Nicole Prause has shown a consistent and troubling pattern of (1) filing groundless, malicious complaints and lawsuits, and (2) threatening such actions, or publicly claiming that she has filed them, when she has not done so. (Three main pages documenting Prause’s behaviors: page 1, page 2, page 3.)
Below is a partial list of such complaints and false claims. (Out of fear of reprisal we have been asked to omit additional individuals and organizations.) Also, Prause regularly claims “whistleblower status” to keep her activities under the radar. So, there are likely other, non-public complaints in addition to those listed here.
The baseless administrative complaints Prause actually lodged were generally dismissed as nuisance filings. However, a few led to time-consuming investigations that were ultimately dismissed or produced little in the way of substantive results (can also download PDF Documenting Nicole Prause’s Malicious Reporting and Malicious Use of Process).
Fight the New Drug – Reported to Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services on the theory that sharing first-hand stories of porn recovery constituted the abuse of minors. DCFS took no action.
Rory Reid PhD – Prause’s former colleague at UCLA. Appears to have been reported to UCLA (and perhaps to the California Psychology Board). Prause’s attacks on him began concurrently with UCLA’s decision not to renew her contract, bringing her academic career to an end.
Five documents currently on Prause’s AmazonAWS website urging readers to report Rory Reid to the state of California: page1, page2, page3, page4, page5.
Don Hilton, MD – Reported to the university where he mentors neurosurgery students, the Texas Medical Board, and academic journals with unfounded claims that he faked his credentials (No action)
Keren Landman, MD – Prause asked VICE magazine to terminate expert Dr. Landman for writing an article recommending use of condoms in porn in support of Proposition 60. Unbelievable.
(Apparently) reported Wilson to the ISSM (International Society for Sexual Medicine) for heaven knows what, which canceled his keynote address scheduled for March, 2018 in Lisbon without giving a reason. Then Prause began a social media campaign saying someone had been “removed for an actual good reason from a conference,” and claimed (again) that Gary had misrepresented his credentials (he hadn’t). Gary soon received his Oregon Psychology Board exoneration (see above), so she may also have told the ISSM earlier that he had been “reported for practicing psychology without a license” among other misleading information – in order to persuade the ISSM to cancel him.
February, 2020: When the above C&D failed, Prause called Wilson’s local Ashland Police, attempting to file a false police report, lying that her home address was on YBOP. Officer Jason St. John determined Prause’s claims did not allege a crime and that this was a civil matter.
On February 12 or thereabouts, Prause sought a temporary restraining order against Wilson, based in part on pictures of people (quite obviously not Wilson) holding guns. The judge denied the TRO, but set a hearing for a permanent restraining order on March 6, 2020. Prause did not serve Wilson, but Wilson’s counsel appeared as if she had, thus waiving service. The judge continued the matter until March 25, 2020, stating that he intends to force the parties to attend mediation before ruling. More to come.
Prause has also repeatedly, publicly urged members of the public, via social media, to report professionals and professional organizations to psychology boards, to the FTC, and to the Attorney General. Sections of Prause page with documentation:
After years of malicious administrative reporting, spurious cease & desist letters, and misuse of law enforcement personnel, Prause, in 2019, began abusing the court system (and the targets of her wrath) with malicious legal proceedings (and continued threats of legal proceedings) in order to silence anyone who calls attention to her bias or activity.
As recounted above, she filed an invalid small claims court suit against therapist Sprout, and a baseless restraining order against Wilson.
Ludden’s primary assertion can be summed by it’s subtitle:
It’s a problem if you think it’s one.
The entire premise of Ludden’s article is based on a lie. He falsely claims that porn use did NOT correlate with “self-perception of it being problematic” (as assessed by the CPUI-4, a porn addiction questionnaire).
The results were as the researchers expected. Specifically, frequency of pornography use in itself didn’t correlate with the self-perception of it being problematic.
In reality, levels of pornography use was the variable correlating most strongly “self-perception of it being problematic”. Better than religiosity or moral disapproval.
GRAPH FROM THE GRUBBS STUDY: Number 1 is porn use. The highlighted numbers are correlations between porn use and self reported problems (used the CPUI-4). As you can see, porn use (average daily use or frequency) was the best predictor of “self-perception of it being problematic“.
No doubt Ludden’s PT blog post will be cited over and over again, even though it is pure fiction.
The Diana Davison video provided a link to the timeline of events chronicling Prause’s nearly 7-year campaign of harassment, defamation, threats, and false accusations: VSS Academic War Timeline (Which Prause got removed by threatening TikiTok with a bogus Cease and Desist letter)
Very revealing comments under the Diana Davison video (in response to an obsessive commentor):
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In response to Diana Davison’s Post Millennial expose’ Prause harasses/defames Davison, followed by a bogus Cease & Desist letter and demanding $10,000 to not file a lawsuit
As she had done with other journalists (e.g. Belinda Luscombe, Amy Fleming) Prause went on the attack, harassing, defaming and threatening Diana Davison. Prause eventually resorted to sending Davison and The Post Millennial a baseless cease & desist letter. (PDF of bogus C&D letter). We begin with Diana Davison’s original tweet linking to her article:
Is it a coincidence that the AVN email to Prause is dated November 21, the day The Post Millennial expose’ on Nicole Prause was published? This suggests that Prause emailed AVN and they immediately responded with the requested statement. It appears as if Prause and AVN have an ongoing relationship.
However, the AVN email fails to back up Prause’s claims. First, AVN’s email is only concerned with 2019, yet Don Hilton only contends that Prause stated she had attended AVN in 2015 (Which she did tweet in 2015). Second, the AVN respnse concerns itself with only RSVP tickets, not general admission. The only thing the AVN email proves is that the AVN is at Prause’s beck and call.
Next she tweets this gem (featuring more of her private emails with porn industry insiders):
The screenshot of the XRCO Chairman’s email to Prause from the above tweet is priceless:
Bob Krotts confirms Prause had attended XRCO (contrary to Nikky’s sworn affidavit), yet he’s not sure if she’s a “part of” the porn industry or not. Prause’s tweet contains a second screenshot – of a Davison tweet:
Davison is referring to this XRCO picture of Prause sitting at a reserved table with porn-industry friends (blonde at left behind porn star Melissa Hill):
In the same thread, ranting about the 2019 AVN (rather than 2015), and tweeting receipts supposedly showing she was in LA during the 2019 AVN (which is held in Las Vegas). However, no one said Prause attended the 2019 AVN award (even though Prause apparently once planned to attend AVN), and The Post Millennial article said nothing about either the AVN or the XRCO awards.
Davison responds to being blocked, then harassed by Prause:
Why does Twitter allow people who have blocked you to reply to tweets? I've got some nutter (Nicole Prause) falsely accusing me (surprise, surprise) and other people have to tell me what's going on.
The next day Prause gets her Backpage.com lawyer to send a bogus cease and desist letter to Davison and The Post Millennial. All of Prause’s alleged wrongs are fabricated nonsense – as usual.
Continued threat against Davison, The Post Millennial, and two other twitter accounts in the Davison thread (note: Prause had already blocked Davison).
Notice how Prause’s C&D letter says “RE: Your Brain On Porn.” Evidence that she is probably the one writing the bogus C&D’s, not her lawyer.
Diana Davison responds to Prause’s harassment and bogus C&D letter.
That she lied about attending the XRCO event and she's threatening to sue people who say they've seen a picture of her there. Also, falsely accusing people of stalking just for doing research and defending themselves.
So I've just been threatened with a bogus lawsuit for saying things that are provably true. Interesting. For the person issuing this threat: I have an LA lawyer and you'll be hearing from him if you persist in this attempt at silencing my speech.
The problem with your question is that the person alleging defamation claims I said things I didn't. What I said is that a person was in a place where photos prove she was. She's alleging I said she was somewhere else which I have no interest in.
Weird year indeed. I did my own investigation and agree with your conclusion but disagree on some of your other statements. Disagreement isn't defamation is it? Meanwhile Prause is threatening to sue me now for stating the truth. She's the biggest nutter in No Nut November.
To clarify, when I say "stating the truth" I mean she wants to sue me for producing a picture of her at a porn award show that she claims she didn't attend.
December 19, 2019: Prause apparently scared Tiki-Toki.com into taking down Davison’s timeline of Prause’s defamation & harassment.
To be honest, I kind of feel like I should have an affidavit of being bullied in the lawsuits now. Just got a notice that Prause had my timeline documentation removed from the website that allowed me to track her nefarious activities.
March 10, 2020: Evidently Diana Davison received emails from more victims of Prause. It never ends:
At what point can Nicole Prause be declared a vexatious litigant? I'm getting messages and screenshots from numerous people of her saying she's suing them… and she doesn't. Because she knows she can't.
Hmm. Criminal harassment has to be repeated unwanted contact after being told the target is afraid of you. I'm not afraid of her. She threatens then disappears so I don't think it would meet the threshold. And she's like buckshot scattering her threats without follow up.
Davison ends with what many of us know to be true:
A fucking nutter. Obsessed with saying porn has no addictive qualities or downsides. She'll sue anyone who calls her a nutter or points out inconvenient facts that interfere with her academic neutrality.
In No Nut November, the question “To fap or not to fap?” has become fraught with legal danger. This whimsical internet challenge has grown in popularity over the years alongside the scientific battle over whether or not pornography can become addictive.
By mid-November, those would-be abstainers who don’t take the challenge seriously likely already failed to remain the “masters of their domain” but the academic war will continue long after the end of the month.
Neuroscientist and sexual psychophysiologist Dr. Nicole Prause is currently facing twodefamation lawsuits filed in US courts as a result of this battle. On Twitter, Prause has declared herself to be the victim of multiple SLAPP suits (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) after years of ongoing harassment. Prause has also claimed that her anti-porn adversaries have stalked her, threatened to rape her, and engaged in general misogyny including falsely accusing her of being paid by the porn industry.
The defamation suits accuse Prause of lying about being stalked, threatened, or harassed by them in any way. The statements of claim say that these are false accusations by Prause and that her public accusations are the only actual harassment taking place. In affidavits attached to the lawsuits, ten different people, including four women, claim to be personal victims of Dr. Prause.
This is not just a Twitter war.
Most people think anti-porn activists to be radical feminists like Catharine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who sought to censor pornography as a civil rights violation and form of human trafficking.
In a strange twist of events, over the last decade, it has been a growing number of young men who have turned against the near limitless fap machine of internet pornography. This quickly increasing demographic has flooded websites like NoFap.com, seeking help for what they have self-described as an addiction to porn.
For some experts, like Prause, the claim that people can become addicted to porn is not only scientifically unsound but, she says, potentially dangerous. Those who oppose porn are often painted as religious science deniers, causing damage to people by morally shaming natural human sexuality. But other experts disagree.
The question of whether or not excessive pornography use can lead to addiction, actually causing physical changes to the brain, has yet to be decided. In the meantime, thousands of mostly young men seeking help online are being demonized as misogynistic for identifying pornography as a cause of their distress.
The complaints from these men include, but are not limited to, erectile dysfunction in the presence of a real-life partner, difficulty achieving orgasm during intercourse, social anxiety and escalation in their viewing habits which causes them to seek out more and more extreme forms of pornography in order to maintain their physical and psychological arousal.
The variety of pornography available online certainly ranges into extremely concerning areas, like rectal prolapse, and most people clicking from one video to the next are bound to quickly come across something this shocking.
In an email exchange with The Post Millennial, Dr. Prause commented “We know it is a low-desire behaviour, people do not actually engage in rosebudding play very much at all. I wonder to what extent some videos on “porn” websites really are just clickbait not expecting a sexual response. That is, all the pornographers want is clicks. It’s how they make money. If you see ‘anus actually falls out’ I would be really horrified…and really curious.”
For those who are struggling with a pornography consumption habit they feel has taken over their enjoyment of life, their curiosity has led many of them to believe they have an addiction.
But, how did this academic dispute escalate into civil lawsuits? It depends on who you ask.
The battle between Nicole Prause and her adversaries seems to have kicked off in March 2013 when an article by Dr. David Ley, titled “Your Brain On Porn: It’s Not Addictive,” was published in Psychology Today promoting a Prause study that had not yet been published. After a critical blog response was published, both posts were removed pending the publication of the research. The author of the response blog, Gary Wilson, also happened to be the owner of a website called “Your Brain On Porn” which was mentioned by name in the original article.
Wilson has chronicled the six-year dispute on his website and, when put on a timeline, which includes Prause’s complaints to licensing boards and attempts to have people fired for sexual harassment or academic fraud, most of the events appear to be initiated by Prause herself.
For example, on January 29, 2019, Prause attempted to take trademark ownership of the website name and domain “Your Brain On Porn.” Gary Wilson, who has regularly been accused of stalking Prause, took this move as another attack upon his work.
When asked about this event, Wilson told The Post Millennial that he received an anonymous tip that Prause had filed an application for his domain, which he then opposed. Without this tip, he may have lost his website and body of research. Prause finally withdrew her application on October 18, 2019.
Meanwhile, in April 2019 a website called “Real Your Brain On Porn” and a matching Twitter account were created which were ultimately found to be connected to Nicole Prause, though registered under the name of someone else. Prause provided The Post Millennial with the final report from the intellectual property investigation by WIPO and confirmed that this is one of the actions against her which Prause is calling a “SLAPP suit.”
Prause explained her motivation to acquire Wilson’s website as an effort to eliminate what she believes are defamatory accusations about her and which she considers to be evidence of a cyber-stalking behaviour. The website currently hosts a lengthy compilation of events and documentation in which Wilson presents Prause as the harasser.
The first defamation suit was filed against Dr. Prause and her business, Liberos LLC, in May 2019 but it was not Gary Wilson who took this legal action. It was filed by neurosurgeon Dr. Donald Hilton Jr after Prause contacted the university where he teaches as an adjunct professor and made a complaint alleging, among other things, that Hilton had engaged in sexual harassment.
Hilton’s own research on behavioural addiction stands in stark contrast to Prause’s conclusions and they have frequently clashed over the pros and cons of pornography use. Hilton was one of the first to criticize Prause’s EEG study released in 2013.
In his lawsuit, Hilton vehemently denies having harassed Prause and claims that her accusations were designed to cause maximum damage to his reputation. Prause’s motion to dismiss appears to admit to the contents of the emails she sent but claims freedom of speech and “the right to petition” as her defence.
Hilton’s lawyer, Dan Packard, told The Post Millennial that “no person can falsely accuse an academic rival of sexual harassment in a deliberate attempt to silence that rival and then successfully hide behind the First Amendment. ‘Free speech’ can never be used as a sword to silence academic discussion and debate.”
An article published in Reason heavily questions the way Prause framed her claims of sexual harassment. Interviewed for that article, “UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment specialist, questions Prause’s ‘novel and pretty dangerous’ definition of sexual harassment.” In the context of her complaint, it reads as if all criticism of her scientific work has been reconstructed as an attack on her as “a female scientist.”
But the second lawsuit moves well beyond an academic dispute.
The founder of NoFap.com, Alexander Rhodes, states in his lawsuit that he was caught in the crosshairs after he was featured in a July 6, 2016, New York Times article called “Internet Porn Nearly Ruined His Life. Now He Wants To Help.” Two days after publication, Prause and a colleague, Dr. David Ley, appear to ridicule Rhodes on Twitter and, in a now-deleted tweet, Prause described Rhodes as a “neckbeard.”
Rhodes’ statement of claim says the harassment escalated two years after this event when he alleges Prause began publicly accusing him of stalking and threatening her – an allegation which he denies. In an affidavit Rhodes states “I would never willingly subject myself to unnecessary communication with Dr. Prause.”
Prause has also publicly alleged that she filed FBI complaints against both Rhodes and Gary Wilson but in both cases, an FOI filed by the accused failed to produce any evidence of the reports. On the other hand, Wilson has posted evidence on his website that he filed a complaint against Prause after speaking with an FBI agent in December 2018.
Thank you for this piece. I have rape & stalking threats & harassment from #NoFap & filed w FBI.Will share report # in DM if you want to add yours. Founder Rhodes work w ProudBoys extremists,so worth getting on FBI radar.Scientists know NoFap misogyny wellhttps://t.co/iJbRaOJeBspic.twitter.com/PPaCQHyTSz
The legal system is still struggling to determine where free speech crosses the line into actionable defamation in online disputes. The question of who “started it” can lead to an endless rabbit hole in which all involved are accused of “sock puppetry” (creating multiple fake usernames) and online mobbing. Most certainly, things have gone too far when employers are being contacted, lawsuits are being filed in court, and it starts to involve the FBI.
Dr. Prause recently tweeted that she reported a fundraiser aimed at helping Rhodes raise money for his legal bills. Prause alleges, despite the existence of the lawsuit, that this fundraiser is fraudulent.
The @FBI has asked me to make clear that the donations going to @AlexanderRhodes of @NoFap are fraud. I have no business relations with the porn industry, no porn industry is named in any suit, & Rhodes is misrepresenting me as employed in porn. Law enforcement are involved.
While Rhodes’ personal Twitter account has been set to private, the NoFap account tweeted their astonishment over these events saying “This is like the alcohol industry trying to take down Alcoholics Anonymous.”
There has been an escalating campaign by the porn industry and its friends to defame & de-platform NoFap & its founder.
This is like the alcohol industry trying to take down Alcoholics Anonymous.
Rhodes’ lawyer Andrew Stebbins provided The Post Millennial with the following statement:
“Mr. Rhodes is and always has been an eager and willing participant in the provocative debate surrounding pornography addiction, and is openly receptive of honest and fair criticism of his work, views, and opinions. He will not, however, tolerate malicious personal attacks from those who seek to discredit, disparage and otherwise injure him through false statements designed to assassinate his character and reputation. This case is brought solely in response, and properly limited in scope, to such attacks.”
In a recent Vice article, Prause is quoted saying “”Alexander Rhodes and NoFap’s lawsuit has no merit nor do his libelous and unfounded assertions regarding me, my character, or my business,” adding that Rhodes is “entitled to his opinions, however he is not entitled to spread complete falsehoods about me to profit himself and silence speech.”
The author of the same Vice article then goes on to call NoFap’s principles “slippery,” and attempts to link Rhodes to white supremacists by citing an April 2016 interview with Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys, despite that group being founded many months later. Ironically, McInnes was a co-founder of Vice and thus has a much stronger connection to their own publication than to Alexander Rhodes or NoFap.
And, in a way, that leads us back to the original question: To fap or not to fap?
For the thousands of people, both men and women, who are asking themselves that very question, it is doubtful that mockery and insults from pornography supportive researchers will stop them from visiting the websites, like NoFap and Your Brain On Porn, who take their concerns more seriously.
The academic battle over whether or not their problem is technically an addiction is less important to them then getting help to change a habit they feel is destroying their lives.
Alex Rhodes is an interesting guy. At the age of 11, he says he started a years-long pornography addiction that turned his life upside down. When he decided to do something about it, he found a community of people online who had the same problems. He started his company, No Fap, in 2011 as a community forum for people to discuss the effects of excessive porn use, compulsive sexual behavior, and recovery. “Fap” is a slang term for masturbation. Rhodes’ road to recovery began with stopping masturbation and avoiding pornography.
The community he created grew to huge numbers of people from all walks of life who benefitted from No Fap’s encouragement. The website says, “we’re here to help you quit porn, improve your relationships, and reach your sexual health goals.” Rhodes says he isn’t in favor of censoring pornography or banning it in any way, but he wanted a community where people affected negatively by it could support one another in breaking their addiction to it. No Fap is not religiously based, as Rhodes is not a person of any faith, which makes his site and mission even more dangerous to the porn industry because he cannot be smeared as a religious zealot.
While porn addiction is not listed on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it is a real problem that many struggle with. According to Psych Guides, “porn addiction, which is a subset of sex addiction, can refer to a range of behaviors that are done in excess and negatively impact one’s life.”
There are mountains of information available about the negative impact pornography use is having on children, including a rise in sex crimes as reported in the UK, where “figures from 30 forces show reports of sexual offences by children aged 10 and under have more than doubled from 204 in 2013-14 to 456 in 2016-17. Experts in the UK point to the rise in pornography access by minors as a cause.
Pornography addictions are also a leading cause of the break-up of marriages and relationships. Psychology Today reported that 500,000 marriages that end every year name porn addiction as the reason.
With that in mind, an organization like No Fap seems like it would be a non-controversial solution for those who choose it to redirect their lives in a more positive direction. But some people are not fans. Sexologists and porn industry people hate Alex Rhodes with a passion they usually reserve for their sex toys.
Rhodes has filed a lawsuit for defamation against Kinsey Institute graduate Nicole Prause, a scientist who studies sex. Rhodes believes that Prause targeted him to destroy his business and smear his name. Sexologists like Prause have very strange ideas about human sexuality. On her Twitter feed, Prause laments the inability to study the sexuality of minors without being called a pedophile.
This is not surprising coming from a person who studied at the Kinsey Institute. Alfred Kinsey was a monster. His sexual experiments on children should have put him behind bars. He published research that involved at least 188 children and toddlers who were sexually manipulated by pedophiles known to Kinsey to induce orgasm and their orgasms were timed and recorded for the study. His research was determined fraudulent and criminal, but the research is still used by people like Prause and her ilk. There is a documentary available on YouTube called “The Children of Table 34” about the abuse the children suffered because of Kinsey. Kinsey did more to normalize pedophilia than anyone before or after him and yet there are people who consider themselves distinguished to graduate from a school bearing his name. It is clear that Prause sees no issue with involving children in studies about sexuality.
(Twitter screenshot)
“If you talk about youth sexuality, people will say you are advocating showing porn to kids,” she wrote. “It’s happened to me and many of my colleagues. It’s vicious, defamatory, and horrifying. This is why there are few studies of youth sexuality. Pure intimidation.”
I reached out to Prause and asked her to explain how she would study “youth sexuality” without breaking current laws about corrupting minors and violating the age of consent and received no response. How would adult scientists study the sexuality of minors when minors can’t consent to sexual activity? How does that kind of research work? It’s also interesting that the sexologists moaning about the lack of access to minors for sex research are clearly ignorant of how repulsive they appear to normal people who never think about children having sex.
Prause’s behavior online toward anti-porn organizations and Rhodes is well-documented and truly bizarre. Your Brain on Porn has compiled extensive screengrabs of her online behavior that includes harassment of Ted Talk speakers who talk about porn addiction and porn harm. It seems that Prause’s main beef with the porn addiction help community is that she believes porn is good for people and not addictive. This belief has apparently led her on a crusade to discredit anyone who disagrees with her.
Prause does not like to be connected to the porn industry and claims she is fully separate and a scientist. But she attends porn industry events and is photographed with porn stars and executives and she lobbies publicly with porn industry organizations to block legislation they don’t like. That’s her in the pink on the far right.
(Screenshot from Twitter)
(Screenshot from Twitter)
California Proposition 60 was legislation to require condoms in porn productions in order to limit the spread of HIV. Prause vociferously opposed this legislation along with the major porn industry lobbyists. She can be seen on Twitter regularly communicating with and defending the porn industry and sex workers.
Rhodes’s lawsuit claims that Prause accused him of being “a stalker, misogynist, serial harasser, promoter of violence against women, cyberstalker, subject to restraining/no-contact orders affiliated with an extremist [h]ate group and threatens rape.” There is evidence of at least one of those things being a demonstrable lie.
After Prause posted on Twitter that she had made an FBI complaint about Rhodes, he sought the report through the Freedom of Information Act. What he got confirmed that she had made it up.
“Dear Mr. Rhodes,” read the letter from the FBI in response to FOIA. The FBI has completed its search for records responsive to your request…We were unable to identify any main file request and; therefore your request is being administratively closed.”
Despite this evidence that Prause never filed any such report with the FBI, she persists in repeating the claim publicly, which Rhodes’s lawsuit claims is damaging to his reputation. Rhodes isn’t the only person she tries to smear with bogus police reports. Prause also went after Gary Wilson, a physiology teacher with a particular interest in the latest neuroscience discoveries, who founded Your Brain and Porn. Prause accuses Wilson regularly of stalking and having multiple police reports for harassing her. Wilson says none of it is true and he has the documentation to back it up. Wilson posted on his website:
While Prause continues to falsely claim she is “the victim,” it is Prause who initiated all contact and harassment towards the individuals and organizations listed on this page. No one on this list has harassed Nicole Prause. Her fabricated claims about being a victim of “stalking” or misogyny from “anti-porn activists” lack one iota of documentation. All the evidence she provides is self-generated: a single info-graphic, a few emails from her to others describing harassment, and five spurious cease and desist letters containing false allegations. You will also see evidence of a number of formal complaints Prause has filed with various regulatory agencies – which have been summarily dismissed or investigated and dismissed. She seems to file these bogus complaints so she can then go on to claim her targets are all “under investigation.”
Perhaps most illustrative of Prause’s character in this saga is her charge that Rhodes is a Nazi and white-supremacist, as detailed in the lawsuit. This should not surprise anyone who has been paying attention since 2016. The minute an SJW disagrees with someone, that person becomes a Nazi. Rhodes’s crime? He allowed political commentator Gavin McInnes to interview him while he was still working for Vice. And since Prause found out that Rhodes spoke to McInnes one time and didn’t throw a drink in his face, she has been accusing him of supporting the Proud Boys (who got in a lot of trouble for street brawling with Antifa). It’s still a stretch, in my opinion, to call the Proud Boys anything but a male drinking club, but Rhodes actually has disavowed the Proud Boys as an “extremist group” on several occasions. He was never a member, nor a supporter. No Fap has never been political and is dedicated to providing addiction help to anyone who needs it. This does not stop Prause from continuing to link him to “white supremacists” through the weak association of one interview with McInnes, who isn’t a white supremacist either.
The lawsuit should be interesting to watch as it opens up statements on Twitter to legal scrutiny. Will Prause be held accountable for publishing false claims on social media?
UPDATE #1: On January 24, 2020 Alex Rhodes filed his amended complaint against Nicole Prause. The new court filings contain several recent incidents of defamation (including alleged collaboration with the porn industry to defame Alex), and sworn affidavits from other Prause victims. Downloadable PDFs of the court documents filed in the amended complaint:
UPDATE #2:There is a practical way we can all help Alex Rhodes and prevent porn industry allies from shutting down NoFap. His fund-raising campaign can be found here: https://nofap.com/defend-alex/ Please give generously, and forward the above link to anyone you can think of who may be able to contribute. This lawsuit is a step forward for all of us. It can raise awareness of how Big Porn and its friends are continuing their campaign against all who dare to raise concerns about the porn industry. Video about the fundraising, by therapist Staci Sprout: https://youtu.be/_hoa-vCS2Xs
UPDATE #3: March 23, 2020 Alex Rhodes filed his opposition to Prause’s motion to dismiss. PDF’s of the 3 court filings:
This is the second defamation lawsuit filed against Nicole Prause in 2019. The first was filed by Donald Hilton MD, and it contains sworn affidavits from 9 other victims of Prause.
As documented on these extensive pages – page 1, page 2, page 3– the Rhodes and Hilton lawsuits expose just the tip of the Prause iceberg. A partial list of her victims includes researchers, medical doctors, therapists, psychologists, a former UCLA colleague, a UK charity, men in recovery, a TIME magazine editor, several professors, IITAP, SASH, Fight The New Drug, Exodus Cry, NoFap.com, RebootNation, YourBrainRebalanced, the academic journal Behavioral Sciences, its parent company MDPI, US Navy medical doctors, the head of the academic journal CUREUS, and the journal Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity. (see below for What’s going on here?)
For years both Prause and Ley have teamed up to defame, harass and cyber-stalk individuals and organizations that have warned of porn’s harms or published research reporting porn’s harms. Recently, Prause and Ley escalated their unethical and often illegal activities in support of a porn industry agenda. For example, 0n January 29, 2019, Prause filed a trademark application to obtain YOURBRAINONPORN and YOURBRAINONPORN.COM. In April 2019, a group headed by Prause and Ley engaged in unlawful trademark infringement of YourBrainOnPorn.com by creating “RealYourBrainOnPorn.com.
In July of 2019, David Ley and two of the better known RealYBOP “experts” (Justin Lehmiller and Chris Donaghue) began openly collaborating with the porn industry. All 3 are on the advisory board of the fledgling Sexual Health Alliance (SHA). In a blatant financial conflict of interest, David Ley and the SHA are being compensated by porn industry giant xHamster to promote its websites (i.e. StripChat) and to convince users that porn addiction and sex addiction are myths!
More on Nicole Prause
In 2013 former UCLA researcher Nicole Prause began openly harassing, libeling and cyberstalking Gary Wilson. (Prause has not been employed by an academic institution since January, 2015.) Within a short time she also began targeting others, including researchers, medical doctors, therapists, psychologists, a former UCLA colleague, a UK charity, men in recovery, a TIME magazine editor, several professors, IITAP, SASH, Fight The New Drug, Exodus Cry, NoFap.com, RebootNation, YourBrainRebalanced, the academic journal Behavioral Sciences, its parent company MDPI, US Navy medical doctors, the head of the academic journal CUREUS, and the journal Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity.
While spending her waking hours harassing others, Prause cleverly cultivated – with zero verifiable evidence – a myth that she was “the victim” of most anyone who dared to disagree with her irresponsible assertions surrounding porn’s effects or the current state of porn research. To counter the ongoing harassment, cyberstalking and false claims, YBOP was compelled to document some of Prause’s activities. Consider the following pages. (Additional incidents have occurred that we are not at liberty to divulge – as Prause’s victims fear further retribution.)
Porn Science Deniers Alliance (AKA: “RealYourBrainOnPorn.com” and “PornographyResearch.com”) (Nicole Prause, Marty Klein, Lynn Comella, David J. Ley, Emily F. Rothman, Samuel Perry, Taylor Kohut, William Fisher, Peter Finn, Janniko Georgiadis, Erick Janssen, Aleksandar Štulhofer, Joshua Grubbs, James Cantor, Michael Seto, Justin Lehmiller, Victoria Hartmann, Julia Velten, Roger Libby, Doug Braun-Harvey, David Hersh, Jennifer Valli, Madita Oeming, Kate Dawson, Eric Sprankle)
In the beginning Prause employed dozens of fake usernames to post on porn recovery forums, Quora, Wikipedia, and in the comment sections under articles. Prause rarely used her real name or her own social media accounts. That all changed after UCLA chose not to renew Prause’s contract (around January, 2015).
Prause began to put her name to falsehoods, openly cyber-harassing multiple individuals and organizations on social media and elsewhere. Since Prause’s primary target was Gary Wilson (hundreds of social media comments along with behind the scenes email campaigns), it became necessary to monitor and document Prause’s tweets and posts. This was done for her victims’ protection, and crucial for any future legal actions.
It soon became apparent that Prause’s tweets and comments were rarely about sex research, neuroscience, or any other subject related to her claimed expertise. In fact, the vast majority of Prause’s posts could be divided into two overlapping categories:
Indirect support of the porn industry: Defamatory & ad hominem comments targeting individuals and organizations that she labeled as “anti-porn activists” (often claiming to be a victim of these individuals and organizations). Documented here: page 1, page 2.
countless misrepresentations of the state of pornography research and attacks on porn studies or porn researchers.
The following pages contain a sampling of tweets and comments related to #2 – her vigorous support of the porn industry and its chosen positions. YBOP is of the view that Prause’s unilateral aggression has escalated to such frequent and reckless defamation (falsely accusing her many victims of “physically stalking her,” “misogyny,” “encouraging others to rape her,” and “being neo-Nazis”), that we are compelled to examine her possible motives. This material is divided into 4 main sections:
Please note: There is unequivocal evidence that the porn industry funded the sexology profession for decades. Sexology’s agenda still appears to serve the porn industry. Thus, the evidence on this page should be viewed in a larger context. See Hugh Hefner, the International Academy of Sex Research, and Its Founding President to understand how porn-industry friendly sexologists influenced the Kinsey Institute. Prause is a Kinsey grad.
More on David Ley
David Ley’s financial conflicts of interest (COI) seem evident.
The fledgling Sexual health Alliance (SHA) advisory board includes David Ley and two other RealYourBrainOnPorn.com “experts” (Justin Lehmiller & Chris Donahue). RealYBOP is a group of openly pro-porn, self-proclaimed “experts” headed by Nicole Prause. This is also the group currently engaged in illegal trademark infringement and squatting directed toward the legitimate YBOP. Put simply, those trying to silence YBOP are also being paid by the porn industry to promote its/their businesses, and assure users that porn and cam sites cause no problems (note: Nicole Prause has close, public ties to the porn industry as documented on this page).
In this article, Ley dismisses his compensated promotion of the porn industry:
Granted, sexual health professionals partnering directly with commercial porn platforms face some potential downsides, particularly for those who’d like to present themselves as completely unbiased. “I fully anticipate [anti-porn advocates] to all scream, ‘Oh, look, see, David Ley is working for porn,’” says Ley, whose name is routinely mentioned with disdain in anti-masturbation communities like NoFap.
But even if his work with Stripchat will undoubtedly provide fodder to anyone eager to write him off as biased or in the pocket of the porn lobby, for Ley, that tradeoff is worth it. “If we want to help [anxious porn consumers], we have to go to them,” he says. “And this is how we do that.”
David J. Ley, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and AASECT-certified supervisor of sex therapy, based in Albuquerque, NM. He has provided expert witness and forensic testimony in a number of cases around the United States. Dr. Ley is regarded as an expert in debunking claims of sexual addiction, and has been certified as an expert witness on this topic. He has testified in state and federal courts.
Contact him to obtain his fee schedule and arrange an appointment to discuss your interest.
COI #3: Ley makes money selling two books that deny sex and porn addiction (“The Myth of Sex Addiction,” 2012 and “Ethical Porn for Dicks,” 2016). Pornhub (which is owned by porn giant MindGeek) is one of the five back-cover endorsements listed for Ley’s 2016 book about porn:
COI #4: Finally, David Ley makes money via CEU seminars, where he promotes the addiction-deniers’ ideology set forth in his two books (which recklessly(?) ignores dozens of studies and the significance of the new Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder diagnosis in the World Health Organization’s diagnostic manual). Ley is compensated for his many talks featuring his biased views of porn. In this 2019 presentation Ley appears to support and promote adolescent porn use: Developing Positive Sexuality and Responsible Pornography Use in Adolescents.
There are numerous instances of Prause and Ley harassing and defaming Alexander Rhodes and NoFap. Each link in this list goes to a more complete description of harassment and/or defamation.
There is a practical way we can all help Alex Rhodes and prevent porn industry allies from shutting down NoFap. His fund-raising campaign can be found here: https://nofap.com/defend-alex/. Please give generously, and forward the above link to anyone you can think of who may be able to contribute. This lawsuit is a step forward for all of us. It can raise awareness of how Big Porn and its friends are continuing their campaign against all who dare to raise concerns about the porn industry. Video about the fundraising, by Staci Sprout: https://youtu.be/_hoa-vCS2Xs
Background: Ley & Prause have a long history of defamation, harassment, unethical and even illegal behaviors
For years Nicole Prause and David Ley have teamed up to defame, harass and cyber-stalk individuals and organizations that have warned of porn’s harms or publicized research reporting porn’s harms.
Their open warfare began on March 6th, 2013 David Ley and spokesperson Nicole Prause teamed up to write a Psychology Today blog post about Steele et al., 2013 called “Your Brain on Porn – It’s NOT Addictive.” Its oh-so-catchy title is misleading as it has nothing to do with Your Brain on Porn or the neuroscience presented there. Instead, David Ley’s March, 2013 blog post limits itself to a single flawed EEG study – Steele et al., 2013. Prause claimed that she had debunked porn addiction because her porn using subjects’ (1) “brains did not respond like other addicts,” and (2) they really just had “high desire.” Both claims are without support. Neither is reported in Steele et al., 2013. Truth? Eight peer-reviewed analyses of Steele et al. 2013 describe how the Steele et al. findings lend support to the porn addiction model (actual results = greater cue-reactivity to porn related to less desire to have sex with a partner).
After Gary Wilson published his extensive dismantling of the claims surrounding Steele et al., 2013, Nicole Prause began openly harassing, libeling and cyberstalking Wilson. (Prause’s UCLA contract was not renewed and she has not been employed by an academic institution since January, 2015.) Within a short time she also began targeting others, including researchers, medical doctors, therapists, psychologists, a former UCLA colleague, a UK charity, a TIME magazine editor, several professors, IITAP, SASH, Fight The New Drug, Exodus Cry, , RebootNation, YourBrainRebalanced, the academic journal Behavioral Sciences, its parent company MDPI, US Navy medical doctors, the head of the academic journal CUREUS, and the journal Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, men in recovery (especially Alex Rhodes) and NoFap.com (to name a few).
While spending her waking hours harassing & defaming others, Prause cleverly cultivated – with zero verifiable evidence – a myth that she was “the victim” of most anyone who dared to disagree with her assertions surrounding porn’s effects or the current state of porn research. To counter the ongoing harassment and false claims, YBOP was compelled to document some of Prause’s activities. Consider the following pages. (Additional incidents have occurred that we are not at liberty to divulge – as Prause’s victims fear further retribution.)
David J. Ley, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and AASECT-certified supervisor of sex therapy, based in Albuquerque, NM. He has provided expert witness and forensic testimony in a number of cases around the United States. Dr. Ley is regarded as an expert in debunking claims of sexual addiction, and has been certified as an expert witness on this topic. He has testified in state and federal courts.
Contact him to obtain his fee schedule and arrange an appointment to discuss your interest.
Third COI: Ley makes money selling two books that deny sex and porn addiction (“The Myth of Sex Addiction,” 2012 and “Ethical Porn for Dicks,” 2016). Pornhub (which is owned by porn giant MindGeek) is one of the five back-cover endorsements listed for Ley’s 2016 book about porn:
“David Ley’s voice brings much-needed nuance to some of the most important conversations occurring about pornography today.”―pornhub
Fourth COI: David Ley makes money via CEU seminars, where he promotes the addiction-deniers’ ideology set forth in his two books (which recklessly(?) ignore dozens of studies and the significance of the new Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder diagnosis in the World Health Organization’s diagnostic manual). Ley is compensated for his many talks featuring his biased views on porn use. In this 2019 presentation Ley appears to support and promote adolescent porn use: Developing Positive Sexuality and Responsible Pornography Use in Adolescents.
December 2013: Prause alias posts on YourBrainRebalanced & asks Gary Wilson about the size of his penis: kicking off Prause’s campaign of calling Wilson, his wife, Alex Rhodes, Don Hilton, and most everyone she disagrees with a misogynist.
Here’s an enlarged version of the image she included in the above tweet. Link to Wilson’s full answer. It is Prause who is being sexist as Prause asks Gary Wilson about the size of his penis:
Nevertheless, Prause has transformed Wilson’s inadvertently typing “Miss” in his reply to her questions about his manhood into her never ending campaign to paint Wilson, and others as misogynists. Below are just a few examples of how Prause has weaponized her bizarre interest in Gary Wilson’s penis and his response.
Over the last few years, Dr. Prause appears to have taken great pains to position herself as a “woman being subjected to misogynistic oppression when she tells truth to power.” She frequently tweets the following infographic that she apparently also shares at her public lectures, suggesting she is being victimized “as a woman scientist,” and painting herself as a trailblazer forging ahead to prove porn’s harmlessness despite prejudiced attacks.
It accuses Wilson, Marnia Robinson, Don Hilton MD, and nofap founder Alexander Rhodes of misogyny. Any suggestion that Wilson (or his wife), Hilton, or Rhodes are motivated by misogyny is fabricated, as their objections have nothing to do with Dr. Prause as a person or as a woman, and only to do with her untrue statements and inadequately supported claims about her research.
Put simply, anyone who exposes Prause’s falsehoods or misrepresentations of the research is automatically labeled “a misogynist,” in hopes that gullible people might believe her defamatory statements. She does this to shut down actual debate on Twitter and other social media platforms, to prevent her falsehoods from being exposed.
It’s ironic that her infographic contains four instances of misogyny taken from anonymous YouTube comments under her TEDx talk. In 2013, TED closed comments under Gary Wilson’s TEDx talk in response to Nicole Prause’s many hateful and defamatory comments (see this section). Prause used the following two YouTube usernames to post her comments:
How ethical is it for psychologists to personally attack individuals trying to remove porn from their lives and recover? Ley has a history of attacking Rhodes and NoFap, and harassing young men trying to quit porn. Prause, a psychologist, tweets again, making fun of Rhodes’ appearance:
Rhodes eventually responded, and Prause accused Alexander of faking his porn-induced sexual dysfunction:
The only so-called science that Prause relies upon is her own roundly criticized paper (not a real study), which did not find what she has claimed. Alexander links to a YBOP page with 28 neurological studies on porn users/sex addicts. In 2019, the same YBOP page lists 44 neuroscience-based studies (MRI, fMRI, EEG, neuropsychological, hormonal). All provide strong support for the addiction model as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies.
Prause ended it all as she usually does: citing no evidence and tweeting Rhodes “I sent you documentation. Do not contact me again.” That’s Nicole Prause’s MO: Initiate a personal attack, follow it up with lies, then end it all by playing the victim.
Others were watching the Twitter storm, which led to an article detailing it, and more Prause tweets attacking yet another person (below). Meanwhile, consider the fact that it is a violation of APA (American Psychological Association) principles for psychologists to attack those trying to recover.
Over the next few months Prause takes every opportunity to belittle and attack Alexander, NoFap.com, and men recovering from porn addiction:
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In this out of the blue May, 2018 tweet attacking Nofap, Prause cited an opinion piece in the journal “Sexualities” falsely stating that the article had “shown by science to denigrate women”.
It sure seems that Prause tweets more about NoFap and Alexander Rhodes than she does about her own research. Prause claims to be licensed psychologist. What ethical psychologist would go out of the way to call a young man recovering from compulsive porn use a liar, especially without evidence? Ethics violation? Violation of APA principles?
This was followed by @pornhelps calling both Alexander and Belinda liars. @NicoleRPrause eventually chimed in to call TIME journalist Luscombe a liar (more in the next section). The back and forth contains too many tweets to post here, but most can be found in these threads: Thread 1, Thread 2, Thread 3. Below is a sampling of @pornhelps’s unstable-sounding tweets falsely claiming that Alexander faked his story of porn-induced sexual problems:
@luscombeland @nytimes “Brave”? Faking a problem to promote his business? You failed to verify any part of his story
@GoodGuypervert @luscombeland exaggerating makes them money, esp in his case. These guys are mostly unemployed, no college…got $$$ somehow
@AlexanderRhodes & @luscombeland are creating fake panic to sell their wares. Disgusting.
@AlexanderRhodes @luscombeland @GoodGuypervert uh-oh, he’s gone full ad-hominem BC he got caught faking to make money off young scared men.
@AlexanderRhodes @luscombeland @GoodGuypervert then I await your proof that any of your claims actually happened to you, fake profiteer.
Pornhelps responds, seeing if a lie will stick: “I heard you got blackballed for false reporting”. Eventually Prause’s “NicoleRPrause” Twitter account chimes in calling Luscombe a liar (below). Hmm…how did @NicoleRPrause know about this Twitter thread? Another bit of evidence suggesting Nicole Prause masqueraded as @pornhelps.
In the Ley interview Prause claims to have unpublished data falsifying any connection between “porn addiction” and penile injures (Prause also said she will never publish the data). It’s important to know that both Prause and Pornhelps had been saying that Alexander lied about his masturbation-induced penile injury and porn-induced sexual problems.
Is it any coincidence that 3 days after multiple @pornhelps tweets called Alexander a liar, Ley and Prause publish a Psychology Today blog post directed at one of Alexander’s complaints (that he injured his penis from excessive masturbation)? Interestingly, their own data apparently showed that a fifth of those surveyed had experienced similar injuries. But again, Prause refuses to publish the data, while claiming her data somehow (inexplicably) prove that Alexander must be a liar. In any case Prause’s blog claims remain unsupported as she did not assess “porn addiction” or compulsive porn use in her subjects (read the comments section of Ley’s post).
October, 2016: Prause commits perjury attempting to silence Alexander Rhodes of NoFap
As described above Prause has a history of personally attacking Alexander Rhodes (it is always Prause who initiates the harassment with her tweets). For example, (again) here’s Prause (on a thread she initiated) claiming that Alexander Rhodes lied about experiencing porn-induced sexual problems:
@YourBrainOnPorn@JamesTherapy How did you get to another state so quickly to stalk? You also behind all of the mysterious clown sightings?
Key point: The above tweet no longer contains this picture of a man hiding in the bushes, which was used under the copyright “fair use” exclusion because it is evident the image’s purpose was for meme/parody:
As Alexander Rhodes describes in subsequent tweets, Nicole Prause falsely claimed ownership of the “man in the bush” picture and filed a bogus DMCA takedown request via Twitter. In doing so Prause committed perjury.Rhodes tweets the evidence:
Libel, perjury, and harassment – all documented. Prause responded with this tweet and her ”misogyny infographic”, which she has tweeted about 30 times and posted all over Qoura:
UPDATE – January, 2018: In response, Alexander Rhodes eventually sent in a counter notice, explaining to Twitter Inc. that as Dr. Nicole Prause is not the copyright holder or an authorized representative of the copyright holder, inconsistent with what she falsely asserted in the DMCA take-down notice sent to Twitter, the copyright infringement notice was baseless. In response, Twitter gave Dr. Prause a window of opportunity to respond to Rhodes’s counter-notice, in which she did not. While Twitter Inc. said that they would reinstate the censored tweet, the image has yet to reappear as of January 2018, despite the copyright decision being reversed. This demonstrates that while Alexander Rhodes and NoFap LLC successfully provided a legal argument against Prause’s censorship, she still was successfully able to permanently remove an image posted on Twitter through perjury without any tangible repercussions for breaking the law.
Prause’s tweet linked to a radio show about Jehovah Witnesses and sex abuse, which contained a segment about a 14-year old gay teen whose mom found his stash of porn magazines. Since being gay is against JW doctrine, the church insisted the gay teen no longer masturbate to images of men. The gay teen was driven to thoughts of suicide because he was a homosexual stuck in the JW facing the very real prospect of being tossed out of the church and shunned by his family and friends. The radio segment did not mention NoFap. Here’s Prause’s tweet (notice that only David Ley liked it):
Prause’s twisted and libelous tweet attempting to smear NoFap in connection with an entirely unrelated event demonstrates just how far she is willing to stretch the truth in pursuit of her agenda. The NoFapTeam responded with 3 tweets:
Not so coincidentally, a rambling hit piece about NoFap, featuring Nicole Prause, was published a few days later by Medical Daily. Of course Prause tweeted it, saying “claims busted by scientists.” By “scientists” Prause means herself. This goes to show that Prause has many contacts in the media, and uses them to her advantage. Prause also called NoFap “woo woo and cult-like.” Medical Daily author Lizette Borreli went so far as to label NoFap an “anti-sex group.” Anyone who has visited Nofap knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Many experiment with NoFap to regain their sexual function. NoFap decided to set the record straight with a few tweets of its own (1, 2, 3, 4), including this one:
Once again, Prause teams up with David Ley to defame Alexander Rhodes, Nofap (along with Gary Wilson’s website and RebootNation). Revealing her long-time obsession with over Rhodes, Prause tweets 4 screenshots from the last 3 years:
May 24-27, 2018: Prause creates multiple sock-puppets to edit the Nofap Wikipedia page
As described above, from May 24th to the 27th, 2018 Prause employed six fake usernames to edit the Wikipedia pages of her ongoing obsessions: MDPI, Nofap, Sexual Addiction, and Pornography Addiction. Even though Prause’s main target was MDPI, two of her sock-puppets took the time to attack Nofap, with edits and defamatory comments. As she has done in Twitter comments and in personal attacks on Alexander Rhodes, Prause called members of Nofap dangerous misogynists.
20:16, 25 May 2018 (diff | hist) . . (+367) . . NoFap (→Reception: Added peer-reviewed study about the verified dangers of NoFap)
20:14, 25 May 2018 (diff | hist) . . (-492) . . NoFap (→Reception: Removed a reference to an unpublished “study” only in a German newspaper and not published anywhere.)
03:28, 24 May 2018 (diff | hist) . . (+379) . . Pornography addiction (→Support groups: NoFap community has recently raised security concerns paralleling Incels and due to this paper discovering considerable misogynist attacks in NoFap. I suggest removal, but at least should warn people community is not safe.)
Another Prause edit involved deletion of a yet to be published paper by researcher Alec Sproten – How Abstinence Affects Preferences (2016). Sproten’s preliminary results, like a handful of other studies, reported significant benefits by participants who ceased using porn. Excerpts from Sproten’s article:
Results of the First Wave – Main Findings
The length of the longest streak participants performed before taking part in the survey correlates with time preferences. The second survey will answer the question if longer periods of abstinence render participants more able to delay rewards, or if more patient participants are more likely to perform longer streaks.
Longer periods of abstinence most likely cause less risk aversion (which is good). The second survey will provide the final proof.
Personality correlates with length of streaks. The second wave will reveal if abstinence influences personality or if personality can explain variation in the length of streaks.
Results of the Second Wave – Main Findings
Abstaining from pornography and masturbation increases the ability to delay rewards
Participating in a period of abstinence renders people more willing to take risks
Abstinence renders people more altruistic
Abstinence renders people more extroverted, more conscientious, and less neurotic
Unfortunately, Prause’s deletion of the Sproten study has not yet been reversed, and the Kris Taylor paper remains. More evidence that Wikipedia editors game the system, and sockpuppets rule.
October, 2018: Ley & Prause devise an article purporting to connect Gary Wilson, Alexander Rhodes, Gabe Deem to white supremacists/fascists (Prause attacks & libels Alexander Rhodes & Nofap in the comments section).
The term “fascist” when misused as it is here, is “hate speech.” The post implies that all of the people named in it are both “fascists” and anti-masturbation. While this may constitute clever public relations spin in light of the immediately preceding reprehensible attack on a temple in Pittsburgh, it is shocking that Ley apparently used the tragedy to promote his well known pro-porn agenda by attempting to tie “fascism” and “anti-masturbation” to a range of people who have addressed the risks of overuse of internet pornography and related concerns. Ley’s proposed associations bear no relation to the facts. For example, Wilson is the author of a book entitled Your Brain On Porn, and the host of this website with the same name. The focus of both is on the risks of internet porn overuse, not on masturbation. A few excerpts from Ley’s article targeting Gary Wilson (yourbrainonporn.com) and Gabe Deem (RebootNation):
Another excerpt where Ley tries to connect Gary Wilson to David Duke (so sickening):
Ironically, Ley has, when it suited him, claimed masturbation, not internet pornography, is the true cause of young men’s rising problems with sexual performance and sexual attraction to real partners. Thus, it is especially disingenuous for him to now claim that those who oppose his views are “anti-masturbation.” See this piece about the absurdity of the sexology claim that the cause of rising sexual dysfunctions in millennials is masturbation. See Sexologists Deny PIED by Claiming Masturbation Is the Problem.
Let’s start with Prause’s admission that she helped David Ley with his defamatory blog post.
The pattern for Psychology Today blog posts co-created by Prause & Ley is for Ley to open the comments section (which he often doesn’t) and for Prause (and her aliases) to police the comments, which usually entails Prause attacking detractors and mischaracterizing the state of the research.
We have reproduced Prause’s comments below. Where appropriate we included the comments of her targets. As you can see, Prause employs her usual mix of personal attacks, falsehoods, faux victim-hood and misrepresentations of studies:
Submitted by PornHelp Team on October 28, 2018 – 12:43pm
This is disgraceful. Of all of the weekends to publish a conspiracy theory equating wanting to quit porn to fascism and Antisemitism, this isn’t the one (really, there’s never a good time for this kind of half-baked nonsense, but especially not now).
Let’s be clear. People seek help with out-of-control porn use for lots and lots of different reasons. Many have no religious motivation at all, but rather look for help because of tangible impacts porn use is having on their lives. For others, religious belief (including, for some, the teachings of Judaism, fwiw) does play a role.
Implying porn skepticism amounts to a Nazi plot is not only morally abhorrent, it’s also demonstrably false. Dr. Ley should know better than to make such irresponsible claims.
Submitted by Nicole Prause on October 28, 2018 – 3:29pm
His timing is perfect. Hate speech results in hateful acts. NoFap has been promoting hate speech for years, including against specific women. There are scientific papers published about the misogyny in NoFap groups. Incel’s have murdered. I fully expect one of these murders will someday be from these anti-masturbation anti-porn groups. HLey is calling attention to their hate speech while they still have time to try to correct. It is past time to stop promoting hate speech on your platforms…or this is what one of your followers will do next. Stop promoting fascism, misogyny, and antisemitism.
Submitted by Nicole Prause on October 29, 2018 – 1:59pm
There is a peer-reviewed article on some of the misogyny in the NoFap community. Search: “‘I want that power back’: Discourses of masculinity within an online pornography abstinence forum”
This means it was reviewed by independent scientists confidentially. There is nothing wrong with choosing for yourself not to masturbate, but they spread intentionally fake news and are a for-profit. For example, I study the effects of porn on the brain and have some of the largest samples in this area in high-impact journals. If they mention my research at all, it’s usually stating we found the opposite of what we actually found. These are not trustworthy sources and are promoting discrimination against protected groups.
Submitted by Nicole Prause on October 28, 2018 – 5:34pm
Geoffrey Goodman is the provider kicked off a listserv for his misogynist comments. Specifically, “Let’s discuss the merits and flaws of the actual research, rather than hide behind Prause’s apron strings.” As far as I know, he still has the title IX complaint with his university.
The “actual research” is quite clear. You and NoFap are openly misogynist and promoting hate speech. Birds of a feather.
Also, it’s cute that you thought EEG was “old” technology and fMRI was “better”. Please, do get to know an actual neuroscientist before spouting fake information.
Note: A communication revealed that Dr. Goodman was not kicked off the AASECT listserv and Prause’s spurious complaint – as usual – was ignored.
all nofap is trying to do is provide a support group for people who have the same goal- not masturbating. I can see why you might think there is discrimination against women there, as the population is predominantly men, but there are places for women to accomplish exactly the same things. when women post in nofap some people see it as a trigger. I personally don’t but from my perspective theres a big difference between unjustified discrimination and keeping order. You can’t make everyone happy 100% of the time.
Note the following back and forth between Prause and bart revolves around grad student Kris Taylor’s dissertation on 15 comments from reddit/nofap: I want that power back: Discourses of masculinity within an online pornography abstinence forum (2018). That’s right, a PhD analyzing 15 reddit comments! Taylor is decidedly pro-porn and anti-Nofap. He has a history of blatantly misrepresenting studies and the state of the research, as chronicled in the YBOP critique: Debunking Kris Taylor’s “A Few Hard Truths about Porn and Erectile Dysfunction” (2017). As bart points out, Taylor carefully selected 15 out-of-context comments from among millions of reddit/nofap comments in order to support his preordained agenda. Interspersed among the 15 reddit comments we find Taylor’s sociological gibberish masquerading as “deep thought.” This are the type of biased, lightweight reflections that sexology journals love to publish.
Submitted by Nicole Prause on October 29, 2018 – 2:05pm
“‘I want that power back’: Discourses of masculinity within an online pornography abstinence forum”
This was a systematic review of the content in those forums. I believe Ley’s point is not to say everyone must masturbate at some regular schedule. If you choose not to masturbate, just don’t promote for-profit groups that support misogyny and advertise Proud Boys and other antisemitic groups. As far as I am aware, the only celebrity fan of YourBrainOnPorn is David Duke, which he described as preventing race mixing.
There are many ways to reach your goals that don’t line the pockets of hate groups.
of anything. Dr. Prause must be referring to the agenda-driven paper by a grad student who chose a few random quotes from Reddit/nofap to push a false narrative (‘I want that power back’: Discourses of masculinity within an online pornography abstinence forum)
The opinion paper was qualitative, not quantitative – and everything excerpted was at the discretion of the grad student (Kris Taylor) – who has a history of pro-porn advocacy
Reddit/nofap has 370,000 members and millions upon millions of comments since its inception 8 years ago. It’s reddit for god sake. You can peruse a single post from reddit and find a thousand divergent and sometimes crazy comments. It’s reddit!!!.
Taylor excerpted 15 comments, writing a skewed narrative to match his predetermined wants. That’s right, 14 comments. That’s not a “study”. A 9th grader could hang out for 30 minutes on reddit (any sub-reddit), grab a few comments and write it up – and it would be comparable. What a joke.
Try citing a quantitative study by someone with PhD.
Submitted by Nicole Prause on October 29, 2018 – 4:47pm
The fake-name account appears to want some of the quotes from the systematic-review paper posted. These will make very clear that extensive content on the NoFap website is misogynist. If you visit this website, you will be supporting and furthering misogyny, above and beyond the antisemitism evidenced from Dr. Ley’s original piece.
“… what in the world is masculine about jerking off to porn in front of a screen? If you got caught you would feel rightfully ashamed. There’s nothing shameful about fucking a hot young girl, you feel like the king of the jungle afterwards that’s what we are meant to do! Fuck girls. Not jerk off like lonely losers to pixels on a screen. He makes some good points in the book, doesn’t mean I became a feminist and grew a vagina after reading it. If anything it made me want to fap less and fuck more. Is that not
masculine for you?”
“You think it’s a coincidence homeless guys don’t get laid? We’re animals… it’s natural to be attracted to what’s best for you and the species.”
“Rarely has it ever been that women chase the man.
That makes no sense. If you are truly masculine, then YOU go after the woman.”
“Think about what feminine means to you. Are you doing those things? Are you seeking approval, laughing nervously, and being indecisive? You shouldn’t be… And by the way, you can laugh, but laugh only if you want to. Laughing because you are nervous is feminine. Let the girls do that around you. Think about what masculine means to you. Are you doing those things? You should be. Are you decisive? Do you know what you stand for? Do you know what you want, and can you find a way to get it? These are the traits you need to be cultivating… Pay deep attention to your internal monologue. Don’t do or say things to people unless you want to… Don’t use 7 words when 4 will do. Speak in a deep, controlled voice.”
“The thing about power, at least in the modern world we live in today, is that a man simply has to respect himself and not heel to being a beta (bitch) to be considered masculine”
They provide many more exact misogynist quotes like this. What an awful group to support.
of a grad student who says porn never causes any problems. Qualitative clap-trap from an non-PhD. Let me grab a few comments out millions, and write a bunch of filler…..
I’ll go to reddit now and grab a few comments:
Delayed ejaculation: GONE! Thank you nofap! ‘
And from there things got even better. ALL and I literally mean ALL my social anxiety went away. On the second week I had cute girls talking to me everyday and I have even started “dating” (we had sex) this girl who was literally the girl of my dreams in high school (still is tbh). I even remember her saying to me “Wow you’re really good at making eye contact” and I received that same complement from others girls too.
I realized how bad I used to be when talking to people and its crazy to look back on. When I go to parties I am able to talk and hold conversations with anyone and it the best thing ever.
I totally agree with the benefits!
Used to have to think of porn in order to orgasm with wife. I have had regular sex through all my marriage (6 years now), but have always found that unless the sex is especially good I had to think of P in order to O in my wife, and found that about 5% of the time that I couldn’t finish at all. Now though I don’t think about this at all, just enjoy the time with her. It’s almost like starting over and learning sex again, it can be such a different with a clear mind not clouded by P.
26days = some of best sex ever!
Well I’ve gone 26 days now after going just a week at a time for ages, I’ve had some amazing sex with my gf of 8 months, not amazing in a porn style way, but very loving very emotional and feeling great. We’d sex 4 times this week, 2 of them were amazing, 2 were more the normal just felt good. It seemed to come out of nowhere the amazing sex. But really it was the lack of porn I’m sure. I wondered did I just think it was very different and gf didn’t, but nope, gf that it was very different and amazing too, which makes it all the better. So keep up the kicking porn in the nuts folks!
I’d always heard about surveys where they’d say that men who don’t watch porn are “more satisfied” with their sex lives. I never really knew what that was, or I thought I was “satisfied” enough. But now, on this streak, I’ve seen the difference. It’s like night and day! It’s better in sooo many ways. More satisfying, it’s a better experience physically, mentally it’s better as well. Can’t even explain. Sex is soooo much better without porn
A little bit different from Kris Taylor’s carefully chosen 15 out of over 10 million. And Taylor didn’t go to the nofap.com forum – which has millions more.
Submitted by Nicole Prause on October 29, 2018 – 5:24pm
Scientist every time
There’s was a peer-reviewed article. You probably wrote all of those yourself. I just discovered that the NoFap company account actually was being run by Alexander Rhodes himself, in violation of his no-contact request. So your actual founder is stalking women online in violation of no-contact orders.
You provide no evidence that their review was not balanced. As your cannot pass peer-review, I think it’s clear where the problem is.
You don’t even know what a review entails, do you? Again, it was 15 carefully selected comments out of tens of millions comments published on reddit/nofap since its inception 8 years ago.
How about detailing for us what a “review” of Reddit comments would entail. How would it be structured? Tell us about the methodology of a “review” of millions of comments over an 8 year period on a platform that allows everyone on the internet to post and say whatever they please.
From the paper itself we can see that it wasn’t a review at all:
Given this approach to data collection, we wish to highlight that the data presented is not intended to be read as representative of NoFap as a whole, but to present how some users express a particular investment in masculinity and its constitution (Edley, 2001; Edley and Wetherell, 1997). That is, as opposed to an analysis in which users’ posts are understood as oblique references to masculinity (through their talk about video games, pornography, exercise and diet, etc.), our study presents the ways in which users actively constitute masculine positions. Our search term ‘masculinity’ rendered numerous pages of ‘original posts’ which pertained specifically to defining masculinity.
So grad student Taylor selected 15 comments from a search for “masculinity” to support his predetermined goal, while ignoring %99.9999999999999 of all other comments. Is that what you call a “review”?
Taylor then interjected mind-numbing commentary on each of the carefully selected comments. For example, this load of gibberish about comment #11:
In the original post (Extract 11) the concept of a man that is both ‘who you are’ and ‘who you strive to be’ is introduced with an appeal to ‘embrace your masculinity’, again in the manner of a motivational call to arms to rally a general NoFap audience. However, the text indicates that it has been necessary for the author to hide aspects of his masculinity in the past to ‘not offend’. This disclosure positions certain expressions of masculinity as naturally offensive, or masculinity as a construct that has been vilified and judged to be problematic in its ‘natural’ form.
And this is what you, Dr. Prause, cite as a “review” of the entirety of reddit/nofap? LOL.
Submitted by Nicole Prause on October 30, 2018 – 10:38pm
They reported their systematic approach, a point you proved yourself by posting their method. You disclose nothing, were subject to no standards, made no attempt to observe in any systematic way…that is the difference between peer-review.
So yes, get it published or stick to your blogs, but there’s a reason you’ll never be able to publish your ramblings: They are poorly reasoned. I suspect this is because you have a conflict of interest. NoFap is a for-profit site; they make money by scaring people into having a problem they don’t actually have.
There was no “systematic approach” and it wasn’t a review. The paper wasn’t even a random sample of reddit/nofap posts. For the 4th time, grad student Taylor carefully selected excerpts from 15 out of context reddit comments (out of tens of millions) to match the narrative he already decided upon- and probably already transcribed (Taylor didn’t even provide full comments!).
As expected, you failed to respond to my very simple request to detail for us what a “review” of Reddit comments would entail. How would it be structured? Tell us about the methodology of a “review” of millions of comments over an 8 year period on a platform that allows everyone on the internet to post and say whatever they please.
It’s clear from your many comments here that you are obsessed with nofap (which is pretty strange). Waving around a grad student’s qualitative paper with 15 carefully selected, out-of-context excerpts from comments, while falsely asserting that it was “systematic review” of reddit/nofap comments is bad look. LOL
Submitted by Nicole Prause on October 30, 2018 – 11:47pm
There actually is no such thing as just a “review”, there are many different types. Each have different criteria. This review fulfilled the requirements for what they were required to meet criteria for publication.
Yours has not. Hurling personal insults at a woman with a doctorate appears consistent with the NoFap community.
Get your ideas through peer-review, or you have nothing to contribute at this point.
Playing the victim, when you are the one attacking members of nofap in every comment, is also a very bad look.
How do you know that I am not a women or transgender?
How do you know that I do not have a doctorate?
You assumptions offend me, as do your personal attacks, your put-downs, and your inability to stay on subject: the Kris Taylor 15-comment opinion piece, that didn’t review anything.
Disappointing. I excepted more civility and better presentation of empirical evidence.
Submitted by Nicole Prause on October 31, 2018 – 12:22am
They passed a scientific bar in peer-review at a reputable journal. You can try to pass that bar. As-is, anecdotes likely written by you are not good counter-points to a peer-reviewed paper.
I am not coming here to be called names. Women can be misogynist the same as anyone else, unfortunately. I expect nothing less from a group with a documented history of misogyny. The comments from their paper are all still present on the website, so it seems NoFap is happy to support the misogyny, even when it’s been identified by independent third parties with no conflict of interest.
You continue to falsely state that Kris Taylor’s paper (an opinion piece by a grad student) was a review. It was not a review of the literature. It did not review the peer-reviewed literature related to anything, including anything to do with porn use.
You continue to falsely claim that the 15 comments were was magically representative of tens of millions of comments posted on reddit/nofap over the last 8 years. The paper clearly states that the 15 bits from carefully selected comments were not representative of reddit/nofap. From the paper:
“Given this approach to data collection, we wish to highlight that the data presented is not intended to be read as representative of NoFap as a whole”
I suggest reading a study before making claims about that study.
You continue to falsely claim that nofap has a “documented history of misogyny”. Not so. There is no “documented” history of anything related to reddit/nofap. To begin to document any pattern of attitudes or beliefs a quantitative, systematic assessment of comments by members of nofap would need to be done. It hasn’s been done. The Taylor paper did not do this as it was not quantitative and was not representative…. it wasn’t anything but 15 carefully selected comments to further the authors predetermined agenda
In addition, Kris Taylor failed to confirm if any of the comments were by members of npfap. Anyone can comment on reddit/nofap. Without confirmation of membership, your assertion, based on only 15 comments, is without support. No documentation exists for misogyny or anything else, and that includes Taylor’s paper.
Below are some of the 15 excerpts from Kris Taylor’s paper that Dr. Prause says documents the misogyny of all of reddit/nofap’s 370,000 members. Judge for yourself if these comments are misogyny at its very worse:
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No Fap is not only about overcoming our addiction over porn and masturbation, it is also about reconnecting with our inner masculinity. So lets come out of our fantasies and begin to connect with real women. Lets love them and have meaningful sex with them
—-
Real women, real life, real respect.
—–
My no Fap journey began when i couldn’t stay erect for a real life woman! That was 44 long hard days ago. Today i had sex for the first time.
—–
I hate how it makes me feel like a creep. I hate how it makes me feel like I am unworthy of love. I hate how it makes me feel weak when I finish. I hate how it makes me feel deprived of my core masculinity. I hate how it keeps me in my head, afraid of the challenges of the real world. I hate everything about porn, other than the fact that it seems pleasurable in the moment. So I will be finding my pleasure in real things from now on, because fuck porn and how it makes me feel.
—–
Good on you man. Remember this feeling, let it drive you and keep away from porn. There’s so many great real things to find pleasure in. The pleasure of connecting with people, the pleasure of exercise, the pleasure of reading, the pleasure of finding a girl you really like without seeing her as a sex object or worrying about sexual problems. All the best in your journey!
——
But I am beginning to realize I am only hurting myself by not constantly striving to be masculine and increase my masculine nature. It will affect some people, but it’s who I am at the core. So embrace your masculinity. For you and your (potential) lover.
—–
Think about what masculine means to you. Are you doing those things? You should be. Are you decisive? Do you know what you stand for? Do you know what you want, and can you find a way to get it? These are the traits you need to be cultivating. . . Pay deep attention to your internal monologue.
—-
Being a man means you are passionate, creative, you focus on solution and fixing. Don’t allow toxic shame to talk away that pride. Learn to self-affirm.
—-
You don’t have to be Heisman winner or national wrestler or something, just respect yourself and your own opinions
—–
As you should know, most fapstronauts partake for several different reasons. My reason for being a fapstronaut is to increase my masculinity, become stronger as a man, and learn who i really am.
—–
What in the world is masculine about jerking off to porn in front of a screen?
—-
That’s it folks. The above is the entirety of Dr. Prause’s empirical evidence that nofap is a “documented” to be a stronghold of misogyny. A handful of non-representative, out-of-context comments found through a search for the term “masculinity”, selected without any discernible criteria, by a grad student with an agenda. A handful of comments, posted on the 5th largest website in the US, by a few guys, who may or may not be nofap members – out of tens of millions possible comments. So devastatingly convincing.
Submitted by Nicole Prause on October 31, 2018 – 10:51am
As the misogynist, misrepresentations of this anonymous troll make clear, this is why I get rape threats and am stalked by NoFap followers.
I do not owe anyone an education on published science they refuse to publish themselves, so would encourage you to stop threatening female scientists online.
Wow. When confronted with study excerpts that refute your claims about the study you devolve into character assassination, name calling, ad hominem and playing the victim (even though you are no victim in this thread).
It has been very enlightening to observe your tactics and internet demeanor.
As Bart and others saw, Prause always engages in personal attacks and outlandish assertions, while simultaneously misrepresenting studies and fabricating tales of her own victimization.
Bart learned, as everyone eventually does, that if you engage Prause in a substantive debate she very quickly resorts to name calling, unsupported accusations, and misrepresentation of the research. Once again we see a licensed psychologist co-authoring an article and trolling the comments section to smear individuals who are trying to quit porn.
Ley’s Psychology Today blog post targeted Alexander Rhodes and Gary Wilson, both of whom are atheists and politically liberal. As is often the case, Ley’s claims are the exact opposite of reality. That’s how propagandists roll.
October, 2018: Prause follows-up the “fascist” article by attacking & libeling Alexander Rhodes and Nofap.com on Twitter
Its important to keep in mind that Nofap isn’t an organization, or movement, or anything other than the practice of abstaining from porn and masturbation for a period of time. While the Nofap subreddit was started in 2011, the “NoFap” concept can be traced back the “No Fap Ironman Competition” (October 20th, 2006 on the North American Subaru Owners Club Forums). Nofap months, and abstaining-from-porn contests subsequently occurred on many internet forum, long before reddit/nofap was born (see a collection of such forums on this page). Even an 8-week militarily boot camp could be considered “nofap.” To claim that nofappers are X or Y is like claiming that all Dallas Cowboy fans are X or Y. Any attempt to label those who abstain from porn or masturbation as a unified group is pure agenda-driven propaganda. Which leads us to the Ley & Prause “nofappers are fascist” blog post.
While policing comments under her and Ley’s Psychology Today blog post, Prause simultaneously went on a Twitter tirade attacking and defaming Nofap, Alexander Rhodes, and Gary Wilson. A reminder: Prause and Ley have a long, documented history of harassing and libeling Alexander Rhodes and Nofap (The current examples are just the tip of the Prause/Ley iceberg.):
Prause’s Twitter storm started with baiting NoFap by misrepresenting tweets from over 3 years ago. (Note how Prause has collected tweets, comments, random posts, for years from various accounts and from porn recovery forums which she has trolled with dozens of fake accounts.)
Prause follows up her targeted harassment and falsehoods with more tweets.
Tweet #2 – About a biased paper by a anti-nofap.com, pro-porn grad student, Kris Taylor (described above)
As described, Kris Taylor carefully selected 15 comments (out of millions available) to advance his predetermined agenda-driven narrative.
In Tweet #3 Prause provides a screenshot of an account that is not associated with NoFap. An account that NoFap lawyers had already served with a cease and desist letter for using their name and for cyberstalking:
The official Nofap account responding to Prause’s harassment and defamation with this tweet:
Caught in blatant misrepresentation, Prause goes on the attack, suggesting that Nofap should police the entire internet for her benefit. Nofap replies with undeserved calmness:
With no provocation, Prause injects Gary Wilson into her Twitter tirade – saying that Wilson has physically stalked her and had been reported to the LAPD and UCLA. All of these familiar lies are covered in several other places on the Prause page. Here, Prause provides a screenshot of a 2016 Alexander Rhodes tweet defending Wilson from Prause’s lies. The entire incident, with screenshots, is documented in this section: Others – October, 2016: Prause commits perjury attempting to silence Nofap’s Alexander Rhodes.
Prause is steeped in the ways of propaganda: When someone calls you out on your lies and harassment (as Rhodes did), Prause turns it into her faux-victimization. Nofap responds and links to this page chronicling her behaviors.
Their Twitter conversation about Gary Wilson continues in this section:
——————————
Prause continues her tirade by posting screenshots from the right-wing site “Gab.” The Gab nutcases have no association with Nofap, yet Prause claims they are Nofap members (as if Nofap issues membership cards):
Nofap calmly responds to Prause as if she were a sincere individual with a legitimate concern. Yet imagine all the time Prause spent scouring internet forums and Twitter for any random comment she could misuse and misrepresent. Impressive.
David Ley, Prause’s companion in cyber-harassment, feels compelled to join in the attack, with his usual unsupported claims about the mighty and powerful “sex addiction industry” (no mention of the actual industry here – the truly mighty and powerful porn industry and the FSC):
Note: The mass shooting of Jews occurred in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the home of NoFap.com founder, Alexander Rhodes.
Prause continues, promoting Kris Taylor’s PhD pathetic dissertation and saying that if her assertions weren’t true NoFap would sue her (knowing very well that a lawsuit might cost a few hundred thousand dollars, drag on for years – and that Nofap.com could not afford such an endeavor. Few could).
Nofap.com also responds to Prause’s assertions related to Kris Taylor’s paper containing 15 carefully selected out-of context comments from reddit/nofap (not NoFap.com):
Prause blatantly lies about Kris Taylor’s 15-comment hit piece, claiming it was a “representative sample” of the millions of reddit/nofap comments posted over the last 8 years:
No Dr. Prause, it wasn’t a “representative sample” – as Taylor clearly stated in his paper:
“Given this approach to data collection, we wish to highlight that the data presented is not intended to be read as representative of NoFap as a whole“
Claims about police reports are lies (see below). Claims about Antisemitism, sexism and other discrimination” are equally without support – Prause never links to examples of such posts on NoFap.com. Note: Nofap.com is not the same as reddit/nofap. Reddit is truly the Wild West where anyone on the internet can post anything. Prause well knows this as she has created at least 20 fake usernames to post on reddit/pornfree and reddit/nofap. A few sections documenting Prause many aliases she has used:
As always, Prause accuses anyone who engages with her falsehoods and misrepresentations of being a misogynist. The attacker playing the victim. Propaganda in its purest form.
After 8 edits, Prause created another fake account – Suuperon – to delete a study showing the benefits of abstaining from porn, while adding more context to her other sock-puppets edits:
All the above Wikipedia edits mirror everything Prause said on twitter and in the comments section under the Prause/Ley Psychology Today article. The cybertsalker caught in the act….. again.
Ongoing – David Ley & Nicole Prause’s ongoing attempts to smear YBOP/Gary Wilson & Nofap/Alexander Rhodes by claiming links with neo-Nazi sympathizers
The answer to “who knew?” is “Prause & Ley” because they were the only ones cultivating a fictitious “connection” between porn recovery forums and fascists. Starting in 2016 defamers Ley and Prause hatched this previously non-existent association. Apart from Prause & Ley’s Twitter pages no connection existed between Nazi sympathizers and Wilson or Rhodes. Ley & Prause initiated their fraudulent campaign with this tweet:
Scouring the internet for anything Ley can use to smear Wilson, he pounced upon an obscure (and disgusting) David Duke blog post containing a link to Gary Wilson’s TEDx talk. Wilson’s TEDx talk has some 11 million views, so thousands of folks of all stripes have linked to (and recommended) Wilson’s talk, “The Great Porn Experiment.”
How does this implicate Gary Wilson as a “white supremacist?” It doesn’t, of course. This ridiculous assertion is like suggesting all dog lovers are Nazi’s because Hitler loved his dogs. It’s the equivalent of claiming that the producers of “The Matrix” are neo-Nazis because David Duke liked their movie. Pure BS. (Reminder: one of Ley & Prause’s closest allies (therapist Joe Kort) linked to and recommended Gary Wilson’s TEDx talk. Consider his words:
Does recommending “The Great Porn Experiment” make Joe Kort a neo-Nazi? It must, according the Ley/Prause doctrine of: if you like X, and a Nazi likes X, you are a Nazi.
Here’s Prause attempting to connect “racist pseudo-science” with anyone who says porn might be a problem, including Pamela Anderson (Prause later deleted her tweet):
In a disgusting tweet she later deleted, Prause tried to make a connection between the tragedies in Charlottesville and Gary Wilson:
The sickening Prause and Ley propaganda machine kept rolling with this David Ley tweet tagging an unrelated NYTimes article about neo-Nazi’s:
With no factual evidence, psychologist Ley tries yet again to connect far-left liberal/atheist Gary Wilson and far-right, former KKK Grand Wizard, David Duke.
What Ley doesn’t know is that Wilson grew up in a black neighborhood and he has African-American relatives. Ley is without scruples.
————————–
Not to be outdone, Prause scours the net for anything she can mischaracterize and implies a non-existent connection between “anti-porn activism” and neo-Nazis.
In this next tweet, Ley takes the laughable stance that there’s no racism in porn, but says those who claim porn is addictive are racist, misogynist and anti-Semites. It’s part of the ongoing strategy to paint anyone who disagrees with them as racist and misogynistic perpetrators – and themselves and the porn industry as the victims:
As these pages reveal, it’s Dr. Prause who regularly attacks those “who claim porn is addictive” (Prause has zero evidence of anyone named on these pages having engaged in misogyny). For much more on this ongoing smear campaign by Prause and David Ley see these sections:
Prause & Ley search twitter for anything they can use to claim that anyone who quits using porn is a misogynist/fascist. Here Ley retweets Prause, and adds his spin:
A quick investigation revealed that Prause lied: the twitter user was not banned, not even for a day. This person, who is not affiliated with nofap or any other organization, appears to be reporting Instagram users for violating rules related to pornographic content. This appears to have drawn the attention of porn stars and Prause was notified. Whatever the case, Prause and Ley are working hard to keep their fabricated meme going.
Ley continues, suggesting that Gary Wilson, Alex Rhodes, and Fight The New Drug are rigged, obsessive, and best of all – homophobic.
October, 2018: Prause tweets that she has reported “serial misogynist harasser” Alexander Rhodes to the FBI
As is clearly evident from the above sections, and several other sections on the 2 Prause pages, the only serial harasser here is Nicole Prause. There are no misogynists among the many Prause targets listed on these pages. While Prause regularly accuses her victims of being misogynists, she never provides a single example of such behavior.
The following day, Prause tweets that she reported Alexander Rhodes to the FBI because he is serial misogynist who “violated” a clear no-contact request:
On the same day (in response to one bart’s comments) Prause posts this in the comment section under her and Ley’s “fascist” Psychology Today blog post:
While Prause ends many of her targeted social media attacks by asserting a “no-contact request”, there is no such thing. A “no-contact request” is as legally binding as requesting someone “stop and smell the roses”.
Prause is trying to trick the public (her twitter followers) into believing she has obtained a restraining order or an injunction. She hasn’t. Its just a tweet. But that doesn’t stop her from publicly and falsely accusing her victims of “violating no contact orders” and of “harassment.” The clear, and clearly false, implication of her statements is to suggest these people are acting illegally. Her aggressive tactics and knowingly false accusations are calculated to bully and intimidate the victims of her online cyber-harassment into silence.
A few examples of Prause initiating harassment and defamation followed by claiming victim-hood and ending with so-called “no-contact orders”:
Update: Both Gary Wilson and Alexander Rhodes filed FOIA requests with the FBI to find out if Prause had ever filed a report. She had not. See the following section:
As is clearly evident from the above sections, and several other sections on the 2 Prause pages, the only serial harasser here is Nicole Prause. There are no misogynists among the many Prause targets listed on these pages.
Backstory: Prause has a long history of claiming to have reported Gary Wilson to the LAPD, the UCLAPD, and the FBI, for “stalking” or “misogyny” or who knows what (as have Prause’s many sockpuppets). To convince the world that she filed police and FBI reports, Prause even offers “case numbers” to those who DM or email her. Here’s one of her many tweets claiming FBI reports:
While Prause is plainly capable of filing false police reports, the FBI, LAPD and UCLAPD have all confirmed that she hasn’t dared. She must realize that filing bogus reports could land her in a lot of trouble.
Back to Alexander Rhodes and Nofap. After her October 29 tweet claiming she had filed an FBI report, Prause escalated her harassment and defamation of Rhodes on Twitter and in the press. As seen below, she began by contacting a journalist and a popular porn site to let them know that Alexander Rhodes was (purportedly) under investigation by the FBI because of a report that she had submitted about him. Prause’s assorted tweets suggest the FBI report was for cyber-harassment or cyber-stalking or some other nonsense, after @NoFap refuted her lies about Rhodes being affiliated with an extremist group on Twitter. (He’s not.)
Prause tweets on a Sarah Manavis thread promoting the Manavis article attacking Nofap, supporting Xhamster, and parroting everything Prause had tweeted on the subject during the previous 3 weeks:
———————
On the same day, Prause tweeted in an XHamster thread, where she spread more of her toxic defamation and told XHamster to Direct Message her:
———————
Another Prause tweet on the XHamster thread smearing Nofap. Prause falsely states that Rhodes “worked with” VICE founder Gavin McGinnes.
Given the seriousness of Prause’s allegations against him, Alexander Rhodes submitted a Freedom of Information request to the FBI to inquire about possible reports about himself.He submitted the following request on November 27:
And….. the verdict is in. Rhodes got word back from the FBI. Prause was lying about his FBI report, too.
———————
Prause has been lying for years about reporting Gary Wilson to “the police” and the FBI – and she continues her lies to this day, defaming yet another victim. As it did with Wilson, the FBI confirmed that Prause is lying about filing an FBI report on Alexander Rhodes (for defending himself against Prause’s obsessive, and suspiciously persistent, defamation).
November, 2018: Prause resumes her unprovoked, libelous attacks on NoFap.com & Alexander Rhodes
Nicole Prause’s obsessive cyber-harassment of Nofap.com and founder Alexander Rhodes (and men trying to quit porn) resumed even after her multiple unmerited attacks in October, 2018. Right after Thanksgiving Prause tweeted Huffpost journalist Andy Campbell with her usual concoction of falsehoods and guilt-by-association ad hominem fallacies:
As described above, Alexander Rhodes debunked Prause’s malicious attempts to assert guilt-by-association by citing Twitter users who do not represent Nofap.com and are not members of Nofap.com. (In fact, Nofap.com had sent the Twitter account cited by Prause (“NoFap ResistanceArmy”) a cease and desist letter.)
Once again we have the cyber-stalker and harasser playing the victim. Propaganda in its purest form.
December, 2018: Prause joins Xhamster to smear NoFap & Alexander Rhodes; induces Fatherly.com to publish a hit-piece where Prause is the “expert”
Prause’s obsessive cyber-stalking and defamation of Alexander Rhodes and Nofap continue. Apparently, Prause’s expensive PR firm and query bombardment of media outlets resulted in yet another hit piece, published by Fatherly.com (written by Lauren Vinopal). The “journalist” did little more than copy and paste Prause’s Twitter threads, quoting her as the world’s expert on everything related to Nofap.com, reddit/nofap, and men trying to quit porn.
First, here’s the barrage of unprovoked tweets, which mirrors previous unsupported drivel in this same “quitting porn causes fascism” (huh?) press campaign. Prause’s first tweet is on the Xhamster thread smearing Nofap. Prause falsely states that Rhodes “worked with” VICE founder Gavin McGinnes:
On the other hand, Prause joined Xhamster’s thread with the above tweet. Does this mean she is “working with” a major porn site to attack a porn-recovery forum (again)? This occurred after Xhamster complained to the world that NoNut November was affecting its bottom line:
Here’s a second Prause tweet in the Xhamster thread, where she spreads more of her toxic misinformation and tells Xhamster to Direct Message her:
What is true? Nicole Prause appears to be “working with” Xhamster to spread falsehoods about Nofap, Alex Rhodes, and Gary Wilson. For much more on Prause’s very cozy relationship with the porn industry, see: Is Nicole Prause Influenced by the Porn Industry?
On the same day Prause repeats her lies on a Sarah Manavis thread promoting the Manavis article attacking Nofap, supporting Xhamster, and parroting everything Prause has tweeted in the previous 3 weeks:
It’s highly suspicious that Sarah Manavis somehow knew about a random xHamster Twitter thread, that her hit piece closely mirrors Prause talking points, and that Manavis did not contact Alexander Rhodes for comment. Did Prause “work with” Sara Manavis behind the scenes?
A few days later Prause crows about the Fatherly.com piece she helped with:
“I think ‘No Nut November’ is largely anti-science,” psychophysiologist and neuroscientist Nicole Prause, told Fatherly. “The new designation, and it is hardly a tradition, appears supported most by the for-profit NoFap company, some religious organizations, and groups like Proud Boys. These are largely known for their very young male members and misogyny.”
More lies as NoFap.com had nothing to do with NoNutNovember, and claims that there’s a link between quitting porn and misogyny are the exact opposite of what the research shows and what men on the forums report.
The truth? The origins of NoNutNovember, and other “no fap” months, can be traced to a 2006 Subaru Imprezza thread. This was going on long before r/nofap was created on June 20th, 2011. Note that NoFap’s guidelines say porn is forbidden, but sex is just great. Not exactly a trend that XHamster, or its supporters, want to see. After all, it hurts their bottom line…by their own public admission.
Just for the fun of it, Prause adds another tweet (with the same lies) into the mix:
Gotta give it up to Prause. It appears that with the aid of her PR firm, and apparently Xhamster, her tireless work paid off. It all started with Ley’s (and her) inflammatory Psychology Today blog post… and eventually mushroomed into a propaganda meme that “the little ol’ porn industry is the victim of evil younguns who no longer watch porn.” Sadly, this fabricated meme has now been recklessly pumped up by irresponsible “journalists” who are able to disregard facts, common sense, and peer-reviewed studies.
April 25, 2019 – Ley retweets a Xhamster tweet of his fascist PT blog post:
September, 2019: In response to a CNN special involving NoFap, the RealYBOP twitter (run by Prause & Burgess) defames and harasses Alex Rhodes of Nofap (over 25 tweets)
In response to a CNN program featuring NoFap and Rhodes, RealYBOP engages in targeted harassment and defamation, tweeting its lies in CNN threads and elsewhere:
Alex Rhodes did not lie. RealYBOP fails to cite an example of anyone lying. Research vs. RealYBOP propaganda? Check out the main YBOP research page, which contains links to about 1,000 studies associating porn use with myriad negative outcomes.
RealYBOP twitter continues its cyberstalking of Alex Rhodes:
On the day of Lisa Ling broadcast, RealYBOP’s cyberstalking escalates, with silly slides that have nothing to do with the program, and entering threads wherever Nofap is mentioned.
What the public may not know is that neither the ICD-11 nor the APA’s DSM-5 ever uses the word “addiction” to describe an addiction – whether it be gambling addiction, heroin addiction, cigarette addiction, or you name it. Both diagnostic manuals use the word “disorder” instead of “addiction” (i.e. “gambling disorder,” “nicotine use disorder,” and so on). Thus, “sex addiction” and “porn addiction” could never have been rejected, because they were never under formal consideration in the major diagnostic manuals. Put simply, there will never be a “porn addiction” diagnosis, just as there will never be a “meth addiction” diagnosis. Yet individuals with the signs and symptoms of consistent with either a “porn addiction” or a “methamphetamine addiction” can be diagnosed using the ICD-11’s provisions. For a complete debunking of Prause’s claims, see: Debunking “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?,” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause (2018).
RealYBOP falsely claims that porn has never caused harm to children.
Reality: This page lists 45 neuroscience-based studies (MRI, fMRI, EEG, neuropsychological, hormonal). They provide strong support for the addiction model as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies.
RealYBOP suggests that it is unliekly your kid will see porn
Continues to traoll threads. Falsely claims that stats were false, but provides no example:
Trolls another person in Lisa Ling’s thread:
RealYBOP lies about the nature of its experts, claiming most are university professors: https://www.realyourbrainonporn.com/experts
Reality: Of the 19 “experts” who still allow RealYBOP to use their picture, only 6 are at universities.
In this tweet, RealYBOP seems to be encouraging other to report Alex Rhodes to the Pennsylvania Psychology board.
It wouldn’t surprise us to eventually learn that RealYBOP filed a false and malicious report on Rhodes (numerous incidents of Prause’s false and malicious reporting are on these pages – page 1, page 2).
While the WIPO decision did not go his way (these are complex matters), Wilson will continue into federal courts, if necessary.
RealYBOP re-tweeting porn star complaining about CNN program (appears to have been egged on):
Note: Prause/RealYBOP falsely claims that others (wilson, Rhodes, etc.) are stalking her. If this were true (it’s not) why does Prause/RealYBOP continue to enter Wilson and Rhodes twitter threads – tagging both, naming both, and aggressively harassing both? The answer – Prause/RealYBOP is lying about being stalked.
The next day RealYBOP harasses Lisa Ling, lying about most everything:
Ley, Prause and RealYBOP are obessesed with opinion papers by NZ grad student Kris Taylor. Taylor, who is beyond biased – and knows nothing about neuroscience. He’s a sociologist. YBOP critiqued a 2017 article by him where he disparaged Gary Wilson and the review with US navy doctors (Taylor often resorts to simply lying in his article): Debunking Kris Taylor’s “A Few Hard Truths about Porn and Erectile Dysfunction” (2017).
This paper is a fav of Prause and Ley with Prause’s Wikipedia aliases inserting both into Wikipedia pages. Prause obsessively cites (and misrepresents) Taylor’s paper about Nofap. Reality: grad student Kris Taylor’s dissertation assessed only 15 comments from reddit/nofap, while ignoring millions of other comments. Taylor chose the 15 comments because they contained the word “masculinity”. Contrary to lies by Prause/RealYBOP, Taylor’s was not an analysis of Nofap or its users. From Taylor’s paper:
Given this approach to data collection, we wish to highlight that the data presented is not intended to be read as representative of NoFap as a whole, but to present how some users express a particular investment in masculinity and its constitution (Edley, 2001; Edley and Wetherell, 1997). That is, as opposed to an analysis in which users’ posts are understood as oblique references to masculinity (through their talk about video games, pornography, exercise and diet, etc.), our study presents the ways in which users actively constitute masculine positions. Our search term ‘masculinity’ rendered numerous pages of ‘original posts’ which pertained specifically to defining masculinity.
October, 2019: RealYBOP twitter (Prause & Daniel Burgess) defame Alex Rhodes & Gabe Deem, falsely claiming both tried to “take down” realyourbrainonporn.
In its twitter tirade, RealYBOP coughed up its usual lies about Alex and Gabe, while adding a new one: Gabe and Alex were involved in the legal actions by YBOP to defend its trademark. Or as RealYBOP incorrectly describes it:
“Tried to have our website taken down bc he cannot answer science”
RealYBOP is referring very specific legal actions by the owners of YBOP to defend our trademark. Our legal proceedings have nothing to do with Alex Rhodes or Gabe deem. RealYBOP (Prause & Burgess) lied, defaming Rhodes and Deem. By the way, the RealYBOP tweets give the false impression that our legal actions are over. Not even close. On to RealYBOP’s defamation:
September 30, 2019 tweet about Alex Rhodes. In it RealYBOP falsely sates that NoFap tried to silence the actual science, but they lost (linking to the WIPO decision in favor of RealYBOP)
In this tweet, RealYBOP sais Gabe Deem “Tried to have our website taken down bc he cannot answer science”:
RealYBOP continues, defaming Deem, and stating that he tried to silence scientists (linking to WIPO decision).
No one is trying to silence anyone. YBOP is simply protecting its trademark. Note: The original name of their website was ScienceOfArousal.com? Why did these self-proclaimed experts change their site name to mirror our website’s name, when their first-choice URL was ScienceOfArousal.com? Proof: copy & paste this URL into your browser. It will redirect you to “realyourbrainonporn” – https://www.scienceofarousal.com . Why do they now claim that they have been censored by a request to cease their trademark infringement, when they could simply revert to their erstwhile brand name ScienceOfArousal.com and continue to operate freely and legally?
We have never attempted to censor opposing views and critiques, unlike one of the Alliance “experts,” Dr. Prause, who has repeatedly tried to remove evidence of her behavior with groundless DMCA takedown requests. We simply ask that that these vocal spokespersons hold forth from their original pulpit, the URL and brand name “Science of Arousal” (ScienceOfArousal.com). And that they relinquish the subsequent name they employed along with the corresponding trademark application (for a name that YBOP has operated under for almost 10 years). Why do they engage in these apparent attempts to suppress traffic to our website and confuse the public?
Gabe’s not involved with our leagal actions involving Daniel Burgess
RealYBOP lies about harm of quitting porn (cites nothing)
October, 2019: In response to “The Doctors” featuring Alex Rhodes, RealYBOP twitter (Prause & Daniel Burgess) cyberstalks, defames & harasses Rhodes with numerous tweets
On October 30, 2019 the TV show “The Doctors” featured Alex Rhodes in a segment on porn addiction. In response, realyourbrainonporn twitter posted numerous tweets under “The Doctors” many tweets about the show. RealYBOP’s tweets involve defamation and expose RealYBOP as a cyberstalker. RealYBOP scoured the web for anything it can weponize against Alex, including random comments on Nofap (there are literally millions of comments on Nofap.com and reddit/nofap). On to RealYBOP’s obsessive cyberstalking.
Below, RealYBOP refers to specific legal actions by the owners of YBOP to defend our trademark. Our legal proceedings have nothing to do with Alex Rhodes. RealYBOP (Prause & Burgess) lied, defaming Rhodes in this tweet.
Once again, RealYBOP saying not using porn = misogyny (the porn industry isn’t misogynistic, right?). As usual RealYBOP cites Grad student Kris Taylor’s paper, lying about what its methodology and what it stated. Contrary to lies by Prause/RealYBOP, Taylor’s paper was not an analysis of Nofap or its users. Nor was it about misogyny (word is not found it paper).
Prause falsely asserts that Kris Taylor’s paper was an analysis of nofap comments. In reality Taylor’s dissertation only assessed 15 comments from reddit/nofap. “Masculinity” search criteria for the 15 cherry-picked comments. Taylor’s explicitly states the 15 comments were not representative of Nofap as a whole:
RealYBOP exposes itself as the cyberstalker, trolling millions of NoFap comments for just the right one to take out-of-context and spin
More comments taken out-of-context (out of millions of comments. For exmaple, the use of “little bitch” was a guy describing his own penis and loss of erection due to porn-induced ED. He wasn’t calling anyone a bitch.
More trolling of forums full of young men, looking for just the right out-of-context excerpt to tweet:
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Cyberstalking continues:
RealYBOP lies (while citing nothing):
There is no treament offered on Nofap.
RealYBOP is suggesting that quitting porn “makes men worse”. OK
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Creepy. RealYBOP taking screenshots of Rhodes’s youtube presentations. Also attacks Kanye West for saying he was addicted to porn:
The above excerpt is a fabricated assertion from a blog post. It cites nothing. Complete BS.
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RealYBOP asking twitter to un-verify the Nofap account.
Again, citing a blog, that cited nothing.
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First, neither the ICD-11 nor the APA’s DSM-5 ever uses the word “addiction” to describe an addiction – whether it be gambling addiction, heroin addiction, cigarette addiction, or you name it. Both diagnostic manuals use the word “disorder” instead of “addiction” (i.e. “gambling disorder,” “nicotine use disorder,” and so on). Thus, “sex addiction” and “porn addiction” could never have been rejected, because they were never under formal consideration in the major diagnostic manuals. Put simply, there will never be a “porn addiction” diagnosis, just as there will never be a “meth addiction” diagnosis. Yet individuals with the signs and symptoms of consistent with either a “porn addiction” or a “methamphetamine addiction” can be diagnosed using the ICD-11’s provisions.
Notice how RealYBOP nevers give an exmaple of “fraudulent medical information”. Never.
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Tweeting Kris Taylor’s paper and misrepresenting it:
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Tweeting the same excerpts, again (the young man is describing PIED)
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At the same time RealYBOP is tweeting on “The Doctors” threads, she tweets lies about porn recovery forums promoting ant-semitism.
Let’s be very clear: Nicole Prause and David Ley, are the ones who initiated this disgusting smear campaign years ago. Have a look at these sections of a page documenting some of the many attacks Nofap and others have been subjected to:
November, 2019: In response to Alex Rhodes’s defamation lawsuit Nicole Prause and alias RealYBOP twitter defames & harasses Rhodes (adding to her counts of defamation).
We will no longer be silenced by those cozy with the porn industry.
Please support our founder Alexander Rhodes's federal lawsuit against the main orchestrators of this relentless campaign to smear him, our website, and 100,000s of people in recovery.https://t.co/io3eagkxLZ
In response to the lawsuit and crowdfunding Prause, RealYBOP (likely Prause), and their allies went on the offensive.
The day before NoFap put up the crowdfunding its twitter foretold of a big announcement:
Instead of just leaving us alone to focus on recovery, the porn industry and certain allies have decided to launch a campaign of defamation and smears against us and our founder. We've generally tried to ignore their attacks, but they have been escalating.
November 11, 2019: The next morning, before NoFap’s announcement, Prause began suspiciously tweeting that she had received death threats. (NOTE: Prause has never provided public evidence of verifiable threats, just as she has never provided evidence of anyone stalking her). She kept a running tab of the “death threats” throughout the first day of Alex’s crowdfunding:
While Prause is tweeting as Prause, @BrainOnPorn Twitter continued to defame and harass NoFap and Alex Rhodes:
At the same time, Prause (who is scouring the internet for material she can claim is evidence of wrongdoing) provides David Ley with a 2015 YBR podcast (featuring Alex Rhodes) to disparage:
Prause tweets about SLAPP, which refers to the legal argument she is attempting to use to dismiss the defamation lawsuits (not going to work):
Prause goes off the deep end, adding to her defamation of Rhodes and her tortious interference in NoFap’s enterpirse, by saying The FBI has asked me to make clear that the donations going to Alexander Rhode of NoFap are fraud. Law enforcement are involved.
Prause claims antisemitic death threats. Most importantly tags DonorBox, the company handling Rhodes’s fundraising. She is attempting to shut down the fundraising. This will now be a part of the lawsuit.
RealYBOP disparages Gail Dines, while posting random, out of context posts from Nofap (which contains millions of posts by people of all different mindsets) as if they are somehow representative of evidence of wrongdoing or of Alex Rhodes:
Would love to know who contacted Samantha Cole. Let’s hope that Rhodes’s lawyers are able to subpoena emails related to the VICE article. Are we looking at a 2nd, conspiracy lawsuit?
The next day 3 of the 4 porn-industry shills from the VICE hit-piece are involved in the same two tweets promoting Ley’s upcoming paid appearance on xHamster-owned Stripchat.
Nicole Prause – likely operator of @BrainOnPorn
David Ley, who is being paid by Stripchat (x-Hamster)
Vice President of Stripchat, who is paying Ley
Next, RealYBOP tweets, disparaging No-NutNovember (the real target is Nofap, even though NoFap did not create NNN).
Nothing suspicious here, folks. The official tweet:
So, the 3 people collaborating in the VICE article to defame and disparage NoFap, do the same on Twitter, to increase Stripchat’s traffic, and thus x-Hamster’s profits.
Stripchat follows up with a tweet linking to the VICE hit-piece, containing numerous lies:
Prause tweeting under the VICE hit-piece, falsely stating that she is being stalked (presumably she is alluding to Rhodes, Hilton, or Wilson). These lies are why she is being sued for defamation:
Yet another incident that will be entered into Federal court.
Prause posting under VICE article, gets into an exchange with an account calling out her lies:
She boasts Alex’s lawsuit will be dismissed. Unlikely.
RealYBOP posts in same thread falsely stating that Rhodes is a paid employee of NCOSE (yet more defamation).
In a strange turn RealYBOP is the first to discover that someone placed Alex’s lawsuit on The Daily Stormer. Many believe that Prause emails “tips” to the Daily Stormer, so she can then claim white supremacists are involved. Same events occured with Gary Wilson. Hope the defamation lawsuits subpoena relevant emails.
Above are just more examples of Prause cyberstalking Alex.
NOTE:Many of us running “anti-porn” sites receive daily threats and disparagement. Welcome to the internet. You don’t see us tweeting that they are from friends of Prause or Ley.
December 2, 2019: In several replies to a lawyer, she claims to be consulting with the FBI concerning Alex Rhodes’s fundraising. She also claims that “records” proving she has no relationship with the porn industry will be in her legal response to the Rhodes lawsuits:
Update: She lied. Her 2 motions to dismiss had nothing related to the porn industry. See this page for some actual documentation of Prause’s cozy relationship with those in the porn industry – Is Nicole Prause Influenced by the Porn Industry?
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January 23, 2020: David Ley and RealYBOP team up to defame and cyberstalk Alex Rhodes of Nofap (tweeting an untruthful article featuring Nicole Prause, who is being sued for defamation by Rhodes).
In a legally perilous move RealYBOP retweets the defamatory SCRAM article:
Two days after this tweet Alex Rhodes filed his amended complaint against Nicole Prause. In his new complaint the ScramNews article was added as a new incident of defamation:
February 8, 2020: Even though Alex Rhodes’s amended complaint against Prause also names the RealYBOP twitter account (@BrainOnPorn)as defaming him, RealYBOP continues to target Alex Rhodes and NoFap (harassers can’t help harassing):
Note on study RealYBOP cited: The program was pretty much like most guys do on nofap – logs, meditation, weekly check-ins, and trying to quit. In fact, the study is on my porn and sexual problems list as:
February 18th, 2020: Prause claims Rape threat on Nofap Forums, but cannot provide URL or screenshot. Prause never provides documentation for any of her claims (she has falsely accused Gary Wilson, Fight The New Drug, Alex Rhodes, and fictitious entities of rape threats.
Esteemed psychology professor, and real sex expert, Frederick Toates challenges Prause to cough up her evidence. She balks.
Yet another account challenges her. Nada:
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February 20, 2020: More fabricated victimhood, with zero evidence:
Actually, she is making Alex Rhodes’s case really easy. She continues to harass and defame Rhodes, and his company – NoFap.
Pathological liar RealYBOP ends her twitter tirade by defaming Gary Wilson, falsely claiming that this twitter account is actually Wilson. For example, 2 of the account’s tweets under the authors’ tweet:
3 days later RealYBOP tweets under RT’s tweet about the same article (what a cyberstalker);
RealYBOP provides no examples of “errors”. Being sued by Alex Rhodes doesn’t slow down her harassment.
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February 29, 2020: Making fun of Rhodes and Hilton:
March 7, 2020: Being sued, but still going after Nofap. The study she cited was NOT about NoFap. None of the participants came from NoFap. Excerpt:
The largest group of participants came from only one subreddit (“r/everymanshouldknow”), where it had been endorsed by the moderator.
She failed to excerpt the study, only mischaracterize it.
The participants were concerned with porn’s effects, yet the paper mischaracterized this as concerns with masturbation. Contrary to claims of conservatism, and religiosity being a significant factor, the demographics of their subjects tell a very different story: 70% atheists or agnostics – far higher rates than the general population. Very low rates on erectile dysfunction (3.48%), so not representative of the men quitting porn.
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March 9, 2020: Even though she is being sued by Alex Rhodes of Nofap, RealYBOP tweets a random attack on NoFap and the concept of quitting porn (called rebooting). The paper cited has nothing to with Nofap, rebooting or quitting porn (it was a questionnaire study on only Jewish Israeli adolescents – and none were attempting to quit porn).
March 9, 2020: RealYBOP goes after Nofap again, disparaging the concept of rebooting (eliminating porn use), a term coined on porn recovery forums such as Nofap.
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March 11, 2020: She finds a 3-month old thread to troll, tweeting under a link to Staci Sprout’s video supporting Nofap’s fundraising (See Staci’s write-up for documentation of Prause harassing and defaming her).
No evidence for the 30 so-called complaints. If they occured there is no doubt all were well-deserved and legitimate, as are the defamation suits against her.
The largest group of participants came from only one subreddit (“r/everymanshouldknow”), where it had been endorsed by the moderator.
It’s a biased, as the write-up conflicts with its own data. While the abstract describes religion and conservatism as motivation for abstinence, the demographics of their subjects tell a very different story: 70% atheists or agnostics – far higher rates than in the general population. Very low rates on erectile dysfunction (3.48%), so not representative of the men quitting porn:
The final sample included data from 1063 male participants, aged 18 years and older (M = 26.86, SD = 6.79). Most participants resided in North America (77.47%) and some in Europe (16.78%) or other continents (5.75%). 61.9% of the sample have acquired a university degree, while 90.69% have attended at least some college. The majority of participants (53.61%) described themselves as being in a relationship. Atheists, agnostics, and apathetics made up the overwhelming majority (70.00%) of the sample. Further, 19.80% indicated a Christian affiliation and 10.20% specified other religions.
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March 25, 2020: Being sued by Alex Rhodes doesn’t slow RealYBOP down. A tweet one day after Alex Rhodes filed his opposition to Prause’s motion to dismiss. Court filings containing new incidents & evidence, additional victims, added background information: Brief – 26 pages, Declaration – 64 pages, Exhibits – 57 pages (what does Covid-19 have to do with porn?):
What a joke. RealYBOP doesn’t care for National Review, but regularly tweets XBIZ, PornHub, YouPorn, and various porn producers. RealYBOP provides no examples of misrepresentation, only ad hominem drivel (as usual). Links to the two National Review articles:
March 25, 2020: Second tweet of the day attacking NoFap. This one features a hit-piece by XBIZ (revealing once again RealYBOP’s close alliance with the porn industry). Is it coincidence that a few hours before the XBIZ article RealYBOP disparaged the National Review and NoFap on twitter? Did RealYBOP have anything to do with XBIZ writing this article? Inquiring minds want to know.
What is up with mentioning COVID…. again?
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January-March, 2020: Prause incites defamatory UK article in an effort to have Alex Rhodes’s “Donor Box” fundraising campaign removed
However, her target, news outlet SCRAM Media, removed its defamatory article, having realized its egregious error in reprinting material supplied to it by Prause.
David Ley and RealYBOP team up to spread the factually-innacurate hit-piece, with RealYBOP tagging DonorBox and its CEO (unconcerned about adding to Rhodes’s concurrent defamation suit against her):
In a legally perilous move RealYBOP retweets the defamatory SCRAM article:
Prause persuaded the outlet to print the falsehood that she had received death threats from members of the far-right after Rhodes’s crowdfunding campaign began. Hilariously, Prause began posting tweets making this phony claim 20 minutes before the campaign itself commenced. Its commencement was slightly delayed, and she impulsively jumped in based on the projected start time Rhodes had announced online.
So it was that Prause claimed the first death threats at 7:50 am, and yet another death threat four minutes later (all before NoFap commenced its crowdfund):
Also notice that Prause never provides screenshots of her claimed death threats. (She’s a serial fabricator.)
The SCRAM article contained other blatant, defamatory misinformation supplied by Prause as well. For example, it claimed Rhodes sued her because her “research was tantamount to defamation.” That’s absurd. Rhodes sued her because of her ongoing campaign of defamation and harassment of him and NoFap. None of his claims challenge her research (although many peer-reviewed papers have implied that she misinterpreted the significance of her research, and that her findings are consistent with the presence of addiction among her subjects).
She also claimed Rhodes engaged in “misogyny” and that Rhodes’s fans have tried to hack her Facebook and email, all with no support whatsoever. The SCRAM article stated that she “believes she is being stalked and that her [home] address has been posted online.”
The later is especially difficult to take seriously, as she has publicly stated that she never posts her home address online. Prause herself has posted various fake addresses online, including an address she used for the malicious trademark application she filed in an illicit effort to grab the URL for this website! These addresses can readily be found. Save yourself a stamp, however, as any correspondence will be returned as undeliverable (as was YBOP’s attorney’s cease & desist letter for Prause’s trademark infringement).
SCRAM quotes Prause’s dismissive remarks about Rhodes’s suit, but did not ask Rhodes for his side of the story. Finally, SCRAM made the very dubious argument that because Prause claims she has no ties to the porn industry (despite images and other extensive evidence to the contrary), Rhodes’s Donor Box campaign to fund his lawsuit against Prause is fraudulent. Really?
On top of this blatant misuse of their journalistic pen, the SCRAM team deleted comments under the article when readers attempted to counter Prause’s/SCRAM’s untruthful and misleading statements with actual evidence.
So much for responsible journalism.
Shortly after the publication of the now deleted SCRAM article, and RealYBOP tweeting it, Alex Rhodes filed his amended complaint against Nicole Prause. In his new complaint the ScramNews article was added as a new incident of defamation:
Rhodes’s new filings contain more about Prause’s hand in the ScramNews hit-piece, including Rhodes hiring a UK law firm to sue ScramNews, and the 2 authors, for defamation.
No wonder SCRAM removed the article.
February/March 2020: Prause (apparently) reports Alex Rhodes to the Pennsylvania Board of Psychology for practicing psychology without a license because CNN filmed him in a group with other young men, all talking about porn’s effects.
A malicious report was filed on October 1, 2020, the day after this RealYBOP tweet encouraged others to report Alex Rhodes to the Pennsylvania psychology board.
However, court documents reveal that Rhodes wasn’t informed of its existence until February, 2020. The following excerpts are taken from pages 8-10 of Alex Rhodes’s March 23, 2020 court filings in opposition to Prause’s Motion to Dismiss. PDFs of the 3 court filings:
38) On February 25, 2020, I was contacted by the Pennsylvania Department of State regarding a complaint received by the Pennsylvania Board of Psychology against me for the unlicensed practice of psychology. They reached out via email, postal mail, and postal certified mail. See Exhibit L.
39) While the Pennsylvania Department of State Bureau of Enforcement and Investigation cannot provide me with information about who submitted the report, this fits the pattern of Defendant Prause’s actions directed towards numerous people in my field.
40) This report was filed on October 01, 2019, the day after a Twitter account believed to be run by Defendant Prause, @BrainOnPorn, tweeted about reporting me to the State Board in response to my appearance on “This is Life” with Lisa Ling, which was filmed in Pennsylvania. Defendant Prause’s Twitter post replied to a photograph that Lisa Ling posted, captioned with “These guys were so so brave to share how exposure to porn at a young age-some were 8 years old-affected their minds, their bodies, how they look at women (and men) and how they perceive sex and relationships. #ThisIsLife SUNDAY 10PM @cnnorigseries” See Exhibit M.
41) Defendant Prause’s Twitter post stated “Cool, so you’ll posts Rhodes’ license to provide such mental health treatments as a link right here, right? Right? Wait, he has NO training? And NO licensure? Yikes, should he be reported for practicing without a license?” Defendant Prause’s Twitter post linked to the Pennsylvania Department of State website’s instructions on how to file a complaint. Ex. M.
42) My appearance on “This is Life” was solely a discussion about pornography addiction and in no way indicated that I was offering psychological or counseling services to anyone. In fact, the show made it very clear that therapy was not being provided, but that we were hosting a round-table discussion about porn. Lisa Ling clearly stated at the beginning of the episode that “Alex is not a therapist. He’s a fellow addict who struggled for almost 2/3rds of his life.” Before the episode was filmed, all participants were emailed “Note that this is simply an event to discuss porn addiction among peers, not actual treatment for porn addiction, not medical advice, and not healthcare or mental healthcare. We strongly encourage everybody to consider seeing a porn addiction-literate therapist. NoFap has published advice on this page: https://www.nofap.com/articles/how-to-find-a-therapist/. If you want a referral or are wondering if you should contact a therapist, please let us know either in person or through email and we can put you in touch with a local therapist who can assist you.” See Exhibit N.
43) Neither I, nor my company, have ever purported to offer any psychology or counseling services, and have made that abundantly clear on the website.
44) The website’s User Agreement clearly states that “NoFap is not a mental healthcare provider. NoFap’s team members cannot be expected to be trained or qualified to give mental health counseling or any kind of mental health care.” Similar topics are clarified numerous times throughout the User Agreement. See selected User Agreement clauses, attached as Exhibit O.
45) On Monday, March 16, 2020, the investigator told me that while they cannot provide me with a hard copy of the report due to Pennsylvania Department of State policies, the report stated that I am “charging residents of Pennsylvania for treatments for compulsive sexual behavior” and that I “hold no appropriate training and no licensure” to do so. The complaint also states that I “described his providing treatments on CNN’s Sunday [sic] to Lisa Ling.”
46) I have never practiced or purported to practice psychology or provide mental healthcare treatments to residents of Pennsylvania without the appropriate licensure to do so.
47) The allegations in the Pennsylvania State Board of Psychology complaint are complete fabrications designed to harass and otherwise defame me.
48) I was told by the investigator that the Pennsylvania Department of State’s Bureau of Enforcement and Investigation is obligated to investigate all complaints, regardless of if they’re frivolous or not. As such, I am now in the middle of a mandatory investigative process, which has been stressful and time-consuming.
49) Further, I have been forced to engage another law firm who specializes in professional licensure defense and I am incurring significant legal fees to deal with these completely baseless allegations.
For years both Prause and Ley have teamed up to defame, harass and cyber-stalk individuals and organizations that have warned of porn’s harms or published research reporting porn’s harms. Recently, Prause and Ley escalated their unethical and often illegal activities in support of a porn industry agenda. For example, 0n January 29, 2019, Prause filed a trademark application to obtain YOURBRAINONPORN and YOURBRAINONPORN.COM. In April 2019, a group headed by Prause and Ley engaged in unlawful trademark infringement of YourBrainOnPorn.com by creating “RealYourBrainOnPorn.com.
In July of 2019, David Ley and two of the better known RealYBOP “experts” (Justin Lehmiller and Chris Donaghue) began openly collaborating with the porn industry. All 3 are on the advisory board of the fledgling Sexual Health Alliance (SHA). In a blatant financial conflict of interest, David Ley and the SHA are being compensated by porn industry giant xHamster to promote its websites (i.e. StripChat) and to convince users that porn addiction and sex addiction are myths!
More on Nicole Prause
In 2013 former UCLA researcher Nicole Prause began openly harassing, libeling and cyberstalking Gary Wilson. (Prause has not been employed by an academic institution since January, 2015.) Within a short time she also began targeting others, including researchers, medical doctors, therapists, psychologists, a former UCLA colleague, a UK charity, men in recovery, a TIME magazine editor, several professors, IITAP, SASH, Fight The New Drug, Exodus Cry, NoFap.com, RebootNation, YourBrainRebalanced, the academic journal Behavioral Sciences, its parent company MDPI, US Navy medical doctors, the head of the academic journal CUREUS, and the journal Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity.
While spending her waking hours harassing others, Prause cleverly cultivated – with zero verifiable evidence – a myth that she was “the victim” of most anyone who dared to disagree with her irresponsible assertions surrounding porn’s effects or the current state of porn research. To counter the ongoing harassment and false claims, YBOP was compelled to document some of Prause’s activities. Consider the following pages. (Additional incidents have occurred that we are not at liberty to divulge – as Prause’s victims fear further retribution.)
In the beginning Prause employed dozens of fake usernames to post on porn recovery forums, Quora, Wikipedia, and in the comment sections under articles. Prause rarely used her real name or her own social media accounts. That all changed after UCLA chose not to renew Prause’s contract (around January, 2015).
Prause began to put her name to falsehoods, openly cyber-harassing multiple individuals and organizations on social media and elsewhere. Since Prause’s primary target was Gary Wilson (hundreds of social media comments along with behind the scenes email campaigns), it became necessary to monitor and document Prause’s tweets and posts. This was done for her victims’ protection, and crucial for any future legal actions.
It soon became apparent that Prause’s tweets and comments were rarely about sex research, neuroscience, or any other subject related to her claimed expertise. In fact, the vast majority of Prause’s posts could be divided into two overlapping categories:
Indirect support of the porn industry: Defamatory & ad hominem comments targeting individuals and organizations that she labeled as “anti-porn activists” (often claiming to be a victim of these individuals and organizations). Documented here: page 1, page 2.
countless misrepresentations of the state of pornography research and attacks on porn studies or porn researchers.
The following pages contain a sampling of tweets and comments related to #2 – her vigorous support of the porn industry and its chosen positions. YBOP is of the view that Prause’s unilateral aggression has escalated to such frequent and reckless defamation (falsely accusing her many victims of “physically stalking her,” “misogyny,” “encouraging others to rape her,” and “being neo-Nazis”), that we are compelled to examine her possible motives. This material is divided into 4 main sections:
Please note: There is unequivocal evidence that the porn industry funded the sexology profession for decades. Sexology’s agenda still appears to serve the porn industry. Thus, the evidence on this page should be viewed in a larger context. See Hugh Hefner, the International Academy of Sex Research, and Its Founding President to understand how porn-industry friendly sexologists influenced the Kinsey Institute. Prause is a Kinsey grad.
More on David Ley
David Ley’s financial conflicts of interest (COI) seem evident.
The fledgling Sexual health Alliance (SHA) advisory board includes David Ley and two other RealYourBrainOnPorn.com “experts” (Justin Lehmiller & Chris Donahue). RealYBOP is a group of openly pro-porn, self-proclaimed “experts” headed by Nicole Prause. This is also the group currently engaged in illegal trademark infringement and squatting directed toward the legitimate YBOP. Put simply, those trying to silence YBOP are also being paid by the porn industry to promote its/their businesses, and assure users that porn and cam sites cause no problems (note: Nicole Prause has close, public ties to the porn industry as documented on this page).
In this article, Ley dismisses his compensated promotion of the porn industry:
Granted, sexual health professionals partnering directly with commercial porn platforms face some potential downsides, particularly for those who’d like to present themselves as completely unbiased. “I fully anticipate [anti-porn advocates] to all scream, ‘Oh, look, see, David Ley is working for porn,’” says Ley, whose name is routinely mentioned with disdain in anti-masturbation communities like NoFap.
But even if his work with Stripchat will undoubtedly provide fodder to anyone eager to write him off as biased or in the pocket of the porn lobby, for Ley, that tradeoff is worth it. “If we want to help [anxious porn consumers], we have to go to them,” he says. “And this is how we do that.”
David J. Ley, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and AASECT-certified supervisor of sex therapy, based in Albuquerque, NM. He has provided expert witness and forensic testimony in a number of cases around the United States. Dr. Ley is regarded as an expert in debunking claims of sexual addiction, and has been certified as an expert witness on this topic. He has testified in state and federal courts.
Contact him to obtain his fee schedule and arrange an appointment to discuss your interest.
COI #3: Ley makes money selling two books that deny sex and porn addiction (“The Myth of Sex Addiction,” 2012 and “Ethical Porn for Dicks,” 2016). Pornhub (which is owned by porn giant MindGeek) is one of the five back-cover endorsements listed for Ley’s 2016 book about porn:
COI #4: Finally, David Ley makes money via CEU seminars, where he promotes the addiction-deniers’ ideology set forth in his two books (which recklessly(?) ignores dozens of studies and the significance of the new Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder diagnosis in the World Health Organization’s diagnostic manual). Ley is compensated for his many talks featuring his biased views of porn. In this 2019 presentation Ley appears to support and promote adolescent porn use: Developing Positive Sexuality and Responsible Pornography Use in Adolescents.
Concerned about the biased, but increasingly well publicized, views of pro-porn sexologists and their allies? For your convenience, a large team of Porn Science Deniers have now “outed” themselves as an exclusive club. You can find them proudly pictured here in their science bubble – https://www.realyourbrainonporn.com/experts Those who are responsible for the new site are engaged in unlawful trademark infringement of YourBrainOnPorn.com. The new imposter site swiftly replaced the “experts'” initial site named “Science of Arousal,” the URL for which redirects visitors to the current imposter site. The new site then attempts to trick visitors with the center of each page declaring “Welcome to the REAL Your Brain On Porn,” while the tab falsely proclaims “Your Brain On Porn.”
Having been in the porn debate since before 2011, we certainly do not wish to stifle, nor do we fear, opposing views. But we think it worth pointing out that many members of this new collective of Porn Science Deniers are well known to YBOP and other porn skeptics. Some of them are authors of outlier studies and many parrot unsupported pro-industry talking points, which find their way into biased (placed?) mainstream press articles.
While many of these Deniers have regularly collaborated on social media or co-authored academic or popular articles, each member of the Alliance has until now purported to be an independent and unbiased purveyor of truth and science. Yet YBOP and many other porn skeptics have long known that various members of this cliquish band of Deniers conspire overtly and behind the scenes, manipulating journalists, sharing talking points, emailing governing bodies, and even influencing the peer-reviewed process in dubious ways (these 2 pages provide extensive documentation of said behaviors: page 1, page 2).
The two most vocal and best known Deniers, Nicole Prause and David Ley, appear to have a cozy relationship with the porn industry:
Prause and Ley have also engaged in overt and covert defamation, harassment and cyberstalking, targeting groups and individuals who believe, based on the objective evidence, that today’s porn might be causing significant problems for some users. Few of their targets are aware of Prause and Ley’s long history of misconduct and disturbing malfeasance. The following pages document hundreds of incidents over several years:
Note: RealYBOP’s research page contains a related section of cherry-picked papers designed to convince us that porn use leads to greater egalitarianism towards women. It is thoroughly debunked here: Attitudes Towards Women Section.
Context: The RealYBOP (pornographyresearch.com) “Sex Offender Section”
Similar to other RealYBOP sections (all critiqued on this page) several of the studies have nothing to do with the section’s heading (Sex Offenders). Forced to speculate, we must assume the Deniers are attempting to “falsify” any links between porn use and rape, violence, sexual aggression, sexual harassment, or sexual coercion. While studies report disparate findings, we discuss the Alliance’s over-reliance upon a few carefully chosen studies. We also provide numerous relevant studies that the Alliance purposely omitted. Two recent articles address many Alliance talking points:
In essence, the Alliance points to a handful of studies correlating changes in a nation’s reported rape rates with estimated changes in the availability of porn. By citing studies involving a few select countries, various Deniers have irresponsibly claimed that sexual violence rates universally decrease as porn becomes more accessible in a society. Below we punch holes in this assertion.
#1 – What about other variables related to violent crime rates?
Correlation doesn’t equal causation. Numerous other variables likely account for the decline in reported rapes in select countries. The most obvious variable playing a role is that developed countries have experienced a decline (per 100K of the population) in the age group most likely to commit sexual crimes (12-34) as the population aged. As you can see in the graph, US rates for all violent crimes peaked around 1990, and then declined until about 2013, when rape rates started to rise. Important to note that rape rates declined the least (of the crime categories) during this period:
The decline in violent crime coincided with an increase in percentage of aged members of the population, and a corresponding decrease in the age group most likely to commit violent crime. This demographic shift has occurred in many “first world” nations. First, the 1990 population distribution by age. Note the population in the 15-44 age ranges.
Next, the 2015 population distribution by age. Notice the decline in the age groups most likely to commit violent crimes, and how old folks make up a much larger percentage of the population.
The above demographic shifts could account for the decrease in reported rape rates, if the rates actually declined (which are typically reported “per [X number] of the population”). Researcher Neil Malamuth responded on a major sexology listserve to Milton Diamond’s papers (touted by the Alliance as proof of their reckless claims):
The Aggregate Issue — Intuitively, it appears to make a lot of sense that the critical “bottom line” is what appears to be happening in the “real world” (e.g., rates of violent crime) as media violence and/or pornography consumption have increased over the years. I think that on the contrary, the problems with looking at this are great and it is virtually impossible to come to any cause and effect conclusions by looking at the aggregate data. For example, consider the following association: The number of guns in the US and the rates of crime. As revealed in the following article Pew: Homicide Rates Cut in Half Over Past 20 Years (While New Gun Ownership Soared) as the number of guns in the US has increased dramatically over the past twenty years, the rates of homicide have dramatically decreased. How many of us are willing to conclude therefore that the wide availability of guns is actually a very good thing and has contributed to the reduction in homicide, as some indeed would be quick to conclude? Drew Kingston and I discuss this aggregate issue more extensively in the following: Problems with Aggregate Data and the Importance of Individual Differences in the Study of Pornography and Sexual Aggression (2010).
The cross-cultural aggregate data regarding pornography use and crime (e.g., Mickey Diamond’s important work) have been obtained, to my knowledge, only in Denmark and in Japan. In those two countries, there has generally been a very low rate of known sexually violent crime. We might expect based on that data as well as several other sources of data that in these countries, there are relatively few men with risk for committing sexual aggression (within the culture and in non-wartime conditions). Therefore, in the context of the Confluence Model’s predictions, in such countries we would actually predict little or no increase in sexual aggression as the availability of pornography increases, as Diamond and associates have reported. Remember, that the men who we have studied in the USA who similarly have low risk have not shown any increased proclivity even with high pornography use. As a critical test, as I noted before, Martin Hald and I did find that even in Denmark, men with relatively higher risk did in fact show greater attitudes accepting of violence against women as a function of both experimental exposure in lab and in“real world” association (see 2015 publication). I would be very interested to see what would happen if a huge change occurred in the availability of pornography in countries with a relatively large percentage of men with high proclivity and associated, sexism, attitudes accepting of violence against women, hostility towards women, etc.).
Moreover, rates of known crime may not be the only “dependent variable” to examine (see below). Although Japan’s adjudicated rates of violence against women are indeed relatively very low (and my limited experience many years ago while visiting Japan suggested that women felt safe walking streets at night) the highest documented rates of rape ever were committed in a single day were by Japanese men (in China in the city of Nanking). Thus, once the culture sanctioned the violence, potential proclivities may have become very evident. Further, in current Japan, there appear to be other manifestations of what may be considered sexual aggressive proclivities and related acts and attitudes towards women (e.g., back in 2000, special train cars were introduced for women to combat men’s groping (chikan).
The “Dependent Variable” Issue
As I mentioned earlier, the Confluence Model focuses on sexually aggressive attitudes and behaviors in men in the general population, particularly college students. Virtually none of the participants we have studied have ever been adjudicated. Known crime rates are therefore somewhat irrelevant. As part of the discussion of the applicability of the model, we have suggested over the years that when it comes to convicted individuals, the model has less relevance as it appears that with such men“general anti-sociality characteristics” have far more direct relevance. These convicted men are often not “specialists” but much more likely to commit a wide variety of crimes. Measures that have consistently shown their utility in the prediction of the sexual aggressors we study, (hostility towards women, attitudes supporting violence against women, etc.) have not as consistently been found to be predictive for known criminals in this area. Although changes in rates of sexual aggression among students would be relevant, it is far from clear whether these have actually increased or decreased over the years or whether there has just been more attention to the matter (I would guess the latter is important). This also relates to the “aggregate problem”: While availability of pornography has increased dramatically over the years, at the same time there has been much more intervention to reduce sexual assault and increase relevant awareness.
Almost every university in the nation now has mandated interventions for all freshman, something that was not the case years ago. Assuming the some media influences may contribute to some increased proclivity to sexual aggression, how can we possibly disentangle the corresponding increases in public awareness of the issue of sexual aggression and actual interventions occurring at much of the same time?
Another important variable revolves around the (in)accuracy of statistics related to sexual crimes.
#2 – Studies reveal that rape rates are often under-reported – and may in fact be on the rise.
Using this novel method to determine if other municipalities likely failed to report the true number of rape complaints made, I find significant undercounting of rape incidents by police departments across the country. The results indicate that approximately 22% of the 210 studied police departments responsible for populations of at least 100,000 persons have substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data indicating considerable undercounting from 1995 to 2012. Notably, the number of undercounting jurisdictions has increased by over 61% during the eighteen years studied.
Correcting the data to remove police undercounting by imputing data from highly correlated murder rates, the study conservatively estimates that 796,213 to 1,145,309 complaints of forcible vaginal rapes of female victims nationwide disappeared from the official records from 1995 to 2012. Further, the corrected data reveal that the study period includes fifteen to eighteen of the highest rates of rape since tracking of the data began in 1930. Instead of experiencing the widely reported “great decline” in rape, America is in the midst of a hidden rape crisis.
#3 – Many countries have reported an increase in rape rates during this same period.
For example, studies from Spain and Norway report findings that contradict Diamond’s claims (all omitted by the Alliance):
Is sexual violence related to Internet exposure? Empirical evidence from Spain (2009) – Excerpt: Using a panel data approach for the provinces of Spain during the period 1998-2006, outcomes indicate that there is a substitution between rape and Internet pornography, while Internet pornography increases other violent sexual behaviors, such as sexual assaults.
Broadband Internet: An Information Superhighway to Sex Crime? (2013) – Excerpt: Does internet use trigger sex crime? We use unique Norwegian data on crime and internet adoption to shed light on this question. A public program with limited funding rolled out broadband access points in 2000–2008, and provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables estimates show that internet use is associated with a substantial increase in both reports, charges and convictions of rape and other sex crimes. Our findings suggest that the direct effect on sex crime propensity is positive and non-negligible, possibly as a result of increased consumption of pornography.
Take a look at this table of rape rates and you will see there’s no real global pattern (indicating a problem with gathering accurate statistics). One thing is for certain, Diamond omitted numerous “modern” countries where both the availability of porn and rape rates have concurrently increased, such as Norway, Sweden, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Iceland, Italy, Argentina, Portugal, etc.
According to new statistics released by the FBI (see graph), the number of rapes (per 100,000 of the population) has steadily increased from 2014-2016 (the last year for which stats are available). In the UK, there were 138,045 sex offenses, up 23%, in the 12 months preceding September, 2017. Yet, during those same periods:
overall rates of sexual activity have steadily dropped, as have fertility rates in the West.
#5 –Studies assessing actual porn users show a link between porn and increased sexual violence, aggression and coercion (reviews of the literature & meta-analyses).
Instead of highly dubious aggregate studies on a few select countries, how about studies on actual porn users that controlled for relevant variables? As with every other Alliance section, this one omitted relevant reviews of literature and meta-analyses, so here are a few. (At the end of the section we also provide numerous individual studies omitted by the Alliance.)
Conducted a meta-analysis of 30 studies, published 1971–1985, to examine the effect of exposure to pornography on aggressive behavior under laboratory conditions, considering a variety of moderating conditions (level of sexual arousal, level of prior anger, type of pornography, gender of S, gender of the target of aggression, and medium used to convey the material).
Results indicate that pictorial nudity induces subsequent aggressive behavior, that consumption of material depicting nonviolent sexual activity increases aggressive behavior, and that media depictions of violent sexual activity generate more aggression than those of nonviolent sexual activity. No other moderator variable produced homogeneous findings.
In response to some recent critiques, we (a) analyze the arguments and data presented in those commentaries, (b) integrate the findings of several metaanalytic summaries of experimental and naturalistic research, and (c) conduct statistical analyses on a large representative sample. All three steps support the existence of reliable associations between frequent pornography use and sexually aggressive behaviors, particularly for violent pornography and/or for men at high risk for sexual aggression. We suggest that the way relatively aggressive men interpret and react to the same pornography may differ from that of nonaggressive men, a perspective that helps integrate the current analyses with studies comparing rapists and nonrapists as well as with cross-cultural research.
A meta-analysis of 46 published studies was undertaken to determine the effects of pornography on sexual deviancy, sexual perpetration, attitudes regarding intimate relationships, and attitudes regarding the rape myth. Most of the studies were done in the United States (39; 85%) and ranged in date from 1962 to 1995, with 35% (n=16) published between 1990 and 1995, and 33% (n=15) between 1978 and 1983. A total sample size of 12,323 people comprised the present meta-analysis. Effect sizes (d) were computed on each of the dependent variables for studies which were published in an academic journal, had a total sample size of 12 or greater, and included a contrast or comparison group. Average unweighted and weighted d’s for sexual deviancy (.68 and .65 ), sexual perpetration (.67 and .46), intimate relationships (.83 and .40), and the rape myth (.74 and .64) provide clear evidence confirming the link between increased risk for negative development when exposed to pornography. These results suggest that the research in this area can move beyond the question of whether pornography has an influence on violence and family functioning.
Research and the Behavioral Effects Associated with Pornography
For Weaver (1993), the controversy stems from three theories of the consequences of exposure to pornography:
The representation of sexuality as a form of learning in view of the social dogma related to what has long been denied or hidden (liberalization)— inhibition, guilt, puritanical attitudes, fixation on sexuality, all of which can be partly eliminated through pornography (Feshbach, 1955).2 Kutchinsky (1991) reiterated this idea, stating that the rate of sexual assault dropped when pornography was made more readily available, serving as a kind of safety valve that eases sexual tensions and thus reduces the rate of sexual offences. Although highly debatable, what this premise means is that pornography offers a form of learning which, according to the author, offsets the acting out. It is debatable because this argument is also used by proponents of the liberalization of prostitution as a way of potentially reducing the number of sexual assaults (McGowan, 2005; Vadas, 2005). That way of thinking undermines human dignity and what it means to be a person. The bottom line is that people are not commodities;
The dehumanization of the person, in contrast to the preceding theory, and where pornography is first and foremost men’s misogynistic image of women (Jensen, 1996; Stoller, 1991);
Desensitization through an image that is not in line with reality. Simply put, pornography offers a highly reductionist view of social relationships. Because the image is nothing more than a series of explicit, repetitive and unrealistic sexual scenes, masturbation to pornography is part of a series of distortions and not a part of reality. Those distortions can be compounded by dynamic and static criminogenic variables. Frequent exposure desensitizes the person by gradually changing his values and behaviour as the stimuli become more intense (Bushman, 2005; Carich & Calder, 2003; Jansen, Linz, Mulac, & Imrich, 1997; Malamuth, Haber, & Feshbach, 1980; Padgett & Brislin-Slutz, 1989; Silbert & Pines, 1984; Wilson, Colvin, & Smith, 2002; Winick & Evans, 1996; Zillmann & Weaver, 1999).
In short, the research carried out to date has not clearly shown a direct cause-and-effect link between the use of pornographic material and sexual assault, but the fact remains that many researchers agree on one thing: Long-term exposure to pornography material is bound to disinhibit the individual. This was confirmed by Linz, Donnerstein and Penrod in 1984, then Sapolsky the same year, Kelley in 1985, Marshall and then Zillmann in 1989, Cramer, McFarlane, Parker, Soeken, Silva, & Reel in 1998 and, more recently, Thornhill and Palmer in 2001, and Apanovitch, Hobfoll and Salovey in 2002. On the basis of their work, all of these researchers concluded that long-term exposure to pornography has an addictive effect and leads offenders to minimize the violence in the acts they commit.
A meta-analysis was conducted to determine whether nonexperimental studies revealed an association between men’s pornography consumption and their attitudes supporting violence against women. The meta-analysis corrected problems with a previously published meta-analysis and added more recent findings. In contrast to the earlier meta-analysis, the current results showed an overall significant positive association between pornography use and attitudes supporting violence against women in nonexperimental studies. In addition, such attitudes were found to correlate significantly higher with the use of sexually violent pornography than with the use of nonviolent pornography, although the latter relationship was also found to be significant. The study resolves what appeared to be a troubling discordance in the literature on pornography and aggressive attitudes by showing that the conclusions from nonexperimental studies in the area are in fact fully consistent with those of their counterpart experimental studies. This finding has important implications for the overall literature on pornography and aggression.
Research has examined pornography use on the extent of offending. However, virtually no work has tested whether other sex industry experiences affect sex crime. By extension, the cumulative effect of these exposures is unknown. Social learning theory predicts that exposure should amplify offending.
Drawing on retrospective longitudinal data, we first test whether exposure during adolescence is associated with a younger age of onset; we also examine whether adulthood exposure is linked with greater frequency of offending.
Findings indicate that most types of adolescent exposures as well as total exposures were related to an earlier age of onset. Exposure during adulthood was also associated with an overall increase in sex offending, but effects were dependent on “type.”
Meta‐analyses of experimental studies have found effects on aggressive behavior and attitudes. That pornography consumption correlates with aggressive attitudes in naturalistic studies has also been found. Yet, no meta‐analysis has addressed the question motivating this body of work: Is pornography consumption correlated with committing actual acts of sexual aggression? 22 studies from 7 different countries were analyzed. Consumption was associated with sexual aggression in the United States and internationally, among males and females, and in cross‐sectional and longitudinal studies. Associations were stronger for verbal than physical sexual aggression, although both were significant. The general pattern of results suggested that violent content may be an exacerbating factor.
The goal of this review was to systematize empirical research that was published in peer-reviewed English-language journals between 1995 and 2015 on the prevalence, predictors, and implications of adolescents’ use of pornography. This research showed that adolescents use pornography, but prevalence rates varied greatly. Adolescents who used pornography more frequently were male, at a more advanced pubertal stage, sensation seekers, and had weak or troubled family relations. Pornography use was associated with more permissive sexual attitudes and tended to be linked with stronger gender-stereotypical sexual beliefs. It also seemed to be related to the occurrence of sexual intercourse, greater experience with casual sex behavior, and more sexual aggression, both in terms of perpetration and victimization.
After adjusting for potentially influential characteristics, prior exposure to parental spousal abuse and current exposure to violent pornography were each strongly associated with the emergence of SV perpetration-attempted rape being the exception for violent pornography. Current aggressive behavior was also significantly implicated in all types of first SV perpetration except rape. Previous victimization of sexual harassment and current victimization of psychological abuse in relationships were additionally predictive of one’s first SV perpetration, albeit in various patterns. In this national longitudinal study of different types of SV perpetration among adolescent men and women, findings suggest several malleable factors that need to be targeted, especially scripts of inter-personal violence that are being modeled by abusive parents in youths’ homes and also reinforced by violent pornography.
We conclude with another post from a major sexology listserve discussion of porn and sexual offenses/aggression. As you will see, the author is very pro-porn (and a PhD sex researcher):
I think that the general statement I made does stand for sexual aggression as well as for the other outcome variables. At this point, in addition to a) correlational data showing greater exposure to porn linked to all sorts of sexual and nonsexual aggressive attitudes and behaviors, we also have:
b) experimental data showing that exposure to porn increases nonsexual aggression in the lab (things like physical, material, or psychological aggression like the administration of electric shocks) (33 studies meta-analyzed in Allen, D’Alessio, & Brezgel, 1995);
c) experimental data showing exposure to porn increases attitudes supportive of sexual violence (acceptance of interpersonal violence, rape myth acceptance, and sexual harassment proclivities) (16 studies meta-analyzed in Emmers, Gebhardt, & Giery, 1995);
d) longitudinal evidence that watching more porn at Time 1 is linked to more acts of real-life sexual aggression at Time 2 (5 studies meta-analyzed in Wright, Tokunaga, & Kraus, 2015), even after controlling for many potential confounding factors, including sexual victimization, substance use, etc.
In light of all this evidence, it is really hard and unreasonable, in my opinion, to argue that the real-life causal links between porn and aggression are somehow not real and completely nonexistent. Yes, a dose of skepticism should remain, and better and more research studies should always continue to be done, but right now, if I was forced to bet, I’d have to say that I’d put my money on there being SOME negative effect of porn on sexual aggression, with that effect likely being a) relatively small, b) limited to a high-risk group of people, and c) much more pronounced for some types of porn (violent) than others (nonviolent but typical mainstream porn) and nonexistent for yet other types of porn (feminist, queer).
Of course, neither experimental nor longitudinal data are perfect for determining causality in the real world, but we all seem to agree that they strongly imply causality when it comes to other areas of psych research. They are our gold standards for establishing causality for all sorts of behavioral outcomes. Why are we so skeptical when it comes to this one area of research? Because it doesn’t suit our desires for porn not to have any negative effects? I’m sorry, but I love porn as much as you all do (I really do), but I cannot justify holding porn to higher standards of proof just because I don’t like the findings. This is what I meant when I said that rejecting or ignoring these findings makes us as blind and ideological about it as the anti-porn crusaders….
…..I didn’t mean to equate us with the anti-porn in how we use the findings and the implications for real-world interventions we draw from them. What I was saying is that just like they do, we seem to be employing some pretty strong confirmation biases to only see what we want to see. But by turning a blind eye to the evidence that keeps mounting, we are compromising our credibility as objective truth-seekers, and we are limiting the impact our position that banning porn is not the solution can have on enacting real-world change. By taking an extreme position (“no kind of porn has any effects on sexual aggression in anyone”) which is not supported by the evidence, we’re making ourselves less relevant and more easily dismissed as just as ideologically driven as the crazies taking the other extreme position (“all porn increases sexual aggression in everyone who watches it”).
Again, don’t get me wrong: I love porn, I watch it all the time, and have zero desire to ban it.
On to the studies the Alliance carefully chose, and many more examples of what was purposely omitted.
The cherry-picked papers listed in the realyourbrainonporn (pornographyresearch.com) “Sex Offender Section”
Burton, D. L., Leibowitz, G. S., & Howard, A. (2010).Comparison by crime type of juvenile delinquents on pornography exposure: The absence of relationships between exposure to pornography and sexual offense characteristics 1. Journal of Forensic Nursing, 6(3), 121-129.Link to web
Analysis: The Alliance summary omits a few very important findings: porn use was related to both sexual offending and non-sexual crimes. From the abstract:
Sexual abusers reported more pre‐ and post‐10 (years of age) exposure to pornography than nonsexual abusers. Yet, for the sexual abusers, exposure is not correlated to the age at which the abusers started abusing, to their reported number of victims, or to sexual offense severity. The pre‐10 exposure subscale was not related to the number of children the group sexually abused, and the forceful exposure subscale was not correlated with either arousal to rape or degree of force used by the youth. Finally, exposure was significantly correlated with all of the nonsexual crime scores in the study.
The Alliance is hoping that no one reads the actual study.
Kutchinsky, B. (1991). Pornography and rape: Theory and practice? Evidence from crime data in four countries where pornography is easily available. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry.Link to web
Analysis: Pre-internet data from the 1980’s. As with Milton Diamond’s selected countries, this involves nation-wide data. Addressed in the introduction.
Rasmussen, K. R., & Kohut, T. (2019). Does religious attendance moderate the connection between pornography consumption and attitudes toward women? The Journal of Sex Research, 56(1), 38-49.Link to web
Analysis:By Alliance member Taylor Kohut. More citation inflation, as his study has nothing to do with sex offending. Like other Kohut studies (described above), he chose criteria to make sure religious women (who use less porn) score lower on his version of “egalitarian attitudes.” Kohut framed “egalitarianism” as only:
Support for abortion.
NOT Believing that family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job.
Regardless of your personal beliefs, it’s easy to see that religious populations would score far lower on Taylor Kohut’s 2-part “egalitarianism” assessment.
Here’s the key: secular populations, which tend to be more liberal, use porn at far higher rates than religious populations. By choosing only these 2 criteria and ignoring endless other variables, Taylor Kohut knew he would end up with porn use (greater in secular populations) correlating with his study’s strategically selected criteria of what constitutes “egalitarianism” (lower in religious populations). Then Kohut chose a title that spun it all.
Kristen N. Jozkowski, Tiffany L. Marcantonio, Kelley E. Rhoads, Sasha Canan, Mary E. Hunt & Malachi Willis (2019) A Content Analysis of Sexual Consent and Refusal Communication in Mainstream Films, The Journal of Sex Research, DOI: 10.1080/00224499.2019.1595503Link to web
More citation inflation. This study is not about pornography. None of the selected movies were X-rated. In fact, most were PG-13. Nice try, Alliance.
Kutchinsky, B. (1992). The politics of pornography research. Law & Soc’y Rev., 26, 447. Link to web
Analysis: Not a study. An irrelevant 1992 commentary about an essay. Talk about citation inflation.
Mellor, E., & Duff, S. (2019).The use of pornography and the relationship between pornography exposure and sexual offending in males: A systematic review. Aggression and Violent Behavior.Link to web
Analysis: The Alliance summary was fairly accurate. However, we question the author’s choice of accepting only 21 of the 157 relevant papers for his review. Our reservations are supported by that fact that no other literature review arrives at the same conclusions. In addition, most of the 21 chosen papers involved adult on child sex offenders, not child on child, or adult on adult offenders. Commenting on Milton Diamond’s studies, researcher Neil Malamuth noted that the effects of pedophiles using child pornography may be quite different from the effects of non-pedophiles using adult pornography:
Put simply, the meta-analaysis omitted nearly every study on adult sexual offenders, which resulted in a very skewed result.
Ferguson, C. J., & Hartley, R. D. (2009).The pleasure is momentary… the expense damnable?: The influence of pornography on rape and sexual assault. Aggression and violent behavior, 14(5), 323-329.Link to web
Analysis: The Alliance summary is accurate – “Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships.” However, the study depends on aggregated data on rape rates and porn availability from only a handful of countries. The serious flaws in these types of studies are examined above in the introduction, which also addressed the Milton Diamond study below.
Note: For years, Ferguson has been attacking the concept of internet addiction, while intensely campaigning to keep Internet Gaming Disorder out of the ICD-11. (He lost that one in 2019 when the World Health Organization adopted the ICD-11, but his campaign continues on many fronts.) In fact, Ferguson and Nicole Prause were co-authors on major paper attempting to discredit internet addictions. (Their assertions were debunked in a series of papers by experts, in this issue of Journal of Behavioral Addictions.)
Diamond, M., Jozifkova, E., & Weiss, P. (2011). Pornography and sex crimes in the Czech Republic. Archives of sexual behavior, 40(5), 1037-1043.Link to web
Analysis: The Alliance’s summary is accurate: “A prolonged interval during which possession of child pornography was not illegal …showed a significant decrease in the incidence of child sex abuse.” Here’s what Malamuth said about Diamond’s study in a discussion on an academic sexology listserve (“You Wrote” is questioner, response is Malamuth):
Pornography use and sex crimes: I think that many people seem to have the impression that the correlational country wide research has shown an inverse correlation between porn use and rape. I don’t believe this is true at all. If you go to Milton Diamond’s own site you can see that once the data is separated between child sex abuse and rape, it is clear that the latter did not decrease (but also did not increase) as porn became more available. Furthermore you can see that there are examples of countries where at least cross-sectionally, there is a high positive correlation between the two. For example, there is an article there indicating that,
“Papua New Guinea, is the most pornography-obsessed country in the world, according to Google Trends. PNG has a population of less than 8 million people and low rates of internet use, but has the greatest percentage of searches for the words “porn” and “pornography” compared to the nation’s total searches. A study published in The Lancet reported that 59 percent of the men in PNG Autonomous Region of Bougainville had raped their partner and 41 per cent had raped a woman who was not their partner.
In addition, the article indicates that Top ten countries searching for ‘pornography’: Google Trends
1. Papua New Guinea
2. Zimbabwe
3. Kenya
4. Botswana
5. Zambia
6. Ethiopia
7. Malawi
8. Uganda
9. Fiji
10. Nigeria
I would guess that among these may also be countries with high rates of sexual and other forms of violence against women. Please note that I am not arguing that pornography is “the” or even “a” cause but rather against the common belief that world-wide or longitudinally that an inverse association has been demonstrated between porn use and rape. It would be interesting to conduct a study that looked cross-culturally at the association after controlling statistically for the risk factors of the Confluence Model, particularly Hostile Masculinity. I would predict that in those countries with high levels of risk, there is a positive correlation between porn use and rape (particularly among men generally rather than only adjudicated crimes) but no correlation or an inverse one in countries with relatively few men who are at risk according to the Confluence Model.
YOU WROTE: at a society level, pornography may indeed have a positive effect on adjudicated sex crimes
RESPONSE: As I indicated before, I don’t believe the Diamond’s and related data reveal what is often assumed about sex crimes generally. As Diamond and colleagues have themselves noted, the data show an inverse relationship between pornography availability and child sex abuse. There is no similar significant association generally between pornography and rape. The causes of rape and the characteristics of rapists vs. child abusers are often quite different and should not be lumped together. In addition, the data are correlational at the country level generally and require much caution about causal relationships, partly due to the “aggregate problem” (Kingston & Malamuth, 2011). What can be concluded with confidence is that for the countries studied, there is no general increase in rape when pornography laws are changed to allow greater availability of pornography. Also, it is important to keep in mind that it appears that all of the countries studied by Diamond and associates appear to be ones that may have relatively few men who are at relatively high risk for committing sexual aggression. I hadn’t previously looked up Croatia, but a quick google search indicates that 94% do not agree with the statement that women should tolerate violence in order to keep the family together.
YOU WROTE: but, within that society wide access there are men exposed to porn where porn increases risk of sex violence, due to a confluence of risk factors
RESPONSE: largely consistent with what you wrote but phrased somewhat differently: for men in the general population who have relatively high levels on the “key” risk factors, the data strongly indicate that “heavy” use of porn may increase sexually violent attitudes and behavioral inclinations.
YOU WROTE: societies which allow porn access may be engaging in a trade off, accepting a small amount of increased risk in a small group for a larger amount of decreased risk across the larger population
RESPONSE: I think we have to be careful about making generalizations about societies without taking into consideration the contextual differences among them. I would guess that changing pornography laws in Saudi Arabia vs. Denmark would have had very different consequences. Also, I think that focusing only or primarily on adjudicated sex crimes, particularly rape, may be a problem. For example, as we have written elsewhere, Japan is often used as one of the prime examples of countries where pornography is widely available (including “violent” porn) and rates of rape are very low now and historically. Japan is indeed a country that has had strong socialized inhibitions against “within group” violence against women. Yet, consider other potential manifestations: “Groping in crowded commuter trains has been a problem in Japan: according to a survey conducted by Tokyo Metropolitan Police and East Japan Railway Company, two-thirds of female passengers in their 20s and 30s reported that they had been groped on trains, and the majority had been victimized frequently.” When violence against women has been tolerated, it has been extremely high (e.g., see Chang, *The Rape of Nanking*,). Although I am not necessarily disagreeing with your suggestion, I am not sure we can reach such a conclusion at this time.
Put simply, relying on two sets of nationwide data (reported sex crimes and estimated porn availability) from a handful of countries (while ignoring hundreds of other countries), to support a claim that more porn definitively leads to fewer sexual offenses, doesn’t fly among true scientists.
Goldstein, M., Kant, H., Judd, L., Rice, C., & Green, R. (1971).Experience with pornography: Rapists, pedophiles, homosexuals, transsexuals, and controls. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 1(1), 1-15.Link to web
Analysis: A 1971 study on adult men (probably born in the 1920’s-40’s) to assess the effects of “Sex Films” on “deviants.” Note – the study categorized gay and transgender subjects as “deviants.” Numerous more recent studies (listed below), report findings that counter the 1971 study.
Hald, G. M., & Malamuth, N. N. (2015). Experimental effects of exposure to pornography: The moderating effect of personality and mediating effect of sexual arousal. Archives of sexual behavior, 44(1), 99-109. Link to web
Analysis: Supports the hypothesis that porn use may lead to sexual attitudes supporting violence against women among certain personality types. The abstract:
Using a randomly selected community sample of 200 Danish young adult men and women in a randomized experimental design, the study investigated the effects of a personality trait (agreeableness), past pornography consumption, and experimental exposure to non-violent pornography on attitudes supporting violence against women (ASV). We found that lower levels of agreeableness and higher levels of past pornography consumption significantly predicted ASV. In addition, experimental exposure to pornography increased ASV but only among men low in agreeableness. This relationship was found to be significantly mediated by sexual arousal with sexual arousal referring to the subjective assessment of feeling sexually excited, ready for sexual activities, and/or bodily sensations associated with being sexually aroused. In underscoring the importance of individual differences, the results supported the hierarchical confluence model of sexual aggression and the media literature on affective engagement and priming effects.
Note: Men with “lower levels of agreeableness” might represent a significant percentage of the population.
Bauserman, R. (1996). Sexual aggression and pornography: A review of correlational research. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 18(4), 405-427. Link to web
Analysis: The Alliance left out a key sentence from their excerpt of the abstract (it’s underlined):
Sex offenders typically do not have earlier or more unusual exposure to pornography in childhood or adolescence, compared to nonoffenders. However, a minority of offenders report current use of pornography in their offenses. Findings are consistent with a social learning view of pornography, but not with the view that sexually explicit materials in general contribute directly to sex crimes. The effort to reduce sex offenses should focus on types of experiences and backgrounds applicable to a larger number of offenders.
A whole lot of studies have been published in the last 25 years that do report links between porn use and sexual offending.
The following studies link porn use to sexual offending, sexual aggression, and sexual coercion. The Alliance conveniently omitted all from this section:
This alliance of agenda-driven porn-science deniers has had two different names. One of them, “RealYourBrainOnPorn,” (RealYBOP) was founded on an illegal trademark squatting effort. Lawyers are now involved.
The organizers of the imposter site employed many tactics calculated to confuse the public. For example, the new site attempted to trick visitors, with the center of each page declaring “Welcome to the REAL Your Brain On Porn,” while the tab falsely proclaimed “Your Brain On Porn.” Also, to advertise their illegitimate site, the “experts” created a Twitter account (https://twitter.com/BrainOnPorn), YouTube channel, Facebook page, all employing the words “Your Brain On Porn.”
In addition, the “experts” created a reddit account (user/sciencearousal) to spam porn recovery forums reddit/pornfree and reddit/NoFap with promotional drivel, claiming porn use is harmless, and disparaging YourBrainOnPorn.com and Wilson. It’s important to note that Prause has a long documented history of employing numerous aliases to post on porn recovery forums and Wikipedia.
These 3 pages have documented numerous online aliases Prause has created to propagandize and defame individuals and organizations: page 1, page 2, page 3 (it appears that all RealYBOP social media accounts are more Prause aliases). Her easily recognizable comments promote her studies, attack the concept of porn addiction, disparage Wilson and YBOP, belittle men in recovery, and defame porn skeptics.
Confirming suspicions, the replies by RealYBOP experts to YBOP’s C&D letter clearly exposed Prause as being in charge of the RealYBOP website and social media accounts.
Who’s legally responsible: only Prause, or only Daniel Burgess, or both, or all the RealYBOP “experts”? Relevant excerpts from the Rhodes complaint:
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On March 23, 2020 Alex Rhodes filed his opposition to Prause’s motion to dismiss. His court filings contain new incidents & evidence, additional victims of Prause, greater context/background: Brief – 26 pages, Declaration – 64 pages, Exhibits – 57 pages. @BrainOnPorn twitter account is named yet again. Excerpts describing these new incidents of harassment & defamation:
RealYBOP is Nicole Prause’s second iteration of a pro-porn industry website and associated social media accounts: The first was “PornHelps”
In 2015, after UCLA did not renew her contract, Nicole Prause created a username called “PornHelps,” which had its own Twitter account (@pornhelps) and a website. All promoted the porn industry agenda as well as outlier studies reporting the “positive” effects of porn. “PornHelps” chronically badgered the same people and organizations that Prause also often attacked. In fact, Prause would team up with her apparent alias PornHelps to attack individuals on Twitter and elsewhere in tandem with her other identities. Some of the Prause/PornHelps coordinated attacks are documented in these Prause-page sections:
The @pornhelps twitter account and PornHelps website were suddenly deleted when it became apparent to that Prause was the individual behind both. While many of us being attacked knew “PornHelps” was really Nicole Prause, the following @pornhelps tweet left no doubt:
Prause, a Kinsey grad, calls herself a neuroscientist, and appears to have started college about 15 years earlier than the above 2016 tweet. In response to several ad hominem attacks by “PornHelps,” which perfectly mirrored many of Prause’s usual comments, “PornHelps” was confronted in the comments section of Psychology Today with this and other evidence:
Within a few days of the above Psychology Today comment the PornHelps website and @pornhelps Twitter account vanished without a trace! All that remains of PornHelps are a smattering of comments on various sites and this abandoned disqus account (listing 87 comments). Want more confirmation that PornHelps was really Prause? This collection of comments, tweets, and coincidences make it apparent.
The RealYBOP “experts”: Some are being compensated by porn industry giant xHamster to promote its websites and convince users that porn addiction & sex addiction are myths
Regardless of its ultimate name, let’s look briefly at the site’s cast of characters. The new site’s faction of sexologists and their chums is not representative of the views of the preponderance of researchers doing research on the effects of today’s porn. (Nicole Prause, Marty Klein, Lynn Comella, David J. Ley, Emily F. Rothman, Samuel Perry, Taylor Kohut, William Fisher, Peter Finn, Janniko Georgiadis, Erick Janssen, Aleksandar Štulhofer, Joshua Grubbs, James Cantor, Michael Seto, Justin Lehmiller, Victoria Hartmann, Julia Velten, Roger Libby, Doug Braun-Harvey, David Hersh, Jennifer Valli, Joe Kort, Charles Moser)
Upon closer examination, almost half of the new site’s “experts” are non-academics, not employed by any university. Not one of the listed “experts” has ever published a neurological study on a group of porn addicted subjects (Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder subjects).
Who’s missing and why? Ask yourself: why are the researchers who authored the preponderance of the relevant evidence on porn’s effects excluded from the “experts” in this alliance?
In their promotional tweet we are promised a slate of SHA brain experts to soothe users’ “porn anxiety” and “shame” (Ley and other SHA “experts” are light years away from being brain experts).
In this article, Ley dismisses his compensated promotion of the porn industry:
Granted, sexual health professionals partnering directly with commercial porn platforms face some potential downsides, particularly for those who’d like to present themselves as completely unbiased. “I fully anticipate [anti-porn advocates] to all scream, ‘Oh, look, see, David Ley is working for porn,’” says Ley, whose name is routinely mentioned with disdain in anti-masturbation communities like NoFap.
But even if his work with Stripchat will undoubtedly provide fodder to anyone eager to write him off as biased or in the pocket of the porn lobby, for Ley, that tradeoff is worth it. “If we want to help [anxious porn consumers], we have to go to them,” he says. “And this is how we do that.”
Another talk by David Ley, disparaging No-NutNovember (the real target is Nofap), and promoted by RealYBOP:
Look how RealYBOP is tagged by Stripchat. Nothing suspicious here, folks:
How does the new site further the interests of the porn industry?
Next, let’s take a closer look at some of the ways the new website + related social media campaign further the interests of the porn (and sexual-enhancement drug?) industries.
The new site’s collection of cherry-picked, often irrelevant, papers misrepresent the preponderance of the research on porn’s effects. For example, these 44 neurological studies on porn users and CSBD subjects are missing from the “experts’” research list. So are studies revealing a link between porn overuse and a range of sexual dysfunctions. For details see Porn Science Deniers Alliance.
The fact is, the deniers are out of step with the experts who drafted the world’s most widely used medical diagnostic manual, The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). The porn industry is well served by a group of purported “experts” who boldly misrepresent the balance of existing research and ignore the preponderance of the research. The latter undercuts the new site’s agenda by pointing to measurable harms associated with porn overuse.
While there’s no evidence of any of Prause’s many victims stating that Prause receives direct funding from the porn industry, anyone might be forgiven for wondering if she is indeed influenced by the porn industry. The Prause pages on this website are just the tip of a very large Prause Icebergs (page 1, page 2). She has posted thousands of times, attacking everyone and anyone who suggests porn might cause problems. (Prause recently purged her twitter account of 3,000 or more incriminating tweets.) She has defended the industry at every turn, much as a paid industry thought-leader could be expected to do.
“The XRCO Awards are given by the American X-Rated Critics Organization annually to people working in adult entertainment and it is the only adult industry awards show reserved exclusively for industry members.[1]“
Prause at a reserved table with porn industry friends:
Watch this 20-minute video of the 2016 XRCO awards (pretty racy). Prause can be seen around the 6:10 mark sitting at a table with porn star buddy Melissa Hill:
One of the porn stars (Avalon) is from Australia. She tells Prause that it’s too expensive to ship a t-shirt to her. Prause asks Avalon if she would like to pick up her t-shirt at “the AVN”. The only logical conclusion is that Prause will be attending AVN awards, the AVN EXPO, or both.
Avalon tells Prause to have an amazing time at the AVN.
Is it any surprise that a casual observer might wonder if Prause, a former academic with a long history of harassing authors, researchers, therapists, reporters and others who dare to report evidence of harms from internet porn use, who lives in LA, who has obtained study subjects through the FSC, who hangs out with big names in the industry, who attends porn industry award ceremonies, and who has publicly been offered (and accepted) support by the FSC, might be influenced by the porn industry?
Again, no one has claimed Prause receives direct funding from the FSC or the “porn industry”. In fact, it seems most unlikely that the FSC would make any such arrangements directly, let alone make them public, even if they did exist. Nor has anyone stated that Prause is “in the porn industry” or “has, herself appeared in pornography“, as she falsely asserted in her bogus cease and desist letters, and in her response to Don Hilton, MD’s defamation lawsuit against her.
We are all wondering why she goes to such extreme lengths, including attempting to steal YBOP’s trademark and URL, while creating & managing realyourbrainonporn and its twitter account (@BrainOnPorn). Will the actual facts ever be revealed?
The pro-porn tweets by @BrainOnPorn (collected here due to ongoing proceedings): all written in Prause’s distinctive, misleading style
Judge for yourself whether they further the interests of the porn industry or rather the authentic search scientific truth. Note: the Twitter accounts for RealYBOP and Prause have never tweeted a study reporting negative outcomes related to porn… even though the vast preponderance of pornography studies report negative outcomes. This alone exposes both accounts as promoting the porn industry’s agenda.
We start with the very first tweet by the new RealYBOP. Notice that about half of the retweets were by accounts associated with the porn industry. As the RealYBOP account had no followers yet, this means these fans were likely notified via email. It appears that PornHub was first account to retweet this, suggesting a coordinated effort between PornHub and the RealYBOP account!
It appears that PornHub was the first account to retweet the above!
Is this evidence that RealYBOP’s Twitter and website are cozy with the porn industry? It’s clear that Pornhub knew about RealYBOP’s twitter account before it was created. Enough said.
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Promoting their disparaging press release:
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Just as Prause often does, RealYBOP trolls an account that claims porn use may cause problems:
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Trolling another porn skeptic:
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Just like Prause, RealYBOP attacks state porn resolutions:
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RealYBOP tweeting under a Ley tweet libeling Wilson (Prause & Ley’s top targets are Wilson and YBOP). Who else but Prause would do this?
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Overview of RealYBOP’s cherry-picked, often dubious papers
A closer examination of RealYBOP’s list of studies reveals cherry-picking, bias, egregious omission, and deception. Here’s an analysis of its initial line-up of studies.
First,half of the papers listed were authored by RealYBOP “experts.” It should be noted that RealYBOP studies by the likes of deniers Prause, Kohut, Fisher or Štulhofer never seem to find any negative effects from porn use (actually, negative effects can often be parsed from their data, as we will see below). The RealYBOP studies are out of alignment with the preponderance of the research in the field. For example, Taylor Kohut’s 2017 non-quantitative study on relationships and porn use claimed to find few negative effects. Kohut’s cunningly designed paper contradicts every other study ever published on males: Over 70 studies link porn use to less sexual & relationship satisfaction, with all studies involving males reporting that more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.
Second, the list omits not only the preponderance of evidence, but also the work of every academic neuroscientist who has published studies on porn users or CSBD subjects. These include Marc Potenza, Matthias Brand, Valerie Voon, Christian Laier, Simone Kühn, Jürgen Gallinat, Rudolf Stark, Tim Klucken, Ji-Woo Seok, Jin-Hun Sohn, Mateusz Gola and many others. As one example, why are Matthias Brand’s studies omitted from the deniers’ list? Brand has authored 310 studies, is the head of the Department of Psychology: Cognition, at the University of Duisburg-Essen, supervises a lab with over 20 researchers, and has published more neuroscience-based studies on pornography users/addicts than any other researcher in the world. (See his list of his porn addiction studies here: 20 neurological studies and 5 reviews of the literature.)
Third, eight of the 50 papers listed are mere opinion pieces, not actual studies. Talk about citation inflation.
Fourth,the list contains no reviews of the literature and only one meta-analysis, which limits itself to 21 studies assessing the porn use of adult sexual offenders: The use of pornography and the relationship between pornography exposure and sexual offending in males: A systematic review. While this meta-analysis concludes porn use is not related to adult sexual offending there’s good reason to question its findings. For example, the authors retrieved 189 studies, but included only 21 in their review. Put simply, numerous studies with opposing results were excluded.
The absence of reviews of the literature and meta-analyses is a giveaway that RealYBOP cherry-picked outlier studies (usually the “experts'” own). While most of RealYBOP’s puzzling research categories don’t lend themselves to literature reviews or meta-analysis, a few might: “love & intimacy” or “youth.” Why not provide the reader with one of the literature reviews on pornography and “youth” (adolescents), such as: review#1, review2, review#3, review#4, review#5, review#6, review#7, review#8, review#9, review#10, review#11, review#12, review#13. Why doesn’t a RealYBOP “love & intimacy” category provide a literature review on pornography and sexual or relationship satisfaction, such as: review#1, review#2, review#3? The answer is clear: no review aligns with RealYBOP’s agenda.
Fifth, and most telling, RealYBOP’s list excludes nearly every study linking porn use to negative outcomes (these represent the majority of porn studies). Moreover, in those few studies listed that did report negative outcomes, RealYBOP omits these findings from their description. By using YBOP’s list of relevant studies we can easily identify their deceit:
It does not contain a representative sample. Whereas most studies show that a tiny minority of females in long-term relationships use porn, in this study 95% of the women used porn on their own. And 83% of the women had used porn since the beginning of the relationship (in some cases for years). Those rates are higher than in various studies in college-aged men! In other words, the researchers appear to have skewed their sample to produce the results they were seeking. The reality? Cross-sectional data from the largest nationally representative US survey (General Social Survey) reported that only 2.6% of married women had visited a “pornographic website” in the last month. Data from 2000, 2002, 2004 (for more see Pornography and Marriage, 2014).
The study used “open ended” questions where the subject could ramble on about porn. Then the researchers read the ramblings and decided, after the fact, what answers were “important,” and how to present (spin?) them in their paper. In other words, the study did not correlate porn use with any variable assessing sexual or relationship satisfaction. Then the researchers had the gall to suggest that all the other studies on porn and relationships, which employed more established, scientific methodology and straightforward questions about porn’s effects were flawed. Is this really science?
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Promoting one of RealYBOP’s experts (Justin Lehmiller) who happens to be a writer for Playboy:
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Prause promoting RealYBOP:
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Misrepresenting the actual findings of a new study:
In this study, 357 adults reported their level of affection deprivation, their weekly pornography consumption, their goals for using pornography (including life satisfaction and loneliness reduction), and indicators of their individual and relational wellness…. As predicted, affection deprivation and pornography consumption were inversely related to relational satisfaction and closeness, while being positively related to loneliness and depression.
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RealYBOP promoting its professionally produced YouTube video. Question: who is paying for all this?
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RealYBOP trolling Skeptic Magazine editor Michael Shermer (who published 2 articles by Gary Wilson and Phil Zimbardo).
Promoting RealYBOP “expert” Marty Klein, who once boasted his very own webpage on the AVN’s Hall of Fame in recognition of his pro-porn advocacy serving the porn industry’s interests (since removed).
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Promoting 2 RealYBOP “experts,” who appear to be as biased and pro-porn as Prause (Ley & Kohut):
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Trolling another person’s thread:
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Trolling another person’s thread, defending the porn industry, and speaking as if the writer possesses insider info on the porn industry:
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Promoting superfans of porn, who attended the AVN convention:
The paper’s criteria for “less sexism” is dubious, to say the least.
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Spinning an incident involving a mentally ill person as “shame.” Nice.
RealYBOP echoes all of Prause’s favorite talking points in this second tweet (all debunked many times over in preceding section).
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Promoting RealYBOP “expert” Chris Donaghue, who just happens to be engaged to a porn star (no bias there).
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Promoting a new study on female porn stars, which reported an expected finding: lower rates of sexual dysfunction than the general population. Noteworthy: RealYBOP did not tweet a study by the same research group, which found much higher rates of ED in male performers! The research survey of male adult film actors published in 2018 reported 37% of male porn stars, ages 20-29, had moderate to severe erectile dysfunction (the IIEF, which measures function during partnered sex, is the standard urology test for erectile function).
Real YBOP lies about replication, as Park et al., 2016 was review of the literature, while the new study was survey data from a naval urology clinic. (Reviews can’t be “replicated.”)
The authors of the new paper believe it supports the existence of porn-induced ED.
The authors of the current study do not agree with spin and omissions by “RealYBOP.” The US Navy doctors believe their data lend support to the existence of porn-induced ED (see screenshots). They suspect sexual conditioning, rather than porn addiction (which is what YBOP has said for years). Graph:
RealYBOP mimics the unsupported talking point that Prause always says, that the problem is masturbation, not porn…. never porn:
RealYBOP continues with falsehoods, asserting that porn is good for relationships. A falsehood as over 70 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.
More Prause-like spin, trying to blame masturbation, rather than porn:
After sophisticated statistical “modeling” (under pressure from Prause?) Perry proposed that masturbation, not porn use, is the real culprit in relationship problems. In reality, more porn use was related to less satisfaction.
The gaping hole in Perry’s analysis is the absence of specific, reliable data on masturbation frequency. Without that, his claim is little more than hypothetical.
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RealYBOP posts on Gary Wilson thread as part of this 4-tweet series. Both Prause and RealYBOP blocked Wilson so they could sneak tweets onto his threads. Are they afraid that Wilson will debunk their misinformation?
Abstract. Does this sound like it debunked sex addiction?
Hypersexual disorder (HD) is defined as a condition in which the individual loses control over engagement in sexual behaviors, leading to distress and negative effects on key life areas. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been proven to reduce symptoms of hypersexual behavior; however, no randomized controlled study of CBT interventions for HD has been reported previously.
A significantly greater decrease in HD symptoms and sexual compulsivity, as well as significantly greater improvements in psychiatric well-being, were found for the treatment condition compared with the waitlist.
In fact, the full paper actually debunks Prause’s ongoing spin around the ICD-11’s CSBD diagnosis:
In the revision of the ICD-11, the diagnostic category compulsive sexual behavior disorder is included in the section for impulse control disorders. The criteria bear many similarities to those of HD and a more nuanced research on possible social, psychological, and biological causes can now be performed.
Although Rettenberger et al identified sexual excitation as the most important predictor of hypersexual behavior, it is reasonable to assume that there are differences between those engaging in interpersonal sexual behaviors (ie, sexual behaviors with consenting adults) and those engaging in solitary sexual behaviors (eg, pornography consumption, masturbation). It has long been argued that HD can be subclassified into sexual behaviors used as a strategy for coping with anxiety and negative mood states on the one hand and a sexually motivated condition, with emphasis on loss of impulse control and sexual sensation-seeking, on the other hand. Sexual behaviors with consenting adults may be further subdivided based on, for example, repeated purchases of sexual services orrepeated establishment of short-term sexual relations.
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Supporting porn industry. Many of the films were violent or degrading porn.
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Promoting their porn-friendly “experts” to TeenVogue:
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Disparaging sex and porn addiction models.
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RealYBOP trolling sex addiction therapist Paula Hall. Prause has harassed Hall in the past, see – September 25, 2016: Prause attacks therapist Paula Hall. Notice that RealYBOP’s comment is identical to Prause’s claims: Pornography use is “overwhelmingly positive” for most people.
Real YBOP claim is BS, and only based on two studies that employ questionable criteria for “egalitarianism.” The truth is that nearly every study assessing porn use and egalitarianism (sexual attitudes) has reported that porn use is associated with attitudes toward women that both liberals and conservatives regard as extremely problematic. RealYBOP’s list of research omitted every study on this list of over 25 studies link porn use to “un-egalitarian attitudes” toward women and sexist views. They also omitted every meta-analysis or review of the literature on the subject, such as this 2016 meta-analysis of 135 studies: Media and Sexualization: State of Empirical Research, 1995–2015. Excerpt:
The goal of this review was to synthesize empirical investigations testing effects of media sexualization. The focus was on research published in peer-reviewed, English-language journals between 1995 and 2015. A total of 109 publications that contained 135 studies were reviewed. The findings provided consistent evidence that both laboratory exposure and regular, everyday exposure to this content are directly associated with a range of consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater self-objectification, greater support of sexist beliefs and of adversarial sexual beliefs, and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women. Moreover, experimental exposure to this content leads both women and men to have a diminished view of women’s competence, morality, and humanity.
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RealYBOP trolling another account, in support of the porn industry’s agenda:
On the basis of a single citation we are asked to believe the production of pornography promotes “higher self-esteem” for performers while its consumption “reduc[es] violence and sexual assaults”—this, without mention of either six studies confirming mental and physical health problems of female performers or a full 50 peer-reviewed studiesdirectly linking porn use to sexual violence.
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As Prause has done countless times, RealYBOP smears FTND (note – troll, and Prause ally, nerdy kinky commie had his original Twitter account permanently banned for misdeeds while targeting FTND):
The following sections of the Prause-Harassment pages contain numerous documented incidents of Prause & David Ley defaming and harassing FTND:
RealYBOP tweets to “peddler of perversion,” describing her defense of porn producer @linabembe:
Interesting how both RealYBOP and Prause have cozy relationships with adult performers and porn producers.
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Tweeting about RealYBOP “expert” William Fisher’s testimony opposing Canada’s Motion 47:
Motion 47 would have been a PR blow to the porn industry.
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Promoting Alan McKee’s claim that porn use does not cause aggression. (Note that Mckee once published a study funded by the porn industry!)
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Supporting Prause & Ley’s prime objective: trying to discredit the phenomenon of porn-induced sexual dysfunctions:
But all RealYBOP can cite is a 3-year old article, in Dutch. All the Dutch sexologist can do is disparage UK sex therapist Angela Gregory, and lie about the state of the research. Articles featuring Angela Gregory:
RealYBOP being very cozy with porn producer (https://www.provillain.com/):
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Trolling well know blogger, neuroskeptic:
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RealYBOP tweets outlier study by denier Alexander Štulhofer, who always seems to report few porn-related problems in his studies. He has played games by downplaying significant findings in write-ups, manipulating regressions to achieve results, and omitting data presented earlier at a conference. Example of omissions of data.
On May 1, 2019 the attorneys for the common-law owner of the trademarks “Your Brain On Porn” and “YourBrainOnPorn.com” (this website) sent a cease and desist demand to all of those who appeared to be behind the infringing site (the “Experts”). They also demand that Dr. Prause abandon her malicious trademark-squatting application for the marks “Your Brain On Porn” and “YourBrainOnPorn.com.”
Instead of complying with the reasonable, well documented demands, a number of the RealYBOP Experts responded with a derisory Twitter rage storm, baseless accusations that their “free speech rights” were being violated, and clear indications of malicious intent, such as threats to go to the press to have their infringing activities mischaracterized as free speech.
Here’s a Twitter response to the C&D letter by one of the experts, Lynn Comella, who incorrectly spins this as squelching her freedom of speech. PornHelp.org educates Comella. Eventually RealYBOP responds with a link that only Prause ever posts:
The CBC link is mischaracterized by RealYBOP, as it has always been by Prause. It’s part of a very long saga, with Prause’s first Twitter account being permanently banned, Prause asking Gary Wilson about the size of penis…and so much more. See:
RealYBOP continues rampage against Wilson, looking more and more unhinged.
Above tweet is nearly identical to 2 earlier tweets by Prause:
RealYBOP comes back with a bizarre tweet under a 2-week old libelous tweet by David Ley. (Prause ally Ley actually stated that “the folks at YBOP” threatened his life. This untrue accusation of a felony constitutes “defamation per se,” and is actionable.)
RealYBOP claims Wilson has a puppet account (he doesn’t) – and of course fails to link to support for the accusation.
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In support of porn industry agenda:
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RealYBOP, once again promoting Perry’s dubious suggestion that masturbation, not porn, affects relationship happiness:
After sophisticated statistical “modeling” Perry (under pressure from Prause?) proposed that masturbation, not porn use, is the real culprit in relationship problems. In reality, more porn use was related to less satisfaction.
The gaping hole in Perry’s new analysis is the absence of specific, reliable data on masturbation frequency. Without that, his claim is little more than hypothetical.
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Trolls another thread with pro-porn propaganda: porn use is just fine for kids.
Same as preceeding tweet, falsely claiming that RealYBOP’s handful of cherry-picked adolescent studies represents the state of the research. This time RealYBOP trolls a sex education organization:
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More trolling and as with preceding tweet, falsely claiming that RealYBOP’s handful of cherry-picked adolescent studies represents the state of the research:
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Cherry-picks oulier finding from 2-3% of study’s subjects. Omits primary findings, and 65 other other studies:
This study is the first to draw on nationally representative, longitudinal data (2006-2012 Portraits of American Life Study) to test whether more frequent pornography use influences marital quality later on and whether this effect is moderated by gender. In general, married persons who more frequently viewed pornography in 2006 reported significantly lower levels of marital quality in 2012, net of controls for earlier marital quality and relevant correlates. Pornography’s effect was not simply a proxy for dissatisfaction with sex life or marital decision-making in 2006. In terms of substantive influence, frequency of pornography use in 2006 was the second strongest predictor of marital quality in 2012.
Third, when evaluating the research, it’s important to know that coupled females who regularly use internet porn (and can thus report on its effects) make up a relatively small percentage of all porn users. Large, nationally representative data are scarce, but the General Social Survey reported that only 2.6% of all US women had visited a “pornographic website” in the last month. The question was only asked in 2002 and 2004 (see Pornography and Marriage, 2014). Studies reporting that more porn use is correlated to greater satisfaction in women are referring to a relatively small percentage of women (perhaps only 1-2% of the female population).
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RealYBOP’s spin and misrepresentation is so egregious that even Taylor Kohut corrects her misleading tweets:
David Ley cites this irrelevant study: EXPOsing Mens Gender Role Attitudes as Porn Superfans. Sociological Forum. doi:10.1111/socf.12506Link to web
Seriously? Interviewing “Porn superfans” attending the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo passed peer-review? What’s next, interviewing bar patrons to see what they think of beer? Even if taken seriously, the study tells us nothing about the effects of viewing porn as it didn’t correlate porn use with the four criteria. Contrary to the RealYBOP summary, the narrow criteria employed assessed “gender roles,” not sexist or misogynistic attitudes. For example, Harvey Weinstein would score exceptionally high on their gender-role assessment. In more extreme example, any pimp who wants his “hoes” working for his benefit would agree that women should work, but that doesn’t rule out extreme misogyny on his part.
As with the Taylor Kohut studies cited by Prause & Ley, it’s easy to see that religious/conservative populations would score lower than secular/liberal populations on these carefully chosen criteria. Here’s the key: secular populations, which tend to be more liberal, have far higher rates of porn use than religious populations. By choosing certain criteria and ignoring endless other variables, Kohut, Fisher, and the authors the current paper knew they would end up with porn use (greater in secular populations) correlating with carefully chosen selection of what they would have defined as “egalitarianism.”
RealYBOP jumps in to defend porn:
None of the studies on RealYBOP support Ley or contradict Gunter. RealYBOP omits the following studies validating Gunter’s concern. Both found that deviant (i.e., bestiality or minor) pornography users reported a significantly younger onset of adult pornography use. These studies link earlier onset of porn use to escalation to more extreme material.
The findings of the current study suggest Internet pornography use may follow a Guttman-like progression. In other words, individuals who consume child pornography also consume other forms of pornography, both nondeviant and deviant. For this relationship to be a Guttman-like progression, child pornography use must be more likely to occur after other forms of pornography use. The current study attempted to assess this progression by measuring if the “age of onset” for adult pornography use facilitated the transition from adult-only to deviant pornography use. Based on the results, this progression to deviant pornography use may be affected by the individuals “age of onset” for engaging in adult pornography. As suggested by Quayle and Taylor (2003), child pornography use may be related to desensitization or appetite satiation to which offenders begin collecting more extreme and deviant pornography. The current study suggests individuals who engage in adult pornography use at a younger age may be at greater risk for engaging in other deviant forms of pornography.
Results indicated that adult + deviant pornography users scored significantly higher on openness to experience and reported a significantly younger age of onset for adult pornography use compared to adult-only pornography users.
Finally, the respondents’ self-reported age of onset for adult pornography significantly predicted adult-only vs. adult + deviant pornography use. That is to day, adult + deviant pornography users self-reported a younger age of onset for non-deviant (adult-only) pornography compared to the adult-only pornography users. Overall, these findings support the conclusion drawn by Seigfried-Spellar and Rogers (2013) that Internet pornography use may follow a Guttman-like progression in that deviant pornography use is more likely to occur after the use of nondeviant adult pornography.
Two more RealYBOP tweets in the Gunter thread:
As Prause and Ley always do, RealYBOP says masturbation, not porn, is the problem.
In the same thread, RealYBOP promotes Ley’s porn book:
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Once again, RealYBOP disparages state resolutions deeming porn a public health issue. Her tweet contains several falsehoods:
RealYBOP falsehoods and spin related to the organizations cited:
HHSgov – Has never said anything about porn addiction.
APAPsychiatric – Last updated DSM in 2013. As for the DSM, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has so far dragged its feet on including compulsive sexual behaviors in its diagnostic manual. When it last updated the manual in 2013 (DSM-5), it didn’t formally consider “internet porn addiction,” opting instead to debate “hypersexual disorder.” The latter umbrella term for problematic sexual behavior was recommended for inclusion by the DSM-5’s own Sexuality Work Group after years of review. However, in an eleventh-hour “star chamber” session (according to a Work Group member), other DSM-5 officials unilaterally rejected hypersexuality, citing reasons that have been described as illogical.
There’s nothing that RealYBOP won’t use to support the porn-industry agenda, including shaming a women for making a choice, re-labeling the choice as “anti-porn shaming.” Question: is RealYBOP exhibiting misogyny?
Notice how RealYBOP says “as Dr. Geoffrey Reed, chair, described for us.” The “us” is Nicole Prause as she emailed (harassed) Dr. Reed several times and tweeted one his out-of-context replies multiple times. One example:
Geoffrey Reed isn’t an official WHO spokesperson, and this was only a private email to Prause to get her off of his back. In truth only one official WHO spokesperson officially commented on CSBD – Christian Lindmeier. If you have any doubts about the true nature of the Prause/RealYBOP campaign, carefully read this responsible article about compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD). It quotes official WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier. Lindmeier is one of only four officials WHO spokespersons listed on this page: Communications contacts in WHO headquarters – and the only WHO spokesperson to have formally commented about CSBD! The SELF article also interviewed Shane Kraus, who was at the center of the ICD-11’s Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder (CSBD) working group. Excerpt with Lindmeir quotes makes it clear that WHO did not reject “sex addiction”:
In regards to CSBD, the largest point of contention is whether or not the disorder should be categorized as an addiction. “There is ongoing scientific debate on whether or not the compulsive sexual behavior disorder constitutes the manifestation of a behavioral addiction,” WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier tells SELF. “WHO does not use the term sex addiction because we are not taking a position about whether it is physiologically an addiction or not.”
Despite a few misleading rumors to the contrary, it is untrue that the WHO has rejected “porn addiction” or “sex addiction.” Compulsive sexual behavior has been called by a variety of names over the years: “hypersexuality”, “porn addiction”, “sex addiction”, “out-of-control sexual behavior” and so forth. In its latest catalogue of diseases the WHO takes a step towards legitimizing the disorder by acknowledging “Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder” (CSBD) as a mental illness. According to WHO expert Geoffrey Reed, the new CSBD diagnosis “lets people know they have “a genuine condition” and can seek treatment.”
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Disparaging sex addiction therapist (as Prause & Ley always do):
Documenation of Ley and Prause harassing and defaming sex addiction therapists:
Trolling researcher Michael Flood. Pro-porn RealYBOP attempts to smear what she calls “anti-porn” activists.
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RealYBOP re-tweets porn performer, once again confirming its pro-porn industry agenda (while taking a swipe at “activists”):
If the illegitimate website (RealYBOP) is suppose to be about porn’s possible effects on users, why does RealYBOP regularly tweet propaganda for the porn industry?
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Three RealYBOP tweets of 15 years old data from Norway (only), claiming (for some unknown reason) that gay people are no more likely to be addicted to porn.
Problematic hypersexuality is a particular concern for gay, bisexual, and other MSM given the unique psychosocial factors driving this problem among this group, including minority stressors across development (Parsons, Grov, & Golub, 2012; Parsons et al., 2008) and the relationship between problematic hypersexuality and HIV risk (Dodge et al., 2008; Grov, Parsons, & Bimbi, 2010). In addition to experiencing disproportionate problems with hypersexuality compared to heterosexual men (Baum & Fishman, 1994; Missildine, Feldstein, Punzalan, & Parsons, 2005), gay and bisexual men contend with elevated rates of other factors shown to be associated with both hypersexuality and maladaptive cognitive processes, including childhood sexual abuse (Purcell et al., 2007) and stressors related to social prejudice and stigma (Muench & Parsons, 2004; Pincu, 1989). These stressors combine with mental health problems, such as problematic hypersexuality, to form a synergistic cluster of risks, or syndemic, that simultaneously threaten the health of this group of individuals (Parsons et al., 2012; Stall et al., 2003). Thus, the identification of treatable components of any one of these health risks has the potential to disrupt the health-depleting cascade of interrelated risks facing members of this population.
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More propaganda serving the porn industry’s agenda:
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One of Prause’s obsessions is FightThe NewDrug. RealYBOP trolls a FTND supporter with her usual ad hominem attacks:
More trolling, citing Prause’s SLT op-ed:
Prause’s 600-word Op-Ed is chock full of unsupported assertions meant to fool the lay public. It fails to support a single assertion as it cites only 4 papers – none of which have anything to do with porn addiction, porn’s effects on relationships, or porn-induced sexual problems.
Several experts in this field debunked its assertions and empty rhetoric in this relatively short response – Op-ed: Who exactly is misrepresenting the science on pornography? (2016). Unlike the “neuroscientists of the Op-Ed,” they cited several hundred studies and multiple reviews of the literature.
Once again, promoting a new study on female porn stars, which reported an expected finding: lower rates of sexual dysfunction than the general population.
Acting as a if it were a propaganda outlet for the porn industry, RealYBOP did not tweet a study by the same research group, which found much higher rates of ED in male performers! The research survey of male adult film actors published in 2018 reported 37% of male porn stars, ages 20-29, had moderate to severe erectile dysfunction (the IIEF, which measures function during partnered sex, is the standard urology test for erectile function).
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RealYBOP promoting a “study” claiming that using prostitutes is aligned with the principles of sexual health.
Why does RealYBOP constantly tweet in support of porn industry and prostitution, when the site claims to be about the effects of porn on the user?
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RealYBOP disparages anti-pornography feminists. The source? An article by Jerry Barnett (AKA pornpanic), who once owned a porn site!
Contrary to RealYBOP’s claim, higher sexual desire was not the strongest predictor of cybersex addiction. Rather, depressive mood, avoidant attachment style, and male gender were better predictors (than “sexual desire”):
We concluded that addictive cybersex use, as assessed by the CIUS adapted for sexual activities, is associated with sexual desire, depressive mood, an avoidant attachment style, and male gender. As shown in Table 3 (standardized coefficients), the results suggest that the most important influence on the CIUS scores is depressive mood, followed by avoidant attachment style, male gender, and sexual desire.
For example, does such logic mean that being morbidly obese, unable to control eating, and being extremely unhappy about it, is simply a “high desire for food?” Extrapolating further, one must conclude that alcoholics simply have a high desire for alcohol, right? In short, all addicts have “high desire” for their addictive substances and activities (called “sensitization”), even when their enjoyment of such activities declines due to other addiction-related brain changes (desensitization).
Another, more legitimate, way to interpret “higher desire” to masturbate or have sex: This is quite possibly evidence of sensitization, which is greater reward circuit (brain) activation and craving when exposed to (porn) cues. Sensitization can be a precursor to addiction.
Most addiction experts consider “continued use despite negative consequences” to be the prime marker of addiction. After all, someone could have porn-induced erectile dysfunction and be unable to venture beyond his computer in his mother’s basement. Yet, according to these researchers, as long as he indicates “high sexual desire,” he has no addiction. This paradigm ignores everything known about addiction, including symptoms and behaviors shared by all addicts, such as severe negative repercussions, inability to control use, cravings, etc.
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RealYBOP had to go all the way back to 1989 to cherry-pick an outlier study:
The goal of this review was to synthesize empirical investigations testing effects of media sexualization. The focus was on research published in peer-reviewed, English-language journals between 1995 and 2015. A total of 109 publications that contained 135 studies were reviewed. The findings provided consistent evidence that both laboratory exposure and regular, everyday exposure to this content are directly associated with a range of consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater self-objectification, greater support of sexist beliefs and of adversarial sexual beliefs, and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women. Moreover, experimental exposure to this content leads both women and men to have a diminished view of women’s competence, morality, and humanity.
A meta-analysis was conducted to determine whether nonexperimental studies revealed an association between men’s pornography consumption and their attitudes supporting violence against women. The meta-analysis corrected problems with a previously published meta-analysis and added more recent findings. In contrast to the earlier meta-analysis, the current results showed an overall significant positive association between pornography use and attitudes supporting violence against women in nonexperimental studies. In addition, such attitudes were found to correlate significantly higher with the use of sexually violent pornography than with the use of nonviolent pornography, although the latter relationship was also found to be significant.
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Tweeting a 10-year old outlier study on adolescents:
Check out YBOP’s expose’ on RealYBOP’s cherry-picked collection of adolescent studies: Youth Section
As always, the Alliance provides only a handful of outlier studies or fillers to delude journalists and the public that porn use is harmless for adolescents. As with the other sections, the Alliance provides no reviews of the literature or meta-analyses. Why did the Alliance omit these seven literature reviews on pornography and “Youth” (adolescents): review#1, review2, review#3, review#4, review#5, review#6, review#7, review#8, review#9, review#10, review#11?
Why has the Alliance omitted all 240 studies in this comprehensive list of peer-reviewed papers assessing porn’s effect on adolescents? The answer is clear: the reviews, as with the vast majority of individual studies, fail to align with the Alliance’s pro-porn agenda. Here we present the reviews the Alliance omitted with relevant excerpts…..
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Tweeting an outlier study employing the PCES (which ALWAYS finds that more porn is beneficial):
As for the findings, this to be expected as the study used the porn use questionnaire known as the Pornography Consumption Effect Scale (PCES). As explained in this critique by YBOP and a psychology professor the study creating the PCES may be the most egregious porn study ever published (Hald & Malamuth, 2008).
The PCES questions are designed and scored so that the more porn one uses the greater the benefits. In fact, if you don’t use porn, the lack of porn use is having a negative effect on your life according to this instrument. This is no exaggeration as many PCES-based studies conclude just that! This 7-minute video critique of the PCES reveals Hald & Malamuth’s primary results from what a dismayed psychology professor called a “psychometric nightmare”:
Porn use was almost always beneficial – with few, if any, drawbacks, for anyone.
The more hardcore the porn the greater its positive effects in your life. Put simply, “More porn is always better.”
For both genders the more porn you use, the more you believe it represents real sex, and the more you masturbate to it, the more positive the effects it has in every area of your life.
The PCES almost always reports benefits because:
Hald & Malamuth randomly decided what was a “positive” and “negative” effect of porn use. For example “added to your knowledge of anal sex” is always beneficial, while “reducing your sexual fantasies” is always negative.
The PCES gives equal weight to questions that do not assess equivalent effects. For example, compare the gravity of “Has added to your knowledge of anal sex?” with “Has led to problems in your sex life?” Whether or not you think superficial effects are positive effects, they are in no way equivalent to reduced quality of life (job loss, divorce), or problems in your sex life (erectile dysfunction, no sex drive).
In other words, your marriage could be destroyed and you could have chronic ED, but your PCES score can still show that porn has been just great for you. As one recovering porn user said after viewing the 47 PCES questions:
Yeah, I’ve dropped out of university, developed problems with other addictions, never had a girlfriend, have lost friends, got into debt, still have ED and never had sex in real life. But at least I know about all the porn star acts and am up to speed on all the different positions. So yeah, basically porn has enriched my life no end.
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Tweets that porn is a source of inspiration:
“Source of inspiration” mean greater use of sex toys and more anal sex. From the study:
The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between pornography use and sexual behavior in young adults from two culturally different countries. Data were collected in an online survey among German (n = 1,303; G) and Polish (n = 1,135; P) university students aged 18 to 26 years. Pornography use was associated with engaging in a greater variety of sexual activities (e.g., sexual role playing, using sex toys; G > P) rather than with a high number of sex partners or condom use consistency. The differences between the samples were found primarily for females (in anal sex experience and age at the first sexual intercourse;
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Ah yes, the usual talking point that greater availability of porn leads to lower rates of sex crimes. The porn industry no doubt loves that myth:
Three problems:
Its not a peer-reviewed study.
The author of the paper carefully selected only the years 1998-2003, only males ages 15-19, only the USA.
The next day, Suzzan Blac calls out RealYBOP (Prause), and Prause replies with her usual lies, even implying that Gary Wilson has sent death threats. Prause provides no proof (she never does for any of her victim claims), because she is lying.
RealYBOP blocked Suzzan Blac so she couldn’t see the RealYBOP/Prause’s defamatory reply. Blac reponded anyway:
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Trolling a well-known therapist with falsehoods – (Note: RealYBOP often simultaneously tweets & blocks so that the person being trolled is never aware, and doesn’t reply):
Trolling a 4th person, with the usal Prause propaganda that the ICD-11 rejected porn addiction:
RealYBOP (Prause) tweets a link to an excerpt from Prause’s Geoffrey Reed email. Geoffrey Reed isn’t an official WHO spokesperson, and this was only a private email to Prause to get her off of his back. In truth only one official WHO spokesperson had commented on CSBD – Christian Lindmeier. If you have any doubts about the true nature of the Prause/RealYBOP campaign, carefully read this responsible article about compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD). It quotes official WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier. Lindmeier is one of only four officials WHO spokespersons listed on this page: Communications contacts in WHO headquarters – and the only WHO spokesperson to have formally commented about CSBD! The SELF article also interviewed Shane Kraus, who was at the center of the ICD-11’s Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder (CSBD) working group. Excerpt with Lindmeir quotes makes it clear that WHO did not reject “sex addiction”:
In regards to CSBD, the largest point of contention is whether or not the disorder should be categorized as an addiction. “There is ongoing scientific debate on whether or not the compulsive sexual behavior disorder constitutes the manifestation of a behavioral addiction,” WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier tells SELF. “WHO does not use the term sex addiction because we are not taking a position about whether it is physiologically an addiction or not.
Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder is characterized by a persistent pattern of failure to control intense repetitive sexual impulses or urges, resulting in repetitive sexual behaviour over an extended period (e.g., six months or more) that causes marked distress or impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning.
Although this category phenomenologically resembles substance dependence, it is included in the ICD‐11 impulse control disorders section in recognition of the lack of definitive information on whether the processes involved in the development and maintenance of the disorder are equivalent to those observed in substance use disorders and behavioural addictions.
Note: A new WHO paper (Geoffrey Reed is one of the authors) calls out Prause’s behavior on ICD-11 comment section: Public stakeholders’ comments on ICD‐11 chapters related to mental and sexual health (2019). WHO discusses public comments made in the proposed ICD-11 mental disorders comment section, including “compulsive sexual behavior disorder” where Nicole Prause posted more comments than everyone else combined (22), disparaging individuals and organizations, making false accusations and engaging in libel. Bold type describes Prause comments:
Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder received the highest number of submissions of all mental disorders (N=47), but often from the same individuals (N=14). The introduction of this diagnostic category has been passionately debated3 and comments on the ICD‐11 definition recapitulated ongoing polarization in the field. Submissions included antagonistic comments among commenters, such as accusations of a conflict of interest or incompetence (48%) or claims that certain organizations or people would profit from inclusion or exclusion in ICD‐11 (43%).
Click here if you want to read the public comments on the ICD-11 CSBD sections (including the hostile/defamatory/disparaging ones). You will need to sign up with a username to view comments.
Prause’s Op-Ed is chock full of unsupported assertions meant to fool the lay public. It fails to support a single assertion as it cites only 4 papers – none of which have anything to do with porn addiction, porn’s effects on relationships, or porn-induced sexual problems. Several experts in this field debunked its assertions and empty rhetoric in this relatively short response – Op-ed: Who exactly is misrepresenting the science on pornography? (2016). Unlike the “neuroscientists of the Op-Ed,” they cited several hundred studies and multiple reviews of the literature.
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The Guardian article got it wrong, as the study in question did not ask about porn use.
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RealYBOP retweeting a “call girls” tweet:
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May, 2019: David Ley and RealYBOP misrepresenting Staci Sprout’s tweet. Sprout said nothing about “sex addiction”:
The new WHO paper linked to by Sprout (Geoffrey Reed is one of the authors) calls out Prause’s behavior on ICD-11 comment section: Public stakeholders’ comments on ICD‐11 chapters related to mental and sexual health (2019). WHO discusses public comments made on proposed ICD-11 mental disorders, incuding “compulsive sexual behavior disorder” where Nicole Prause posted more comments than everyone else combined (22), disparaging individuals and organizations, making false accusations and engaging in libel. Bold type describes Prause comments:
Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder received the highest number of submissions of all mental disorders (N=47), but often from the same individuals (N=14). The introduction of this diagnostic category has been passionately debated3 and comments on the ICD‐11 definition recapitulated ongoing polarization in the field. Submissions included antagonistic comments among commenters, such as accusations of a conflict of interest or incompetence (48%) or claims that certain organizations or people would profit from inclusion or exclusion in ICD‐11 (43%).
Click here if you want to read the public comments on the ICD-11 CSBD sections (including the hostile/defamatory/disparaging ones). You will need to sign up with a username to view comments.
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Obsessively tweeting same thing over and over again:
7th or 8th tweet of the day, mentioning WHO and the ICD-11 diagnosis for CSBD:
Exposing RealYBOP’s “Models of Hypersexuality”section – with its handful of irrelevant papers – as irresponsible: Models of Hypersexuality Section.
More ICD spin:
The truth:
1) “Most contested”: If RealYBOP means most comments on ICD-11 beta draft, it was Prause who created the “most” comments as she posted more than all others combined! Add in Prause allies such as David Ley, Roger Libby and others, and all the “contested comments” came from a handful of obsessed spammers (who now run the RealYBOP Twitter account!). A new WHO paper (Geoffrey Reed is one of the authors) calls out Prause’s behavior on ICD-11 comment section: Public stakeholders’ comments on ICD‐11 chapters related to mental and sexual health (2019). WHO discusses public comments made on proposed ICD-11 mental disorders, including “compulsive sexual behavior disorder” where Prause posted more comments than everyone else combined (22), disparaging individuals and organizations, making false accusations and engaging in libel. Bold type describes Prause comments:
Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder received the highest number of submissions of all mental disorders (N=47), but often from the same individuals (N=14). The introduction of this diagnostic category has been passionately debated3 and comments on the ICD‐11 definition recapitulated ongoing polarization in the field. Submissions included antagonistic comments among commenters, such as accusations of a conflict of interest or incompetence (48%) or claims that certain organizations or people would profit from inclusion or exclusion in ICD‐11 (43%).
2) ICD rarely changes. The 1990 ICD, without homosexuality, was ICD-10. The previous ICD-9 was created in the mid 1970’s. The DSM had homosexuality in the DSM until 1973.
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According to RealYBOP – “A majority of women have enjoyed rape pornography, while a minority of women describe it as their most preferred content.”
RealYBOP (Prause aliases) cites an article by the Adult Video News (AVN) to disparage FTND. Sounds like someone is back-tracking as no amount of editing could put words in the former porn star’s mouth (and he hasn’t asked FTND to take down the interview). Interview: Most Successful Male Porn Star Of All Time Speaks Out On Porn
While Prause and RealYBOP have posted countless times that FTND misrepresents studies, they never link to an example of misrepresentation. Never.
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Innacurate claims by RealYBOP:
First, studies examine neutral constructs like sexual or relationship satisfaction. More is better, less not so much. These types of studies are the most legitimate.
Second, as for “participants reported greater positive self-perceived effects” this to be expected as the study used the porn use questionnaire known as the Pornography Consumption Effect Scale (PCES). As explained in this critique by YBOP and a psychology professor the study creating the PCES may be the most egregious porn study ever published (Hald & Malamuth, 2008).
The PCES questions are designed and scored so that the more porn one uses the greater the benefits. In fact, if you don’t use porn, the lack of porn use is having a negative effect on your life according to this instrument. This is no exaggeration as many PCES-based studies conclude just that! This 7-minute video critique of the PCES reveal Hald & Malamuth’s primary results from what a dismayed psychology professor called a “psychometric nightmare”:
Porn use was almost always beneficial – with few, if any, drawbacks, for anyone.
The more hardcore the porn the greater its positive effects in your life. Put simply, “More porn is always better.”
For both genders the more porn you use, the more you believe it represents real sex, and the more you masturbate to it, the more positive the effects it has in every area of your life.
The PCES almost always reports benefits because:
Hald & Malamuth randomly decided what was a “positive” and “negative” effect of porn use. For example “added to your knowledge of anal sex” is always beneficial, while “reducing your sexual fantasies” is always negative.
The PCES gives equal weight to questions that do not assess equivalent effects. For example, compare “Has added to your knowledge of anal sex?” with “Has led to problems in your sex life?” Whether or not you think superficial effects are positive effects, they are in no way equivalent to reduced quality of life (job loss, divorce), or problems in your sex life (erectile dysfunction, no sex drive).
In other words, your marriage could be destroyed and you could have chronic ED, but your PCES score can still show that porn has been just great for you. As one recovering porn user said after viewing the 47 PCES questions: “Yeah, I’ve dropped out of university, developed problems with other addictions, never had a girlfriend, have lost friends, got into debt, still have ED and never had sex in real life. But at least I know about all the porn star acts and am up to speed on all the different positions. So yeah, basically porn has enriched my life no end.”
More support for porn industry agenda” ‘fake porn panic”:
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Links to two PhD’s who think it’s just fine to let sexual offenders use porn:
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David Ley and Prause (as RealYBOP Twitter & “sciencearousal”) continue their campaign to connect porn recovery forums to white supremacists/Nazis. It’s 2019 and not much has changed. David Ley and Prause (as RealYBOP Twitter & “sciencearousal”) are still campaigning to connect porn recovery forums and anti-porn activists to anti-Semitism and fascism. This is just the latest, as we have already documented Prause and Ley’s previous attempts in other sections:
It appears that David Ley collaborated again with journalist Rob Kuznia to produce the following June, 2019 NY Times piece: “Among Some Hate Groups, Porn Is Viewed as a Conspiracy.” Back in 2017 Kuznia collaborated with Prause and Ley to produce a factually inaccurate hit-piece for The Daily Beast. As was cleverly done in his 2017 Daily Beast article, Kuznia tricks the reader into presuming connections that don’t really exist. For example, in this new piece he places two unconnected sentences into a single paragraph to fool the reader into thinking that reddit/nofap is populated by white nationalists and somehow connected to the Proud Boys.
For example, a forum on Reddit is a support group of sorts for 440,000 members who take breaks from masturbation and porn for what they believe to be mental, physical and sexual-health reasons. The Proud Boys, a self-professed “western chauvinist” group, encouraged a similar message.
Neither is the case, and Kuznia provides no evidence. But hey, that’s what you can expect from agenda-driven journalists.
Concurrently with the latest Kuznia smear, Prause tunes up with two aliases representing her new website (which illegally infringes on YBOP’s trademarks): realyourbrainonporn twitter account and reddit user scienceofarousal. First, here are the targeted tweets (which both Ley and Prause retweet):
RealYBOP falsely claims the “anti-porn” movement is rooted in hate groups.
RealYBOP trolls another thread with Prause’s standard claims about being stalked or receiving rape threats. Prause has yet to provide documentation for these incidents. On the other hand, the page you’re reading, and its sister page, document Prause lying numerous times by making false claims that Gary Wilson, Alex Rhodes, and Clay Olsen have threatened or stalked her physically.
As RealYBOP was tweeting, the RealYBOP Reddit account (user/sciencearousal) was spamming r/nofap with the Kuznia article, implying that r/nofap is a hate group:
Sciencearousal (Prause) followed up her post with what on the surface appears to be an uncharacteristically sincere answer:
However, closer examination reveals a link to one of Prause & Ley’s all time favorite propaganda articles: a 2016 David Duke article with a link to Gary Wilson’s TEDx talk. Ley and Prause have used this over and over to suggest (falsely) that Wilson is allied with Duke. That’s what sciencearousal is trying to do with her oh-so-reasonable comment (hoping not to be deleted). Disgusting ploy.
Wilson’s TEDx talk has some 11 million views, so thousands of folks of all stripes have linked to (and recommended) Wilson’s talk, “The Great Porn Experiment.” How does this implicate Gary Wilson as a “white supremacist?” It doesn’t, of course. This ridiculous assertion is like suggesting all dog lovers are Nazis because Hitler loved his dogs.
RealYBOP continues, trolling a thread to spread her usual propaganda:
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RealYBOP & Ley team up again to attack the concept porn-induced sexual dysfunctions (Prause’s #1 obsession). Both tweeted in reponse to a person questioning Ley, and citing YBOP’s research page (which has about 500 studies that debunking Ley’s talking points):
RealYBOP continues, appearing to suggest that porn is OK for kids:
RealYBOP links to its laughable “youth section”, which YBOP dismantled here: Youth Section. As always, RealYBOP provides only a handful of outlier studies or fillers to delude journalists and the public that porn use is harmless for adolescents. As with the other sections, RealYBOP provides no reviews of the literature or meta-analyses. RealYBOP/Prause omitted these 12 literature reviews on pornography and “Youth” (adolescents): review#1, review2, review#3, review#4, review#5, review#6, review#7, review#8, review#9, review#10, review#11, review#12? RealYBOP/Prause omitted all 260 studies in this comprehensive list of peer-reviewed papers assessing porn’s effect on adolescents.
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A RealYBOP tweet that is unrelated to Fight The New Drug, cites Prause’s debunked op-ed disparaging FTND:
Using a probability-based sample of young Danish adults and a randomized experimental design, this study investigated effects of past pornography consumption, experimental exposure to nonviolent pornography, perceived realism of pornography, and personality (i.e., agreeableness) on sexist attitudes (i.e., attitudes toward women, hostile and benevolent sexism). Further, sexual arousal mediation was assessed. Results showed that, among men, an increased past pornography consumption was significantly associated with less egalitarian attitudes toward women and more hostile sexism. Further, lower agreeableness was found to significantly predict higher sexist attitudes. Significant effects of experimental exposure to pornography were found for hostile sexism among low in agreeableness participants and for benevolent sexism among women.
More propaganda. In reality “sex addiction” was never considered for the ICD-1. Neither the the ICD-11 nor the DSM uses the word addiction, for any addiction. Both use “disorder”:
Faced with a corrleation she doesn’t care for, RealYBOP makes unsupported claim. The correlation: “higher likelihood of committing infidelity is associated with preferences for gangbang scenes in pornography”. Nope, the study to not turn “the causal arrow”, and the authors of the study do not make this assertion:
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RealYBOP falsely claims that a study “busts the myth” that men watch more porn than women. Numerous individuals mock her for this misrepresentation:
The next day:
Another PhD making fun of RealYBOP’s “myth-busting”
Yet more criticism:
Within a day RealYBOP has become an internet meme, yet she still defends her original tweet. In this thread RealYBOP argues that being drunk does not impair driving:
RealYBOP exposed.
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Upset by a new study, RealYBOP tries to spin the findings.
Given the pervasive nature of pornography, we study how viewing pornography affects unethical behavior at work. Using survey data from a sample that approximates a nationally representative sample in terms of demographics, we find a positive correlation between viewing pornography and intended unethical behavior. We then conduct an experiment to provide causal evidence.The experiment confirms the survey—consuming pornography causes individuals to be less ethical. We find that this relationship is mediated by increased moral disengagement from dehumanization of others due to viewing pornography. Combined, our results suggest that choosing to consume pornography causes individuals to behave less ethically.
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Tweets pro-porn activist, and former porn site owner, Jerry Barnett’s (“@PornPanic”), propaganda:
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More pro-porn propaganda, from 1988!
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About the 500th time Prause/RealYBOP has tweeted about Mormons and attacked porn as a public health issue. This incredibly biased video by “slutever” contains Mormon porn (not kidding):
2) The lawyer for Nicole R Prause in her attempt to steal the YBOP trademark and URL was the lawyer for BackPage!
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Never asks about negatives, never tweets a study reporting negatives.
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Disparaging an article about the negative effects of porn:
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Tweets article by biased researchers:
Reading their paper exposes them as biased. More importantly, the author tags RealYBOP, Prause, Ley, Josh Grubbs, Sam Perry (all involved in illegal trademark infringement of YBOP) in this tweet, while hashtag’s pathologizing-porn.
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ReaYBOP tweets the 3rd junk paper by NZ grad student Kris Taylor. Taylor is beyond biased – and knows nothing about neuroscience. He’s a sociologist. YBOP critiqued a 2017 article by him where he disparaged Gary Wilson and the review with US navy doctors (Taylor often resorts to simply lying in his article): Debunking Kris Taylor’s “A Few Hard Truths about Porn and Erectile Dysfunction” (2017)
Retweets RealYBOP “expert”, grad student Madita Oeming’s tweet about her biased article trying to blame religion and the media for porn addiction:
In her article Madita Oeming admits she knows nothing about addiction, or neuroscience, or the neurological studies on porn users, but she is miraculously confident that porn addiction doesn’t exist. Her qualifying statement:
I am neither a neurobiologist nor a behavioral psychologist, so I have no expertise in judging whether pornography is actually physically addictive. But first, it will be discussed among those who have this expertise. Although the WHO has now decided to “obsessive-compulsive sexual behavior”, including apparently also “excessive consumption of porn” , from 2022 to include in their diagnostic catalog. And secondly, I’m dealing with something completely different. As a cultural scientist, er, poetry interpreter, I understand pornography primarily as a narrative.
A poetry student?
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RealYBOP trolling the New York Times OBGYN Jen Gunter because she’s not a fan of porn. RealYBOP links to an article by Free Speech Coalition employee Lotus Lain. Helping out the porn industry whenever she can:
RealYBOP claims that “Many viewers also experience improved body image” are debunked here: Body Image Section.
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Why does RealYBOP chronically posts tweets in support of the porn industry, when RealYBOP claims to be concerned about porn’s effects on the users?
The answer is obvious.
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Another fine example of RealYBOP omitting the primary findings while highlighting irrelevant findings (a form of propaganda):
The important findings:
Controlling for pornography viewing frequency, religious identity, and sexual orientation, structural equation modeling revealed power over women and playboy norms as associated with increased problematic pornography viewing, while emotional control and winning norms were negatively related to problematic pornography viewing. Of these associations, power over women norms produced consistent positive direct effects across all dimensions, whereas emotional control norms produced consistent negative direct effects
Put simply – power over women is associted with probelmatic porn use (porn addiction).
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RealYBOP (Prause) retweets David Ley propaganda piece, where he asserts that he and others are victims of “ant-porn activists (Prause being reported to California Board is recounted, but she is not named). In fact, the opposite is true as Prause and Ley are the perpetrators, with Prause reporting over 20 individuals and organizations to governing bodies (Prause’s comaplinst were all dismissed as being without merits. These pages contains hundreds of instances of Prause and Ley defaming, stalking and harassing those they disagree with about porn’s effects:
Never blame the porn industry, just those who suggest porn may cause problems. The article.
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As for the findings, this to be expected as the study used the porn use questionnaire known as the Pornography Consumption Effect Scale (PCES). As explained in this critique by YBOP and a psychology professor the study creating the PCES may be the most egregious porn study ever published (Hald & Malamuth, 2008).
The PCES questions are designed and scored so that the more porn one uses the greater the benefits. In fact, if you don’t use porn, the lack of porn use is having a negative effect on your life according to this instrument. This is no exaggeration as many PCES-based studies conclude just that! This 7-minute video critique of the PCES reveals Hald & Malamuth’s primary results from what a dismayed psychology professor called a “psychometric nightmare”.
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Tweeted a highly criticized paper:
Getting a lot of press, falsely claiming that men and women are no different in how they respond to porn. The headline doesn’t match the study or authors spin as they did assess MAGNITUDE of brain respo
But questions remain. The latest study was not able to look at whether the magnitude of the changes of brain activity were the same for both biological sexes.
So it doesn’t assess if men are more turned than women by the same images – so the headlines are BS. As I pointed out in my critique of Prause’s EEG studies (which mixed males, females, gay straight) – men and women have different brain responses to the same sexual images. That’s what these studies and reviews found:
Here are 3 comments by PhD’s from an academic sexology listserve. Two of the three have done reviews of the literature on this very subject. The 1st is Mike Bailey, who runs the listserve. I omitted the name of the 2nd name. The 3rd is Kim Wallen who runs a journal and did earlier stduies on Amygdala described in RealYBOP’s tweet.
On Tue, Jul 16, 2019, Mike Bailey wrote:
Um, no
> *Women as likely to be turned on by sexual images as men – study*
Subject: Re: Women as likely to be turned on by sexual images as men – study
I agree with Mike.
While I appreciate that they included a lot of our work, I have some concerns about this paper.
1. I could be mistaken, but it doesn’t seem like they’re taking into account effect sizes from the original studies. It’s one thing to say that areas are likely to “show up”, but this doesn’t address the question, “how much.” Without taking this information into account, these may not be sound statistical inferences.
2. Many of the individual studies show male>female responses (e.g. Karama et al., Sabatinelli et al., Hamann et al., Sylva et al., Safron et al. (in press)), and I don’t believe any show effects in the opposite direction. In case anyone wants more details on that, I’ve attached an unpublished
manuscript I wrote in 2015 where I reviewed much of this literature. I probably should have published it, but perfectionism got in the way, and then I got distracted. Reminder to self: Perfect is the enemy of the good.
3. They don’t really show any clearly reward-related activations. Only ventral striatum has been shown to be valence specific (and even then you can have mixed results). One could make a case for hypothalamus, but even then, I worry about the poor spatial resolution of non-invasive neuroimaging (although 7T scanning might be a game changer).
This study never would have been published if it didn’t further political agendas.
This study will be interpreted as pushing back against patriarchal assumptions that biased scientific practice and reporting. I imagine this was the case in the past, but I don’t think it’s been an accurate description for a long time, and now may frame the situation precisely backwards.
Politics is the minds killer.
—-B
Subject: Re: [External] Re: Women as likely to be turned on by sexual images as men – study
Thanks for your insightful comments. I would add a few additional concerns. I was particularly struck by the fact that the authors highlighted Stephan Hamann’s and my study in 2004 where we demonstrated a sex difference in amygdala activation. The authors went on to say that when they used the whole sample they didn’t find this sex difference. There are two aspects of this that I find curious. The first is that in 2014 Stephan and I replicated our 2004 finding in the control men and women in our CAIS study. Interestingly this study is not in the metaanalysis sample (I have asked logothetis why this was not included). It would seem that replication with comparable effect sizes in both samples would warrant some consideration.
A second issue is that from the sample size the authors claimed to have used to assess sex differences in amygdala activation, they clearly used all of the subjects including nonheterosexuals and trans people. This strikes me as inappropriate as our samples were limited to heterosexual men and women. Since that is the population from which the sex difference was identified it would seem that the heterosexual portion of the MA sample (about 90% of the sample) should have been the sample to compare to our samples.
I think there is also a concern about the earlier conclusion that there are not sex differences. This too is based on the whole sample. They found sex had <1% predictive value, whereas sexual orientation had 15% predictive value. Given that for 90% of the sample sex and sexual orientation are congruent it is surprising that sexual orientation shows an effect, but sex doesn’t. This leads me to think that SO interacts with sex in a manner that eliminates the sex effect. This most likely reflects that sex in this analysis is categorical, whereas SO is a more or less continuous variable. I would have liked to see a metaanalysis that used only the heterosexual sample to investigate the sex difference in response. I didn’t see such an analysis in the supplementary materials, maybe I missed it. Given the findings for SO I suspect that sex differences would be found in the heterosexual only sample.
I am not sure that I agree that this illustrates that a political agenda drives this paper, though it is in the current zeitgeist. Sadly I think it more reflects that age old circumstance where members of the NAS can publish whatever they damn well please. Those must have been some sweetheart reviews that this got
Kim Wallen, Ph.D.
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RealYBOP saying addiction model causes harm (she cites nothing to support propaganda):
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Propaganda: trying to blame masturbation, not porn, for the hundreds of studies that link porn use to myriad negative effects.
RealYBOP cites a 30-year old outlier study to convince us that employing misogynistic images of females to sell goods is OK:
Porn industry thanks you, RealYBOP.
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Two for one: 1) misrepresentation of the tweeted study, 2) ignoring every quantitative study on relationships
Misrepresentation – “subliminal but not supraliminal exposure”. In other words ,subliminal had a transient effect, but actual porn exposure did help out the situation.
As a pro-porn shill, RealYBOP never tells the truth about the preponderance of studies. Continued use is bad for relationships. Porn’s effects on relationships? Over 70 studies link porn use to less sexual and relationship satisfaction. As far as we know all studies involving males have reported more porn use linked to poorer sexual or relationship satisfaction.
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RealYBOP directly promoting the porn industry:
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RealYBOP once again pushing her lies about anti-porn activists
If you have any doubt about who RealYBOP might be, see these pages:
If you still have doubt: July, 2019 – Prause supplies troll NerdyKinkyCommie with a YBOP trademark lawsuit document; NerdyKinkyCommie lies about a document; & RealYBOP experts spread his libelous tweets, adding their own lies
Ley and Prause minions: NerdyKinkyCommie, whose Twitter handle is @SexualSocialist, appears to be a prolific troll. He freely admits to being obsessed with porn and sex and revels in harassing and defaming anyone who suggests that internet porn might cause problems. Among his favorite targets are Alexander Rhodes, NoFap, Fight The New Drug, Gary Wilson, and men in recovery from porn-related difficulties. Nerdy’s original Twitter account was permanently banned for relentless harassment of Fight The New Drug (Prause’s original account was also banned for harassment). In violation of Twitter rules, and just like Prause, Nerdy created a new Twitter account for trolling: https://twitter.com/SexualSocialist
NerdyKinkyCommie often re-tweets Ley, RealYBOP and Prause propaganda. Prause, Ley and Nerdy regularly engage in friendly banter, expressing their disdain for the aforementioned targets. In June and July, NerdyKinkyCommie trolled Gary Wilson threads posting material mirroring Prause & Ley’s disgusting tweets and screenshots struggling in vain to connect Gary Wilson, YBOP and Nofap with Nazis and white nationalists. One example of many such tweets:
Wilson reported NerdyKinkyCommie, who was eventually banned for a week by Twitter.
After the ban, NerdyKinkyCommie continued where he left off, this time aided by Prause, the RealYBOP Twitter account, and RealYBOP “experts.”
On July 21 David Ley tweets in Nerdy’s thread that defamed Wilson:
The next day NerdyKinkyCommie produced a tweet that was most certainly constructed by Nicole Prause.
It falsely accused Wilson of being funded by The Reward Foundation (Prause concocted this lie in 2016, repeating it on social media and on Wikipedia)
The screenshot is of a the YourBrainOnPorn UK trademark provided to Prause’s lawyers, by Wilson, in trademark infringement case made necessary because Prause had filed an application for an infringing trademark.
What the above screenshot actually shows: Acting as Gary Wilson’s UK representative and using Wilson’s money, The Reward Foundation (a UK charity) paid the UK government to trademark YourBrainOnPorn in the UK. The UK trademark was a response to Prause trying to shut down YBOP by:
publicizing a new website with the trademark-infringing URL realyourbrainonporn.com in April of 2019.
As thoroughly explained elsewhere Wilson donates the proceeds of his book to The Reward Foundation. Wilson accepts no money, and has never received a dime for any of his efforts. YBOP accepts no ads and Wilson has accepted no fees for speaking. As documented in these sections, Prause has constructed a libelous fairy tale that Wilson is being paid by the same charity he donates his book proceeds to:
In fact, this is not true. The above two sections are addressed in Gary Wilson’s sworn affidavit, which is part of the Dr. Hilton’s defamation lawsuit filed against Dr. Prause. Here are the relevant sections of Wilson’s sworn affidavit filed in Federal Court: Gary Wilson of YBOP (affidavit #2 in Hilton defamation lawsuit):
Put simply, Nikky and Nerdy are collaborating in provable defamation (to repeat, Prause provided Nerdy with the “evidence” for his misleading tweet). Then RealYBOP, RealYBOP “experts” and good old PornHub jumped aboard. First we have RealYBOP (Prause) immediately retweeting Nerdy’s lies, and adding her own (RealYBOP “expert” Roger Libby also comments):
All lies. RealYBOP isn’t a registered non-profit. In fact, all the experts advertise their services on RealYBOP. Moreover, David Ley and two other RealYourBrainOnPorn.com “experts” (Justin Lehmiller and Chris Donaghue) are being paid to promote xHamster websites! If you believe that RealYBOP isn’s biased, check out their tweets, or their so-called “research page”. Other RealYBOP “experts” joined NerdyKinkCommie in defaming the legitimate YBOP, Wilson, and The Reward Foundation. First, “expert” Victoria Hartmann:
Finally we have PornHub, a RealYBOP ally, “liking” the defamatory tweet (PornHub’s was the second Twitter account to tweet about RealYBOp’s new Twitter account and website when it appeared):
Hmmm… PornHub, Prause, Ley and Hartmann all “liking” the tweet of an obscure Twitter troll who had recently completed a 7-day ban for harassing Gary Wilson. Go figure.
The cherry on top of RealYBOP’s targeted defamatory cyberstalking: As described here, RealYBOP’s reddit account, sciencearousal trolled and spammed reddit porn recovery forums, usually posting wherever Gary Wilson’s name or “Your Brain On Porn” appeared. In her recent reddit posts, sciencearousal spammed a nofap subreddit with the same Rob Kuznia article frequently tweeted by RealYBOP and Nikky (Kuznia is pals with Nikky). Nofap deleted her post:
RealYBOP/sciencearousal comment where she links to her fav – David Duke’s article about porn, which conatins a link to Gary Wilson’s TEDx Talk (Sciencearousal comment was deleted):
Scouring the internet for anything Ley can use to smear Wilson, he pounced upon an obscure (and disgusting) David Duke blog post containing a link to Gary Wilson’s TEDx talk. Wilson’s TEDx talk has some 11 million views, so thousands of folks of all stripes have linked to (and recommended) Wilson’s talk, “The Great Porn Experiment.”
There are not “thousands of studies” assessing physiological responses to viewing porn. Not even 100. Only 2200 PubMed indexed studies mention pornography (dating back to 1951).
Neurological responses cannot be classified as “positive or “negative” in relation to their effect. Eye blink response, galvanic responses, EEG readings, blood flow to sections of the brain are not “positive”. Exposes RealYBOP as knowing nothing about basic biology.
For example, a neurological response isn’t “better” or “more pleasant” because it is of greater magnitude: Ingesting cocaine induces greater activation of the reward than ingesting blueberries. Should we consume cocaine because of this? Idiocy from RealYBOP.
The OBVIOUS: greater or lesser physiological responses in a lab tells us absolutely nothing about the long-term effects of chronically using porn, any more than greater brain activation when snorting cocaine or eating Bic Macs informs us of long-term effects of either.
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Prause as RealYBOP contradicts Prause silly talking point that viewing puppies is neurologically identical to watching porn (one of many examples –Penthouse Magazine, featuring Prause). In the hit-piece we find Prause’s hilarious assertion that viewing images of puppies has exactly the same effect as watching hard core porn:
It’s true — pornography does that,” Dr. Prause said previously. “It’s also true with images of chocolate and images of puppies. You don’t see puppies being declared a public health hazard. These sex addiction studies are relying on ignorance, claiming that pornography is the same thing as cocaine and hoping you don’t know any different.
One of Prause’s core claims is that viewing puppies play, or eating cheese/chocolate are neurological & hormonally no different than masturbating internet porn. This talking point is meant to debunk any and all neurological studies on porn users. No actual neuroscientist agrees with Prause’s claim, including Prause tweeting as RealYBOP. Prause contradicts herself when she tweets as RealYBOP (August, 2018), stating that pornography is uniquely pleasurable:
Propagandist speaking out of both sides of her mouth.
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Making ridicuoulsy false statemenst about “porn activists”, while promoting a paid porn site:
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RealYBOP disparaging NoFap, mischaracterizing what Paula Hall said:
Study by RealYBOP member Samuel Perry. After sophisticated statistical “modeling” Perry proposed that masturbation, not porn use, is the real culprit in relationship happiness. The gaping hole in Perry’s new analysis is the absence of specific, reliable data on masturbation frequency, as he only asked “When did you last masturbate?” Without solid data on frequency, his claim is little more than a hypothetical. From Perry’s study:
Masturbation Practice. Both the NFSS and the RIA ask the same two questions about masturbation that the author combined into a single masturbation measure for both surveys. Participants were first asked if they have ever masturbated (Yes or No). Those who answered that they had ever masturbated were then asked, “When did you last masturbate?” Responses ranged from 1 = today to 9 = over a year ago.
Perry continues:
“While this question technically does not inquire about frequency…..”
No kidding. And yet Perry, Prause, Ley, Grubbs and others are now making extraordinary claims based on this solitary study, relying on these highly dubious data. The Alliance propaganda machine is in full view with respect to Perry’s re-analysis. Perry’s assertions are countered by over 75 studies linking porn use to lower sexual and relationship satisfaction – and Perry’s current study which correlated more porn use with less relationship happiness. That’s right, greater porn use was associated with less relationship happiness in both Perry samples (A & B):
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Perry’s claims that he could magically tease apart porn use from masturbation cannot be taken seriously – especially since he lacked accurate data for masturbation frequency.
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Promoting pro-porn course by ReaYBOP member who claims that porn use is only beneficial
More about it – https://twitter.com/LailaMickelwait/status/1164558559897505792
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WOW!
RYBOP saying that kids who don’t know that porn isn’t reality is the only problem with kids watching porn? Instead of using “teens” they used “kids” Kids.
And only kids who don’t know that porn isn’t reality. Otherwise, kids watching porn = ok for them?
Meaning like ages 3-12?
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Promoting a silly study on horny guys attending a porn convention (AVN)
Seriously? Interviewing “Porn superfans” attending the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo passed peer-review? What’s next, interviewing bar patrons to see if they like beer? Even if taken seriously, the study tells us nothing about the effects of viewing porn as it didn’t correlate porn use with the four criteria. Contrary to the Alliance’s summary, the narrow criteria employed assessed “gender roles,” not sexist or misogynistic attitudes. For example, Harvey Weinstein would score exceptionally high on their gender-role assessment. In more extreme example, any pimp who wants his “hoes” working for his benefit would agree, but that doesn’t rule out extreme misogyny on his part.
As with the Taylor Kohut studies cited here, it’s easy to see that religious/conservative populations would score lower than secular/liberal populations (AVN attendees) on a these carefully chosen criteria. Here’s the key: secular populations, which tend to be more liberal, have far higher rates of porn use than religious populations. (clearly, all the AVN attendees in this study used porn). By choosing certain criteria and ignoring endless other variables, Jackson et al. knew porn fans would score higher on their highly selective version of “egalitarianism.”
The goal of this review was to synthesize empirical investigations testing effects of media sexualization. The focus was on research published in peer-reviewed, English-language journals between 1995 and 2015. A total of 109 publications that contained 135 studies were reviewed. The findings provided consistent evidence that both laboratory exposure and regular, everyday exposure to this content are directly associated with a range of consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater self-objectification, greater support of sexist beliefs and of adversarial sexual beliefs, and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women. Moreover, experimental exposure to this content leads both women and men to have a diminished view of women’s competence, morality, and humanity.
RealYBOP decided to comment under the article, saying porn is only bad if the guy doesn’t know how to lube an anus:
The above cherry-picked papers are discussed here: Attitudes Towards Women Section. We also expose what studies RealYBOP omitted.
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Logical fallacies abound. RealYBOP paints “anti-porn” as a single entity, then tells twitter whatt “ant-porn’ believes about performers:
Again, why is a site supposedly about porn’s effects on the users, tweeting pro-porn industry propaganda?
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Anecdotes in silly articles are ok, as long as they potray porn as beneficial:
There’s no falsification of anything: Debunking RealYBOP’s reasearch page section covering porn and relationships – Love and Intimacy Section.
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Posts a a 2003 study that revaels nothing about porn use. Then makes false staement:
Falsehood: “There is no evidence that people who view more porn have decreased neural responses to it.”
Realityty – Prause et al., 2015 reported that more frequent porn users had less brain activation to vanilla porn than did controls? Given the high percentage of porn users who report escalation to more extreme material, sluggish response to laboratory porn would hardly be surprising. In fact, the findings of Prause et al. 2015 align with Kühn & Gallinat (2014), which found that more porn use correlated with less brain activation in response to pictures of vanilla porn, and with Banca et al. 2015, which found faster habituation to sexual images in porn addicts.
RealYBOP caught lying.
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Tweets a Joe Kort interview of Prause (Both are RealYBOP “experts”):
The interview seems focused on a solitary irrelevant EEG finding showing that watching porn is not neurologically identical to having sex (of course having sex produces different EEG readings than watching porn). Plus an addedl straw men no one ever said (“triggers dangerous neurochemical changes in the brain”). Podcast description:
There’s been a lot of noise in the media about porn use, with many doomsayers claiming that it triggers dangerous neurochemical changes in the brain. However, newer research says that just isn’t so. This week Joe talks with American neuroscientist, Nikki Prause, who thinks that porn and sex are totally different in the brain. Hear Nikki explain how her brain research debunks the myth that you can have an addiction to sex or porn. Brain science is hot these days, so listen to Nikki and Joe talk about how rigorous studies have not found sex addiction to be a real dependency, or reflective of any brain-related compulsion issues at all …
Brushing my teeth is neurologically different than watching cat videos. So what? Anyone who has taken a neuroscience course knows that non-identical activities involve different brain regions activated in a unique sequence or pattern. I hear the sound of real neuroscientists laughing at thsi monumental discovery.
Omission: It’s what porn and sex have in common that matters – same reward system regions activated, same high levels of reward-related neurotransmitter, same brain and hormonal changes induced at orgasm, same powerful learning.
Special Section – Realyourbrainonporn (Daniel Burgess) defamation/harassment of Gary Wilson: Fake porn URLs “found” in the Internet Wayback Archive (August, 21-27, 2019)
Context: realyourbrainonporn.com, Daniel Burgess and Nicole Prause
During his February/March, 2018 social media campaign, Daniel Burgess defamed and harassed me – regurgitating Nicole Prause’s usual set of lies and fabrications of victimhood, which she has spewed for several years. Burgess’s comments and tweets were nearly identical to Prause’s litany of invented misdeeds, leaving no doubt that Burgess and Prause collaborate and are in close communication. (There are rumors of a private Facebook group.) As an example of his malice, I’ll provide Burgess’s initial comment on YBOP’s Facebook page. It includes Nicole Prause’s baseless 2015 cease and desist letter to me (how did Burgess obtain this letter?):
Soon after Burgess defamed me on the YBOP Facebook page and Twitter, he set his sights on “Marriage and Family Therapists.” The eighteen replies to Burgess by therapists Staci Sprout and Forest Benedict are all that remains of Burgess’s defamatory tirade. Because Burgess displayed his defamation before 6,000 licensed therapists and the YBOP Facebook audience, I felt it necessary to debunk his malicious comments (and his unsupported claims about the preponderance of porn research): Addressing Unsupported Claims and Personal Attacks by Daniel Burgess (March, 2018).
Daniel Burgess’s choice to become Nicole Prause’s errand boy is a key element of this story, as a year later they collaborate once again: (1) engaging in unlawful trademark infringement of YourBrainOnPorn.com by creating realyourbrainonporn.com, and, (2) operating the social media accounts for realyourbrainonporn.com (specifically the trademark-infringing Twitter account – @BrainOnPorn). In fact, in late July, 2019 Daniel Burgess was exposed as the person controlling the trademark-infringing URL www.realyourbrainonporn.com.
Before we return to the failed “Fake URLs” smear campaign of August, 2019, a brief history of Dr. Prause is in order.
In 2013 former UCLA researcher Nicole Prause began openly harassing, libeling and cyberstalking Gary Wilson. (Prause’s UCLA contract was not renewed and she has not been employed by an academic institution since January, 2015.) Within a short time she also began targeting others, including researchers, medical doctors, therapists, psychologists, a former UCLA colleague, a UK charity, men in recovery, a TIME magazine editor, several professors, IITAP, SASH, Fight The New Drug, Exodus Cry, NoFap.com, RebootNation, YourBrainRebalanced, the academic journal Behavioral Sciences, its parent company MDPI, US Navy medical doctors, the head of the academic journal CUREUS, and the journal Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity – to name a few.
While spending her waking hours harassing & defaming others, Prause cleverly cultivated – with zero verifiable evidence – a myth that she was “the victim” of most anyone who dared to disagree with her assertions surrounding porn’s effects or the current state of porn research. To counter the ongoing harassment and false claims, YBOP was compelled to document some of Prause’s activities. Consider the following pages. (Additional incidents have occurred that we are not at liberty to divulge – as Prause’s victims fear further retribution.)
You would think that a $10,000,000 defamation suit against his chum might have tempered Burgess’s defamatory impulsiveness. Apparently not. In addition to the character-impugning porn-smear campaign (below) conducted by the “Real Brain On Porn” Twitter account (which mirrors Nicole Prause’s litany of falsehoods), the Twitter account also explicitly accused me of at least 3 felonies:
Stalking women in person
Making death threats, and
Hacking into websites.
As explained in more detail below, concurrent with @BrainOnPorn’s 4-day, 100+ tweet rampage, the“RealYourBrainOnPorn” website admin (under Burgess’s control) emailed friends of mine with similar astounding lies.
Publicly accusing people of sexual misconduct and felonies is actionable. In fact, the above libelous statements are deemed “defamation per se” – which means that I need not show any commercial damages in order to recover (the proceeds from my book go to charity and I make no money from YBOP).
On August 21, 2019, a likely Burgess alias (@RonSwansonTime – more on “RonSwanson” below) tweeted a screenshot of fraudulent porn URLs (of pages that never existed). It appeared under a NerdyKinkyCommie tweet ranting about me. (Nerdy is a professional troll and Prause-collaborator who received a 7-day Twitter suspension for harassing me.):
After being outed as a likely Burgess alias, @RonSwansonTime apparently thought better of his participation and set his Twitter account to “protected” (just more evidence that Ron Swanson is really Burgess). The initial Twitter thread “discovering” Mormon porn URLs on the Wayback Machine (8/21/19):
These tweets are the first I, or anyone else, had ever heard of the existence of the fake URLs (of nonexistent pages on YBOP’s Wayback Machine archive).
Aug 22, 2019: realyourbrainonporn.com admin sends emails containing libelous claims to Gary Wilson’s friends and associates (on the same day @BrainOnPorn posts 14 tweets targeting Wilson)
As expected the trolls and stalkers upped their harassment and defamation. On August 22 this email by the realyourbrainonporn website admin was forwarded to Gary Wilson. (As Burgess owns the URL, we must assume the following was sent by him.)
As the organization forwarding the email knows me, and is keenly aware of RealYBOP’s trademark infringement, and Prause’s long history of defaming and harassing those in the porn skeptics movement, they knew it was all lies.
At the same time RealYBOP sent out libelous emails, its Twitter account (@BrainOnPorn) began furiously pumping out libelous tweets insisting that I had placed 300 “Mormon porn” URLs on my website over a 3-year period starting in 2016 (without anyone ever noticing). One of the fourteen @BrainOnPorn tweets targeting me on August 22nd:
Although @BrainOnPorn began its obsessive Twitter rampage with the Mormon-porn fabrication, it quickly descended into numerous incidents of unrelated defamation. By the end of the weekend @BrainOnPorn had posted over 100 tweets targeting me. @BrainOnPorn often tweeted in my existing threads, or under anyone who had tagged me, or harassed those who retweeted one of my tweets.
Aug 22, 2019: Concurrently, a fake Twitter account is created to post content duplicating RealYBOP’s emails and tweets: https://twitter.com/CorrectingWils1
At the same time that RealYBOP was sending libelous emails and obsessively tweeting fake porn URLs, a fake Twitter account appeared posting the same drivel: https://twitter.com/CorrectingWils1. The CorrectingWilson account tagged the exact same Twitter accounts as RealYBOP was tagging in dozens of similar tweets (Gail Dines, Fight The New Drug, John Foubert, SASH123, and YourBrainOnPorn):
This juvenile attack was apparently orchestrated over 2 years and came to light on on August 21, 2019, as explained above. It involved fraudulent URLs (of nonexistent pages) placed on the Internet Wayback Machine, an archive of snapshots of websites across time (operated by a non-profit).
In addition to grabbing screenshots of webpages, the Wayback Machine lists URLs it has archived – or been requested to archive – on its site. The following link goes to all 100,000 YBOP URLs archived since YBOP was created in 2010 (it takes a while to load): https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.yourbrainonporn.com/* As of this writing, the first 3 pages (out of 2,000) contain URLs for what would appear to be “Mormon porn. A few examples from the first 3 pages:
The “Mormon porn” URLs only ever existed in the Wayback Machine Archive. They were requested to be archived there simply to defame. They never existed on my site (and consequently they never had any content…sorry, porn fans).
The bogus Wayback archive “porn” links go nowhere except to “Page not found” pages on the Wayback Machine (404 pages). This establishes that they never existed because legitimate Wayback archive links go to screenshots of webpage content instead. Try it for yourself. Click on any of the Mormon porn URLs and all you will get is a “Page not found” screenshot. Never existed.
An example of a random Mormon Porn URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20170212162002/http://www.yourbrainonporn.com/hot-blonde-mormon-feet – A “record” of the fake URL in the archives:
The Wayback screenshot of the above URL from 2017 (notice how its the old version of YBOP):
Another example says the page was never archived: https://web.archive.org/web/2017*/http://www.yourbrainonporn.com//milf-by-a-cottonwood-tree-at-age-43/
All the Mormon porn URLs are fake, manually inserted by a trickster.
Here’s what a legitimate archived YBOP page from the past looks like: https://web.archive.org/web/20150412200603/http://www.yourbrainonporn.com/age-40s-brain-fog-cured-forever-no-more-pixel-paradise
Simplified: The Wayback Machine URL is only real if it grabbed a screenshot of an actual page with content, not if it grabbed a screenshot of a “page not found” (a 404) error.
August 22-24, 2019: To prove anyone can insert fake URLs into the Wayback machine, I did it for YBOP
RealYBOP falsely asserted in multiple tweets that fake URLs could not be inserted into the Wayback Machine. So I did it (as did a few of my techie friends). The “Using the Wayback Machine” page located here provides instructions. An excerpt:
Can I add pages to the Wayback Machine?
On https://archive.org/web you can use the “Save Page Now” feature to save a specific page one time. This does not currently add the URL to any future crawls nor does it save more than that one page. It does not save multiple pages, directories or entire sites.
So I went to archive.org/web and requested that it archive a page on my site at “yourbrainonporn.com/testing-can-random-people-insert-links“, the Wayback Machine created this: https://web.archive.org/web/20190515000000*/http://www.yourbrainonporn.com/testing-can-random-people-insert-links. A screenshot of the fake YBOP URL archived in the Wayback Machine:
As with all the “YBOP” Mormon porn URLs, a screenshot of a “page not found (404)” error is archived into the Wayback Machine :
I also inserted another very relevant fake URL into the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20190801000000*/http://www.yourbrainonporn.com/cyberstalkers-on-twitter/
Ignoring my evidence that fake URLs had just been inserted into the Wayback Machine, RealYBOP continued shrieking that it could not be done – “a computer engineer already documented it is not possible“:
RealYBOP repeated this disproved mantra in dozens tweets over the weekend, even claiming to have “talked to the director of Google about it”. Oh please.
August 23-24, 2019: An anonymous ally inserted fake URLs into Wayback Machine archive of RealYourBrainOnPorn.com
In a failed attempt to “prove” that fake URLs cannot be inserted into the Wayback Machine, RealYBOP tweeted a screenshot RealYBOP’s 11 archived URLs: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.realyourbrainonporn.com/*
Big mistake. An ally let me know that an anonymous person inserted two fake URLs into realyourbrainonporn’s own Wayback Archive:
Screenshot of the “impossible” below. (Again, who was the ‘computer engineer” that said this couldn’t be done?)
Screenshot of the archived fake realyourbrainonporn page: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.realyourbrainonporn.com/we-are-terrible-people
Applying the false logic of RealYourBrainOnPorn, if the Wayback Machine archived it, the URL “RealYourBrainOnPorn are terrible people” must be on their website, and true.
Again, I had nothing to with the above demonstration (but it is hilarious).
In response to the above evidence, a normal defamer would have put down the smartphone, and stopped tweeting the same disproven lie that URLs cannot be inserted into the WayBack archive. But @BrainOnPorn is far from normal. After I tweeted the above, @BrainOnPorn added 60 or more tweets to his unhinged and defamatory attack on me.
August 22-25, 2019: How did the trickster get the “Mormon porn URLs” to group together on only the first 3 pages (out of the 2,000 pages of YBOP archived URLs)?
How did the cyber-trickster cause the “Mormon porn URLs” to group together on the first 3 pages (out of 2000 pages of YBOP URLs)? S/he put double backslashes (//) into the fake porn URLs. Because the WayBack Machine archive organizes URLs alphabetically, the porn URLs with the extra symbol appeared (alphabetically) above normal URLs (a symbol is before a letter or number). Here’s how to compare a real YBOP archived URL vs a fake archived URL:
Legitimate YBOP URL on the Wayback Machine – http://www.yourbrainonporn.com/big-list-tips-tricks
Fake YBOP URL on the Wayback Machine – http://www.yourbrainonporn.com//mormon-woman-bare/
A screenshot of a few of the trickster URLs that were inserted into the Wayback Machine:
As legitimate URLs only contain a single backslash, this screenshot confirms that the Wayback “porn URLs” were fraudulent.
Hey @BrainOnPorn what was the name of that computer expert you claimed said the porn URLs were real? Oh yeah, you never provided a name.
August 26, 2019: In a 4-day rampage @BrainOnPorn posts over 100 tweets targeting Gary Wilson (many containing defamation per se).
As mentioned in the intro, @BrainOnPorn posted over 100 tweets targeting Gary Wilson during a 4-day Twitter rampage. Nearly every @BrainOnPorn tweet contained at least one defamatory statement (most contained several). Rather than posting 100+ tweets here, including tweets RealYBOP posted under other comments out of context, visit this link to see all the @BrainOnPorn tweets targeting me between August 22-26: Over 100 RealYBOP tweets targeting Gary Wilson from August 22-26. Most contain defamation by RealYBOP.
In addition to the character-impugning campaign conducted by the “Brain On Porn” Twitter account, the Twitter account also explicitly accused me of at least 3 felonies (screenshots below):
Stalking women in person
Making death threats, and
Hacking into websites.
Publicly accusing people of sexual/professional misconduct and felonies is actionable. In fact, if a tribunal deems RealYBOP’s (Burgess’s) actions “defamation per se,” I need not show any commercial damages in order to recover. I am investigating the remedies open to me to seek redress for RealYBOP’s (Burgess’s) actions.
A few disgusting examples taken from the many RealYBOP tweets engaging in defamation:
Getting a lot of press, falsely claiming that men and women are no different in how they respond to porn. The headline doesn’t match the study or authors spin as they did assess MAGNITUDE of brain respo
