So I’ve already bought my digital copy of Haidt’s latest, The Anxious Generation, but have not gotten down to reading it. Nonetheless, Rob Henderson, coiner of the concept of “luxury beliefs” and guy I follow on Twitter, has read it and has also been highlighting relevant and interesting passages and posting the pics to Twitter. In one example, he had underlined some especially striking points about porn use and its detrimental effects, particularly on boys. The highlighted portion read as follows: 

The problem is not just that modern pornography amplifies the risk for porn addiction, but that heavy porn use can lead boys to choose the easy option for sexual satisfaction (by watching porn) rather than trying to engage in the more uncertain and risky dating world. Additionally, there is evidence that heavy use can disrupt boys’ and young men’s romantic relationships. For example, several studies indicate that after watching porn, heterosexual men find real women less attractive, including their own partners.

Now, for anyone who has ever dipped their toes into the discourse surrounding the negative impacts of pornography use, especially heavy use, this is not that surprising. And it also has that nice quality of coinciding with our intuitive understandings of the way the world works. Some like to call this “passing the reality check.” Pornography is a heightened display of sex benefiting from a number of advantages that real sexuality does not possess, not least of which is the beauty of the woman and their over the top “selling” of their own sexual arousal and gratification. It’s also easier to get access to and available on demand at any hour of the day. It is not surprising that significant exposure to something like this would affect one’s sexual habits. In fact, these observations seem so obvious that one would expect that it would take some fairly extraordinary evidence to disprove them. 

Enter Dr. Nicole Prause, proud PhD holder, Senior Statistician, and “lab member” at UCLA, who fired back that Haidt was “completely wrong.” 

Naturally, my curiosity was piqued. As I said before, my intuitive understanding of the world strongly supports Haidt’s claims, and while I have seen my intuitions proven wrong before, their track record remains pretty good. I decided to check out the study that Dr. Prouse had linked, but before getting to that, I think it would be worth examining the prior claim made. 

“Men report dissatisfaction first and start masturbating/viewing to address the dissatisfaction, not the reverse.”

There’s just something vaguely retarded about that, isn’t there? All the words are used correctly, and they are arranged in the correct grammatical fashion, and they even produce meaning when read. But still, there is something subtly but significantly off about the statement. 

Let’s examine this statement, and while so doing, let’s keep track of certain obvious truths. Obvious truth #1: If you’re a man, especially a young man, then being dissatisfied with the amount of sex you are having is going to be your normal state of existence. Does this even need mentioning? Young men are horny, by design. Obvious truth #2: young men’s ability to gratify their sexual urges (even with a willing partner) is significantly impeded by so many different factors that if you’re outside of your teens, or –god forbid– your twenties, you probably don’t even remember a lot of them. 

So when Dr. Prause says that dissatisfaction precedes masturbation, not the other way around…any person who is not an idiot should probably understand that this statement is both true and irrelevant. Far from disproving Haidt’s claim, it supports it. In order for Prause’s claim to even make sense as a rebuttal, she would have to believe that the sexual marketplace is such that everyone who can have sex, is having sex. But this is so obviously wrong that I am now worried that it looks like I am straw-manning her position, even though I honestly cannot understand how her argument could be fully formulated without at least partially owning this position. 

Sexual dissatisfaction can obviously lead to porn use, but since sex isn’t something that is dispensed at the push of a button. Since obtaining it (certainly for a young man) does typically involve the expenditure of some effort and taking some risks (to one’s ego if nothing else), then it is not at all hard to imagine that porn use might lead to a feedback loop in which the accessibility of porn would make the risks and costs of pursuing real sex (especially in an increasingly fraught marketplace) seem less and less worth the investment. And—geewillickers—maybe this has something to do with the skyrocketing male virginity.  

Prause’s claim would also seem to fly in the face of her other statement that men who view more porn have more sexual partners. If porn use is caused by sexual dissatisfaction, then wouldn’t one expect the opposite to be true? But Prause gives no indication that she is even aware of this hiccup, bulldozing on to her final claim that “men who watch more porn get more turned on by their partners.” And this is really the claim that I would like to focus on because this time, she brought receipts in the form of a study which she, herself, conducted.  

I’d like to point out that CSIRO, the Australian publishing company that Prause used is also a member of an organization called COPE, an acronym standing for the Committee on Publication Ethics, which is probably completely above board and hardly relevant to the issue at hand, but which nonetheless gave me a little chuckle. 

Keep in mind the claim that Dr. Prause intends for this study to debunk, porn use can lead to men having decreased sexual interest in the kinds of women they are likely to be able to have sex with. 

The paper begins with a dense exegesis of the terminology employed–one section header reading “Disambiguating compulsivity and impulsivity models” ought to give you some idea of what’s involved–but once you wade through all that, you find that this study consisted of 250 people (125 couples), gathered by advertising on social media, to perform an experiment in which each couple was to engage in a practice known as “orgasmic meditation.” The couples involved did not have to be romantically involved with one another, but they were required to be familiar with the practice and to have performed it at least ten times in the past. So, you dear reader, normal person that you are, would not be eligible to participate in this study. Don’t feel bad, I wouldn’t either as I’d never heard the words “orgasmic meditation” prior to coming across Dr. Prause’s tweet and certainly have never accidentally recreated the practice on my own time. In case you’re curious, here is a quick breakdown courtesy of Healthline. 

For the uninitiated, it’s a partnered experience of stroking around the clitoris for 15 minutes, with only one goal: let go and feel.

The stroking is meant to happen in an incredibly specific way — on the upper-left quadrant of the clitoris in an up-and-down motion, no firmer than you would stroke an eyelid. It’s done (usually) by male partners wearing latex gloves dipped or coated in lube. There is no stroking of male genitalia.

Lest I be labeled a prude, I’ll say that I have no immediate objection to orgasmic meditation other than that I find it odd that anyone would want to make sex as boring as meditation, but whatever. 

According to the aforementioned source, orgasmic meditation entered the “public conversation” following a 2009 NY Times article on a company called OneTaste, the “first ever orgasmic meditation company” where, for the extraordinarily reasonable cost of $149, you could learn how to make sex boring. 

“A worthy goal,” you may be thinking to yourself, “I’d like to give these people my money. Where can I send it?” 

Well you’re going to have a little bit of trouble with that, since OneTaste has recently come down with a bad case of being-investigated-for-forced-labor. The Guardian ran an article on it last year, and in case you’re wondering, the answer is “yes,” the words “cult-like” did get used. 

But, more important than all of this background, you would think that requiring knowledge and experience of such a storied sexual practice–one which most people have never even heard of–would lead to a pretty massive selection bias. Recall, we’re talking about this in the context of a claim made about teenagers and young men. 

And maybe this requirement goes some way to explaining why the average age of each of the participants was more than 40 years old. 

Once again I would like to mention that study is being used to debunk a claim related to the effects of porn use in young and teenage men.

So the experimenters set-up a scenario for these couples to engage in orgasmic meditation and recorded their reported levels of sexual excitement on scale from 1 to 7 as well as measuring skin conductance response. They also queried the participants on their level of porn use (“sex film viewing”). And what results did this study produce which so thoroughly embarrass Haidt? Well, here ya go. 

The skin conductance response results are given short shrift in the article. They did correspond to a slight increase in sexual arousal in the “strokee,” but the results emphasized are this graph showing a average difference of about half an “arousal unit” between those 

One might point out the obvious fact that there are far fewer heavy porn users involved than and that upward-trending correlation between sexual arousal and porn use appears to be driven almost entirely by a literal handful of outliers, but I sort of doubt that anybody really needs me to. So instead, I’d like to bring your attention to the gaping chasm between the claims being made by a PhD holder in the field and the data used to support those claims. 

This is what I would like to call academic autism. 

Academic Autism

One of the common features of autistic thinking is what is known as “bottom-up thinking.” While non-autistic people tend to begin with larger concepts and then reason down to details, autistic adults often do the opposite, reasoning from details to concepts in a way which leads them to unjustified conclusion due to an inability to perceive the context of those details. I think something like this can happen to academics otherwise not affected by any form of “neurodivergence.” This is how you could wind up with someone who, if the information we are given about the value of the credentials offered by our contemporary university system is to be believed, is in the highest tier of “very smart people” saying that because a bunch of weirdo 40-somethings reported a small difference in horniness levels, it is impossible that porn could affect people in the ways that Haidt described, even though if you just fucking ask them (as was done in one of the three studies that Haidt cited for that point), they’ll tell you that it does. 

Prause herself even acknowledges many of the faults with this study in “Limitations, concerns, and their implications for future research” section, but does so with an air of someone discussing what human colonization of mars might one day look like.

‘It may one day be found that middle-aged freakies who are into bizarre sexual practices and dispositionally inclined to volunteer for bizarre sex studies are actually different from normal teenage boys and young men, but I think it will be a very long time before we are able to study that in a lab, so of course there is little sense in talking about it.’ 

This is the dark side of the “trust the data” mentality: sometimes the data is utterly, hopelessly inadequate, but those who throw this line around are often not bothered by that, as Prause showed little concern with her own previously acknowledged “limitations and concerns” when using her study to speciously debunk a claim it was in no way equipped to debunk.  

However, this is not a wholesale condemnation of eggheads or academics by any means. I suspect that most serious scientists would quickly point out the same issues and exercise a great deal more care than Prause in brandishing this data in the ways that she has. But I still think that it’s meaningful that someone with her position and credentials would be so careless with her claims. 

But pursuing that further is something for another time.