4-28-2011 Global:
A new book, which analyzes a billion web searches from around the world, highlights the way in which the Internet apparently revolutionized sexual desires, making tastes once regarded as deviant more widespread.
"A Billion Wicked Thoughts," by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, is billed as the first massive research in the field of collective sexual identity since the Kinsey Reports in the mid-20th century, the New York Post reported.
According to the authors' research, straight men enjoy a wider variety of erotica than previously thought, including sites devoted to elderly women and transsexuals.
The findings also indicated that straight men prefer heavy women to thin ones and that straight women enjoy reading about and watching romances between two men. Gay men were found to enjoy straight porn in large numbers.
"Sex therapists haven't known which interests are common and which are rare," co-author Ogas said. "We probably now know more than ever before ... we just let the data tell us where to go."
Though the information sent them to Japanese anime sites (exceptionally popular among straight men) or to "cuckold porn" (in which men are forced to watch their wives have sex with someone else), it unearthed an even more surprising finding: 80 percent of all Internet searches are composed of just 20 interests.
According to the search engine Dogpile -- which provided the authors with search data from Google, Yahoo! and Bing -- the top 10 sex-related searches include variations on youth (13.5 percent), breasts (4 percent), cheating wives (3.4 percent) and cheerleaders (0.1 percent) among others.
"The research, as far as I can tell, is pretty damn sound," said Dr. Stephen Snyder, a sex therapist in private practice in Manhattan for over 20 years. "They worked very hard to acquire a large data set, and they found some very, very interesting stuff."
"Web porn has changed everything," said the book's co-author Gaddam.
Whereas once men may not have had access to unique sets of sexual triggers, now that they do, and now that we know large numbers of men are searching for them, perhaps male desire is evolving. ..Source.. by NewsCore
April 28, 2011
Internet Porn Has Transformed Sexual Desire, Study Finds
April 24, 2011
Posturing Against Pornography
4-24-2011 National:
The government should stop trying to censor the Internet.
We all know that pornography is offensive and destructive, so we can guess that wherever X-rated fare gains popularity, social decay will follow. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn which state has the highest rate of online subscriptions to adult websites. Not New York or California, but Utah. Yes, Utah.
Some members of Congress are up in arms at the news that the Justice Department has dismantled a Bush-era Obscenity Prosecution Task Force to go after hard-core material on the Internet. No fewer than 42 senators, most of them Republicans, have written Attorney General Eric Holder to urge tougher enforcement of obscenity laws.
Their argument is that pornography causes sexual violence, molestation of children, sex trafficking, and other maladies. "This material harms individuals, families and communities and the problems are only getting worse," wrote the group, led by Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of—you guessed it—Utah. You will wait in vain to hear of other senators joining together to say this is all nonsense, though that happens to be the case.
The past two decades have been to electronic erotica what Thanksgiving is to gluttony. Never in history have more people had easier access to sexually explicit material in such vast abundance and such low cost. More than one out of every three Americans with Internet access regularly visits porn sites.
By the logic of the puritans, we should be coping with an avalanche of collateral damage. But we're not.
Sexual violence? Rape has dropped by 86 percent in the United States since 1991. Harm to families? Divorce rates are down 25 percent during the same period.
As for sex trafficking, no one really knows how much goes on, or whether it's rising or falling. But when the Bush administration mounted a crackdown on the problem, The Washington Post reported in 2007, it found only "1,362 victims of human trafficking brought into the United States since 2000, nowhere near the 50,000 a year the government had estimated."
Numerous studies have failed to prove that viewing prurient pictures has any deleterious consequences to individuals. Just because the occasional rapist or child molester blames his crimes on skin flicks doesn't make it true.
Critics claim that pornography can take over some people's lives, but so can fantasy baseball. Porn addiction is not a recognized psychiatric disorder. And what if it were? Alcoholism is a form of addiction, but we don't ban wine.
Based on the evidence, it would be easier to make the case that adult entertainment is beneficial than that it's harmful. Harvard economist Benjamin Edelman even found that in places where porn subscriptions are most popular, you find more people "donating blood, engaging in volunteer activities or participating in community projects."
The absence of any visible damage caused by adult sites won't deter the crusading senators, whose true objection to sexual fare is not that it's harmful but that it's sexual. Moral disapproval, however, is no more grounds for prosecuting obscenity than it is for banning Charlie Sheen from TV.
What must particularly annoy Hatch and Co. is that most Americans see no need to censor websites that feature naked bodies. Nor is it easy to understand why the constitutional guarantee of free expression should exclude depictions of erotic activity.
The Supreme Court, it's true, has yet to abandon its position that obscenity has no First Amendment protection. But given the evolution of sexual standards in America, there's not a lot that clearly qualifies as obscene anymore, which makes prosecutions difficult.
In any case, what business is it of Hatch or Holder what adults choose to view on their home computers? If we can tolerate racist literature, slasher videos, and the Westboro Baptist Church, we can put up with Jenna Jameson at her most indiscreet.
Besides, it's not like we have a choice. The nature of the Internet makes it next to impossible to keep out porn, short of draconian government controls. U.S.-based suppliers may be prosecuted, but there are plenty of other countries where smut peddlers can set up shop and stream live shower cams all night long.
The government could squander both money and personal freedom by trying to stamp out pornography. Or it could try the policy attributed to Oscar Wilde: "I have no objection to anyone's sex life as long as they don't practice it in the street and frighten the horses." That would work fine, even in Utah. ..Source.. by Steve Chapman
November 4, 2010
North Shore's teen boys addicted to sex and violence online
11-4-2010 Australia:
NORTH Shore boys as young as 12 are becoming addicted to graphic and violent internet pornography.
Ku-ring-gai Youth Development Service counsellor David Citer said the worrying behaviour was an addiction, like drugs and alcohol, and was replacing normal relationships.
“Internet porn is everywhere and a lot of young boys have become addicted,” he said.
“It’s all about instant gratification, rather than delaying urges and building relationships. It teaches them they can have sex there and then and doesn’t teach good values”.
Mr Citer said some schoolboys had developed “rites of passage” where they were required to sexually assault girls to become members of a club.
“A lot of this (internet) stuff is very violent, where you have five or six males having sex with a woman and if you look at the kind of stuff that’s happened in rugby league, a lot of that is bred out of internet pornography.”
He said internet porn was increasingly “a coping strategy” for boys under stress and the harder life got at school, the more they turned to it. The danger was they were being duped into thinking sex without a relationship was normal behaviour.
Many 12-year-olds were regular browsers of pornography and some were even younger.
Parents had little control because “kids are too computer savvy and always one step ahead”.
While schools promoted computer use, “once parents go to bed, they don’t know what they are doing in their room.
“Children aged 14 and 15 end up chatting to people in their 30s and 40s and sex advances are made.”
Another concerning trend was “sexting”, where young girls text nude photos of themselves to their boyfriends.
``He then passes it to a lot of his mates, sending it around mobile phones, and when you are dealing with 14 and 15-year-olds, that’s child pornography,’’ Mr Citer said.
``We are hearing a lot of that.’‘
But chairwoman of the department of digital cultures at the University of Sydney, Kathy Cleland, said fear around the internet was overstated.
``I think the internet is often beaten up for social problems. There’s fear with new communication technologies, like there was with television.
``Kids do go through intense adolescent phases and don’t want to communicate with their parents and it’s not necessarily about technology,’’ she said. ``However, the internet does provide instant gratification It’s easy to turn to as it’s always available.’’ ..Source.. by Julie Huffer
