Encourage your surfers to participate in this research

[Ms Naughty]

I recently met a UK academic who is specialising in porn research. She and a couple of others are trying to get a more accurate picture of porn users and they're doing a study that isn't tainted with a pre-existing anti-porn bias.

Their site is Porn Research.

I thought I'd ask GG&J webmasters to recommend their surfers take part. Too often the governments, religious nutjobs and anti-porn feminists use statistics and "research" that's not accurate in order to back up their claims and demand censorship. There are all sorts of examples of dodgy studies out there and the media blithely pick them up and report them as fact.

Studies are becoming the battleground. This one, which is trying to get a real picture of porn use, needs our support.

Here's what they say on their page:

In the past, pornography has overwhelmingly been assumed to be a ‘problem’, and the only really important questions to ask about it are – how much do people (and especially children) encounter it, and how great is the ‘harm’ that it does? This research is different.

Our project is concerned with the everyday uses of pornography, and how the people who use it feel it fits into their lives. Pornography is of course a highly topical issue, subject to many opposing views and ‘strong opinions’. And we are not saying that there are no moral or political issues. But we are saying that the voices of users and enjoyers have been swamped. In fact, there is very little research that engages with the users of pornography, asking how, when and why they turn to it.