.
Thanks to Member Motiman for presenting the link to the article numbered one. I felt the article was important enough to get spotlighted again, for those of us interested in the workings of the industry. It led to other fascinating reads, which also included looks at non-Japanese porn and sex in general, which some of you may also find worth your while.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
0) Internet Pornography Statistics
1) This Is Why Japan's Porn Industry Is Profitable, and America's Isn't
2) Korea's per Capita Porn Spending Highest in World
3) Get the Latest Pornography Statistics
4) The Porn Myth: Uncovering the Truth About Sex Stars
5) The History of Pornography No More Prudish Than the Present
6) Hourglass Figures Affect Men's Brains Like a Drug
7) Men Agree Who's Hot, Women Don't
8) Ooga Ooga! Men Overspend to Attract Mates
9) Is Porn Bad For You?
10) Sex Education Delays Teen Sex, Study Finds
11) 6 (Other) Great Things Sex Can Do For You
12) Penis Size Matters in Bed, Study Finds
13) James Deen (Porn Set r***) Allegations Discussed by Voodoo
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Internet Pornography Statistics
The page has some fascinating tidbits; for example, a countdown clock as to porn's pervasiveness is at the top of the page. I've only been on the page for a few minutes, and the clock claims that while on that page, a million dollars have been spent on porn (not among most Akiba-Online members, we are sure), ten million have viewed porn, and 150,000 people have searched with adult terms. The page also reveals other things, such as "U.S. Adult Pornography Viewer Demographics," and "Hardcore Pornography Titles Released per Year." The information is outdated, however, ending for the year 2005.
http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html?cmpid=ttr-ls
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This Is Why Japan's Porn Industry Is Profitable, and America's Isn't
By EJ Dickson, Jan 15, 2014
2013 was not the best year for the domestic adult film industry. On top of grappling with the triple scourges of piracy, mandatory condom laws, and waning DVD sales, the porn biz also had to deal with costly moratoriums on shooting after four performers tested positive for HIV. Yet outside the United States, the business of selling sex is booming.
According to an article in the Japan Times, the burgeoning Japanese AV (adult video) industry is giving the U.S. porn biz a run for its money, producing at least twice as many films as the United States does per year. Consumers in Japan are also apparently more willing to blow more of their cash on adult DVDs and other products, with the average consumer spending nearly $157 per year on content in 2011. For the sake of comparison, in the U.S. revenue per capita for that year was a meager $47 per year, in part because the advent of tube sites have made it easier for consumers to access porn for free (one website estimates that only 80 to 90 percent of U.S. consumers have actually paid for porn).
Japanese adult performer Mumin, who has shot more than 2,000 titles in his decade-long career, says part of the reason why there’s more demand for Japanese porn is because Japanese AV filmmakers put more emphasis on the amateur subgenre, as opposed to the slick production value associated with American adult films (Japanese AV films also tend to portray a wider range of kinks and fetishes than mainstream U.S. adult films do, as indicated by the enormous popularity of niches like tentacle porn).
Mumin; from another interesting article, "A Hard Day's Grind for Porn's Professionals"
“We tend to go with more day-to-day storylines featuring regular guys, unlike on American-made DVDs,” says Mumin, who says he shoots an average of six adult films per week (while some top-earning U.S. adult performers used to shoot as frequently, this is no longer the case more often than not, as there are generally fewer available shoots) . “There are few, if any, steroid-fueled actors in Japan’s AV industry. Our dramas are far more realistic.”
Unlike the adult film industry in the San Fernando Valley, the Japanese porn biz is subject to stringent censorship laws—female and male genitalia are required to be pixelated, for instance (urabon, or hardcore Japanese porn that does not censor genitalia, is technically illegal, but extremely easy to find on the Internet.)
In other respects, however, the Japanese AV industry is relatively similar to that of the United States: as is the case in the San Fernando Valley, Japanese female adult performers make more money than males, and the average performer stays in the industry for about as long as American performers do (six months, according to the low end of one estimate). In fact, the primary distinction between the Japanese and American porn industries seems to be simply that the Japanese AV industry has figured out how to get consumers to pony up for their content, while many U.S. adult production companies, unfortunately, have not.
http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/japanese-porn-industry-profitable/
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Korea's per Capita Porn Spending Highest in World
By Lee Hyo-sik, 2011-02-07
South Koreans are found to be the world’s top buyer of pornographic materials, according to Newsweek.
The U.S. weekly magazine said on its latest online edition that Koreans spent an average $527 per person in 2006 to watch pornography through CDs, videos and other mediums, followed by Japan’s $157 and Finland’s $114.
Pornography revenue per capita for Australia came in third at $99, followed by Brazil at $53, Czech Republic at $45 and the U.S at $45.
Proof that North Koreans want to
be like their brothers in the South
The magazine said the figures are derived from the data quoted by a blog maintained by Mark Rice, a professor of American Studies at ST. John Fisher College. (http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com).
It also said the Ranking American graphics are based on data from Durex and www.toptenreviews.com.
The toptenreveiws.com said the revenue of the world’s pornography industry reached $97 billion in 2006. By country, China was the largest market at $27 billion, followed by South Korea’s $25.7 billion and Japan’s $19.9 billion.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/02/117_80964.html
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Warning: While the statistics presented are probably trustworthy for the most part (which makes this article worthwhile reading), the site and the writer come from a religious slant, and do not appear without bias.
Get the Latest Pornography Statistics
Written by Luke Gilkerson, February 19, 2013
German poet Heinrich Heine said you cannot feed the hungry on statistics. Well-researched stats can only illuminate the problem, not solve it.
But for many, the problem of pornography in our modern culture still needs a spotlight. What do some of the latest stats tell us about this sexual-media giant?
Covenant Eyes has released a new conglomeration of pornography statistics based on some of the best research. Here are the highlights…
Porn is big business
Just seven years ago, global porn revenues were estimated at $20 billion, with $10 billion coming from US consumers.
However, by 2011 both global and U.S. porn revenues had been reduced by 50%, due in large part to the amount of free pornography available online. It is estimated that 80-90% of Internet porn users only access free online material.
As far as online pornography is concerned, from 2001 to 2007, the Internet porn industry went from a $1-billion-a-year industry to $3-billion-a-year in the US alone.
Porn is a dangerous business
On average, 17% of performers use condoms in heterosexual porn films. 66% of porn performers have herpes, and 7% of porn performers have HIV.
Ex-porn star Tanya Burleson says men and women in pornography do drugs because “they can’t deal with the way they’re being treated” in the industry. A 2012 survey of porn actresses demonstrated 79% of porn stars have used marijuana, 50% have used ecstasy, 44% have used cocaine, and 39% have used hallucinogens.
When hundreds of scenes were analyzed from the 50 top selling adult films, 88% of scenes contained acts of physical aggression, and 49% of scenes contained verbal aggression.
All types of people look at Internet porn
Paul Fishbein, founder of Adult Video News, is right when he says, “Porn doesn’t have a demographic—it goes across all demographics.” After an analysis of 400 million web searches, researchers concluded that 1 in 8 of all searches online are for erotic content.
Who is more likely to seek out pornography online? According to data taken from Internet users who took part in the General Social Survey:
After an analysis of more than one million hits to Google’s mobile search sites, more than 1 in 5 searches are for pornography on mobile devices.
By 2015, mobile adult content and services are expected to reach $2.8 billion, mobile adult subscriptions will reach nearly $1 billion, and mobile adult video on tablets will triple worldwide.
It is common for teens to see porn
In a 2010 national survey, over a quarter of 16- to 17-year olds said they were exposed to nudity online when they did not want to see it. In addition 20% of 16-year-olds and 30% of 17-year-olds have received a “sext” (a sexually explicit text message).
More than 7 out of 10 teens hide their online behavior from their parents in some way.
35% of boys say they have viewed pornographic videos “too many times to count.”
More than half of boys and nearly a third of girls see their first pornographic images before they turn 13. In a survey of hundreds of college students, 93% of boys and 62% of girls said they were exposed to pornography before they turned 18. In the same survey, 83% of boys and 57% of girls said they had seen images of group sex online.
It is common for young adults to use porn
About 64-68% of young adult men and about 18% of women use porn at least once every week. Another 17% of men and another 30% of women use porn 1-2 times per month.
Two-thirds of college-age men and half of college-age women say viewing porn is an acceptable way to express one’s sexuality.
Porn is destroying families
The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers reports that 56% of divorce cases involve one party having “an obsessive interest in pornographic websites.”
According to numerous studies, prolonged exposure to pornography leads to:
http://www.covenanteyes.com/2013/02/19/pornography-statistics/
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The Porn Myth: Uncovering the Truth About Sex Stars
by Stephanie Pappas, February 25, 2013
What are porn stars really like? Science struggles with the answer.
Porn stars aren't particularly keen on being studied. But they are the focus of great public interest and moral debate, which may explain why one man's in-depth analysis of adult film performers went viral last week.
The average adult film actress is a brunette with a B-cup named Nikki, at least according to blogger Jon Millward, who spent six months analyzing the demographics of 10,000 porn stars drawn from the Internet Adult Film Database. But what's known about porn stars beyond their breast size? Remarkably little, thanks to practically zero research funding and a community wary of researchers.
"The average span of a performer's career is usually only about six to 18 months, so the benefit of participating in these things isn't usually apparent to the people who are in it at the time," Kayden Kross, an adult film actress and writer, told LiveScience.
Not only that, Kross said, but many actresses are reluctant to help researchers, because they're worried that the studies will be used against them by anti-pornography activists. [The Sex Quiz: Myths, Taboos and Bizarre Facts]
"The difficulty with this population has always been access," said James Griffith, a psychologist at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and one of the few scientists to delve into the subject. "It's a very difficult population to define."
This lack of research is notable given the number of stereotypes about porn actresses, particularly that they have high rates of childhood sexual abuse and psychological problems. Though it's hard to know for sure without more extensive studies, early explorations have found these stereotypes fail to hold up. Ultimately, the findings could lead to better understanding of sexual health, sexual identity and other aspects of the high-grossing porn business.
Un-stereotyping porn
Stereotypes were the motivation for Millward, whose analysis of porn stars includes a facial composite of the "average" actress.
The stereotypical porn actress — with enormous breasts and blonde hair — doesn't match reality, Millward found. In fact, the most common bra size among porn stars is a 34B, compared with 36C for the average American woman. High obesity rates among the public may explain some of the discrepancy in breast size; porn actresses are also thinner than the average American woman. According to the numbers given on Internet Adult Film Database profiles, the average female porn star weighs 117 pounds (53 kilograms), which is 48 pounds (22 kg) less than the average American woman. [5 Myths About Women's Bodies]
The average male porn star weighs 167.5 pounds (76 kg), 27 pounds (12 kg) less than the national average of 195.7 pounds (89 kg) for men.
Nor are blondes as dominant as might be expected. Only 32.7 percent of porn actresses have blonde hair, whether natural or dyed. About 39 percent have brown hair, 22.5 percent have black hair, and only about 5 percent are redheads.
Nikki is the most common name for female porn stars, Millward found, and David is the most common name for men.
The psychology of pornography
Millward's data is not published in a research journal or peer-reviewed by experts, so scientists like Griffith take it with a grain of salt. (Millward plans to make his methods available on his website.) Kross, however, said the results didn't surprise her.
"There have been more brunette stars than blonde stars," she said. "It's just that those stars have never been as big as the blonde stars."
Meanwhile, academic research on the porn star population is lacking.
Part of the reason is that there just aren't that many porn stars — about a thousand working at any given time, Kross said. Add to that short career spans, a reluctance to be put under the microscope and a population of performers centered in Los Angeles County, where many researchers don't have the luxury of spending time, and it's a recipe for lack of research.
Another barrier is funding. Griffith conducted his study on pornography without the benefit of outside money.
"I didn't even attempt it," he told LiveScience. "I don't know of anyone that would fund a study on characteristics of people in the adult entertainment industry."
Porn isn't Griffith's typical area of research (he studies risk-taking and decision-making), but he decided to look into it after a question from an undergraduate student in a lecture on human sexuality made him realize how little research on porn actors has been done.
He advertised for volunteers at the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, a now-defunct medical organization that used to administer mandatory tests for sexually transmitted infections to industry actors (tests are now done elsewhere).
Though the majority of porn stars would have used the Foundation's services, the volunteer sample makes it hard to know if the 177 actresses who agreed to participate in the study represent the industry as a whole. Nevertheless, the study is the largest sample of porn stars ever published.
The results of the research failed to support many common stereotypes. Most notably, the porn actresses were no more likely to report having been sexually abused as children than national averages or than a sample of demographically matched women Griffith and his colleagues recruited at a university and at an airport.
Porn actresses did report having sex for the first time at a younger age and having more partners (outside of work) than the typical woman, which is unsurprising, Griffith said, given that they likely got into the adult industry because they liked sex. (Of the 177 women surveyed, only one said she was coerced into a pornography career.) Sixty-nine percent of porn actresses ranked their enjoyment of sex as 10 out of 10, a rating given by only 32.8 percent of non-performers. [10 Surprising Sex Statistics]
Porn actresses were also more likely to report higher self-esteem than average women, another unsurprising finding, Griffith said.
"They do have to be comfortable with themselves in order to engage in intercourse in front of other people on camera," he said.
Kross warned that the finding that porn actresses enjoyed sex more than other women might be unreliable, given that a porn star's public image relies on her fans' belief that she thinks sex is the "greatest thing on the planet." But the self-esteem finding did not surprise her.
"All you hear from fans is, 'Oh, you're so wonderful, I wish I had a girlfriend like you,'" she said. "The fan base just adores us. They worship us online, and we hear it every day."
The stereotype that porn stars use more drugs than the average person was partially true, Griffith and his colleagues found. Porn actresses had tried more drugs than other women, though the only difference in recent drug use was a higher prevalence of marijuana smoking. The drug use could be linked to the personality of people who get into the industry, Griffith said.
"Maybe they're higher risk-takers," he said.
Kross agreed. "I have a feeling we've probably, as a demographic, tried skydiving more," she said. "We've probably tried monkey brains in South Africa more."
Unanswered questions
Griffith and his colleagues reported their findings in the International Journal of Sexual Health in September 2012. They also asked performers their reasons for entering the industry, and found that money was the primary driver, followed by fame.
This research is a "first step," Griffith said. The sample was limited, based on self-reports and focused on performers in the United States. Griffith doesn't have plans to pursue the research further, though he hopes other researchers will. One particularly interesting finding, he said, was that two-thirds of the porn actresses said they were bisexual. It's not clear whether they identified this way before they entered the industry or whether they began seeing themselves as bisexual after doing popular woman-on-woman scenes.
"Engaging in that behavior while they're in the industry, is that related to them identifying as bisexual or not?" Griffith said. "If it is the case, that could be applied to theories of bisexuality."
More work is also needed on rates of sexually transmitted infections in the industry and the effect on a performer of contracting one, he said. In 2012, a measure requiring porn stars to wear condoms passed in Los Angeles. In January, Vivid Entertainment and performers Kross and Logan Pierce filed a lawsuit to challenge the law on freedom of speech and anti-censorship grounds.
Mental health is important, Griffith said, but "I think the more important question has to do with physical health."
http://www.livescience.com/27428-truth-about-porn-stars.html
The original link presents readers' comments, many not worth the ink they are not printed on, but some are thought-provoking, such as:
Maryann Fläsch
From the Slate Article: "Whenever a new porn starlet appears on The Howard Stern Show, Stern asks her the same biographical question: “Were you molested as a child?” Many of them were, and detail their history of childhood sexual abuse on the air. Some admit to it later. “I lied like a rug,” Jenna Jameson wrote in her book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, of her own appearance on Stern’s show. “I didn’t want anyone to think that I was in the business because I was a victim."
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The History of Pornography No More Prudish Than the Present
by Stephanie Pappas, October 11, 2010
Pornography is often portrayed as one of the ills of today's society, evidence of modern moral decay brought to you by video cameras and broadband access.
As it turns out, modern times have got nothing on the past. Pornography existed long before video or even photography, and many researchers think evolution predisposed humans for visual arousal (It's a lot easier to pass on your genes if the sight of other naked humans turns you on, after all). Whichever way you slice it, the diversity of pornographic materials throughout history suggests that human beings have always been interested in images of sex. Lots and lots of sex.
"Sex has always played a super-important role for human beings and their relationships," said Seth Prosterman, a clinical sexologist and licensed therapist in San Francisco. "What people do sexually has always been a curiosity, and of interest." [RELATED: New Technologies Let Pornography Producers Stay On Top]
Ancient erotica
The definition of "pornography" is famously subjective. After all, one man's Venus de Milo is another man's masturbation aid. But researchers generally define the genre as material designed solely for sexual arousal, without further artistic merit.
By that standard, the first known erotic representations of humans might not be porn, in the traditional sense, at all. As early as 30,000 years ago, Paleolithic people were carving large-breasted, thick-thighed figurines of pregnant women out of stone and wood. Archaeologists doubt these "Venus figurines" were intended for sexual arousal. More likely, the figurines were religious icons or fertility symbols.
Fast-forwarding through history, the ancient Greeks and Romans created public sculptures and frescos depicting homosexuality, threesomes, fellatio and cunnilingus. In India during the second century, the Kama Sutra was half sex-manual, half relationship-handbook. The Moche people of ancient Peru painted sexual scenes on ceramic pottery, while the aristocracy in 16th century Japan was fond of erotic woodblock prints.
In the West, many early explicit materials were political, rather than exclusively pornographic, said Joseph Slade, a professor of media arts at Ohio University. French revolutionaries, in particular, satirized the aristocracy with sexually charged pamphlets. Even the Marquis de Sade's famously brutal and erotic works were part philosophical.
"They were political invectives disguised as pornography," Slade said.
Porn is born
In the 1800s, the idea of porn for porn's sake began to spread. Erotic novels had been in print since at least the mid-1600s in France (though being identified as the author of one meant a sure trip to jail), but the first full-length English-language pornographic novel, "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," also known as "Fanny Hill" (Oxford University Press) wasn't published until 1748.
Despite the reserved public attitudes toward sex at the time, pornographic novels held little back. The author of "Fanny Hill" managed to cover bisexuality, voyeurism, group sex and masochism, among other topics. By 1888, the anonymous author of "My Secret Life" was writing about sex with words that would make a modern television censor squirm.
Technology drove innovation in the porn genre. In 1839, Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype, a primitive form of photography. Almost immediately, pornographers commandeered the new technology. The earliest surviving dirty daguerreotype — described by Slade in a 2006 paper as "depicting a rather solemn man gingerly inserting his penis into the vagina of an equally solemn and middle-aged woman" — is dated at 1846.
Video followed a similar path. By 1896, filmmakers in France were delving into the erotic with short, silent clips like "Le Coucher de la Marie," in which an actress performed a strip tease. Hard-core sex started showing up after 1900. These "stag films" were usually shown at all-male gatherings, and they were tame by today's standards, Slade said.
"They look like your grandparents having sex," he said. "They were quaint, but it was real intercourse."
Pornography gets popular
For a long time, stag films remained stagnant, both in content and in quality. Then, in the 1970s, changing social mores opened the door for public showing of explicit films. The Internet and the invention of the digital camera lowered the barriers to porn-making so low that entire websites are now devoted solely to non-professional videos.
The shift from publically viewed stag films to privately viewed rentals and internet downloads drove changes in the types of acts shown on-screen. Privacy, Slade said, made men more willing to watch fetish films depicting specific, sometimes odd, sexual behavior. A 1994 Carnegie Mellon study of early porn on computer Bulletin Board Systems (a precursor to the World Wide Web), found that 48 percent of downloads were far outside the sexual mainstream, depicting bestiality, incest and pedophilia. Less than 5 percent of downloads depicted vaginal sex. This could have been because magazines and pornographic films had traditional sex covered, and people went to their computers for images they couldn't find elsewhere, Slade suggested.
Today, porn is all over the internet, but the actual size of the industry is a mystery. No one keeps official records, and few studies have made a stab at the economics of porn. Adult Video News, a trade industry journal, made annual estimates of porn sales and rentals, along with sales of magazines and sex toys. In 2007, according to an AVN senior editor Mark Kernes, retail sales reached $6 billion a year. However, AVN's figures have been widely disputed. And even if they were reliable, the numbers wouldn't take into account all of the free amateur videos uploaded to sites like XTube or the photography site Flickr.
Regardless of how much money is being made, porn is attracting eyes. A 2008 study of 813 American university students found that 87 percent of men and 31 percent of women reported using pornography. The study was published in the Journal of Adolescent Research. And in 2009, University of Montreal researcher Simon Louis Lajeunesse made headlines when he announced that he had attempted a study on the impact of pornography on young men's sexuality, but he couldn't find a control group. In other words, good luck finding a man in his twenties who hasn't seen porn.
Controversial content
So what is all that porn doing to us? The question is a hornet's nest of controversy. While most mainstream Internet porn today doesn't rise to the level of those early Bulletin Board images, critics argue that competition between pornographers has led to an upswing in dominance and verbal abuse of women depicted in films made for straight men.
"They need to always put out something new, something enticing, to attract people," Chyng Sun, a professor of media studies at New York University and director of the film "The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships," told LiveScience. "The degradation, the aggression levels, that is something you can create, something a little bit new to offer to the audience."
By analyzing best-selling pornography films, Sun has found that physical and verbal aggression are present in 90 percent of mainstream porn scenes. Films directed by women are no less likely to contain aggression than films directed by men, she reported in a 2008 paper in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly.
Sun argues that these aggressive images are harmful to people's sex lives and that they help cement negative stereotypes about women. Others disagree. Prosterman, the San Francisco sexologist, points out that research has failed to draw a clear link between porn and criminal sexual behavior. And, he said, porn is one way for people to explore their own sexual desires.
Debates about pornography have been ongoing since at least the Victorian era (no word on whether stone-age people hid the fertility statues under the mattress), and they're not likely to cease anytime soon. Nor are people likely to stop looking at pictures of other naked people.
"Most people like to have sex," said the AVN's Kernes. "A not-too-much-smaller segment of them like to watch other people have sex, and that is what the adult industry delivers."
http://www.livescience.com/8748-history-pornography-prudish-present.html
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Hourglass Figures Affect Men's Brains Like a Drug
by Charles Q. Choi, February 22, 2010
Sexy-Sensual: A model walks down the runway during the Victoria's Secret Fashion show,
November 9, 2005, in New York. (Credit: AP Photo/Jeff Christensen)
Watching a curvaceous woman can feel like a reward in the brain of men, much as drinking alcohol or taking drugs might, research now reveals.
These new findings might help explain the preoccupation men can have toward pornography, scientists added.
Shapely hips in women are linked with fertility and overall health. As such, it makes sense evolutionarily speaking that studies across cultures have shown men typically find hourglass figures sexy.
To explore the roots of this behavior, researchers had 14 men, average age 25, rate how attractive they found pictures of the naked derrieres of seven women before and after cosmetic surgery that gave them more shapely hips. These operations did not reduce weight but just redistributed it, by implanting fat harvested from the waists into the buttocks.
Brain scans of the men revealed that seeing post-surgery women activated parts of the brain linked with rewards, including regions associated with responses to drugs and alcohol.
It might not be especially surprising that evolution wired the male brain to find attractive bodies rewarding.
"Hugh Hefner could have told us that by showing us how many zeroes are in his bank account," said researcher Steven Platek, an evolutionary cognitive neuroscientist at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. "But there's more to it than buying Playboy, Maxim, or FHM."
For instance, "these findings could help further our understanding pornography addiction and related disorders, such as erectile dysfunction in the absence of pornography," he explained. "These findings could also lend to the scientific inquiry about sexual infidelity."
The scientists also found that changes in a woman's body-mass index or BMI — a common measure of body fat — only really affected brain areas linked to simple visual evaluations of size and shape. This may be evidence that body fat influences judgments of female beauty due more to societal norms than brain wiring.
"The media portrays women as wholly too skinny," Platek said. "It's not just about body fat, or body mass index."
What do women think?
Future research could also investigate the effects that attractive figures have on the female brain.
"It turns out women find similar optimally attractive female bodies as attention-grabbing, albeit for different reasons," Platek said. "Women size up other women in an effort to determine their own relative attractiveness and to maintain mate guarding — or, in other words, keep their mate away from optimally designed females."
These findings should not be construed as saying that men are solely programmed by their biology, nor that "women without optimal design should just hang up their mating towel," Platek added.
Platek and his colleague Devendra Singh detailed their findings online Feb. 5 in the journal PLoS ONE.
http://www.livescience.com/9834-hourglass-figures-affect-men-brains-drug.html
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Men Agree Who's Hot, Women Don't
by Jeanna Bryner, June 30, 2009
Men find thin, seductive women attractive, while women tend to disagree on what makes a potential mate hot.
But it also means more competition for the hottest chicks, scientists say. Credit: Stockxpert.hottest hunks.
Thin and seductive, that's what men find attractive in women. But the ladies are less in agreement over what makes for a hot guy, new research finds.
The news is good for guys who might think they're not the hottest hunks. But it also means more competition for the hottest chicks, scientists say.
"Men agree a lot more about who they find attractive and unattractive than women agree about who they find attractive and unattractive," said study researcher Dustin Wood, assistant professor of psychology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
The study included more than 1,300 heterosexual men, about 2,700 heterosexual women, about 125 homosexual men and about the same number of homosexual women. The average age of participants was about 28 years old, and ranged from 18 to more than 70.
Participants each rated nearly 100 photographs of either men or women, depending on the participant's gender and sexual orientation. They scored how attractive they found each photographed individual on a 10-point scale from "not at all" to "very" attractive.
Previously, the researchers had judged each of the photos for various factors of attractiveness, including how seductive, confident, thin, sensitive, stylish, curvaceous (women), muscular (men), traditional, masculine/feminine, classy, well-groomed, or upbeat the person in the image looked.
What men want: Despite another recent study that found modern men are more interested in intelligent, educated women than in decades past, in the new study men tended to base their attractiveness ratings on women's physical features, giving stellar marks to those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
What women want: Women showed some preference for thin, muscular men. But they also disagreed over the hotness factor of many men, with some women giving a guy high attractiveness ratings while others scored the same guy as not attractive at all.
Do men actually agree more on what makes a person attractive or was there something about the photos that caused men to rate them in certain ways? To figure this out, the researchers turned to the homosexual ratings. Sure enough, gay men showed a greater consensus about attractiveness levels of photos of men than did straight women of those same photos.
And straight men also showed more consensus than lesbians in terms of attractiveness ratings of the photos of women.
The results, published in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have implications for the dating scene.
For instance, with varying ideas of which men are attractive, women may face less competition from other women on the prowl. Men, on the other hand, might face stiff competition from other guys who all have eyes for the same handful of potential mates. Men, therefore, may need to invest more time and energy into attracting and guarding their mates from other potential suitors, the researchers said.
Oh, and they do: After eons of evolution, men are hardwired to overspend and max out credit cards to attract mates, a study last year concluded.
http://www.livescience.com/5502-men-agree-hot-women.html
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Ooga Ooga! Men Overspend to Attract Mates
by Jeanna Bryner, December 10, 2008
Men are hardwired after eons of evolution to overspend, a new study suggests. Their maxed-out credit cards and mega-purchases have been tied to their desire to attract mates.
The biggest male spenders in the survey were found to have the highest number of reported past partners and desired the most future partners.
The finding, detailed in the current issue of the journal Evolutionary Psychology, did not hold with women.
Vying for women is simply what men do and have done for hundreds of thousands of years, said study leader Daniel Kruger, a social and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. But how they entice mates has evolved.
"Men in the ancestral environment were valued if they were good providers," Kruger said. "Now we have this new consumer culture, so basically we show our potential through the consumer goods that we purchase, rather than being a good hunter or providing protection."
Financial habits of men
Kruger used data collected from telephone surveys of more than 400 men and women with an average age of 34 (100 men and 309 women). Participants rated how much they agreed with three statements about their financial habits, such as "I always live within my income range," and "Each income period, I set aside at least ten percent for savings."
(A person who highly agreed with the statements would be considered conservative in matters financial, as opposed to consumptive.)
They also indicated marital status and sexual partners (their count for the past five years and number desired in the future).
Men who spent more (saved less) and who were more likely to shell out more than they earned reported having more sexual partners in the past five years and desired more future partners than other guys in the study.
Specifically, the 25 percent of men who were most conservative about spending had an average of three partners in the past five years and desired about one partner in the next five years. The 2 percent of men with the riskiest financial strategies had double those numbers.
For women, financial consumption wasn't significantly related to past or future mates.
Why we're in debt
Kruger said the results could help to explain why so many people are in a financial mess right now.
"It is partially a result of our economic system and recent financial policies, but I really do think that our evolved mating strategies have an influence," Kruger said. "Our competition for economic displays drives our consumer economy and culture of affluence."
He added, "In terms of the current mortgage crisis, the findings suggest that one of the reasons why we overextend ourselves is that we're basically in a status race. We have expectations that spiral upward as people make more money, and everyone wants to show that they are better than average."
This research involved the secondary analyses of data from a project funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
http://www.livescience.com/3137-ooga-ooga-men-overspend-attract-mates.html
Not the kind of thing men want to think about... 'cause it's so depressing, if not dehumanizing. Yet... money is the one thing that gives us an edge over other men. Where is Karl Marx, when you need him?
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Is Porn Bad For You? Santorum Brings Up Tricky Question
by Stephanie Pappas, March 23, 2012
Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum; his thoughts on sex
A statement posted on Rick Santorum's website brought obscenity and pornography into the national spotlight.
With a statement decrying the Obama administration's "blind eye" toward enforcement of federal obscenity laws, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has brought the subject of pornography into the presidential campaign. But some of Santorum's statements about the ills of explicit material may not hold up.
In a statement first posted last week on his campaign website, Santorum cites "a wealth of research" demonstrating that pornography causes "profound brain changes" and widespread negative effects in both adults and children, including violence against women. There's no such evidence of brain changes, researchers say — though the question of pornography's harmfulness is still in some dispute.
"It's very easy if you want to support one side or the other, to pull a particular study," said Paul Wright, an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington, who has studied sex in the media. "Anybody can support one side or another by simply isolating a particular study and talking about it."
Getting meta
Most experimental studies on the effects of pornography have focused on college students, given their easy proximity to the psychology lab. Looked at individually, these studies seem mixed. Some find that exposing young men to porn increases sexist attitudes and even a willingness to inflict pain, often tested by having the men inflict what they believe are real electric shocks on a woman. (The shocks are fake.) Other studies find little to no effect. [Sex Quix: Myths, Taboos & Bizarre Facts]
To pull this disparate research together, psychologists depend on meta-analyses, or studies that analyze data from multiple single studies. Using this technique, Wright said, the effects of pornography are "fairly clear."
"In experimental settings where actual aggressive behavior is measured as the outcome measure among males, both violent pornography and nonviolent pornography increased the probability of subsequent aggression," Wright told LiveScience.
Complexities and caveats
Not all researchers put stock in experimental findings, however.
"The question became do these little tests that we're having these guys do [in the lab], do they really apply to real life?" said Chris Ferguson, a psychologist at Texas A&M University who studies the link between media and violent behavior.
In real life, of course, researchers can't carry out controlled experiments on pornography. One alternative strategy has been to look at sexual violence rates in countries right after pornography is decriminalized. These studies, many done by Milton Diamond, the director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, usually find that rates of sexual violence go down after pornography becomes more prevalent. Diamond sees this as evidence that pornography actually provides a catharsis for men who have sexually aggressive tendencies. [A Brief History of Porn]
"The majority of the pornography dissipates the arousal by masturbation and I think that works both for males and females," Diamond told LiveScience. "And usually after somebody masturbates and they have their orgasm, they're not as interested in sex as they were 10 minutes before, so I think it dissipates the interest to go out and do anything illegal."
There's no proof of this catharsis effect in the countrywide studies. It's not even possible to firmly link the drop in violence to pornography at all, given the large number of other factors that could play a role. The decriminalization of pornography could go hand-in-hand with other societal changes that influence sexual violence, Ferguson said. Women might even be influenced by a more porn-saturated society to accept violence against themselves and not report sexual aggression, Wright pointed out. Or some other, non-porn-related factor might play a role.
Nonetheless, some researchers see the countrywide correlations as telling.
"When you have people that are making these kinds of claims, that it's a major contributor to men's aggression toward women, it makes sense to look at if that societal data point exists," Ferguson said. [Internet Pornography Statistics]
High-risk men
If the laboratory studies are correct that pornography does increase male violence, it's a small to moderate effect, said Wright, who is quick to point out that he does not advocate censorship in any case.
Researcher Neil Malamuth of the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that exposure to pornography doesn't affect the average man. But for men with other risk factors that predispose them toward sexual violence, "it can add fuel to the fire," Malamuth said.
"It can make a person who perhaps has a certain proclivity, a certain inclination, a certain risk profile even more likely to act out in a sexually aggressive way," Malamuth said.
Risky characteristics include hostility toward women, a narcissistic personality, and a tendency to derive gratification from power and control over women, as well as background characteristics such as growing up in a violent home.
Perhaps different studies are capturing different proportions of men with these characteristics, which would explain the conflicting results, Malamuth said.
Positives of porn
The focus on the link between pornography and aggression glosses over other potential pitfalls of porn, including working conditions for the porn actors and the pressure on women to look or act like a porn star. But some researchers are taking a closer look at the potentially positive sign of sexually explicit media. In surveys, pornography users generally see porn as a boon, said Malamuth.
"Pornography may have many beneficial effects for some people in their sexual lives, and many don't see themselves as harmed in any way," Malamuth said.
In one study published this month in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers compared poses of women in photographs taken from popular pornography websites, magazines and porn-star portfolios, in Norway, the United States and Japan. These three countries were chosen because they fall in different portions of the United Nations' Gender Empowerment Measure, a measure of women's political and economic power in a nation. Norway is No.1 globally on the scale, the U.S. is No. 15, and Japan is No. 54.
The researchers compared "empowering" and "disempowering" poses in the popular pictorial pornography of each nation. An example of a disempowering photograph would be a woman tied up or contorted, with little care given to her own comfort. An empowering photograph would be the opposite, for example an unbound woman facing the camera with confidence.
The researchers found that disempowering photographs were equally common across all three countries. But Norway had the highest number of empowering photographs, followed by the U.S. The findings suggest that pornography may mirror the gender equality or lack thereof of society at large, according to study researcher Dana Arakawa, a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
"It's a reflection of what our culture produces to show what is sexy about women or what should be considered a sexual ideal," Arakawa told LiveScience. The fact that relatively equal Norway exhibits more examples of "empowering" images of sexual women is heartening, Arakawa said. Most Americans have a vision of porn stars as stereotypically pouting Playboy bunnies, but that view of sexuality is limited in scope, she said.
"There is variety," Arakawa said. "Pornography isn't just what we know of in the U.S."
http://www.livescience.com/19251-pornography-effects-santorum.html
Indeed, "Pornography isn't just what we know of in the U.S." There is also JAV.
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Sex Education Delays Teen Sex, Study Finds
by Stephanie Pappas, March 08, 2012
Sex education can delay teen sex, a new study finds.
Teens who receive formal sex education wait longer to have sex, a new study finds — and when they do get around to doing the deed, they're more likely than teens who haven't had sex ed to use contraception.
The study, conducted by researchers from the reproductive health research organization The Guttmacher Institute, used data from the 2006 to 2008 National Survey of Family Growth. In this survey, 4,691 participants, ages 15 to 24, told researchers whether they had ever had formal instruction in "how to say no to sex" and in "methods of birth control." The teens and young adults also answered questions about their first experience with vaginal sex.
Abstinence-only vs. comprehensive
The questions couldn't differentiate between comprehensive sex education — which includes instruction on both how to delay sex and the proper use of birth control — and abstinence-only education, which focuses only on delaying sex until marriage. That's because some abstinence-only programs do discuss birth control in order to emphasize the failure rate of various methods. The researchers couldn't be sure of the quality or content of instruction, so the resultingclassifications of sex ed as "abstinence-only" or "with birth control instruction" are tentative. [Birth Control Quiz: Test Your Knowledge]
The results showed, however, that two-thirds of young women and 55 percent of young men received some sort of instruction on birth control and abstinence before their first sexual experience. About 20 percent said they only learned how to delay sex, while 16 percent of females and 24 percent of males got no sexual education at all.
The last group was the worst off when it came to risky sexual behaviors. Of the students who had any type of sex education, 77 percent of women and 78 percent of men had sex before they turned 20. For young adults with no sexual instruction, those numbers jumped to 86 percent and 88 percent, respectively.
Using protection
In addition, students who had sex education were more likely to use contraception during their first sexual encounter compared with those who hadn't received sex ed. They also had "healthier partnerships," being less likely to lose their virginity to someone more than three years older or younger than themselves. [Teen Pregnancy: A Winnable Public Health Battle?]
The researchers found little difference on these contraception measures between the abstinence-only group and the group who received birth control instruction, although young women who had received birth control instruction were more likely to protect themselves by using condoms during their first intercourse. Other studies have found that comprehensive sex education is better at delaying vaginal sex and reducing teen pregnancy than abstinence-only education; however, a 2010 study published in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found that abstinence education can delay sex in young teens.
"It appears that talking with adolescents about sex — before they first have sex — seems to be what is important, regardless of the specific subject matter," the researchers wrote in the new study published online March 7 in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
The effectiveness of sexual education may depend, in part, on where the students are. A recent study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found that sex ed is less effective at reducing teen birthrates in more conservative areas, perhaps because instruction is not as high-quality. Attitudes toward abortion may play a role in teen birthrates, too, the study found, with teens in more conservative areas less willing or less able to get the procedure, making them more likely to carry to term.
The new Guttmacher study also turned up some alarming demographic differences in sex education, with minority students and students in lower-income families less likely to receive any sexual education at all. For example, one-third of minority men received no formal sex ed. Girls from lower-income families with less-educated parents were also less likely than their better-off counterparts to receive instruction on birth control.
"These demographic groups have poorer SRH [sexual and reproductive health] outcomes, including higher rates of STIs [sexually transmitted infections] and teen pregnancy, highlighting the unmet need for formal instruction in sex education," the researchers wrote.
http://www.livescience.com/18931-sex-education-delay-sex.html
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6 (Other) Great Things Sex Can Do For You
by Stephanie Pappas, February 11, 2011
To sum up:
1) Reduce Anxiety
2) Make you happy
3) Boost immunity
4) Soothe your pain
5) Decrease neuroticism
6) Reduce prostate cancer risk
Details:
http://www.livescience.com/12832-6-benefits-sex.html
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Penis Size Matters in Bed, Study Finds
by Stephanie Pappas, October 08, 2012
Women who have vaginal orgasms say they climax more easily if their man has a longer penis. Credit: Yuri Arcurs
Contrary to the reassuring catchphrase "size doesn't matter," penis size may matter in bed — but only for some women, and for certain types of orgasms.
A new study finds that women who have frequent vaginal orgasms are more likely than other women to say they climax more easily with men with larger penises. Women who tend to prefer penile-vaginal intercourse over other types of sex also say the same, researchers reported online Sept. 24 in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.
"Male anxiety about penis size may not reflect internalized, culturally arbitrary masculine stereotypes, but an accurate appreciation that size matters to many women — just as men feel legitimate anxiety when they enter the mating market about their intelligence, personality traits, sense of humor, social status, height, wealth, and other traits known to be favored by women across cultures," study researcher Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of the West of Scotland, told LiveScience.
But other researchers were less convinced.
"There's such variability in preference," said Barry Komisaruk, who researches female sexual response at Rutgers University. Women who orgasm through vaginal stimulation may indeed prefer longer penises, Komisaruk told LiveScience, but not everyone prefers to orgasm that way. [10 Odd Facts About the Female Body]
"There are so many different factors," said Komisaruk, who was not involved in Brody's study. "Once it gets to the kind of specifics that they're talking about, I get wary."
The female orgasm
Both penis size and female orgasm are hot-button topics. There is still scientific debate about whether vaginal and clitoral orgasms are different phenomena. Different nerves carry signals from the vagina and from the clitoris, Komisaruk said, and stimulation of each activates different brain regions. But some researchers argue that vaginal stimulation is simply activating a different, internal, section of the clitoris. Women report different sensations from vaginal and clitoral orgasms, Komisaruk said, but which one women prefer largely comes down to personal preference.
In some cases, female orgasm is even more complex. For example, Beverly Whipple, professor emerita at Rutgers University and one of the discoverers of the G spot, a sensitive area felt through the front wall of the vagina, has found that women with complete spinal cord injuries can sometimes experience orgasm, even though the nerves that carry sensation up the spinal cord from the pelvis have been severed. It's likely that the sensory vagus nerve, which runs in the abdomen but bypasses the spinal cord, is recruited to carry signals to the brain in these cases, Whipple told LiveScience.
Other research has found that abdominal exercises induce orgasm in some women, resulting in pleasurable spasms at the gym.
Brody holds a different view, pointing to studies finding that the ability to orgasm with vaginal stimulation alone is correlated with better psychological functioning, better relationship quality and greater sexual satisfaction.
"Earlier research with a large representative sample also found that women who are made aware in their youth that the vagina is a source of women's orgasm are more likely to develop the capacity for vaginal orgasm. Therefore, those who deny these findings (and insist on maintaining the politically correct party line) are not doing women a favor, but might be injuring women's health and sexual potential," Brody wrote in an email to LiveScience.
Does size matter?
In the new study, Brody and his colleagues asked 323 women, mostly Scottish university students, to recall past sexual encounters. They were asked about their recent sexual behaviors as well as how important penile-vaginal intercourse and other sex acts were to them. They were also asked whether penis length influenced their ability to orgasm with vaginal stimulation.
Defining "average" as the length of a 20-pound banknote or U.S. dollar bill, which are 5.8 inches (14.9 cm) and 6.1 inches (15.5 cm) long, respectively, the researchers asked women if they were more likely to orgasm vaginally with a longer-than-average or shorter-than-average penis. [Macho Man: 10 Wild Facts About His Body]
They found that 160 of the women experienced vaginal-only orgasms and had enough sexual partners to compare size experiences. Of these, 33.8 percent preferred longer-than-average penises, 60 percent said size made no difference and 6.3 percent said longer was less pleasurable than shorter.
Supporting the hypothesis that size matters, Brody and his colleagues found the women who reported the highest number of vaginal orgasms in the past month were most likely to say that longer was better.
"This might be due at least in part to greater ability of a longer penis to stimulate the entire length of the vagina, and the cervix," Brody said.
Finding sexual satisfaction
The data supports Brody's claim, Whipple said, but the sample is limited to Scottish university students and should be replicated with a broader group. Nevertheless, she warned against worrying about the findings in bed.
"To me, all of this is just so goal-oriented, and it's difficult for me to see researchers setting up another goal [vaginal orgasm] for women to experience," Whipple said.
Whipple argued that sexuality is healthier when focused on the pleasure of acts from cuddling to kissing to other sexual sensations rather than the goal of reaching orgasm.
"I recommend for women to learn about themselves, learn about their body, find what they find pleasurable and enjoy that, as long as it's not exploiting another person," she said.
http://www.livescience.com/23785-pe...?li_source=LI&li_medium=more-from-livescience
Of course, the foregoing article was entirely unnecessary.
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James Deen Allegations Discussed by Voodoo
Pointed out by Member Natsuxdragon, I felt the video was very insightful. I was of the opinion that even though porn and sleaze go hand in hand, on porn sets producers would be very careful to show the greatest respect toward the actresses, who are, after all, very vulnerable. The claims Voodoo made came across as believable, and if so, the way the ladies get treated as described is heartbreaking... and infuriating.
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Thanks to Member Motiman for presenting the link to the article numbered one. I felt the article was important enough to get spotlighted again, for those of us interested in the workings of the industry. It led to other fascinating reads, which also included looks at non-Japanese porn and sex in general, which some of you may also find worth your while.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
0) Internet Pornography Statistics
1) This Is Why Japan's Porn Industry Is Profitable, and America's Isn't
2) Korea's per Capita Porn Spending Highest in World
3) Get the Latest Pornography Statistics
4) The Porn Myth: Uncovering the Truth About Sex Stars
5) The History of Pornography No More Prudish Than the Present
6) Hourglass Figures Affect Men's Brains Like a Drug
7) Men Agree Who's Hot, Women Don't
8) Ooga Ooga! Men Overspend to Attract Mates
9) Is Porn Bad For You?
10) Sex Education Delays Teen Sex, Study Finds
11) 6 (Other) Great Things Sex Can Do For You
12) Penis Size Matters in Bed, Study Finds
13) James Deen (Porn Set r***) Allegations Discussed by Voodoo
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Internet Pornography Statistics
The page has some fascinating tidbits; for example, a countdown clock as to porn's pervasiveness is at the top of the page. I've only been on the page for a few minutes, and the clock claims that while on that page, a million dollars have been spent on porn (not among most Akiba-Online members, we are sure), ten million have viewed porn, and 150,000 people have searched with adult terms. The page also reveals other things, such as "U.S. Adult Pornography Viewer Demographics," and "Hardcore Pornography Titles Released per Year." The information is outdated, however, ending for the year 2005.
http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html?cmpid=ttr-ls
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This Is Why Japan's Porn Industry Is Profitable, and America's Isn't
By EJ Dickson, Jan 15, 2014
2013 was not the best year for the domestic adult film industry. On top of grappling with the triple scourges of piracy, mandatory condom laws, and waning DVD sales, the porn biz also had to deal with costly moratoriums on shooting after four performers tested positive for HIV. Yet outside the United States, the business of selling sex is booming.
According to an article in the Japan Times, the burgeoning Japanese AV (adult video) industry is giving the U.S. porn biz a run for its money, producing at least twice as many films as the United States does per year. Consumers in Japan are also apparently more willing to blow more of their cash on adult DVDs and other products, with the average consumer spending nearly $157 per year on content in 2011. For the sake of comparison, in the U.S. revenue per capita for that year was a meager $47 per year, in part because the advent of tube sites have made it easier for consumers to access porn for free (one website estimates that only 80 to 90 percent of U.S. consumers have actually paid for porn).
Japanese adult performer Mumin, who has shot more than 2,000 titles in his decade-long career, says part of the reason why there’s more demand for Japanese porn is because Japanese AV filmmakers put more emphasis on the amateur subgenre, as opposed to the slick production value associated with American adult films (Japanese AV films also tend to portray a wider range of kinks and fetishes than mainstream U.S. adult films do, as indicated by the enormous popularity of niches like tentacle porn).
Mumin; from another interesting article, "A Hard Day's Grind for Porn's Professionals"
“We tend to go with more day-to-day storylines featuring regular guys, unlike on American-made DVDs,” says Mumin, who says he shoots an average of six adult films per week (while some top-earning U.S. adult performers used to shoot as frequently, this is no longer the case more often than not, as there are generally fewer available shoots) . “There are few, if any, steroid-fueled actors in Japan’s AV industry. Our dramas are far more realistic.”
Unlike the adult film industry in the San Fernando Valley, the Japanese porn biz is subject to stringent censorship laws—female and male genitalia are required to be pixelated, for instance (urabon, or hardcore Japanese porn that does not censor genitalia, is technically illegal, but extremely easy to find on the Internet.)
In other respects, however, the Japanese AV industry is relatively similar to that of the United States: as is the case in the San Fernando Valley, Japanese female adult performers make more money than males, and the average performer stays in the industry for about as long as American performers do (six months, according to the low end of one estimate). In fact, the primary distinction between the Japanese and American porn industries seems to be simply that the Japanese AV industry has figured out how to get consumers to pony up for their content, while many U.S. adult production companies, unfortunately, have not.
http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/japanese-porn-industry-profitable/
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Korea's per Capita Porn Spending Highest in World
By Lee Hyo-sik, 2011-02-07
South Koreans are found to be the world’s top buyer of pornographic materials, according to Newsweek.
The U.S. weekly magazine said on its latest online edition that Koreans spent an average $527 per person in 2006 to watch pornography through CDs, videos and other mediums, followed by Japan’s $157 and Finland’s $114.
Pornography revenue per capita for Australia came in third at $99, followed by Brazil at $53, Czech Republic at $45 and the U.S at $45.
Proof that North Koreans want to
be like their brothers in the South
The magazine said the figures are derived from the data quoted by a blog maintained by Mark Rice, a professor of American Studies at ST. John Fisher College. (http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com).
It also said the Ranking American graphics are based on data from Durex and www.toptenreviews.com.
The toptenreveiws.com said the revenue of the world’s pornography industry reached $97 billion in 2006. By country, China was the largest market at $27 billion, followed by South Korea’s $25.7 billion and Japan’s $19.9 billion.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/02/117_80964.html
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Warning: While the statistics presented are probably trustworthy for the most part (which makes this article worthwhile reading), the site and the writer come from a religious slant, and do not appear without bias.
Get the Latest Pornography Statistics
Written by Luke Gilkerson, February 19, 2013
German poet Heinrich Heine said you cannot feed the hungry on statistics. Well-researched stats can only illuminate the problem, not solve it.
But for many, the problem of pornography in our modern culture still needs a spotlight. What do some of the latest stats tell us about this sexual-media giant?
Covenant Eyes has released a new conglomeration of pornography statistics based on some of the best research. Here are the highlights…
Porn is big business
Just seven years ago, global porn revenues were estimated at $20 billion, with $10 billion coming from US consumers.
However, by 2011 both global and U.S. porn revenues had been reduced by 50%, due in large part to the amount of free pornography available online. It is estimated that 80-90% of Internet porn users only access free online material.
As far as online pornography is concerned, from 2001 to 2007, the Internet porn industry went from a $1-billion-a-year industry to $3-billion-a-year in the US alone.
Porn is a dangerous business
On average, 17% of performers use condoms in heterosexual porn films. 66% of porn performers have herpes, and 7% of porn performers have HIV.
Ex-porn star Tanya Burleson says men and women in pornography do drugs because “they can’t deal with the way they’re being treated” in the industry. A 2012 survey of porn actresses demonstrated 79% of porn stars have used marijuana, 50% have used ecstasy, 44% have used cocaine, and 39% have used hallucinogens.
When hundreds of scenes were analyzed from the 50 top selling adult films, 88% of scenes contained acts of physical aggression, and 49% of scenes contained verbal aggression.
All types of people look at Internet porn
Paul Fishbein, founder of Adult Video News, is right when he says, “Porn doesn’t have a demographic—it goes across all demographics.” After an analysis of 400 million web searches, researchers concluded that 1 in 8 of all searches online are for erotic content.
Who is more likely to seek out pornography online? According to data taken from Internet users who took part in the General Social Survey:
- Men are 543% more likely to look at porn than females.
- Those who are politically more liberal are 19% more likely to look at porn.
- Those who have ever committed adultery are 218% more likely to look at porn.
- Those who have ever engaged in paid sex are 270% more likely to look at porn.
- Those who are happily married are 61% less likely to look at porn.
- Those with teen children at home are 45% less likely to look at porn.
- Regular church attenders are 26% less likely to look at porn than non-attenders, but those self-identified as “fundamentalists” are 91% more likely to look at porn.
After an analysis of more than one million hits to Google’s mobile search sites, more than 1 in 5 searches are for pornography on mobile devices.
By 2015, mobile adult content and services are expected to reach $2.8 billion, mobile adult subscriptions will reach nearly $1 billion, and mobile adult video on tablets will triple worldwide.
It is common for teens to see porn
In a 2010 national survey, over a quarter of 16- to 17-year olds said they were exposed to nudity online when they did not want to see it. In addition 20% of 16-year-olds and 30% of 17-year-olds have received a “sext” (a sexually explicit text message).
More than 7 out of 10 teens hide their online behavior from their parents in some way.
35% of boys say they have viewed pornographic videos “too many times to count.”
More than half of boys and nearly a third of girls see their first pornographic images before they turn 13. In a survey of hundreds of college students, 93% of boys and 62% of girls said they were exposed to pornography before they turned 18. In the same survey, 83% of boys and 57% of girls said they had seen images of group sex online.
It is common for young adults to use porn
About 64-68% of young adult men and about 18% of women use porn at least once every week. Another 17% of men and another 30% of women use porn 1-2 times per month.
Two-thirds of college-age men and half of college-age women say viewing porn is an acceptable way to express one’s sexuality.
Porn is destroying families
The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers reports that 56% of divorce cases involve one party having “an obsessive interest in pornographic websites.”
According to numerous studies, prolonged exposure to pornography leads to:
- a diminished trust between intimate couples
- the belief that promiscuity is the natural state
- cynicism about love or the need for affection between sexual partners
- the belief that marriage is sexually confining
- a lack of attraction to family and child-raising
http://www.covenanteyes.com/2013/02/19/pornography-statistics/
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The Porn Myth: Uncovering the Truth About Sex Stars
by Stephanie Pappas, February 25, 2013
What are porn stars really like? Science struggles with the answer.
Porn stars aren't particularly keen on being studied. But they are the focus of great public interest and moral debate, which may explain why one man's in-depth analysis of adult film performers went viral last week.
The average adult film actress is a brunette with a B-cup named Nikki, at least according to blogger Jon Millward, who spent six months analyzing the demographics of 10,000 porn stars drawn from the Internet Adult Film Database. But what's known about porn stars beyond their breast size? Remarkably little, thanks to practically zero research funding and a community wary of researchers.
"The average span of a performer's career is usually only about six to 18 months, so the benefit of participating in these things isn't usually apparent to the people who are in it at the time," Kayden Kross, an adult film actress and writer, told LiveScience.
Not only that, Kross said, but many actresses are reluctant to help researchers, because they're worried that the studies will be used against them by anti-pornography activists. [The Sex Quiz: Myths, Taboos and Bizarre Facts]
"The difficulty with this population has always been access," said James Griffith, a psychologist at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and one of the few scientists to delve into the subject. "It's a very difficult population to define."
This lack of research is notable given the number of stereotypes about porn actresses, particularly that they have high rates of childhood sexual abuse and psychological problems. Though it's hard to know for sure without more extensive studies, early explorations have found these stereotypes fail to hold up. Ultimately, the findings could lead to better understanding of sexual health, sexual identity and other aspects of the high-grossing porn business.
Un-stereotyping porn
Stereotypes were the motivation for Millward, whose analysis of porn stars includes a facial composite of the "average" actress.
The stereotypical porn actress — with enormous breasts and blonde hair — doesn't match reality, Millward found. In fact, the most common bra size among porn stars is a 34B, compared with 36C for the average American woman. High obesity rates among the public may explain some of the discrepancy in breast size; porn actresses are also thinner than the average American woman. According to the numbers given on Internet Adult Film Database profiles, the average female porn star weighs 117 pounds (53 kilograms), which is 48 pounds (22 kg) less than the average American woman. [5 Myths About Women's Bodies]
The average male porn star weighs 167.5 pounds (76 kg), 27 pounds (12 kg) less than the national average of 195.7 pounds (89 kg) for men.
Nor are blondes as dominant as might be expected. Only 32.7 percent of porn actresses have blonde hair, whether natural or dyed. About 39 percent have brown hair, 22.5 percent have black hair, and only about 5 percent are redheads.
Nikki is the most common name for female porn stars, Millward found, and David is the most common name for men.
The psychology of pornography
Millward's data is not published in a research journal or peer-reviewed by experts, so scientists like Griffith take it with a grain of salt. (Millward plans to make his methods available on his website.) Kross, however, said the results didn't surprise her.
"There have been more brunette stars than blonde stars," she said. "It's just that those stars have never been as big as the blonde stars."
Meanwhile, academic research on the porn star population is lacking.
Part of the reason is that there just aren't that many porn stars — about a thousand working at any given time, Kross said. Add to that short career spans, a reluctance to be put under the microscope and a population of performers centered in Los Angeles County, where many researchers don't have the luxury of spending time, and it's a recipe for lack of research.
Another barrier is funding. Griffith conducted his study on pornography without the benefit of outside money.
"I didn't even attempt it," he told LiveScience. "I don't know of anyone that would fund a study on characteristics of people in the adult entertainment industry."
Porn isn't Griffith's typical area of research (he studies risk-taking and decision-making), but he decided to look into it after a question from an undergraduate student in a lecture on human sexuality made him realize how little research on porn actors has been done.
He advertised for volunteers at the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, a now-defunct medical organization that used to administer mandatory tests for sexually transmitted infections to industry actors (tests are now done elsewhere).
Though the majority of porn stars would have used the Foundation's services, the volunteer sample makes it hard to know if the 177 actresses who agreed to participate in the study represent the industry as a whole. Nevertheless, the study is the largest sample of porn stars ever published.
The results of the research failed to support many common stereotypes. Most notably, the porn actresses were no more likely to report having been sexually abused as children than national averages or than a sample of demographically matched women Griffith and his colleagues recruited at a university and at an airport.
Porn actresses did report having sex for the first time at a younger age and having more partners (outside of work) than the typical woman, which is unsurprising, Griffith said, given that they likely got into the adult industry because they liked sex. (Of the 177 women surveyed, only one said she was coerced into a pornography career.) Sixty-nine percent of porn actresses ranked their enjoyment of sex as 10 out of 10, a rating given by only 32.8 percent of non-performers. [10 Surprising Sex Statistics]
Porn actresses were also more likely to report higher self-esteem than average women, another unsurprising finding, Griffith said.
"They do have to be comfortable with themselves in order to engage in intercourse in front of other people on camera," he said.
Kross warned that the finding that porn actresses enjoyed sex more than other women might be unreliable, given that a porn star's public image relies on her fans' belief that she thinks sex is the "greatest thing on the planet." But the self-esteem finding did not surprise her.
"All you hear from fans is, 'Oh, you're so wonderful, I wish I had a girlfriend like you,'" she said. "The fan base just adores us. They worship us online, and we hear it every day."
The stereotype that porn stars use more drugs than the average person was partially true, Griffith and his colleagues found. Porn actresses had tried more drugs than other women, though the only difference in recent drug use was a higher prevalence of marijuana smoking. The drug use could be linked to the personality of people who get into the industry, Griffith said.
"Maybe they're higher risk-takers," he said.
Kross agreed. "I have a feeling we've probably, as a demographic, tried skydiving more," she said. "We've probably tried monkey brains in South Africa more."
Unanswered questions
Griffith and his colleagues reported their findings in the International Journal of Sexual Health in September 2012. They also asked performers their reasons for entering the industry, and found that money was the primary driver, followed by fame.
This research is a "first step," Griffith said. The sample was limited, based on self-reports and focused on performers in the United States. Griffith doesn't have plans to pursue the research further, though he hopes other researchers will. One particularly interesting finding, he said, was that two-thirds of the porn actresses said they were bisexual. It's not clear whether they identified this way before they entered the industry or whether they began seeing themselves as bisexual after doing popular woman-on-woman scenes.
"Engaging in that behavior while they're in the industry, is that related to them identifying as bisexual or not?" Griffith said. "If it is the case, that could be applied to theories of bisexuality."
More work is also needed on rates of sexually transmitted infections in the industry and the effect on a performer of contracting one, he said. In 2012, a measure requiring porn stars to wear condoms passed in Los Angeles. In January, Vivid Entertainment and performers Kross and Logan Pierce filed a lawsuit to challenge the law on freedom of speech and anti-censorship grounds.
Mental health is important, Griffith said, but "I think the more important question has to do with physical health."
http://www.livescience.com/27428-truth-about-porn-stars.html
The original link presents readers' comments, many not worth the ink they are not printed on, but some are thought-provoking, such as:
Maryann Fläsch
From the Slate Article: "Whenever a new porn starlet appears on The Howard Stern Show, Stern asks her the same biographical question: “Were you molested as a child?” Many of them were, and detail their history of childhood sexual abuse on the air. Some admit to it later. “I lied like a rug,” Jenna Jameson wrote in her book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, of her own appearance on Stern’s show. “I didn’t want anyone to think that I was in the business because I was a victim."
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The History of Pornography No More Prudish Than the Present
by Stephanie Pappas, October 11, 2010
Pornography is often portrayed as one of the ills of today's society, evidence of modern moral decay brought to you by video cameras and broadband access.
As it turns out, modern times have got nothing on the past. Pornography existed long before video or even photography, and many researchers think evolution predisposed humans for visual arousal (It's a lot easier to pass on your genes if the sight of other naked humans turns you on, after all). Whichever way you slice it, the diversity of pornographic materials throughout history suggests that human beings have always been interested in images of sex. Lots and lots of sex.
"Sex has always played a super-important role for human beings and their relationships," said Seth Prosterman, a clinical sexologist and licensed therapist in San Francisco. "What people do sexually has always been a curiosity, and of interest." [RELATED: New Technologies Let Pornography Producers Stay On Top]
Ancient erotica
The definition of "pornography" is famously subjective. After all, one man's Venus de Milo is another man's masturbation aid. But researchers generally define the genre as material designed solely for sexual arousal, without further artistic merit.
By that standard, the first known erotic representations of humans might not be porn, in the traditional sense, at all. As early as 30,000 years ago, Paleolithic people were carving large-breasted, thick-thighed figurines of pregnant women out of stone and wood. Archaeologists doubt these "Venus figurines" were intended for sexual arousal. More likely, the figurines were religious icons or fertility symbols.
Fast-forwarding through history, the ancient Greeks and Romans created public sculptures and frescos depicting homosexuality, threesomes, fellatio and cunnilingus. In India during the second century, the Kama Sutra was half sex-manual, half relationship-handbook. The Moche people of ancient Peru painted sexual scenes on ceramic pottery, while the aristocracy in 16th century Japan was fond of erotic woodblock prints.
In the West, many early explicit materials were political, rather than exclusively pornographic, said Joseph Slade, a professor of media arts at Ohio University. French revolutionaries, in particular, satirized the aristocracy with sexually charged pamphlets. Even the Marquis de Sade's famously brutal and erotic works were part philosophical.
"They were political invectives disguised as pornography," Slade said.
Porn is born
In the 1800s, the idea of porn for porn's sake began to spread. Erotic novels had been in print since at least the mid-1600s in France (though being identified as the author of one meant a sure trip to jail), but the first full-length English-language pornographic novel, "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," also known as "Fanny Hill" (Oxford University Press) wasn't published until 1748.
Despite the reserved public attitudes toward sex at the time, pornographic novels held little back. The author of "Fanny Hill" managed to cover bisexuality, voyeurism, group sex and masochism, among other topics. By 1888, the anonymous author of "My Secret Life" was writing about sex with words that would make a modern television censor squirm.
Technology drove innovation in the porn genre. In 1839, Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype, a primitive form of photography. Almost immediately, pornographers commandeered the new technology. The earliest surviving dirty daguerreotype — described by Slade in a 2006 paper as "depicting a rather solemn man gingerly inserting his penis into the vagina of an equally solemn and middle-aged woman" — is dated at 1846.
Video followed a similar path. By 1896, filmmakers in France were delving into the erotic with short, silent clips like "Le Coucher de la Marie," in which an actress performed a strip tease. Hard-core sex started showing up after 1900. These "stag films" were usually shown at all-male gatherings, and they were tame by today's standards, Slade said.
"They look like your grandparents having sex," he said. "They were quaint, but it was real intercourse."
Pornography gets popular
For a long time, stag films remained stagnant, both in content and in quality. Then, in the 1970s, changing social mores opened the door for public showing of explicit films. The Internet and the invention of the digital camera lowered the barriers to porn-making so low that entire websites are now devoted solely to non-professional videos.
The shift from publically viewed stag films to privately viewed rentals and internet downloads drove changes in the types of acts shown on-screen. Privacy, Slade said, made men more willing to watch fetish films depicting specific, sometimes odd, sexual behavior. A 1994 Carnegie Mellon study of early porn on computer Bulletin Board Systems (a precursor to the World Wide Web), found that 48 percent of downloads were far outside the sexual mainstream, depicting bestiality, incest and pedophilia. Less than 5 percent of downloads depicted vaginal sex. This could have been because magazines and pornographic films had traditional sex covered, and people went to their computers for images they couldn't find elsewhere, Slade suggested.
Today, porn is all over the internet, but the actual size of the industry is a mystery. No one keeps official records, and few studies have made a stab at the economics of porn. Adult Video News, a trade industry journal, made annual estimates of porn sales and rentals, along with sales of magazines and sex toys. In 2007, according to an AVN senior editor Mark Kernes, retail sales reached $6 billion a year. However, AVN's figures have been widely disputed. And even if they were reliable, the numbers wouldn't take into account all of the free amateur videos uploaded to sites like XTube or the photography site Flickr.
Regardless of how much money is being made, porn is attracting eyes. A 2008 study of 813 American university students found that 87 percent of men and 31 percent of women reported using pornography. The study was published in the Journal of Adolescent Research. And in 2009, University of Montreal researcher Simon Louis Lajeunesse made headlines when he announced that he had attempted a study on the impact of pornography on young men's sexuality, but he couldn't find a control group. In other words, good luck finding a man in his twenties who hasn't seen porn.
Controversial content
So what is all that porn doing to us? The question is a hornet's nest of controversy. While most mainstream Internet porn today doesn't rise to the level of those early Bulletin Board images, critics argue that competition between pornographers has led to an upswing in dominance and verbal abuse of women depicted in films made for straight men.
"They need to always put out something new, something enticing, to attract people," Chyng Sun, a professor of media studies at New York University and director of the film "The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships," told LiveScience. "The degradation, the aggression levels, that is something you can create, something a little bit new to offer to the audience."
By analyzing best-selling pornography films, Sun has found that physical and verbal aggression are present in 90 percent of mainstream porn scenes. Films directed by women are no less likely to contain aggression than films directed by men, she reported in a 2008 paper in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly.
Sun argues that these aggressive images are harmful to people's sex lives and that they help cement negative stereotypes about women. Others disagree. Prosterman, the San Francisco sexologist, points out that research has failed to draw a clear link between porn and criminal sexual behavior. And, he said, porn is one way for people to explore their own sexual desires.
Debates about pornography have been ongoing since at least the Victorian era (no word on whether stone-age people hid the fertility statues under the mattress), and they're not likely to cease anytime soon. Nor are people likely to stop looking at pictures of other naked people.
"Most people like to have sex," said the AVN's Kernes. "A not-too-much-smaller segment of them like to watch other people have sex, and that is what the adult industry delivers."
http://www.livescience.com/8748-history-pornography-prudish-present.html
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Hourglass Figures Affect Men's Brains Like a Drug
by Charles Q. Choi, February 22, 2010
Sexy-Sensual: A model walks down the runway during the Victoria's Secret Fashion show,
November 9, 2005, in New York. (Credit: AP Photo/Jeff Christensen)
Watching a curvaceous woman can feel like a reward in the brain of men, much as drinking alcohol or taking drugs might, research now reveals.
These new findings might help explain the preoccupation men can have toward pornography, scientists added.
Shapely hips in women are linked with fertility and overall health. As such, it makes sense evolutionarily speaking that studies across cultures have shown men typically find hourglass figures sexy.
To explore the roots of this behavior, researchers had 14 men, average age 25, rate how attractive they found pictures of the naked derrieres of seven women before and after cosmetic surgery that gave them more shapely hips. These operations did not reduce weight but just redistributed it, by implanting fat harvested from the waists into the buttocks.
Brain scans of the men revealed that seeing post-surgery women activated parts of the brain linked with rewards, including regions associated with responses to drugs and alcohol.
It might not be especially surprising that evolution wired the male brain to find attractive bodies rewarding.
"Hugh Hefner could have told us that by showing us how many zeroes are in his bank account," said researcher Steven Platek, an evolutionary cognitive neuroscientist at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. "But there's more to it than buying Playboy, Maxim, or FHM."
For instance, "these findings could help further our understanding pornography addiction and related disorders, such as erectile dysfunction in the absence of pornography," he explained. "These findings could also lend to the scientific inquiry about sexual infidelity."
The scientists also found that changes in a woman's body-mass index or BMI — a common measure of body fat — only really affected brain areas linked to simple visual evaluations of size and shape. This may be evidence that body fat influences judgments of female beauty due more to societal norms than brain wiring.
"The media portrays women as wholly too skinny," Platek said. "It's not just about body fat, or body mass index."
What do women think?
Future research could also investigate the effects that attractive figures have on the female brain.
"It turns out women find similar optimally attractive female bodies as attention-grabbing, albeit for different reasons," Platek said. "Women size up other women in an effort to determine their own relative attractiveness and to maintain mate guarding — or, in other words, keep their mate away from optimally designed females."
These findings should not be construed as saying that men are solely programmed by their biology, nor that "women without optimal design should just hang up their mating towel," Platek added.
Platek and his colleague Devendra Singh detailed their findings online Feb. 5 in the journal PLoS ONE.
http://www.livescience.com/9834-hourglass-figures-affect-men-brains-drug.html
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Men Agree Who's Hot, Women Don't
by Jeanna Bryner, June 30, 2009
Men find thin, seductive women attractive, while women tend to disagree on what makes a potential mate hot.
But it also means more competition for the hottest chicks, scientists say. Credit: Stockxpert.hottest hunks.
Thin and seductive, that's what men find attractive in women. But the ladies are less in agreement over what makes for a hot guy, new research finds.
The news is good for guys who might think they're not the hottest hunks. But it also means more competition for the hottest chicks, scientists say.
"Men agree a lot more about who they find attractive and unattractive than women agree about who they find attractive and unattractive," said study researcher Dustin Wood, assistant professor of psychology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
The study included more than 1,300 heterosexual men, about 2,700 heterosexual women, about 125 homosexual men and about the same number of homosexual women. The average age of participants was about 28 years old, and ranged from 18 to more than 70.
Participants each rated nearly 100 photographs of either men or women, depending on the participant's gender and sexual orientation. They scored how attractive they found each photographed individual on a 10-point scale from "not at all" to "very" attractive.
Previously, the researchers had judged each of the photos for various factors of attractiveness, including how seductive, confident, thin, sensitive, stylish, curvaceous (women), muscular (men), traditional, masculine/feminine, classy, well-groomed, or upbeat the person in the image looked.
What men want: Despite another recent study that found modern men are more interested in intelligent, educated women than in decades past, in the new study men tended to base their attractiveness ratings on women's physical features, giving stellar marks to those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
What women want: Women showed some preference for thin, muscular men. But they also disagreed over the hotness factor of many men, with some women giving a guy high attractiveness ratings while others scored the same guy as not attractive at all.
Do men actually agree more on what makes a person attractive or was there something about the photos that caused men to rate them in certain ways? To figure this out, the researchers turned to the homosexual ratings. Sure enough, gay men showed a greater consensus about attractiveness levels of photos of men than did straight women of those same photos.
And straight men also showed more consensus than lesbians in terms of attractiveness ratings of the photos of women.
The results, published in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have implications for the dating scene.
For instance, with varying ideas of which men are attractive, women may face less competition from other women on the prowl. Men, on the other hand, might face stiff competition from other guys who all have eyes for the same handful of potential mates. Men, therefore, may need to invest more time and energy into attracting and guarding their mates from other potential suitors, the researchers said.
Oh, and they do: After eons of evolution, men are hardwired to overspend and max out credit cards to attract mates, a study last year concluded.
http://www.livescience.com/5502-men-agree-hot-women.html
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Ooga Ooga! Men Overspend to Attract Mates
by Jeanna Bryner, December 10, 2008
Men are hardwired after eons of evolution to overspend, a new study suggests. Their maxed-out credit cards and mega-purchases have been tied to their desire to attract mates.
The biggest male spenders in the survey were found to have the highest number of reported past partners and desired the most future partners.
The finding, detailed in the current issue of the journal Evolutionary Psychology, did not hold with women.
Vying for women is simply what men do and have done for hundreds of thousands of years, said study leader Daniel Kruger, a social and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. But how they entice mates has evolved.
"Men in the ancestral environment were valued if they were good providers," Kruger said. "Now we have this new consumer culture, so basically we show our potential through the consumer goods that we purchase, rather than being a good hunter or providing protection."
Financial habits of men
Kruger used data collected from telephone surveys of more than 400 men and women with an average age of 34 (100 men and 309 women). Participants rated how much they agreed with three statements about their financial habits, such as "I always live within my income range," and "Each income period, I set aside at least ten percent for savings."
(A person who highly agreed with the statements would be considered conservative in matters financial, as opposed to consumptive.)
They also indicated marital status and sexual partners (their count for the past five years and number desired in the future).
Men who spent more (saved less) and who were more likely to shell out more than they earned reported having more sexual partners in the past five years and desired more future partners than other guys in the study.
Specifically, the 25 percent of men who were most conservative about spending had an average of three partners in the past five years and desired about one partner in the next five years. The 2 percent of men with the riskiest financial strategies had double those numbers.
For women, financial consumption wasn't significantly related to past or future mates.
Why we're in debt
Kruger said the results could help to explain why so many people are in a financial mess right now.
"It is partially a result of our economic system and recent financial policies, but I really do think that our evolved mating strategies have an influence," Kruger said. "Our competition for economic displays drives our consumer economy and culture of affluence."
He added, "In terms of the current mortgage crisis, the findings suggest that one of the reasons why we overextend ourselves is that we're basically in a status race. We have expectations that spiral upward as people make more money, and everyone wants to show that they are better than average."
This research involved the secondary analyses of data from a project funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
http://www.livescience.com/3137-ooga-ooga-men-overspend-attract-mates.html
Not the kind of thing men want to think about... 'cause it's so depressing, if not dehumanizing. Yet... money is the one thing that gives us an edge over other men. Where is Karl Marx, when you need him?
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Is Porn Bad For You? Santorum Brings Up Tricky Question
by Stephanie Pappas, March 23, 2012
Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum; his thoughts on sex
A statement posted on Rick Santorum's website brought obscenity and pornography into the national spotlight.
With a statement decrying the Obama administration's "blind eye" toward enforcement of federal obscenity laws, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has brought the subject of pornography into the presidential campaign. But some of Santorum's statements about the ills of explicit material may not hold up.
In a statement first posted last week on his campaign website, Santorum cites "a wealth of research" demonstrating that pornography causes "profound brain changes" and widespread negative effects in both adults and children, including violence against women. There's no such evidence of brain changes, researchers say — though the question of pornography's harmfulness is still in some dispute.
"It's very easy if you want to support one side or the other, to pull a particular study," said Paul Wright, an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington, who has studied sex in the media. "Anybody can support one side or another by simply isolating a particular study and talking about it."
Getting meta
Most experimental studies on the effects of pornography have focused on college students, given their easy proximity to the psychology lab. Looked at individually, these studies seem mixed. Some find that exposing young men to porn increases sexist attitudes and even a willingness to inflict pain, often tested by having the men inflict what they believe are real electric shocks on a woman. (The shocks are fake.) Other studies find little to no effect. [Sex Quix: Myths, Taboos & Bizarre Facts]
To pull this disparate research together, psychologists depend on meta-analyses, or studies that analyze data from multiple single studies. Using this technique, Wright said, the effects of pornography are "fairly clear."
"In experimental settings where actual aggressive behavior is measured as the outcome measure among males, both violent pornography and nonviolent pornography increased the probability of subsequent aggression," Wright told LiveScience.
Complexities and caveats
Not all researchers put stock in experimental findings, however.
"The question became do these little tests that we're having these guys do [in the lab], do they really apply to real life?" said Chris Ferguson, a psychologist at Texas A&M University who studies the link between media and violent behavior.
In real life, of course, researchers can't carry out controlled experiments on pornography. One alternative strategy has been to look at sexual violence rates in countries right after pornography is decriminalized. These studies, many done by Milton Diamond, the director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, usually find that rates of sexual violence go down after pornography becomes more prevalent. Diamond sees this as evidence that pornography actually provides a catharsis for men who have sexually aggressive tendencies. [A Brief History of Porn]
"The majority of the pornography dissipates the arousal by masturbation and I think that works both for males and females," Diamond told LiveScience. "And usually after somebody masturbates and they have their orgasm, they're not as interested in sex as they were 10 minutes before, so I think it dissipates the interest to go out and do anything illegal."
There's no proof of this catharsis effect in the countrywide studies. It's not even possible to firmly link the drop in violence to pornography at all, given the large number of other factors that could play a role. The decriminalization of pornography could go hand-in-hand with other societal changes that influence sexual violence, Ferguson said. Women might even be influenced by a more porn-saturated society to accept violence against themselves and not report sexual aggression, Wright pointed out. Or some other, non-porn-related factor might play a role.
Nonetheless, some researchers see the countrywide correlations as telling.
"When you have people that are making these kinds of claims, that it's a major contributor to men's aggression toward women, it makes sense to look at if that societal data point exists," Ferguson said. [Internet Pornography Statistics]
High-risk men
If the laboratory studies are correct that pornography does increase male violence, it's a small to moderate effect, said Wright, who is quick to point out that he does not advocate censorship in any case.
Researcher Neil Malamuth of the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that exposure to pornography doesn't affect the average man. But for men with other risk factors that predispose them toward sexual violence, "it can add fuel to the fire," Malamuth said.
"It can make a person who perhaps has a certain proclivity, a certain inclination, a certain risk profile even more likely to act out in a sexually aggressive way," Malamuth said.
Risky characteristics include hostility toward women, a narcissistic personality, and a tendency to derive gratification from power and control over women, as well as background characteristics such as growing up in a violent home.
Perhaps different studies are capturing different proportions of men with these characteristics, which would explain the conflicting results, Malamuth said.
Positives of porn
The focus on the link between pornography and aggression glosses over other potential pitfalls of porn, including working conditions for the porn actors and the pressure on women to look or act like a porn star. But some researchers are taking a closer look at the potentially positive sign of sexually explicit media. In surveys, pornography users generally see porn as a boon, said Malamuth.
"Pornography may have many beneficial effects for some people in their sexual lives, and many don't see themselves as harmed in any way," Malamuth said.
In one study published this month in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers compared poses of women in photographs taken from popular pornography websites, magazines and porn-star portfolios, in Norway, the United States and Japan. These three countries were chosen because they fall in different portions of the United Nations' Gender Empowerment Measure, a measure of women's political and economic power in a nation. Norway is No.1 globally on the scale, the U.S. is No. 15, and Japan is No. 54.
The researchers compared "empowering" and "disempowering" poses in the popular pictorial pornography of each nation. An example of a disempowering photograph would be a woman tied up or contorted, with little care given to her own comfort. An empowering photograph would be the opposite, for example an unbound woman facing the camera with confidence.
The researchers found that disempowering photographs were equally common across all three countries. But Norway had the highest number of empowering photographs, followed by the U.S. The findings suggest that pornography may mirror the gender equality or lack thereof of society at large, according to study researcher Dana Arakawa, a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
"It's a reflection of what our culture produces to show what is sexy about women or what should be considered a sexual ideal," Arakawa told LiveScience. The fact that relatively equal Norway exhibits more examples of "empowering" images of sexual women is heartening, Arakawa said. Most Americans have a vision of porn stars as stereotypically pouting Playboy bunnies, but that view of sexuality is limited in scope, she said.
"There is variety," Arakawa said. "Pornography isn't just what we know of in the U.S."
http://www.livescience.com/19251-pornography-effects-santorum.html
Indeed, "Pornography isn't just what we know of in the U.S." There is also JAV.
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Sex Education Delays Teen Sex, Study Finds
by Stephanie Pappas, March 08, 2012
Sex education can delay teen sex, a new study finds.
Teens who receive formal sex education wait longer to have sex, a new study finds — and when they do get around to doing the deed, they're more likely than teens who haven't had sex ed to use contraception.
The study, conducted by researchers from the reproductive health research organization The Guttmacher Institute, used data from the 2006 to 2008 National Survey of Family Growth. In this survey, 4,691 participants, ages 15 to 24, told researchers whether they had ever had formal instruction in "how to say no to sex" and in "methods of birth control." The teens and young adults also answered questions about their first experience with vaginal sex.
Abstinence-only vs. comprehensive
The questions couldn't differentiate between comprehensive sex education — which includes instruction on both how to delay sex and the proper use of birth control — and abstinence-only education, which focuses only on delaying sex until marriage. That's because some abstinence-only programs do discuss birth control in order to emphasize the failure rate of various methods. The researchers couldn't be sure of the quality or content of instruction, so the resultingclassifications of sex ed as "abstinence-only" or "with birth control instruction" are tentative. [Birth Control Quiz: Test Your Knowledge]
The results showed, however, that two-thirds of young women and 55 percent of young men received some sort of instruction on birth control and abstinence before their first sexual experience. About 20 percent said they only learned how to delay sex, while 16 percent of females and 24 percent of males got no sexual education at all.
The last group was the worst off when it came to risky sexual behaviors. Of the students who had any type of sex education, 77 percent of women and 78 percent of men had sex before they turned 20. For young adults with no sexual instruction, those numbers jumped to 86 percent and 88 percent, respectively.
Using protection
In addition, students who had sex education were more likely to use contraception during their first sexual encounter compared with those who hadn't received sex ed. They also had "healthier partnerships," being less likely to lose their virginity to someone more than three years older or younger than themselves. [Teen Pregnancy: A Winnable Public Health Battle?]
The researchers found little difference on these contraception measures between the abstinence-only group and the group who received birth control instruction, although young women who had received birth control instruction were more likely to protect themselves by using condoms during their first intercourse. Other studies have found that comprehensive sex education is better at delaying vaginal sex and reducing teen pregnancy than abstinence-only education; however, a 2010 study published in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found that abstinence education can delay sex in young teens.
"It appears that talking with adolescents about sex — before they first have sex — seems to be what is important, regardless of the specific subject matter," the researchers wrote in the new study published online March 7 in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
The effectiveness of sexual education may depend, in part, on where the students are. A recent study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found that sex ed is less effective at reducing teen birthrates in more conservative areas, perhaps because instruction is not as high-quality. Attitudes toward abortion may play a role in teen birthrates, too, the study found, with teens in more conservative areas less willing or less able to get the procedure, making them more likely to carry to term.
The new Guttmacher study also turned up some alarming demographic differences in sex education, with minority students and students in lower-income families less likely to receive any sexual education at all. For example, one-third of minority men received no formal sex ed. Girls from lower-income families with less-educated parents were also less likely than their better-off counterparts to receive instruction on birth control.
"These demographic groups have poorer SRH [sexual and reproductive health] outcomes, including higher rates of STIs [sexually transmitted infections] and teen pregnancy, highlighting the unmet need for formal instruction in sex education," the researchers wrote.
http://www.livescience.com/18931-sex-education-delay-sex.html
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6 (Other) Great Things Sex Can Do For You
by Stephanie Pappas, February 11, 2011
To sum up:
1) Reduce Anxiety
2) Make you happy
3) Boost immunity
4) Soothe your pain
5) Decrease neuroticism
6) Reduce prostate cancer risk
Details:
http://www.livescience.com/12832-6-benefits-sex.html
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Penis Size Matters in Bed, Study Finds
by Stephanie Pappas, October 08, 2012
Women who have vaginal orgasms say they climax more easily if their man has a longer penis. Credit: Yuri Arcurs
Contrary to the reassuring catchphrase "size doesn't matter," penis size may matter in bed — but only for some women, and for certain types of orgasms.
A new study finds that women who have frequent vaginal orgasms are more likely than other women to say they climax more easily with men with larger penises. Women who tend to prefer penile-vaginal intercourse over other types of sex also say the same, researchers reported online Sept. 24 in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.
"Male anxiety about penis size may not reflect internalized, culturally arbitrary masculine stereotypes, but an accurate appreciation that size matters to many women — just as men feel legitimate anxiety when they enter the mating market about their intelligence, personality traits, sense of humor, social status, height, wealth, and other traits known to be favored by women across cultures," study researcher Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of the West of Scotland, told LiveScience.
But other researchers were less convinced.
"There's such variability in preference," said Barry Komisaruk, who researches female sexual response at Rutgers University. Women who orgasm through vaginal stimulation may indeed prefer longer penises, Komisaruk told LiveScience, but not everyone prefers to orgasm that way. [10 Odd Facts About the Female Body]
"There are so many different factors," said Komisaruk, who was not involved in Brody's study. "Once it gets to the kind of specifics that they're talking about, I get wary."
The female orgasm
Both penis size and female orgasm are hot-button topics. There is still scientific debate about whether vaginal and clitoral orgasms are different phenomena. Different nerves carry signals from the vagina and from the clitoris, Komisaruk said, and stimulation of each activates different brain regions. But some researchers argue that vaginal stimulation is simply activating a different, internal, section of the clitoris. Women report different sensations from vaginal and clitoral orgasms, Komisaruk said, but which one women prefer largely comes down to personal preference.
In some cases, female orgasm is even more complex. For example, Beverly Whipple, professor emerita at Rutgers University and one of the discoverers of the G spot, a sensitive area felt through the front wall of the vagina, has found that women with complete spinal cord injuries can sometimes experience orgasm, even though the nerves that carry sensation up the spinal cord from the pelvis have been severed. It's likely that the sensory vagus nerve, which runs in the abdomen but bypasses the spinal cord, is recruited to carry signals to the brain in these cases, Whipple told LiveScience.
Other research has found that abdominal exercises induce orgasm in some women, resulting in pleasurable spasms at the gym.
Brody holds a different view, pointing to studies finding that the ability to orgasm with vaginal stimulation alone is correlated with better psychological functioning, better relationship quality and greater sexual satisfaction.
"Earlier research with a large representative sample also found that women who are made aware in their youth that the vagina is a source of women's orgasm are more likely to develop the capacity for vaginal orgasm. Therefore, those who deny these findings (and insist on maintaining the politically correct party line) are not doing women a favor, but might be injuring women's health and sexual potential," Brody wrote in an email to LiveScience.
Does size matter?
In the new study, Brody and his colleagues asked 323 women, mostly Scottish university students, to recall past sexual encounters. They were asked about their recent sexual behaviors as well as how important penile-vaginal intercourse and other sex acts were to them. They were also asked whether penis length influenced their ability to orgasm with vaginal stimulation.
Defining "average" as the length of a 20-pound banknote or U.S. dollar bill, which are 5.8 inches (14.9 cm) and 6.1 inches (15.5 cm) long, respectively, the researchers asked women if they were more likely to orgasm vaginally with a longer-than-average or shorter-than-average penis. [Macho Man: 10 Wild Facts About His Body]
They found that 160 of the women experienced vaginal-only orgasms and had enough sexual partners to compare size experiences. Of these, 33.8 percent preferred longer-than-average penises, 60 percent said size made no difference and 6.3 percent said longer was less pleasurable than shorter.
Supporting the hypothesis that size matters, Brody and his colleagues found the women who reported the highest number of vaginal orgasms in the past month were most likely to say that longer was better.
"This might be due at least in part to greater ability of a longer penis to stimulate the entire length of the vagina, and the cervix," Brody said.
Finding sexual satisfaction
The data supports Brody's claim, Whipple said, but the sample is limited to Scottish university students and should be replicated with a broader group. Nevertheless, she warned against worrying about the findings in bed.
"To me, all of this is just so goal-oriented, and it's difficult for me to see researchers setting up another goal [vaginal orgasm] for women to experience," Whipple said.
Whipple argued that sexuality is healthier when focused on the pleasure of acts from cuddling to kissing to other sexual sensations rather than the goal of reaching orgasm.
"I recommend for women to learn about themselves, learn about their body, find what they find pleasurable and enjoy that, as long as it's not exploiting another person," she said.
http://www.livescience.com/23785-pe...?li_source=LI&li_medium=more-from-livescience
Of course, the foregoing article was entirely unnecessary.
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James Deen Allegations Discussed by Voodoo
Pointed out by Member Natsuxdragon, I felt the video was very insightful. I was of the opinion that even though porn and sleaze go hand in hand, on porn sets producers would be very careful to show the greatest respect toward the actresses, who are, after all, very vulnerable. The claims Voodoo made came across as believable, and if so, the way the ladies get treated as described is heartbreaking... and infuriating.
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