As a moderately computer-savvy person, I often get calls for help when someone’s computer gets infected with a virus that hijacks their homepage or causes porn site popups. As a joke, when I get a call like this my first question is: “Is there a male between the ages of 13 and 75 in your house“? Because without fail, the caller is either male themselves or is a woman with male children, a husband, a dad, or a boyfriend in the house. Although I have no formal research to back this up, I’d feel comfortable saying (although if you’re a woman, you’ll be uncomfortable hearing) that 3 out of 5 American males have seen more Internet porn than they’d like you to think, and of the other two, one is an asexual ascetic, and the other has seen more than the first three combined but doesn’t care what you think. So is Internet porn bad? Unfortunately, the people that seem to ask this question the most do it out of their own morality-based discomfort with it, rather than a balanced look at how it really impacts current attitudes. Much like substance abuse (or anything else fun in life) studying sexuality in a scientific fashion is beset with a lot of obstacles. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that clinical research, surveys, and direct observation are all problematic. For an example, look at these PBS Frontline survey results and note not only the basic figures, but the fact that the vast majority of respondents are males, 21-30 years old. A classic example of “volunteer bias”.  I thought I was alone amongst my more open-minded friends in my perception that Internet porn has been having a serious negative impact on our culture until I ran across Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families, by Pamela Paul. She does a great job of even-handedly exploring through investigative reporting (rather than hard research) how the ready availability of explicit pornography has impacted our lives, especially the way in which porn has essentially replaced healthy sex education for teens of the past decade or two. In this NYMag piece Naomi Wolf touches on another phenomena I’ve witnessed firsthand; the way porn often turns men off to real sex. So. Do you have a porn addiction? Let’s hope not; apparently it’s harder to beat than crack. Why don’t you take the quiz and decide for yourself? Or, if you actually want to be addicted to porn, just follow Cracked.com’s 10 Steps to Porn Addiction. Or here’s some Good Porn for you. And here are some basic porn statistics…

• 70% of all internet porn traffic occurs during the 9-to-5 workday
• 25% of total search engine requests are porn-related
• The largest consumer of Internet pornography is the 12-17 age group.
• Median age for the first use of pornography is 11-13 for boys, 12-14 for girls.
• Porn generates $12 billion a year in revenue in the US
  (More than the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC)

And some graphs:

Who would’ve guessed that Facebook is the new porn?

Or that Monday is Porn Day?

…because statistics, they speak the truth.

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