VB note: This is the first post by Thomas Roche, who is the first guest contributor to TinyNibbles. For the ten-year anniversary of this blog, I’m expanding it. Please welcome my best friend, fellow SFSI educator and longtime writing buddy to our mix.
Hello there, Tiny Nibbles readers! You may not know me; I’m Thomas Roche, a blogger, erotica writer and soon-to-be published science fiction/horror novelist.
Violet and I have been best friends for years, and she’s asked me to lend my voice to Tiny Nibbles. I’ve been blogging for one of Violet’s other outlets, Techyum.com, for quite a time, and now I’ll be popping by with sex-related news and half-assed opinions from time to time.
My first piece of bad news is that if you’re male, web porn makes you impotent. This is courtesy of Faux News, which assures me that a presentation at the conference of the Italian Society of Andrology and Sexual Medicine (SIAM) proves it:
Researchers said Thursday that young men who indulge in “excessive consumption” of Internet porn gradually become immune to explicit images, the ANSA news agency reported.
Over time, this can lead to a loss of libido, impotence and a notion of sex that is totally divorced from real-life relations.
“It starts with lower reactions to porn sites, then there is a general drop in libido and in the end it becomes impossible to get an erection,” said Carlo Foresta, head of the Italian Society of Andrology and Sexual Medicine (SIAM).
His team drew their conclusions from a survey of 28,000 Italian men which revealed that many became hooked on porn as early as 14, exhibiting symptoms of so-called “sexual anorexia” by the time they reached their mid-twenties.
[Link.]
Now, I’m going to say up front that I’m using the term “male” pretty flippantly in this article – I mean, let’s be serious, the transmen I know can look at all the porn they want, and if their equipment gets floppy from all that jacking, all they have to do is drop by the boner store and buy something with stiffer silicone. I’m also completely ignoring female porn use, which the study – at least as it’s reported in the fragmentary Fox News article – doesn’t pertain to.
The article is a week old at this point, and the study doesn’t yet seem to have hit the mainstream press. This is probably a good thing.
I say this because it’s a perfect example of the kind of scientific information that gets turned into meaningless “proof” that porn is bad for you. In the absence of critical information, journalists, professionals and the general public point to studies like this as fact, rather than data. But the information delivered by Fox News doesn’t even qualify as an anecdote.
Surely there are endless hours of meaningful debate to be had among people who hate porn. This kind of fragmentary information, in some commentators’ minds, will surely “prove” what they’ve already decided – that internet porn causes every conceivable malady for men, from insensitivity to cluelessness to sexual perversion to ravenous sexual appetite to sexual anorexia to a distaste for performing cunnilingus.
Those of you out there who are inclined toward sex with men and are old enough to remember doing it before 1995 may recall that a few of these symptoms did, in fact, show up in the male population before internet porn came along to screw up our lives. What’s more, although I can’t see the actual presentation — and wouldn’t speak Italian if i did -I am pretty sure that it is meaningless, because a “survey” is not a “study.”
A “survey” of 28,000 Italian men means that 28,000 Italian men were “surveyed,” i.e., “asked.” It does not establish a damn thing. A “survey” is not a “study.” A study is conducted under controlled clinical conditions. A study is what you need to have – several or even many of them, actually – before the FDA will even consider an application to approve a new drug. When a “study” is of a specific medication, it’s called a “trial.”
A “survey” can range across the Fruit Loop spectrum. You can have a survey that is performed with flawless methodology and is rigorous in its approach. You can also have a survey where 100,000 people are asked on the Internet what kind of peanut butter they prefer. In the absence of seeing the methodology, there is no way to evaluate whether this information is worth anything at all – but I’m deeply suspicious of any “survey” of 28,000 men, because that’s a hell of a lot of men. It would be time-consuming and expensive to conduct such a survey in the kind of controlled setting that would be expected when you’re evaluating something like erection problems — which can have many, many physical causes that have little to do with behavioral choices.
Who footed that bill? The Italian government? Eli Lily, who markets Cialis? Pfizer, who markets Viagra?
If you put such a survey on the internet, however, you could get 28,000 responses in a week, but they would be meaningless. Until you know what exact methodology this survey used, you know absolutely nothing about its validity.
Furthermore, an Italian survey is difficult to evaluate for English-speaking researchers, when it comes to behavioral science. Dosages of particular molecules stay the same whether you’re in Italy or the United States. Behavioral questions, however, carry different subtleties in different languages, so in a survey you’re at a disadvantage if you don’t speak or read the originating language.
For example, internet porn has been virtually ubiquitous for 15 years or more. Men almost invariably have more erection problems as they age. Asking a man to evaluate his erection problems “before internet porn” would be ridiculous. Even if I looked at the exact study, how am I, as an English speaker, to know exactly what the subtleties of the survey’s questions are in Italian?
“But wait,” you say! “Isn’t the study leader, Carlos Foresta, the head of an important Italian society?” Well…yeah, he is and he isn’t. Again, not seeing the survey, it’s hard to know what to think about Foresta’s team’s conclusion. But if you think the important holders of prestigious positions in the scientific community are immune to talking out their ass or holding bizarre and unsupportable opinions, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
The really great news that comes from all of this is that if you google “Carlo Foresta,” you get THIS image at the right…
…which is about as pleasingly random as you can get. And yes, it’s the same Carlo Foresta, who in addition to being the King of Siam and the Chair of Clinical Pathology at the University of Padua, chair of of the Center for Male Gamete Cryopreservation and President of the Italian Society of Reproductive Pathophysiology, also, apparently, insists on being the one to sweep out the lab every night.
Well…I can’t actually vouch for that fact, because I’m too excited about this page to plug it into Google Translate. I mean…they’re all carrying brooms. All of them are carrying brooms. Why are they carrying brooms? As far as I can tell, it has something to do with cleaning up the City of Padua. Um…okay. If you think that’s bad, try Googling “SIAM conference impotence porn” — about the fifth hit I got was a message-board request for porn featuring siamese twins.
Anyway, the best link I could find to the Italian Society of Andrology and Sexual Medicine was at the European Society for Sexual Medicine, and that leads to an expired site, and as far as I can tell, the abstract for the study is not on the web anywhere. Presentations at conferences don’t generally show up on Medline, at least not until they’ve been turned into full articles (if they ever are). Typically, data presented at conferences is often, though by no means always, preliminary. It doesn’t have quite the same rigorous peer review process that you’ll see in formal journal articles.
Another thing to know about Dr. Foresta is that he is a physician, which is promising, though not a psychiatrist, which would be important in evaluating behaviors like porn consumption in a behavior context rather than in a strictly physiological one. However, just because Foresta led the team doesn’t mean they didn’t have any psychiatrists or psychologists working with them. Furthermore, it is heartening that he’s an actual clinical pathologist, since one of the major problems I have with much health reporting is when conclusions are drawn by doctors who aren’t trained in pathology, which is the study and diagnosis of diseases.
But in the case of a physician, as opposed to a psychiatrist, the diseases he studies are physical in nature – not, generally, behavioral.
So, to summarize:
- The Italian report that claims to link porn use to male impotence is a survey, not a study.
- It is a presentation at a conference, not a peer-reviewed clinical article. The abstract is not available.
- The leader of the team is a clinical pathologist, endocrinologist and andrologist, not a behavioral scientist.
- Internet porn has been virtually ubiquitous for 15 years or more. Men almost invariably have more erection problems as they age. Asking a man to evaluate his erection problems “before internet porn” would be ridiculous.
All these things are important.
It’s also important to remember one simple thing in evaluating any behavioral scientific information like this: If you have a problem with porn, you don’t need science to tell you that you don’t like it. If you have a problem with the porn use someone in your life is engaging in, you don’t need an Italian team to “prove” that what that person’s doing is problematic. You should feel wholly empowered not to like something, and no amount of peer pressure, partner pressure or science is going to lastingly convince you to like it.
Similarly, if a man in your life is using porn and you’re uncomfortable with it, and uncomfortable with the way he reacts to your being uncomfortable with it, no amount of waving Fox News blurbs about vague, undefined Italian studies of boner dysfunction will convince that guy to change his porn use. If he’s open to your concerns and willing to modify his behavior for the sake of the relationship, mazel tov. If he’s not, then you’ve got a problem no Italian study is likely to help you with.
Image from Explicte Art’s Redheads Gallery.
UPDATE: The Sexademic used this very same Fox News story as an example of how to spot a fake sex study/news hoax in her excellent post, How To Spot an Internet Sex Research Hoax.
Umm, as a novice yet somewhat experienced researcher myself, before y’all go jumpin’ on Mr. Roche’s this-survey-sucks bandwagon, take heed. If you really want to intelligently consider the matter at hand – the validity of this piece of research, the survey of 28,000 men (which, if you do happen to know anything about research, is actually, quite a lot of ‘power’ – meaning that the chances of significant findings being due to spurious effects is quite diminished) – then actually go and find the article in a peer-reviewed journal and READ it! Mr. Roche himself admits that he doesn’t know about the methodology behind the survey and then bases the crux of his argument against the ‘limp’ findings on the supposition that the methodology is weak. And, Mr. Roche, a survey DOES, in fact, constitute the basis for a ‘study’ in the behavioral research field. A clinical trial, on the other hand, is typically conducted with rats, not people. A researcher cannot perform a clinical trial with men, put them all in a social vacuum for a given number of months, expose half of them to moderate amounts of porn and the other half to endless porn until some negative effect occurs in order to see if some negative effect WILL occur, because that is not ETHICAL. So, you conduct a survey with a large quantity of men and ask them about their porn use and their sexual functioning, and if you are a good researcher, a number of other behaviors as well, and then you draw conclusions from the analysis of your data. And with 28,000 subjects, you diminish the possibility that such findings are due to some sort of odd coincidence or, as you call it, ‘bad methodology’. Before you base an entire argument on the supposition that a study is poorly performed, get yourself a PhD in a research field, read the damn article (learn Italian first if you must) and then critique the study. But, please, for the love of good porn and good research, do not pass yourself off as some sort of researcher when you are clearly not one. I, myself, have no idea if this study has what researchers look for when they critique each others’ work, namely external and internal validity, reliability, a strong theoretical orientation, a logic model, sound sampling and recruitment strategies and reputable and ethical researchers at its fore, because I won’t know that until I read the article. And I won’t debunk the study’s findings until I do that first. And I certainly wouldn’t misrepresent myself as someone who ought to be writing as though he knows enough about research to convince others that a particular study is flawed, even if the principal researcher involved was once photographed with a broom in-hand and that photo was posted on the internet. What is this, a witchhunt?
Thomas, so good to read you writing here and adding your smarts!
Dammit! Let me try that one again:
I wonder are the contributers to the survey also now blind?
sigh.
I wonder at the contributers to the survey also now blind?
Whoa, that is one strong reaction you have there mate. I can agree that the so called research sounds a bit strange, especially the bit about 28.000 research subjects, but still… I mean, they mention “excessive consumption”, which quite different from “porn is bad, mkey?”. Also, “immune to explicit images”, which I personally don’t hold that implausible. Eat too much cake and you don’t fancy it too much any more either. I really don’t see what the big problem is?
@Thomas
Thank you very much for your clarifying reply.
I totaly agree with you, that the article, as published by Fox, is absolutely useless and only helps Fox to interpret the informations published at the SIAMS congress tendentioulsy in order to make an own statement about porn consumption.
I found some more informations about what was published at the congress on italian newspapers. The informations given by Fox are compressed that much, that the initial information content is lost.
After my research on this topic I can’t even tell if Foresta participated on the study/survey (whatever ist was) or just made a statement as SIAMS president and member of the board of directors.
The articles I found about this on italian sites focus on the problem of young male adolescents consuming a lot of internet porn and what effect this has on their sexuality (e.g. erectile dysfunction) and problems re the relationship towards girls of the same age.
Again, many thanks for your reply and also for questioning the information given by the news.
@Erica — I haven’t read that New York Magazine article, but I will go read it. That picture at the top of it is somewhat disturbing.
Daniel —
Perhaps my use of the broom picture it was a bit too subtle. It was a comment about what information is find on the web. Foresta’s survey is being reported in the U.S. press as something important. With half an hour or so of research, I can’t even find an abstract of it — not even in Italian. But I can find a picture of Foresta participating in a (laudable) campaign to clean up Padua.
I believe the Fox news story and the picture of Foresta holding a broom to be of equivalent web randomness. Both are propaganda, but one is not harmful.
It’s not Foresta’s fault that the average American knows squat about how medical or behavioral studies are done. That’s (partially) Fox’s fault. Throughout this article, I hope I made it obvious that my criticisms of reporting on Foresta are not intended to imply he is not a good endocrinologist or pathologist. From his resume, he looks pretty impressive. I am criticizing Fox News’s reporting of non-information. It’s not Foresta’s fault Fox quoted him or reported his survey clearly out of any meaningful context for anyone who knows anything about science.
I’m not even implying that this survey is not valuable. It may even be mis-reported by Fox. For all I know the conditions may have been controlled and this would be valuable clinical information.
What I’m commenting on throughout is that this information, as reported by Fox News, is meaningless. I know virtually NOTHING about the study, which is Fox’s bad for not asking the right questions (like they care?) Without at least an abstract being available, reading about this survey with one brief quote from Foresta on Fox news is the news equivalent of hearing “My friend says her husband has been looking at web porn and now he can’t get it up. It’s obvious what’s causing that!”
This does not address fundamental flaws in the survey — I know virtually nothing about the survey, because the abstract is not available. Just having a soundbite of Foresta’s conclusions is not just empty but DANGEROUS. An abstract is the very LEAST that would be required for anyone who knows anything about scientific studies to evaluate what the survey actually might mean or not mean for themselves. I don’t know. I don’t have that abstract. I only know about the Fox story, and it’s garbage.
And yet, Foresta’s survey will be quoted in passing as “fact” the next time a media pundit who vaguely remembers hearing about it needs an example of how porn is changing men for the worse. No one will challenge it. No one will question it. It will enter popular consciousness as a simple fact: porn makes men impotent. OF COURSE it does, they’ll say.
AND, another indisputable fact, Foresta helped clean up the city of Padua. In the context of what I’ve seen, in the context of not my speaking Italian, THAT fact is more inarguably established than anything Foresta’s study said.
I’m quite happy there are people who question articles wherever they are found and publish a substantiated diessenting opinion.
But I do not understand why you wrote about that picture you found of Carlo Foresta holding a broom. This has nothing to do with the topic and it seems as you’re making fun of Mr. Foresta just because of this picture and refer to a reduced credibility as a scientist. As you have enough other arguments this wasn’t necessary and not useful to your article.
This picture was part of a campaign of leading people in Padua who care about their city and the people. There’s nothing wrong with it.
Perhaps I dind’t get the point why you refered to this picture. Therefore I apologize if I’m wrong about your intentions.
Hi! What do you think about the article published in New York Magazine about the “waning male libido?” Here’s the link http://nymag.com/news/features/70976/
I’m curious because I didn’t think this article made sense since porn has existed for so long and the sampling of men is so small.
How does this compare to the study of the Italian male libido?
Dammit, that picture at the top of this article killed my last boner-making neuron!
Seriously this is a great guest post debunking a piece of terrible science. I think it’s important for people to hear not just that something is false, but also an explanation of why and how to spot it next time. Well done.