WASHINGTON – According to NoFap founder Alexander Rhodes, people aren’t talking enough about the problems caused by excessive consumption of online pornography.
It’s a curious assertion, given that every single day I’m able to find multiple new articles focused on this very subject. Many of them are opinion pieces warning of the perils of porn, presented with the trappings of scientific certainty even as they demonstrate a pronounced lack of appropriate scientific skepticism.
Making Rhodes’ claim even stranger are the words he uses to make his point throughout the article, many of which seem to undermine his thesis in a fundamental way.
“Thousands of individuals, often young and male, are reporting that using porn multiple times per day trained their brains to associate their sexualities with pixels on their computer screens, rather than sexual activity with human beings,” Rhodes wrote. “They are reporting that they have a decreased interest in seeking out human partners, and if they do so, they often cannot achieve sexual arousal during partnered sex, have a decreased sensitivity to pleasure or cannot experience an orgasm without porn or porn fantasy.”
How do these thousands of people manage to “report” such things without having conversations with anybody? Are they complaining of their porn addiction telepathically? Are smoke signals involved?
How about the Utah Legislature and its recent resolution declaring porn a “public health crisis,” another development Rhodes references in his article. Does this resolution — meaningless as it may be in a practical sense — not represent discussion of the “porn problem?”
“The negative effects of over-consuming internet pornography is a well-documented phenomenon,” Rhodes asserts flatly, evidently referencing data someone slipped to him on a napkin since, as we’ve already established, porn is a conversation people simply aren’t having despite talking about it almost constantly.
Rhodes advocates treating compulsive porn consumption like other substance-abuse problems, noting “we treat drugs, alcohol and gambling as serious issues not because everyone who partakes in them has an addiction but because the problematic few have a deleterious effect on our communities as a whole.”
To be clear, I don’t have a problem with NoFap or with Rhodes or with how his group goes about discouraging people from watching porn. Among other things, they don’t appear to be selling people recovery courses costing thousands of dollars, nor do they advocate a massive rethink porn regulation, much less an outright ban on pornography.
I do take issue, however, with the (facially ludicrous, I think) suggestion porn consumption is an under-discussed subject these days.
Very few days go by during which I’m unable to find some new study purporting to reveal something about porn. Some of the efforts appear to include decent clinical research, but most falls into the squishy area of self-reported behavioral science sourced either from surveys with small respondent pools or an analysis of the Portraits of American Life Study. Whether the study finds something negative or positive in its evaluation of porn-viewing, the findings invariably involve correlations, not causality — and there’s an enormous and important difference between those two things.
What Rhodes ignores in flatly asserting a causal connection between porn consumption and the various negative effects he assigns to porn is the vast majority of the studies to which he refers are actually far less categorical and decisive in their claims than is Rhodes in his vague retelling of those claims.
This is a common problem when it comes to the reportage surrounding any scientific research or claim: However responsible and accurate the researchers themselves might be, once the media and the general public get hold of the study, they summarily remove all the wiggle words and caveats found in the study and its abstract. This is how we end up being peppered with idiotic headlines like “Want to Raise Successful Kids? Science Says Do These 7 Things Every Day” and “Science Says the First Born Child Is the Most Intelligent.”
That’s right folks: Your first child is your smartest — no ifs ands or buts — because “science says” it’s so.
Does your first child suffer from some sort of birth defect that has constrained the development of his or her brain? Well, if intelligence in your progeny is an ego thing for you, you’d best not have any more kids, even if the birth defect was the direct result of the mother being exposed to toxic substances that can be avoided during her future pregnancies — because, you know, science has already told us the first child is going to be your smartest kid.
Sorry mom and dad! Science has spoken.
Such is the absurdity of “science” as a catchall term, especially once filtered through the minds of headline writers — or, in some cases, filtered through the minds of people who are hell-bent on “proving” porn is either rotting society from the roots or liberating us all from the tyranny of sexual conformity.
Again, I have no issue with this porn conversation Rhodes wants us to have. I’m just a bit confused as to why he’s convinced we’re not already having it.
For something we’re all supposedly not talking about, I sure am getting sick of hearing so much talk.
