"the everyday uses of pornography"
And they needed a survey to tell them? FFS
A ground-breaking and timely survey of how individuals use porn was launched yesterday. The aim of this survey, available online at pornresearch.org, is to collect evidence around the everyday uses of pornography and find out how the people who use it feel it fits into their lives. Ultimately, the data may be used to challenge …
So then, no need to check if the earth is flat, as that's obvious.
No need to research a lot of things, when you take 3 seconds to think about how obvious they are.
But most of all, it's obvious the obvious isn't always how things work in reality. Now THAT is obvious and doesn't require research.
Paris ... why should be obvious
... any sentence that begins "Everyone knows ..." is automatically suspect, and often wrong. I once read a suggestion that researchers looking for funding should specifically search out instances of "everyone knows", because no-one actually does, and a grant application can therefore be built.
This could be a valuable study. If the data is suitably anonymized*, it could show the extent of pornography use by "normal" people who do not subsequently become the subject of law enforcement or mental health intervention. So far, we've got a pretty good idea about porn use among various classes of offenders. And this has led (through faulty logic) to linking porn with the propensity to commit such offenses. A good baseline or control group will go a long way to possibly disproving such links.
*Both the survey participant and the sources (URLs, newsgroups, etc.) need to be kept confidential so that this study can't be used to "clean house" or generate blacklists.
However way back in the 1990s when e-commerce first showed up it was clearly understood from traffic analysis that the only companies that made money via e-commerce were porn sites.
Would you believe that all of the 'deviants' managed to jump on the Internet e-commerce bandwagon before the entire world figured it out, just to get their porn fix?
Lots of people like porn. Porn is a bigger movie industry in California than Hollywood is by a factor of approx 10. I suggest that researchers who want to demonstrate this are probably wanking.
Belle de Jour was an *escort* not a pornographer and she's a Research Scientist with specialisations in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology, she has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science.
Let me see: ignorant person makes Straw Man argument based on their own lack of knowledge. Colour me unsurprised...!
Pornography: from Greek porne=prostitute, graphein=writing. So someone who claims to have been a prostitute* and then writes about it, isn't a pornographer (according to you). And I can't see that the number of irrelevant qualifications she holds have any bearing on the matter.
Utterly epic fail.
* You may want to look that up in a dictionary, too.
Your presumption is wrong, I have made no claim about harmful or beneficial effects of pornography. What I have said, although many seem incapable of reading or comprehension, is that I am not surprised that someone who makes a living from prostitution and pornographic writing would claim that pornography is not harmful. No doubt Richard Desmond could be called upon to second the motion.
completed the survey.
Perhaps the only way to stop ridiculous laws being enacted and enforced is to have a body of research like this.
Asking pressure groups what their opinion is will only get you their narrow, and biased, viewpoint. This is dangerous as it warps the viewpoint of our lawmakers (as if those viewpoints weren't warped enough already.) And this leads to very bad laws being enacted, i.e. the extreme cartoon laws.
A lot of the pressure groups, who are trying to force these limitations upon us, are just trying to make us conform to a set of rules which are basically unnatural and unworkable. These laws are criminalising people just for the sake of criminalising them.
"If “everybody knows” such-and-such, then it ain’t so, by at least ten thousand to one." - Lazarus Long (via Robert A Heinlein).
Once again I mention that I make leather bondage gear. There are times when I've seen something on a website etc that has made me go "Damn, I never thought of that, what a great idea for a new product...!"
Who says you can't enjoy Business Research? :-)
Surely only an American woman could have written this bunk:
1) "how porn fits into their sense of self" - come again??
2) "their relationships" - oh yes, all my years in the real world lead me to gullibly believe that all women are gagging for it and just need to be revved up like a child's toy car.
3) "and their everyday lives" - Oi! Do you mind! Maybe everyday for you, you sex-crazed neurotic. Sometimes we members of the rest of the human race manage to fit in something else- do you mind??
4) "is to simply waste energy on measuring the obvious". - you might have some paper degree but apparently you didn't go to the University Of The Bleedin' Obvious.
But yeah, like P.H. says, studies have been skewed by being conducted on offenders. Perhaps porn make bad people just a little worse sometimes, eh?
"society is attempting to legislate"
WHY? Is it because some people enjoy it, and we can't have that. What about train spotting? How about people that like sport? Hell make everything illegal.
"in order to 'protect children'"
Here we go again. Little people should not know what people look like without clothes on. They should not know what a breast looks like, despite sucking on one continually for the first part of their lives. They should not know where people come from, or how. Perhaps we can also protect the children by preventing them from ever seeing someone over 30, or ill so that they don't know that people get old, ill and die*. (*Stolen from a story about a stupid King trying to prevent people knowing the truth)
the only erroneous assumption here is that the results of this survey will be listened to. 'legislating in a vacuum' is entirely the intent. Its not about whether or not porn is good, bad, or indifferent to you, or if individual types or usage habits affect you as a human being. Legislating against porn in the UK is a distant, muted echo of individual states legislating against abortion. its the perceived need to be doing something about _an issue perceived as harmful by the mainstream voter_.
the legislating thats in place now for violent pornography has nothing to do with the actualities involved with either commercial or underground pornography or its consumer, and everything to do with appeasing squeaky wheels and interest groups.
far too much government effort these days seems to be expended on either working to appear busy, or being busy and loud on a public project to detract notice from other affairs (we've flipped on selling off the national forests versus 'just a little change to corporation and business tax re; foreign offices' anyone?)