already knew there were some people taking porn-viewing to excess. That's true of anything - if you looked a bit, you should be able to find a few hundred people who ruined their lives by excessive television, gaming or religion. This study only looked at the extreme cases. What we really need is some idea of how many people who view porn fall into that category, as opposed to just enjoying it a couple of times a week and otherwise getting on with their lives.
I know a great many people who like porn, and yet somehow none of them have been fired or ran into legal trouble because of it.
not read the original study, but nothing in here to suggest causation or a correllation. i.e. watching porn causing a crap life or crap life makes them watch porn?
Also - 20% would rather watch porn than be at it with a woman - so 80% would rather have the real thing but presumably aren't getting it?
Also - a lifestyle involving 'extreme' or 'excessive' porn causes trouble? Is that like saying the majority of people into armed robbery said that it ruined their lives, leading to legal trouble, job loss and social exclusion?
Inquiring minds...
Steve
From the article:
"surveyed 800 habitual online smut viewers and found “excessive users had severe social and relationship problems and had often lost their jobs or been in trouble with the law as a result of their addiction."
This is questionable science. In the first place how were the subjects selected? I find it hard to believe that a truly representative sample population could be obtained since I wouldn't expect that many smut viewers without problems would volunteer to be studied.
Second the conclusion apparently being drawn is that excessive viewing of smut results in severe social, relationship, and employment problems. It is just as likely that having such severe problems resulted in the excessive smut viewing as a distraction from reality.
This kind of bogus science shouldn't be taken as gospel. Sometimes scientists have personal axes to grind just like laymen.
===KGH
This post has been deleted by its author
I know of two people who lost their jobs because they were downloading huge amounts of porn via an Internet connection at work. It turned out that one of them had lost his previous job for the same reason. In both cases, they were downloading so much that their systems featured in the top 10 Internet users - next to email, web and ftp servers. Both were employed in technical roles, so would have been aware of the concepts of firewalls and service monitoring.
"...they were fired for being morons then?"
Well, that's what I thought. I had even tried to warn the second one by moving a few of his pictures to his desktop and deleting the rest of his porn collection on his work-issued desktop but to no avail - I guess the porn addiction overrides all common sense.
The problem with studies like this, is just how tiny a number they represent - not only that, how are the subjects chosen in the first place?
Surely the act of signing up for a study would, in many cases, imply the subject is possibly in some sort of financial trouble, or is troubled within themselves?
Do they apply via adverts in papers? Are they just the type of people who are frequently used in different scientific studies for cash? Are they people that have already been in trouble for viewing smut?
The figure of 800 habitual viewers is given - how did they get chosen? - offered free smut for contributing? (smirk)
See where I'm going with this - unless you can do a totally random selection and guarantee those contributing are telling the truth and also get a *significant* volume of data, the results are tainted from the start.
This can be said of the vast majority of studies of a subjective nature.
“Surely the act of signing up for a study would, in many cases, imply the subject is possibly in some sort of financial trouble, or is troubled within themselves?”
Nope, no such thing of all. There are many ways that people are recruited for these types of academic research and they don’t get paid.
From what I’ve read, the results – or rather the preliminary results, which are being discussed here – were obtained from an online survey. This is a very common method.
“See where I'm going with this - unless you can do a totally random selection and guarantee those contributing are telling the truth and also get a *significant* volume of data, the results are tainted from the start.”
Not really, this news article has been culled from a press release from a university about the preliminary findings from a research project. We’re just getting the juicy bits, which will ensure media coverage.
There will be a published paper in due course, which will state how the participants were chosen and the method of obtaining the information – it’s also very common for the writers to comment about the margin of error and about factors that may affect the actual findings. It’s when you’ve read that, that you’re in a position to really scrutinise the project.
It would suck to be a subject in your lab then. Participants in most studies are compensated either through direct payments or course credit for uni students.
Also, no real study uses online respondants/participants. You just can't do science like that. I hope that's not what you're doing.
I wonder if we are going to see more and more studies like this over the next year or so, with a miss-mash of information (to confuse), which then results in a government official quoting these reports as a way to argue about blocking web sites or white listing porn?
That is the government way after all!
But I hope not! I like porn! It keeps me from going ape-like mental when I see women (being single and all)....
If there is rigid online censorship in Australia I have yet to come up against it. The reality is that there have been persistent failed attempts at online censorship. Failed, because no one supports them except a few unrepresentative lobby groups which unfortunately have the main political parties running scared.