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Notes -
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:
Now! The juicy summation of findings, which is where the hair-pulling starts!
I'm leaving this here for discussion, I'm not going to express an opinion one way or the other.
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.
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