Exactly what percentage of men watch porn isn’t clear, but it’s most of them. In 2009, a University of Montreal researcher tried to do a study on how pornography affects men, and couldn’t find any men in their 20s who hadn’t used it to use as a control group. This study found 98% of men (and 73% of women) had used it in the last six months. This one found 87% of men report using it for sexual purposes, along with 31% of women. [...]
This runs a big risk of creating a database of sexual preferences and porn habits, in the hands of providers with varying abilities to protect it. This sort of thing has happened before: the “dating site for married people”, Ashley Madison, was hacked in 2015. It became something of a feeding frenzy for extortionists, and there were reports of suicides linked to the leak. A lot more people use porn than use skeevy hookup sites for affairs. And it’d be OK for those of us with vanilla proclivities, but for people with unusual or hidden kinks, it could be awful. [...]
I want to be charitable, though. The Government’s impact assessment is embarrassingly bad, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no impact to assess. I spoke to Dr Victoria Nash of the Oxford Internet Institute: she took part in a major review of the evidence in 2015. She said that they found that establishing the evidence of harm is extremely difficult. “There’s a really limited evidence base,” she said. “There are many studies looking at impact on young people but it’s very hard to draw strong conclusions from them.” [...]
You may think that adults shouldn’t be allowed to view porn either, of course. It’s a legitimate viewpoint, although I will point out that there is no evidence that I am aware of that, as was the fear a few years ago, porn use leads to sexual violence. If anything the correlation is the other way around – countries and states with higher porn use experience lower levels of rape and sexual assault. It may be causal, but the author of the study I just linked to says that it’s probably just because countries with liberal porn laws also tend to be more progressive generally. There was also a recently released study which found that once you control for confounding factors, there’s no link between porn consumption and adolescents’ psychological wellbeing, even in girls.
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