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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Roll up, roll up to yet another round in the "Pornography: Harmless Enjoyment That Prevents Rape, or Degradation of Women And Should Be Banned" boxing match!

This time, news from Ireland. A study by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ‘Use of Pornography by Young Adults in Ireland’, was published today. It's generally on the negative side. I was surprised by this plum which I plucked out - men from advantaged, as opposed to disadvantaged, backgrounds use porn more.

Before anyone goes "Ah yeah, well this is what you'd expect the ESRI in Ireland to say", they're not religious, they're no more right-wing than any semi-government body, the Church has nothing to do with them, and remember we're up to our necks in Pride parades and trans non-binary gender rights (as Leo tried and failed to get with the recent referenda. Speaking of which, I'll be coming back to those elsewhere) with social liberalisation now, so it's not "little Catholic Ireland finger-wags at porn, the backwards repressed bunch".

This is the age cohort they studied, the ESRI says the study is about "pornography use among over 4,500 young adults at 20 years of age" which is when the last reporting was done:

This cohort started in 2008 with 8,500 children aged 9 years. Information was collected from parents, teachers, Principals and the children themselves. Additional perspectives were collected by post from non-resident parents and regular carers of the Study Child. This cohort was revisited at age 13 years, 17/18 years and at age 20. Fieldwork for Cohort ’98 at 25 is currently underway.

Growing Up in Ireland is the national longitudinal study of children and young people, a joint project of the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY) and the Central Statistics Office (CSO). Since 2006, the study has provided Government with an evidence base to make informed policy decisions on a wide range of issues based on data from children and young people living in Ireland.

For over 15 years, the study has followed the progress of two groups of children: 8,000 9-year-olds (Cohort ’98) and 10,000 9-month-olds (Cohort ’08). The members of Cohort ’98 are now 25-26 years old and those of Cohort ’08 are around 16 years old. In 2023, the study launched a new third cohort of babies who will be 9 months old in 2024.

Now! The juicy summation of findings, which is where the hair-pulling starts!

(O)nline pornography use in Ireland is highly gendered, with 64 per cent of young men and 13 per cent of young women reporting use.

Key findings:

  • Different factors are linked to pornography use for men and women.
  • Men from more advantaged backgrounds are more likely to use pornography. In contrast, there is little systematic variation by social background for women.
  • Men from lone-parent families are less likely than those from two-parent families to use pornography, while rates of use are higher for women from lone-parent families.
  • Pornography use is lower among those with a religious affiliation and where there is greater parental monitoring of behaviour in adolescence.
  • There is no strong relationship evident between the provision of Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) at school and pornography use. However, this finding is limited by the fact that the GUI study did not collect data on the quality or extent of RSE received by young people.
  • Young people who are more reliant on the Internet or (in the case of men in particular) their friends rather than their parents for information about sex are significantly more likely to use pornography. LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly women in this group, are more likely to use pornography. This may reflect information-seeking among this group or their lack of contact with other LGBTQ+ youth.

The study also looked at the relationship between pornography use and two sets of outcomes: sexual behaviour and wellbeing.

  • In general, users and non-users of pornography do not differ in their use of contraception, but users of pornography are significantly less likely to use condoms regularly.
  • Men who use pornography have poorer wellbeing than non-users, being less satisfied with their lives, reporting more depressive symptoms and having a poorer self-image. This pattern is evident even taking account of levels of wellbeing at 17 years of age.
  • Among both women and men, those who use pornography have higher levels of aggression and are more likely to cope with stress by using negative strategies, such as drinking alcohol or drug-taking, or taking to their bed.

I'm leaving this here for discussion, I'm not going to express an opinion one way or the other.

So porn is an addictive behavior and high levels of addictive behavior predict poor mental health outcomes pretty strongly. That’s not a surprise.

Boys of single moms use a lot of porn, that’s not a surprise either. Upper class boys using more porn is somewhat surprising, but I think part of that is just having less actual sex. LGBT people use more porn, not a surprise there.

Strong religious affiliation(this is Ireland, so I’m pretty sure this group is heavily catholic) predicting lower porn use, not a surprise. More parental involvement predicting lower porn use, also not surprising. Rely on the internet or on friends for information about sex correlating with increased porn use certainly makes sense when you think about it.

I’m struck by how much of this seems to be correlates with having a good or bad relationship with your parents.

Boys of single moms use a lot of porn, that’s not a surprise either.

Other way round, which was also very surprising to me. Sons of single mothers use porn less than boys from two-parent families, but girls from single-parent families use porn more. That wasn't intuitive, so whether the single-parent boys are lying or whether they have stronger bonds with their mothers, I have no idea what is going on. Girls from single-parents families, not so surprising, they often have poor outcomes.

I have no idea what is going on

What you are looking at, probably, is amplified noise. They display three models of increasing statistical complexity, the simplest one (model 1) got them almost no results, with almost all their results coming for the most complicated one. None of the models is explained in any great detail and this wasn't a pre-registered study (AFAICT) so who knows how many models they even tried.

I think this is just ‘they have more real sex’, which shouldn’t surprise anyone- they’re probably from a lower social stratum, imbibe less conservative views around sex, etc, etc.

Seems like a spurious correlation to me.

A quick perusal of the summary makes me wonder what's the % difference between these groups. It could simply be noise or it could be statistically relevant and worth a closer study. The weird superposition of people as both individuals and social communities, and the fact that the summary doesn't say the exact usage difference between these groups, makes me wonder if it is actually relevant.

From the study, about half of the negative effect of porn is just gay men watching more porn and being more depressed in general (model 3 on page 50). Also, the study suspiciously says porn usage imparts a massive uptick in violence, which leads me to believe there's just other factors not being controlled for. One of the authoritarian right's attacks on porn is that masturbation leads to men essentially "leaking their manna" and becoming passive and less likely to pursue their goals, which is the opposite of what this study finds.

Yeah, but the whole thing is this is not the authoritarian right, it's not a right-coded conservative think-tank. I don't think it comes down to "porn makes you more X", I think it's more like "people with problems like depression, anger issues, etc. engage in anti-social/coping behaviours like getting in fights, being aggressive, drinking, smoking, drugs, and porn use".

the whole thing is this is not the authoritarian right

I wasn't saying this publication was from the auth-right, I was saying it has similar goals as the auth-right in banning porn, but its evidence is the opposite of what the auth-right normally claims. Both sides want to ban porn, but one side is saying it increases violence while the other side says it decreases violence. Both claims can't be true simultaneously. At an intuitive level, the claim that porn leads to violence simply doesn't make much sense to me, and leads me to believe this study is falling victim to selection effects, i.e. the old "correlation doesn't equal causation".

I think it's more like "people with problems like depression, anger issues, etc. engage in anti-social/coping behaviours like getting in fights, being aggressive, drinking, smoking, drugs, and porn use".

I agree with this, the behaviors correlate but aren't caused by each other. So a porn ban wouldn't have the desired effect and the study is effectively worthless.

It is plain to me that "pornography" - in the broadest sense of the term, any material that contains the explicit depiction of sexual activities or sexualized nudity, fictional or not, regardless of context or intended purpose - represents the most urgently necessary direction of development for art in general, the most fertile soil for aesthetic discoveries and innovations, and indeed the greatest possibility of an experience that might be called "spiritual".

Plainly there has never been an epoch of human history where sexuality was not of central importance. And consider the explicitly acknowledged centrality of sexuality in contemporary political discourse - not only the status of men and women in general, but also transsexuality and homosexuality, consent, the depiction of women's bodies. An art that does not fully develop its capacities in this domain is a dead art, an art that has abdicated its duty.

Some of the most important and advanced works of recent decades were not produced by the organs of the academy and traditional "literary circles", but are instead being circulated on obscure Japanese doujin sites and fanfiction platforms.

Anyone who flatly announces themselves as "anti-pornography", without first demonstrating that they have clearly perceived the aesthetic necessity for art to become more "pornographic", instantly arouses great mistrust in me. It is evidence that their senses have been dulled regarding certain vital matters.

I might as well mention it here, even though it's very tangential: today, Gumroad announced that NSFW content will no longer be allowed on the platform (well, I say "announced," but it's more that this KB article was uploaded/updated today).

For those who don't know, Gumroad is a sort of storefront service, akin to Etsy and the like: you open your storefront, add products (generally digital, but there's some allowance for selling physical goods), and people can buy from you. Simple as. The thing that's notable about Gumroad is that probably something like 80% of all products available on Gumroad are NSFW art of various kinds--many 18+ artists who take commissions or run Patreons and the like tended to open up a Gumroad storefront to sell monthly content and such a la carte to fans and others interested.

Now, granted, even previously, Gumroad did have limits as to what you could sell, but I think the hardest line was essentially "no porn of or between living humans." It was otherwise pretty permissible and you could indeed find anything from explicit cosplay to explicit illustrations and everything in-between.

However, some months ago, Gumroad added PayPal support (and/or they had it even further in the past, but removed it at one point?), and was already also using Stripe for credit card processing. Both these companies, as you may know, tend to disallow their services being used to purchase adult stuff (and they themselves attempt to pass the buck to the credit card companies themselves, who have had a policy of not supporting adult stuff because of allegedly high chargeback rates from embarassed men). The announcement today was perhaps inevitable, but still quite disappointing.

If Gumroad didn't do this, they'd presumably lose support and be choked off from money for too long. The CEO did at least try and bargain for an extension to the deadline, but no dice. Every day, the argument of "just build your own financial system" seems like less and less of a ridiculous proposition.

Don't you need to distinguish pornography here from any work that is about sex?

Simply containing a depiction of sex, or more than that, being about sex, relationships, desire, and identity is not sufficient to make something porn. Porn is not about investigating those things - indeed, a work that sincerely investigates or explores those issues in a meaningful way is practically by definition not porn.

Some of the most important and advanced works of recent decades were not produced by the organs of the academy and traditional "literary circles", but are instead being circulated on obscure Japanese doujin sites and fanfiction platforms.

If I have skimmed the study correctly, it's not talking about "pornography" in the same way you are. While it starts with a broad definition, it soon narrows down to just look at "watched pornography online". This is also why it reports such large differences between male and female consumption - it deletes the female consumption by ignoring euphemistically categorized written material (this doesn't explain all the gap but it is a sizable fraction of it).

I think this really quickly devolves into a semantic argument on the definition of pornography. So, let's avoid that and take it to the level of use or consumption.

If, like you, people are reading obscure Japanese doujin sites to try to explore the new depths / heights of frontier fiction, that's all well and good. I definitely don't subscribe to the idea that "Art" is only what The New Yorker deems worthy.

But hyperscale internet porn is not being used as an exploratory medium. It's an utterly cheap consumptive good that users mainline to meet base biological urges. The best comparison is absolutely processed sugar. It's such an overwhelming stimulant to the "yes, good, more!" part of the brain that it creates an almost addict like behavior pattern. When you're hyper-circuiting your brain by overcharging your endocrine system, there are no cycles left to devote to metaphysical pondering of the high concepts of art. My 3 hour jerk-fest to Backdoor Sluts 9 does not conclude with a new appreciation for the masculine-feminine dynamic.

So, this leaves us with the question of is it possible to separate and independently evaluate the medium from its most common consumption pattern? Can we look at "tasteful" amateur porn and draw some interesting conclusions about art and sexual behavior while casting away the comments section with such profound gems as "tits are meh. good bj"

I'd argue no - because the feedback loop in internet porn is inherently based on the consumption patterns of the users. PornHub makes money through data mining and algorithm building. Content creators there surf trends just as much as YouTube content creators. Indirectly, the consuming user today is the trend-setter for tomorrow. Operating at the speed and scale of the internet, this creates the insane feedback loops that lead to weird niches suddenly bubbling to the top. (faux-cest etc.)

So, is porn bad and are people who call themselves anti-porn worth taking seriously? Yes. Because they're not talking about the content in isolation, they're talking about the larger patterns, systems, and societal outcomes surrounding it. The Irish study presented above literally ends by saying "people who use porn a lot have bad lives. We don't like that they have bad lives." This is a far, far cry from the trope of a Nancy Reagan look alike waggling her finger at a few playboys found under a mattress. This is not a rejection of the primacy of human sexuality in culture. This is not puritanical rejection of the body. This is a principled stand against the degradation of beauty, intimacy, and pro-social functioning.

My 3 hour jerk-fest to Backdoor Sluts 9 does not conclude with a new appreciation for the masculine-feminine dynamic.

Well not with that attitude it won't.

Why not leave yourself open to the possibility that the phenomenon still has something in it that you haven't appreciated yet, instead of just writing it off?

So, is porn bad and are people who call themselves anti-porn worth taking seriously? Yes. Because they're not talking about the content in isolation, they're talking about the larger patterns, systems, and societal outcomes surrounding it.

To be clear I don't think there's anything particularly unique, special, or valuable about the average /r/gonewild post.

Partially my concern is simply due to the classic philosophical problem of drawing boundaries. How do you say where one color ends and another begins if there's a smooth transition between them, how do you draw precise boundaries two races or two languages? How do you come up with precise criteria that will let you say - yes, this audiovisual work contains explicit depictions of sex, but it's the bad kind, mass produced pablum, prone to inducing addiction and societal decay, with no redeeming aesthetic value; and this audiovisual work contains explicit depictions of sex, but it's the good kind, ennobling and uplifting, fully meritorious, saved from being consigned to the flames because we have bestowed upon it all the protections granted by the designation of Art?

I don't trust people who call themselves "anti-porn" to make the distinction. I don't think they particularly care about getting it right in the first place. There are many historical examples of the censors getting it wrong - see the controversy that surrounded something as anodyne as Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and the painting's initial rejection from the Paris Salon. I don't even trust myself to be able to make the distinction. Although we must of necessity classify various works as superior and inferior, such judgements are always in the last instance provisional; it is impossible to guarantee that you have exhausted all the possibilities inherent in any given work, and all judgements may be overturned by new evidence or future developments and recontextualizations.

I would also say that I believe that a certain wellspring of unrestrained sexual energy is necessary to counterbalance the encroaching technocratic, hyper-rational global order (and there are no significant public champions of this approach today, in spite of what superficial appearances might lead you to believe about the left - they are deeply mistrustful of sexuality), although this is a speculative thesis that I would probably not be able to speak cogently on at this time.

How do you say where one color ends and another begins if there's a smooth transition between them, how do you draw precise boundaries two races or two languages?

You can't / it's really hard. But this is why my post began with the intent to avoid a semantic argument which eventually gets where it starts; nowhere.

How do you come up with precise criteria ...

In this context, I would say the line of demarcation is "was this content produced with the intent to serve a market demand of consumers using the previous demand signals of those very consumers to design it (the content)?" If yes, then Porn.

I put "art" as a meta-concept closely related to "truth." Anything that earnestly tries to reveal the truth of something could be called art (but could also be called something else - "analysis", "philosophy" what have you. I'm just saying "art" is one possible label). But something that is designed, constructed, and broadcast solely to cater to the consumerist preferences of a group of people fails this test. To give an example; I love sports and love the emblems of certain sports teams. I think the crossed "NY" of the Yankees is almost like the Coke logo in terms of human universal recognition. Yet, I wouldn't quite call it art. Another post in the thread discussed Warhol and Campbell's soup. Although I think it was self-indulgent and eye-rollingly "hip," I can at least contemplate the argument that it was an attempt to reveal some truth about mid 20th century consumerism.

I don't even trust myself to be able to make the distinction

Combined with the intro sentence of that same paragraph, it appears you are close to saying "I don't trust anyone to make a distinction besides those who call themselves pro-porn and art experts?" Perhaps that's not charitable, but that's how I'm reading it. Regardless, I've set forth to you my explicit criteria (above). Also saying something like "I don't trust myself on x, but I can also spot other folks who can't be trusted" seems to be a little bit of a double-reverse. I can't quite put a finger on it, but I think this is rhetorical sleight of hand.

Although we must of necessity classify various works as superior and inferior, such judgements are always in the last instance provisional; it is impossible to guarantee that you have exhausted all the possibilities inherent in any given work, and all judgements may be overturned by new evidence or future developments and recontextualizations.

Yes, the future may change how we look at the past and we cannot predict the future. I don't know what point this proves other than to retreat to a milquetoast "who's to say?" Nevertheless, I do actually think it is, has, and always will be easy to designate something as porn / filth (though I don't believe we should ban it). Take James Joyce's infamous letters to his wife (or maybe mistress, I can't remember). Even when you're one of the greatest writers in 100 years, when you talk about fucking the farts out of you "shitting like a pig" girlfriend, you're getting fuckin' gross, dude. Ditto for Lord Byron and his frat house "So, I was banging this one chick, right?" poems.

I would also say that I believe that a certain wellspring of unrestrained sexual energy is necessary to counterbalance the encroaching technocratic, hyper-rational global order.

The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities. This is exactly the objective and outcome of feminism - It says young women should "express themselves" and "have fun" .... so that they then end up bitter, unmarried, childless, and neurotic at 35. It ruins souls and beauty.

What's needed is a fundamental respect for the human body across all of its dimensions, including the sexual. That's the whole point. That's what everyone anti-porn is arguing. Pornography is not only demonstrably extrinsically bad because, as the Irish study says, it turns people generally and broadly unhappy, it is intrinsically bad because its production constitutes a fundamental disrespect for human beauty and authentic sexuality or what would may be called eros. This is a little too meta to be a serious demarcation criteria, but that's what I would submit for the porn/art distinct even outside of the modern internet hyperscale context.

It is bewildering to me that so much explicit sexual content in society is broadcast out to people of all ages, without their informed consent, and then mass reaction to it is sort of a squirm-and-look-away at best. This is bad for everyone involved and everyone watching.

the left - they are deeply mistrustful of sexuality

Couldn't agree more.

Well not with that attitude it won't.

I laughed.

Also saying something like "I don't trust myself on x, but I can also spot other folks who can't be trusted" seems to be a little bit of a double-reverse. I can't quite put a finger on it, but I think this is rhetorical sleight of hand.

Let me put it this way: I have no interest in classifying works as either "mass market products" or "genuine Art". This is of no use to me (and indeed it can be actively harmful).

Even when you're one of the greatest writers in 100 years, when you talk about fucking the farts out of you "shitting like a pig" girlfriend, you're getting fuckin' gross, dude.

His letters are obviously beautiful.

The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities.

I hear this idea a lot that the globalists want to push porn because it destroys people, but as far as I can tell this is contradicted by most of the available evidence. Most major corporations and websites are not very friendly to porn at all:

  • Patreon's ToS outright bans porn involving real people (and they will shut down fiction/drawings too if they think it's too "extreme")
  • Apple app store obviously bans porn
  • Major payment processors like Paypal do not want to be associated with porn
  • Steam's guidelines have a bit of leeway but generally they don't publish porn, it's common for localizers of Japanese adult games to put a gimped version of the game on Steam and then have a separate patch you download to restore the cut content

I mean yeah porn isn't literally illegal and is always just one click away for anyone with internet access, but, the same can be said for a lot of politically incorrect stuff.

I would contend Steam, there are actually a number of games that are outright uncensored (with no need for a patch) and/or contain explicit content in their store page materials.

Dude, Pornhub is not out there trying to enhance the spiritual achievement of the race, it's trying to make money out of people who want to watch naked bodies going at it in their favourite fetish. I don't see that a fetish about eating shit is going to move the spiritual needle upwards, even making all the allowances for the left hand path and the aghori.

Pornhub is not out there trying to enhance the spiritual achievement of the race

I prefer to reserve judgement and proceed cautiously in such matters, when possible.

With regards to the case of pornhub specifically, I'd gesture towards something like Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, or his prints of Marilyn Monroe - turning the concept of mass production itself into an aesthetic phenomenon.

don't see that a fetish about eating shit is going to move the spiritual needle upwards

I sincerely, earnestly disagree.

(Of course not all porn is great just because it's porn. Every genre has superior and inferior works. But if a video about eating shit is bad, it's not bad because it's a video of eating shit. It would be bad for other reasons.)

Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, or his prints of Marilyn Monroe - turning the concept of mass production itself into an aesthetic phenomenon.

is modern art really art?, or is it just a Banana taped to the wall?

I think the Brillo boxes look nice and it would be fun to hold one in my hands and carry it around. Seems like art to me.

It sparks an internal and social reflection that we would even entertain the notion that a banana taped to a wall is art, therefore, it is art.

Broke: Some of the most important and advanced works of recent decades were produced on obscure Japanese doujin sites and fanfiction platforms.

Woke: Pornhub is not out there trying to enhance the spiritual achievement of the race, it's trying to make money out of people who want to watch naked bodies going at it in their favourite fetish.

Bespoke: Pornhub is not trying to make money, it's actively trying to drag down and destroy the spiritual achievement of the race.

That's actually a valid question. Does Pornhub make money? I... assume it does, but I don't see how. I know most of their content is stolen or free, but hosting videos at scale is expensive. I can't see most of their users paying for premium, or advertisers paying much for ads there. And these days Onlyfans dominates the market of people paying for adult videos. What the hell is Pornhub doing?

In fairness, ever since the big controversy with GirlsDoPorn and the temporary financial deplatforming they went through, they got rid of uploads from "unverified" users and have pivoted to adding OnlyFans/ManyVids-type features. Also, I think you underestimate the ad revenue.

They probably do make money. I'd be interested to see some actual numbers though, even a rough estimate.

Yes -- they make shitloads. Even lower-tier sites make absolute boatloads on subscriptions if managed somewhat intelligently. There's a certain amount of whale action, but a lot of it actually amounts to 'drunk horny dude wants to watch the rest of one of your videos and puts a $10 subscription on his visa". On aggregate there are a lot of drunk horny dudes, and a certain number of them are also less-than-conscientious about cancelling subscriptions. You can certainly fuck it up, but if one is moderately savvy it's a lucrative business.

It's generally on the negative side. I was surprised by this plum which I plucked out - men from advantaged, as opposed to disadvantaged, backgrounds use porn more.

No surprise there. They're more on the internet and on average have less access to actual women who would be willing to have sex with them (proportionally fewer Chads among the advantaged compared to Henrys among the disadvantaged)

proportionally fewer Chads among the advantaged compared to Henrys among the disadvantaged

Or, alternatively, lower class women are easy.

Are there coinciding identities that might impact things here? Religious practice among upper vs lower classes? Or immigration and resulting cultural differences?

I think there's also evidence that wealthier people spend more time, on average, on the internet, which is surely the most obvious explanation.

"Pornography: Harmless Enjoyment That Prevents Rape, or Degradation of Women And Should Be Banned"

For some reason I read this as ""Pornography: Harmless Enjoyment That Prevents Rape or Degradation of Women - And Should Be Banned".

On the main point, hasn't it been pointed out that the lower classes generally tend to have more real sex in general, while the higher classes are too busy studying for the real thing, so they cope through porn? Also, as usual I see no way to properly control for the direction of causality with this kind of study, and almost any negative claim here can just be turned around - of course someone who is unhappier and has poorer wellbeing (maybe due to lack of sex?) is more likely to use porn. They don't even argue chronologically ("Men who have used pornography in the past now are X"), they argue concurrently ("Men who use pornography have higher X"). The former has at least a little bit of a claim for causality in the direction of chronologicity (is that a word in english? I guess you get what I mean), the latter not so much.