According to this blog post at Psychology Today (which has not yet discovered the typographical wonder that is paragraphs, so I’m helping them out with that) even anti-porn researchers are discovering that if their “porn wrecks lives” theory is true, it’s true in ways so subtle that the people with wrecked lives somehow fail to notice. Not only do people think porn is good for them, but the more they see, the better off they think they are:

What about at the individual level? Are women who view pornography terrorized beyond redemption? Do they descend into a well of despair and self-doubt about their sexuality? Do men become misogynist monsters upon viewing pornographic material? Do they develop debilitating penis insecurities at the sight of well-endowed male porn actors?

Let’s see what Gert Martin Hald and Neil M. Malamuth found in their 2008 paper titled Self-Perceived Effects of Pornographic Consumption. I should mention that Neil Malamuth is a highly regarded scholar of pornography who has often argued for its supposed ill effects. Hence, if there exists a possibility of an a priori bias here, it would be in hoping to find that pornography yields negative consequences.

In their survey of 688 young Danish adults (men = 316; women = 372), Hald and Malamuth found that respondents construed the viewing of hardcore pornography as beneficial to their sex lives, their attitudes towards sex, their perceptions and attitudes towards members of the opposite sex, toward life in general, and over all. The obtained beneficial effects were statistically significant for all but one measure across both sexes. Now here is the kicker: A positive correlation was obtained between the amount of hardcore pornography that was viewed and the impact of the benefits reaped. This positive correlation was found for both sexes. In other words, the more that one watched porn, the stronger the benefits (for both sexes)! There you have it.

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