“Worth a glance”

I visited the eye doctor’s this afternoon, and while in the waiting room, picked up the July 2009 issue of a national, Canadian women’s magazine. Flipping idly through its pages, an article caught my attention. It was a short piece, a couple of hundred words at most. The headline read, “Worth a Glance.” So I glanced.

“Women get a lot out of pornography,” the piece began. It went on to say that according to a report in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour, researchers had ”found that … porn not only boosted the sex lives of both men and women, it also enhanced their attitudes toward sex and life in general.”

The first thing I wondered was what constituted “enhanced” attitudes toward “sex” and “life in general?” And who defined the “enhanced” bit? The next thing I wondered was how said researchers had managed to measure such things.

Tiny electrodes on the brain? Observation of the participants before, during and after consuming porn? Maybe they interviewed participants’ sexual partners, and found them to be a really happy bunch. As for the improved attitude toward life in general – did study participants walk with more of a spring in their steps after consuming porn? Perform more good deeds for their neighbours? Stop to smell roses more often? Give to charity? Give thanks?

Curious, I decided to dig into the matter a little, and when I got home I Googled around a bit until I found the study. Published by Gert Martin Hald and Neil M. Malamuth, the paper reported on the results of a study conducted on the “self-perceived effects” of “hardcore” pornography consumption among 688 Danish men and women. It was titled, “Self-Perceived Effects of Pornography Consumption.”

So. The researchers hadn’t actually found porn consumption enhanced anything. What they’d found was that people – who admitted to consuming hardcore porn – thought that doing so improved their lives.

I might think that sitting at my computer all day long eating chocolate improves my life – but my family and my doctor would probably disagree. There’s a mighty big difference between findings gleaned through objective research – which the women’s magazine article implied had occurred – and a study that’s merely reporting on the highly subjective perceptions of obviously biased individuals.

Strikes me as pretty shoddy journalism on the part of the magazine’s writers at best, and total irresponsibility (not to mention reckless disregard for readers) on the part of the magazine’s editors at worst.

In the study – which I read and I suspect the folks at the women’s magazine didn’t – the researchers write, “one reason why consumers reported very little negative effect of consumption could be the phenomenon of biased optimism.”

Ya think?! How about a willful blindness to the truth? Like an alcoholic who’s convinced drinking makes him the life of the party – and denies he’s hurting himself or anyone else until his life lies in ruins.

Perhaps the way this article presented a lie-masquerading-as-truth – thereby practically telling people, “Go! Consume porn! Your life will be blessed!” bugged me all the more because of a television program I helped put together this week. It’s an episode of Listen Up (www.listenuptv.com) that looks at the court challenge underway in Canada to legalize prostitution. The program features an interview with a man who started down the road of buying sex by consuming pornography. We called him “John.”

“Whether it was through a print magazine or through the Internet or though a video clip of some sort, I would find myself either being rewarded or comforted through instant gratification…” said  John.

I suspect, that given the opportunity of filling out an anonymous survey while under the bondage of his porn addiction John might have said porn “enhanced” his life too.

Want to know what he says today? Check it out: