[stratomorph]

You see, that's my point. How do we know there are serious negative consequences at all? Because of the anecdotes she mentions? She didn't cite any rigorous study that concludes pornography is harmful, but simply appealed to our gut feeling that it's got to be hurting us somehow. While I may agree or disagree, my complaint is that her anecdotal evidence is somehow supposed to sweep away the presumably well-designed study cited at the start. That's the opposite of science.

Edit: My tone here is a little combative. Sorry, it's not intended as an attack on you.

[radu_floricica]

I was thinking reading the article: the guys who mindlessly copy porn moves and replies, how do we know it they would have been any better without porn? A pretty good hypothesis is that they wouldn't, they'd have been either woefully inexperienced or unimaginative. That's why gut feelings are bad and studies are good.

[akgerber]

But studies don't come into existence out of thin air. You need to put things into conversation for someone to put the effort in to go out and do a study.

[tome]

That's OK I wasn't offended.

If it's so hard to study, for example, the climate scientifically, then it must be orders of magnitude harder to study something like the effect of pornography scientifically. I simply don't think it's a scientific question.

That's not to say that the article should be confused for an academic study of any sort, but it's certainly useful insofar as it will encourage some readers to think about a specific aspect of pornography prevalence that they'd never thought of before.