> But is there any real evidence that adult content is harmful to underaged people? Unless scientists have put together a rigorous study, which even then there are confounding factors. Like all existing studies are small and don't control for desire to access such material.
Plenty of people who have gotten completely out of pornography can tell you directly about the difference in their lives. That doesn't require a study. It's as simple as, I touched the hot stove, I got burned. Perspective provides better answers than numbers. We don't need a controlled study of 1500 randomly sampled people to establish that touching a hot stove is bad. The difficulty is that this "touch" can play out over years or a lifetime and is done principally within your mind and affects your relationships and emotions. You can find various studies [0] to support these general conclusions also.
When you're a regular consumer of porn, you cannot really see its effect on you unless you have a clear perspective of what it is like to not be a regular consumer of porn and indulging in objectifying sex objects in your mind. Teenagers, or worse, children, who have become addicted, haven't had the time or experience to have any other perspective. All they know is the haze of porn sexuality.
It clogs up your love receptors and transmitters like a drug. It's like seeing love through a thick fog, being unable to really comprehend it. Without perspective the individual just assumes they can see everything clearly. That a sexual relationship can be cheaply bought at a glance and satisfied in a moment and then tossed in the trash when inconvenient without even needing to talk to someone. It creates the appetite for low effort relationships, which are often short-lived instead of durable. We should strive for the kind that can go 60 years of happiness for both parties and be more in love than when they started. That's what we're capable of. But with lust addled minds mired in selfish indulgence — we don't get there.
Plenty of people who have gotten completely out of pornography can tell you directly about the difference in their lives. That doesn't require a study. It's as simple as, I touched the hot stove, I got burned. Perspective provides better answers than numbers. We don't need a controlled study of 1500 randomly sampled people to establish that touching a hot stove is bad. The difficulty is that this "touch" can play out over years or a lifetime and is done principally within your mind and affects your relationships and emotions. You can find various studies [0] to support these general conclusions also.
When you're a regular consumer of porn, you cannot really see its effect on you unless you have a clear perspective of what it is like to not be a regular consumer of porn and indulging in objectifying sex objects in your mind. Teenagers, or worse, children, who have become addicted, haven't had the time or experience to have any other perspective. All they know is the haze of porn sexuality.
It clogs up your love receptors and transmitters like a drug. It's like seeing love through a thick fog, being unable to really comprehend it. Without perspective the individual just assumes they can see everything clearly. That a sexual relationship can be cheaply bought at a glance and satisfied in a moment and then tossed in the trash when inconvenient without even needing to talk to someone. It creates the appetite for low effort relationships, which are often short-lived instead of durable. We should strive for the kind that can go 60 years of happiness for both parties and be more in love than when they started. That's what we're capable of. But with lust addled minds mired in selfish indulgence — we don't get there.
0: https://marripedia.org/effects_of_pornography_on_marriage