Pornhub Funding Unbiased Study of Porn's Effects on Users

LAWRENCE, Kan.—As every politically aware adult industry member and fan must know, there are dozens of websites on the World Wide Web that are only too happy to print any article or screed whose subject matter is, essentially, "Why Porn Is So Bad for You." Such sites include, most prominently, FightTheNewDrug.org, an offshoot of the equally scurrilous National Center On Sexual Exploitation, or NCOSE, the successor to Morality In Media. But plenty of other religio-conservative groups have taken up that calling as well, including Family Research Council, Parents Television Council, Concerned Women For America, Focus on the Family, and of course anti-porn activist Gail Dines' own website, but there are plenty more. Countering those anti-fappers are a number of researchers such as Dr. Neil Malamuth, Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals, Dr. Marty Klein and several others, many of whom can be found in the peer-reviewed academic journal Porn Studies. But considering the vast religio-conservative armies amassed against the adult industry, and the general lack of will within the industry to support research to counter the poor scholarship and outright lies that make up the "anti-porn research" industry, kudos must be given to Pornhub, whose roughly two-year-old "official philanthropic division" Pornhub Cares has just awarded a trio of researchers at the University of Kansas $25,000 to fund research into just how porn viewers (including the 28.5 billion who spent 4.6 billion hours looking at it on Pornhub last year) use porn in their everyday lives and how such viewing affects those lives—if it does at all to any significant degree. According to an article on the website Inverse.com, University of Kansas psychology professor Omri Gillath, Ph.D., together with collaborators Dr. Ateret Gewirtz-Meydan and doctoral candidate Katie Adams will be carrying out a total of three studies over the next year and a half, all dedicated to "investigating the concern that porn is a part of day-to-day life ... but we know nearly nothing about its short- and long-term effects." "For many years there was a trend," said Gillath. "Researchers with a negative bias coming into the area and almost forcing their negative bias on the research of porn." However, Gillath hasn't made any promises to Pornhub that it will necessarily like the conclusions he and his team may reach after completing their research, especially in light of Gillath's statement that, "This is where people are getting some of the sex ed, for better or worse," referring to the plethora of online porn, and noting that "it takes some sort of education and explanation" to make sure people still forming their ideas about sex and sexuality understand that porn is not real life—such as the widespread notion among some younger porn viewers that all women like anal sex. "Unfortunately for some people, porn is replacing what used to be a level-headed education about these things, and it adds a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress and all kinds of maladjustments," Gillath said. It's the sort of misinformation that could easily be corrected if public (and private) schools simply had comprehensive sex education courses for teens, but a combination of a lack of federal funding for such teachings together with religio-conservative groups targeting school districts that do offer it, claiming that such education is better handled in the home by parents (who often are even more ignorant of the subject that are their children), makes Gillath's and his associates' work all the more necessary.