Internet pornography has social costs

NJ.com: “[An] exemplary new report to be issued tomorrow by the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton called “The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations.” Very ably authored by Mary Eberstadt and Mary Anne Layden, this report is a careful reflection on the consequences of the deluge of internet pornography. (The document has been endorsed by a wide and diverse group of impressive scholars.)”
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(9.15.2008) Is Pornography Adultery?
The Atlantic, Ross Douthat, October 2008

The notion that pornography, and especially hard-core pornography, has something to do with marital infidelity has been floating around the edges of the American conversation for a while now, even as the porn industry, by some estimates, has swollen to rival professional sports and the major broadcast networks as a revenue-generating source of entertainment. A 2002 survey of the American Academy of Matri­monial Lawyers suggests that Internet porn plays a part in an increasing number of divorce cases, and the Brinkley-Cook divorce wasn’t the first celebrity split to feature porn-related revelations…

But the attention paid to the connection between porn and infidelity doesn’t translate into anything like a consensus on what that connection is. Polls show that Americans are almost evenly divided on questions like whether porn is bad for relationships, whether it’s an inevitable feature of male existence, and whether it’s demeaning to women. This divide tends to cut along gender lines, inevitably: women are more likely to look at pornography than in the past, but they remain considerably more hostile to porn than men are, and considerably less likely to make use of it. (Even among the Internet generation, the split between the sexes remains stark. A survey of American college students last year found that 70 percent of the women in the sample never looked at pornography, compared with just 14 percent of their male peers; almost half of the men surveyed looked at porn at least once a week, versus just 3 percent of the women.) . . .