What does it mean to say that sex addiction “exists” or “doesn’t exist” apart from the fact that denying its existence or rebutting the denials can get you your 15 minutes of fame. A diagnostic term is always a provisional construct, a tool for organizing information about phenomena we are trying to understand and work […]
[This was first published in July, 2013 as a reply blog post to a “Psychology Today” blog post that featured an interview with Dr. Nicole Prause, spokesperson for Steele et al., 2013.] The full study: “Sexual Desire, not Hypersexuality, is Related to Neurophysiological Responses Elicited by Sexual Images” (2013) This EEG study was touted in the media as […]
Why the media takes one bad study and distorts its conclusions for shock value. Published on July 24, 2013 by Robert Weiss, LCSW, CSAT-S in Love and Sex in the Digital Age In a nationally distributed study published last week, a group of researchers argued that what is often termed as “sexual addiction” could be […]
Porn alters sexual behavior; so do other things A new Dutch study (“Does Viewing Explain Doing? Assessing the Association Between Sexually Explicit Materials Use and Sexual Behaviors in a Large Sample of Dutch Adolescents and Young Adults“) finds porn use correlates with risky sexual behavior in 15 to 25-year olds…and that other things do as […]
SPAN Lab porn study obscures results with study title Results in a study by SPAN Lab entitled, “No Evidence of Emotion Dysregulation in “Hypersexuals” Reporting Their Emotions to a Sexual Film,” align with what some ex-porn users are reporting. Namely, that porn curtailed their emotional range. Or more simply, frequent porn users are more desensitized […]
See this 7-minute video presentation critiquing the PCES. PCES yields peculiar results measuring self-perceived effects of pornography This post addresses a porn use questionnaire known as the Pornography Consumption Effect Scale (PCES). Several studies have employed it, with the paper that created the PCES (Hald & Malamuth, 2008) boldly concluding that “Young Danish adults believe […]
Does Internet porn reveal our sexual desires—or alter them? Fellow “Psychology Today” blogger Leon F. Seltzer recently completed a herculean 12-part blog series on the subject of the Internet and human sexual desire (based on Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam’s A Billion Wicked Thoughts, 2011). In his final segment, he did an excellent job of outlining […]
Longitudinal studies are needed to reveal morphing porn tastes This post is a response to The Truth about 50 Shades of Grey and Futanari Porn by Ogi Ogas, Ph.D. We’d like to begin our response to your above post by clarifying some points that you have misunderstood in our post. 1. You’ve completely missed the […]
Academia prepares to ‘accentuate the positive’ in new porn periodical If there were ever a human phenomenon in need of serious objective investigation, Internet porn use is surely it. Never has the youthful human brain been battered with so much erotic novelty during such a critical window of sexual development, and cracks are definitely appearing. […]
Kinsey/Trojan study on vibrators omitted lovers’ top question Sexual exploration is a fine idea, but we need to be radically honest with ourselves about researching its effects, lest we overlook signs of excess. A couple of years ago, I wrote “Vibrators and Other Pleasures: When ‘Moderation’ Fails.” It included self-reports by women for whom vibrator […]