British Medical Journal: Happiness and Social Factors
Posted by NPNAdmin at 12/5/2008 10:06 AM 
Categories: Green Sexuality,Marriage,Love and Beauty,Impact of Porn
Categories: Green Sexuality,Marriage,Love and Beauty,Impact of Porn
BMJ (British Medical Journal) published a study yesterday that traces social influences on personal happiness. The results: "People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future."
To the extent that a person's consumption of porn isolates them and degrades the quality of their relationships, it's likely they'll be less happy than they could be.
See also:
Salon: Porn Isolates its Users, Erodes Civility and Love
Apr. 11, 2007 | Dear Cary,
...I know it's common to look at porn. And I like it, too (though I wouldn't say it's part of my regular routine). But for some reason, I have this primitive and unenlightened hope somewhere in my subconscious that my boyfriend is only turned on by me. Am I deceiving myself by considering myself open-minded? Am I really a Victorian?...
Vicky Victorian
Dear Vicky Victorian,
I have gotten many, many letters from women over the last year or two with questions similar to yours...
...whether you approve of porn in theory or not, its effect will be to displace you. Like crack, it tends to take over, to push out other hungers that tend to nurture the human community by making us dependent on one another. Since we are dependent on each other we must be civil and loving. If we are not dependent on each other then we needn't be civil and loving. We needn't have community and family. That is the way in which any drug breaks down family and community by isolating its user. Porn isolates its users also, meeting their needs outside the social compact. The social compact becomes a commercial compact between anonymous people, while those in the actual human community are relegated to bystander status. It introduces a third party into the erotic economy of a relationship...
Young New Yorkers Talk about Porn's Effect on their Relationships (explicit language)
Jill was in love. It was the late nineties, she was a sophomore at a competitive state university, and she found herself smitten with Kyle, a junior with a confident strut who also happened to be the editor of the school newspaper, which won him instant parental approval. By the end of that year, they were a serious couple. Jill knew that she had discovered not only true love but, to put it bluntly, great sex as well.
So when, after a year, she learned that Kyle spent quite a bit of time looking at pornography—first online, then, eventually, on videos too—she wasn’t immediately put off, despite being a psychology major who seriously questioned the morality of porn. “I was the kind of girlfriend who was up for anything sexually,” says Jill, who is 25, has hazel eyes, and works in PR. “When we were having sex, he’d call me his porn star, and I thought that was hot.”
In time, this changed. Kyle would sometimes e-mail her links to sites “he thought were really hot,” which made Jill more than a little uncomfortable. Sometimes, she’d drop by his house for a surprise visit and he’d have already “exhausted himself” with the computer...
They have since broken up, and have stopped talking. “He was a lot more innocent when he was younger,” she says. “He was looking for love and companionship. Now he just wants a good lay. I’m sure he’s looking for some huge-breasted, tight-assed bitch...” These days, she feels “very jaded about love and sex,” but every so often, she finds her cynicism dissolving... “I think it will be really rare, and hopefully it will happen, that I can meet a guy who will be happy with only me.”
Now Showing at Amazing.net: The War on Relationships (explicit)
Amazing.net is jealous of your human relationships.
It wants your attention and money for itself. With messages subtle or not, its movies encourage you to neglect and abuse your intimate partners, especially your female ones. If you must relate to another human, Amazing.net wants the experience to be exploitative, short and unstable, to better ensure your swift return to a porn-hungry state. These strategies appear to be working. At a 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, two-thirds of the 350 divorce lawyers who attended said Internet porn contributed to more than half of the divorce cases they handled...
The Impact of Internet Pornography on Marriage and the Family: A Review of the Research
...according to data from the General Social Survey in 2000 (N = 531), people who report being happily married are 61 percent less likely to report using Internet pornography compared to those who also used the Internet and who had completed the General Social Survey in 2000...
Video Presentation: A Content Analysis of 50 of Today's Top Selling Porn Films (explicit language)
Ana Bridges: So how many scenes didn't contain aggression? About 10%...
For verbal aggression, by far namecalling and insulting were the most common types. They were seen in almost half of scenes...
Gagging and choking were much, much more common than any of us thought when we first walked into this project.
...in couples research we know that couples, even couples who fight a lot, as long as there's a lot of good in the relationship, about five times more good than bad, they actually do pretty well.
Less than 10% of the videos showed any kind of a positive act, and that included kissing... caressing happened maybe twice. Something like a verbal compliment, 'Gosh, you look pretty', not, 'Slut bitch, come over here,' that happened maybe five times in the 304 scenes. So we have a ratio of positive to negative behaviors of 1 to 9, which is not a sustainable, happy relationship.
The Psychology of Porn for Men
Morgan's experience of counseling men addicted to porn has convinced him that "the more time you spend in this fantasy world, the more difficult it becomes to make the transition to reality. Just like drugs, pornography provides a quick fix, a masturbatory universe people can get stuck in. This can result in their not being able to involve anyone else..."
Wall Street Journal: "What's at the Heart of Happiness?"
"Marriage provides two sources of happiness," says Andrew Oswald, an economics professor at England's Warwick University. "One is sex and the other is friendship. Marriage has one of the largest impacts on human well-being..."
The production and consumption of porn are unlikely to lead to happiness. Two of porn's hallmarks are unattached promiscuity and despair about marriage:
Consider the past 50 years in America. Compared to our grandparents, we are amazingly wealthy... And yet over the same period, the divorce rate has doubled, suicide has tripled and violent crime has quadrupled...
...in polls, more Americans than ever say that they don't trust strangers...
Can happiness be successfully pursued in a self-interested fashion?
...Recently, I asked some social entrepreneurs about the things that made them feel most happy and unhappy. Not one spoke of money, position or status...
Perhaps the strongest theme was "actualizing and witnessing the growth of others' potential"--using your life to enable the life in others to flourish.
Conversely, the greatest sadness, other than losing loved ones, came when human beings failed to listen respectfully to one another and degraded or betrayed one another, when teams fought internally and, in general, when the feeling of trust and unity with others, and the world, was injured in some way.
Moving from Shrill Debates to Consensus: "Political Charity"
The Virtue of Civility: Bringing depth, respectfulness and integrity back to our national discourse
New York Times: Whatever Happened to Online Etiquette?
Abuse and Threats Drive Women Out of Online Participation (explicit language)
Firestorm Rages Over Issue of Civility in the Blogosphere
George Will: Anger Is All The Rage
Sex-Positive Debate-Killing Tactics Stretch into Their Fifth Decade
Exclusion, ridicule, misrepresentation are very effective censors, and they were applied ruthlessly to the values which, right through the centuries, had been accepted as basic to a stable and responsible society, and to the people who fought to maintain them.
King and Queen of MoPornNorthampton Savagery Do Freelance Work for Republican, MassLive (explicit language)
As those who have visited opposition blog MoPornNorthampton are aware, Jeff Hobbs, Jennifer Ruggieri and their associates have engaged in savage personal attacks on Northampton anti-porn citizens for months. These self-styled heroes of free speech actually suppress it by fostering an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, inducing many citizens to abandon the debate.
To the extent that a person's consumption of porn isolates them and degrades the quality of their relationships, it's likely they'll be less happy than they could be.
See also:
Salon: Porn Isolates its Users, Erodes Civility and Love
Apr. 11, 2007 | Dear Cary,
...I know it's common to look at porn. And I like it, too (though I wouldn't say it's part of my regular routine). But for some reason, I have this primitive and unenlightened hope somewhere in my subconscious that my boyfriend is only turned on by me. Am I deceiving myself by considering myself open-minded? Am I really a Victorian?...
Vicky Victorian
Dear Vicky Victorian,
I have gotten many, many letters from women over the last year or two with questions similar to yours...
...whether you approve of porn in theory or not, its effect will be to displace you. Like crack, it tends to take over, to push out other hungers that tend to nurture the human community by making us dependent on one another. Since we are dependent on each other we must be civil and loving. If we are not dependent on each other then we needn't be civil and loving. We needn't have community and family. That is the way in which any drug breaks down family and community by isolating its user. Porn isolates its users also, meeting their needs outside the social compact. The social compact becomes a commercial compact between anonymous people, while those in the actual human community are relegated to bystander status. It introduces a third party into the erotic economy of a relationship...
Young New Yorkers Talk about Porn's Effect on their Relationships (explicit language)
Jill was in love. It was the late nineties, she was a sophomore at a competitive state university, and she found herself smitten with Kyle, a junior with a confident strut who also happened to be the editor of the school newspaper, which won him instant parental approval. By the end of that year, they were a serious couple. Jill knew that she had discovered not only true love but, to put it bluntly, great sex as well.
So when, after a year, she learned that Kyle spent quite a bit of time looking at pornography—first online, then, eventually, on videos too—she wasn’t immediately put off, despite being a psychology major who seriously questioned the morality of porn. “I was the kind of girlfriend who was up for anything sexually,” says Jill, who is 25, has hazel eyes, and works in PR. “When we were having sex, he’d call me his porn star, and I thought that was hot.”
In time, this changed. Kyle would sometimes e-mail her links to sites “he thought were really hot,” which made Jill more than a little uncomfortable. Sometimes, she’d drop by his house for a surprise visit and he’d have already “exhausted himself” with the computer...
They have since broken up, and have stopped talking. “He was a lot more innocent when he was younger,” she says. “He was looking for love and companionship. Now he just wants a good lay. I’m sure he’s looking for some huge-breasted, tight-assed bitch...” These days, she feels “very jaded about love and sex,” but every so often, she finds her cynicism dissolving... “I think it will be really rare, and hopefully it will happen, that I can meet a guy who will be happy with only me.”
Now Showing at Amazing.net: The War on Relationships (explicit)
Amazing.net is jealous of your human relationships.
It wants your attention and money for itself. With messages subtle or not, its movies encourage you to neglect and abuse your intimate partners, especially your female ones. If you must relate to another human, Amazing.net wants the experience to be exploitative, short and unstable, to better ensure your swift return to a porn-hungry state. These strategies appear to be working. At a 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, two-thirds of the 350 divorce lawyers who attended said Internet porn contributed to more than half of the divorce cases they handled...
The Impact of Internet Pornography on Marriage and the Family: A Review of the Research
...according to data from the General Social Survey in 2000 (N = 531), people who report being happily married are 61 percent less likely to report using Internet pornography compared to those who also used the Internet and who had completed the General Social Survey in 2000...
Video Presentation: A Content Analysis of 50 of Today's Top Selling Porn Films (explicit language)
Ana Bridges: So how many scenes didn't contain aggression? About 10%...
For verbal aggression, by far namecalling and insulting were the most common types. They were seen in almost half of scenes...
Gagging and choking were much, much more common than any of us thought when we first walked into this project.
...in couples research we know that couples, even couples who fight a lot, as long as there's a lot of good in the relationship, about five times more good than bad, they actually do pretty well.
Less than 10% of the videos showed any kind of a positive act, and that included kissing... caressing happened maybe twice. Something like a verbal compliment, 'Gosh, you look pretty', not, 'Slut bitch, come over here,' that happened maybe five times in the 304 scenes. So we have a ratio of positive to negative behaviors of 1 to 9, which is not a sustainable, happy relationship.
The Psychology of Porn for Men
Morgan's experience of counseling men addicted to porn has convinced him that "the more time you spend in this fantasy world, the more difficult it becomes to make the transition to reality. Just like drugs, pornography provides a quick fix, a masturbatory universe people can get stuck in. This can result in their not being able to involve anyone else..."
Wall Street Journal: "What's at the Heart of Happiness?"
"Marriage provides two sources of happiness," says Andrew Oswald, an economics professor at England's Warwick University. "One is sex and the other is friendship. Marriage has one of the largest impacts on human well-being..."
The production and consumption of porn are unlikely to lead to happiness. Two of porn's hallmarks are unattached promiscuity and despair about marriage:
Now on Sale at Amazing.net (explicit language)Dolf Zillman and Jennings Bryant (1988) found that "common, nonviolent pornography" is highly effective anti-marriage propaganda:
Wonderland
This DVD features a story-driven title that mixes drama with hardcore sex. Wonderland tells the story of a man obsessed with his stepdaughter's friend when she visits during Christmas break. Gary sacrifices everything in his traditional suburban existence for a single moment of ecstasy with a femme fatale.
Deviant Housewives
In this world nothing lasts forever and it looks like Kelly Erikson's husband Van needs some space. Kelly decides to invite all her friends going thru the same problems to stay and support each other. But all of Kelly's friends have an empty void in their lives they need filled and it's from a younger man!
Use Em' Abuse Em' and Lose Em' #9
Ride along as we pick up ordinary young women fuck'em senseless and dump'em! It's all good clean fun!
Housewives Unleashed #16
These fine ladies have been locked away in their houses for far too long. With their husbands away on business our housewives need crave and demand satisfaction. The action gets hot and horny the moment their desires are finally unleased..!
Darkside
David and Jennifer have a marriage on the rocks. In desperation they seek out a marriage counselor who proposes a revolutionary new method of therapy. David and Jennifer have free reign to cheat on each other for the next 24 hours. Their sexual inhibitions are set free and their fantasies fulfilled as they visit The Dark Side.
Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography on Family Values; Women's Desire to Have Daughters PlummetsDavid Bornstein: "Pursuing Happiness"
Strong perceptual and attitudinal changes were indeed observed. The perception of the very nature of sexuality changed... [P]romiscuity in both men and women was deemed more natural after prolonged consumption of pornography than without such consumption. The effect was uniform for male and female respondents and for students and nonstudents. Beliefs in the faithfulness of sexual partners predictably declined with the greater acceptance of promiscuity...
Prolonged consumption of pornography fostered greater acceptance of pre- and extramarital sexual relations for self and intimate partners. Along with that, it fostered acceptance of sexually nonexclusive relations with parters. Prolonged consumption also led to greater acceptance of the myth of health risks from sexual repression. Pornography apparently manages to convey the idea that unrestrained sexuality is wholesome and healthy, and that any restraint poses risks... Additionally, prolonged consumption of pornography was found to counteract gender equality. For intimate relationships, male dominance was favored over egalitarianism...
Pornography consumption had a most powerful effect on evaluations of the desirability and viability of marriage. Endorsement of marriage as an essential institution dropped from 60.0% in the control groups to 38.8% in the treatment groups...
Consider the past 50 years in America. Compared to our grandparents, we are amazingly wealthy... And yet over the same period, the divorce rate has doubled, suicide has tripled and violent crime has quadrupled...
...in polls, more Americans than ever say that they don't trust strangers...
Can happiness be successfully pursued in a self-interested fashion?
...Recently, I asked some social entrepreneurs about the things that made them feel most happy and unhappy. Not one spoke of money, position or status...
Perhaps the strongest theme was "actualizing and witnessing the growth of others' potential"--using your life to enable the life in others to flourish.
Conversely, the greatest sadness, other than losing loved ones, came when human beings failed to listen respectfully to one another and degraded or betrayed one another, when teams fought internally and, in general, when the feeling of trust and unity with others, and the world, was injured in some way.
Moving from Shrill Debates to Consensus: "Political Charity"
The Virtue of Civility: Bringing depth, respectfulness and integrity back to our national discourse
New York Times: Whatever Happened to Online Etiquette?
Abuse and Threats Drive Women Out of Online Participation (explicit language)
Firestorm Rages Over Issue of Civility in the Blogosphere
George Will: Anger Is All The Rage
Sex-Positive Debate-Killing Tactics Stretch into Their Fifth Decade
Exclusion, ridicule, misrepresentation are very effective censors, and they were applied ruthlessly to the values which, right through the centuries, had been accepted as basic to a stable and responsible society, and to the people who fought to maintain them.
King and Queen of MoPornNorthampton Savagery Do Freelance Work for Republican, MassLive (explicit language)
As those who have visited opposition blog MoPornNorthampton are aware, Jeff Hobbs, Jennifer Ruggieri and their associates have engaged in savage personal attacks on Northampton anti-porn citizens for months. These self-styled heroes of free speech actually suppress it by fostering an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, inducing many citizens to abandon the debate.
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