Then again, whenever I’ve covered a paper on something like ant navigation, I’ve never been expected to place it into the context of an entire corpus of literature, and cover everything on ants, and everything on navigation. That people expected I should do that, and berated me for NOT doing that, for something more politically divisive…well perhaps I should have, but I don’t think that’s really the point.

Last – it was pointed out to me that I failed to include a statement about how the researchers in the third study operationalized “aggression.” In this case, it was defined as rape or criminal activity. Certainly there are other forms of aggression that may or may not be more highly associated with the viewing of pornography, not covered by this particular paper.

Jason, thank you for circling back with the update. Interestingly, I find your new and re-edited post a lot more useful. For instance, I wanted to include some of the original on a page for Our Porn, Ourselves but I was going to have to excerpt the opinion *out* of it to do so. Looks great, the real meat of the discussion is right there now. And thanks again.

I still disagree with you about academic media vs. real time / indie media, but that’s just fine.

Wake up to the world of media in which you write, how it is perceived and its scope of influence. You need only look at the reaction around the blogosphere and Twitter to what you’ve written to see that I am far from the only person who thinks this is a huge shift in the conversation, and you may think all of us as irresponsible if you like. At the end of the day, what you think about how the world reacts to what you put together and said (“what this means”) does not matter. It’s what you wrote that matters. You don’t think it’s a big deal? Good. Stay that way and we can trust your objectivity.

Don’t worry: no one here is a fan of you and no one said you by any means did a complete job. It’s what you found. And after my decade of online journalism, far be it for you to tell me how to analyze my media.

Definitely took you and your writing with a huge grain of salt, and I appreciate that you call your own credibility into question. And I’m very glad you don’t agree with me, or like what I have to say. My blog, my opinion. Your post has more value to me than to you. I’d be delighted to tell you which parts of your post are irresponsible as well. But having the larger discussion is more important to me than doing the kind of accusatory drive-by you’ve done here in the comments.

“Another important measure they included was the a series of questions regarding the content of their preferred genre of porn. If they preferred BDSM, fetishism, bestiality, or violence/coercion, they were coded as “paraphilic” users. If they answered “none of the above,” they were coded as “mainstream” users. I think this bifurcation leaves some things to be desired, but let’s see how their results turned out.”

the bifurcation is the study’s distinction between what might be considered “mainstream” sex and, well, everything else. on one hand it’s apparent that they needed to make a distinction between what most consumers are consuming and what makes other sexual interests different. but it’s inaccurate (on their part, likely because they follow DSM definitions (unfortunately academically accepted as psychologically definitive on “outsider” sexuality).

we all know that BDSM is NOT the same sexual interest as bestiality, not by a long shot. Goldman, to his credit acknowledges the nuanced flaw in this thinking when he states ” I think this bifurcation leaves some things to be desired” which is a big understatement, but continues on to examine the findings.

the findings seem to make *even more obvious* the flaw in DSM-style definitions of non-mainstream human sexuality. I was reading this like you and thinking, hey, hold on a minute. the findings appear to back up exactly what your conclusion is, that being people with outsider sexual interests (and I’m using “outsider” by no way to indicate that this might be a minority experience of sex) have less satisfying sex because their needs in real life are simply not being met. not as a cause, or even in correlation to, the type of porn they consumed. and they consume more of it, logically because (for example) they’re turned on by non-vanilla sex, but is is not happening or they do not have safe access to it in life.

the flawed thinking on paraphilias is institutional (even how it defines them is inaccurate). yet that didn’t seem to undermine what happened in this examination, which shows porn isn’t *causing* *anything*.

we still have a lot of educating to do.

I was pleased to see women included as study subjects as equals, which is appallingly rare.

I assume this was gathered from the questionnaire given to Croatian men and women, but what I think could also be concluded is that those who prefer “paraphilic” porn content may also prefer a “paraphilic” sexual lifestyle and, as anyone with a kink they enjoy participating in regularly can tell you, finding sexual satisfaction can be tougher in some environments. Basically, perhaps the porn is not the cause of their sexual dissatisfaction, but instead an outlet through which they deal with unsatisfactory sex.