[maxbond]

> [P]eople across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction.

I think everyone acknowledges it can be, but it's a pretty distinct cohort that holds it necessarily is. Definitely not that it inevitably leads to sexual dysfunction, that's just patently untrue.

Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem. Every adult who's sex life I know anything about, watches porn. They're fine.

[User23]

> Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem.

Got a source for this? Because everything I look at suggests that much like alcohol, a relatively small number of habitual users account for the vast majority of consumption.

[maxbond]

Not to hand. That's my belief from my observation. I looked for statistics for about 10 minutes, but didn't really find good information. I suspect this area is under researched. Happy to look at any sources you want to link.

Both of these can be true, however. I imagine most adults sometimes drink alcohol too. Personally I might go weeks or months without watching porn, it's not something I generally do everyday. People who do would blow my usage out of the water (which, to be clear, is fine, you do you).

As a thought experiment - we all agree that lots of people watch porn, right? So if it leads to addiction or sexual dysfunction at even a rate of 1% or 2%, that would be an epidemic. If there are tens of millions of porn consumers in the US (which I think is very conservative), we'd expect hundreds of thousands of people to develop issues.

So - where are they? Do we have a source for that?

[shadowgovt]

You know, the organizations most likely to have that information are the ones with the big data on access and source IP address, who could make an educated guess on the scale and variety of consumers of pornography.

... In other words, PornHub.

[maxbond]

Do you think anonymous surveys wouldn't work here? (Genuinely asking and not being snarky, I expected to find lots of people doing surveys in this area but didn't readily find it, so I'm open to there being something I'm not understanding.)

[shadowgovt]

I have no idea. Broadly speaking, I don't trust self-reporting on anything taboo even when it's anonymous; people both lie to themselves and have justified paranoia about precisely how anonymous any collected data is.

... But it's real hard to fake the actual server requests and human sourced usage patterns to the service provider at scale.

[maxbond]

Yeah, ideally I suppose we'd have both and perhaps other sorts of measurements, the server logs can still have error because of eg bots scraping porn sites, the uncertainty of attribution, and people who consume porn offline (by downloading it, by ordering DVDs or magazines, etc).

There's also the matter that, from what I've observed, women often prefer erotic literature. That seems very difficult to parse out from traffic.

For what it's worth, I did come across one article where researchers were using data from an analytics company to probe porn use[1], but it wasn't measuring what I was looking for, so I didn't look too closely.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2023.2...