{"id":2477,"date":"2011-05-20T11:21:09","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T01:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.msnaughty.com\/blog\/?p=2477"},"modified":"2011-05-20T11:21:09","modified_gmt":"2011-05-20T01:21:09","slug":"beware-these-skewed-statistics-about-porn-addiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/20\/beware-these-skewed-statistics-about-porn-addiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware These Skewed Statistics About Porn “Addiction”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TruthinessGail Dines is doing the rounds and she’s back in Australia promoting censorship of porn, saying that “there is no room for porn in a just society<\/a>.” The response to that is a whole other blog post (although I have 2 comments on that story). <\/p>\n

Today Joel Tozer, a freelance writer, offers his reply to Dines’ piece here<\/a>. And while it’s mostly OK, I’ve got a problem with his basic assumption that porn is “addictive” and his use of a University of Sydney study to back it up.<\/p>\n

Firstly, there is no scientific consensus on the topic of “porn addiction”.<\/strong> There is no diagnosis of pornography addiction in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Porn is not inherently “addictive” although some people may develop behavioural compulsions with it. The phrase “porn addiction” has become widespread thanks to its use by fundamentalist Christian organisations offering “cures” and anti-porn conservatives. It’s not helped by the numerous pseudo-psychological articles found online and the media’s constant unquestioning use of the term.<\/p>\n

The whole dirty ball of lint will then be expanded by a piece of research which has been conducted by Gomathi and Raj Sitharthan at the University of Sydney. I can see that their preliminary statistics are about to propagate throughout the media and become a new “truth” about porn, even though their research doesn’t come close to being the whole story.<\/p>\n

To quote from the Joel’s article:<\/p>\n

A world-first study in Sydney has found that almost half of all adults first watched pornography between the ages of 11 and 13…<\/p>\n

Preliminary results from the University of Sydney study show many men, and women, are spending massive amounts of time and money viewing porn. Of more than 700 adult Australians surveyed, about one-third looked at internet porn three to five times a week, while 28 per cent look at it almost every day – half of them for between 30 minutes and three hours. A few are spending up to 14 hours watching porn.<\/p>\n

Co-researcher Professor Raj Sitharthan says many are becoming addicted to the safety of online pornography to the point where some are unable to achieve orgasm during intercourse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s the thing the article doesn’t tell you: that university study was created specifically to study “porn addiction”<\/strong>. It’s basic premise was that porn addiction is real and it sought to find participants who felt they had a problem with porn. <\/p>\n

Here’s the abstract, taken from this University of Sydney Page<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Impact of Internet Pornography
\nThe purpose of this research is to further our understanding of Internet Pornography Addiction\/ Problematic Internet-Enabled Sexual Behaviours .The study is exploring the support \/ treatment currently available for internet pornography addiction. The investigation is also exploring help seeking behaviour for internet pornography addiction and the barriers to seeking assistance. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When you click through to the survey<\/a>, the questions are very specific in their tone. Under the heading of “The Impact of Internet Pornography”, the questions are:<\/p>\n

How often do you find that you stay on-line longer than you intended?
\nHow often do you neglect household chores to spend more time on-line?
\nHow often do you prefer the excitement of the Internet to intimacy with your partner?
\nHow often do you form new relationships with fellow on-line users?
\nHow often do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend on-line?
\nHow often do your grades or school work suffer because of the amount of time you spend on-line?
\nHow often do you check your e-mail before something else that you need to do?
\nHow often does your job performance or productivity suffer because of the Internet?
\nHow often do you become defensive or secretive when anyone asks you what you do on-line?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that’s just the first page of questions<\/strong>. There’s another page of very similar questions before things get specific about first use of porn, what kind of porn is used etc.<\/p>\n

I actually wanted to take part in this survey because I thought it might be about porn use<\/em>. When I encountered those first biased questions I realised that I did not not fulfil their criteria – or their agenda. So I filled it out anyway, hoping to at least even up their figures a little bit. <\/p>\n

By the way, question 41 is “Would you like to seek professional assistance to manage your dependence viewing pornographic materials?”<\/p>\n

Question 42 says “If you answered Yes to question 41, how would you like to receive assistance to manage your dependence on pornographic materials:
\n\t* send me booklets
\n\t* via the internet
\n\t* face-to-face individual counselling
\n\t* group counseling<\/p>\n

So, it’s pretty clear that this is not research about porn use. It’s research about porn “addiction” and one of its aims is finding the best way to cure that “addiction”.<\/p>\n

The problem with today’s SMH article is that the figures produced by this survey are being quoted out of context. The statistics are being used to imply that ALL Australians accessed porn early and that lots of people have some kind of problem with it or use it constantly. The article doesn’t acknowledge that the survey was designed to find people who already thought they had some kind of problem with it.<\/p>\n

Now, watch the truthiness propagate out. These figures will start to pop up in mainstream media outlets without any fact checking. They’ll be repeated ad nauseum until it becomes The Truth.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this is often the problem with a lot of research into porn. It often approaches the subject as if porn use is a problem that needs to be solved, or it has an anti-porn slant. This is why I’m really looking forward to the results of the Pornography Research Online study<\/a> being conducted by Clarissa Smith, Feona Attwood and Martin Barker, three UK academics who are interested in studying porn use. They want to be as objective as they can with the results.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t already, I recommend you take their private and confidential survey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I also recommend the Sexademic’s excellent debunking of the “addiction” myth here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gail Dines is doing the rounds and she’s back in Australia promoting censorship of porn, saying that “there is no room for porn in a just society.” The response to that is a whole other blog post (although I have 2 comments on that story). Today Joel Tozer, a freelance writer, offers his reply to Dines’ piece here. And while it’s mostly OK, I’ve got a problem with his basic Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14],"tags":[43,357,915,677,757],"class_list":["post-2477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism","category-porn","tag-addiction","tag-gail-dines","tag-porn","tag-research","tag-statistics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}