No such thing as a XXX virgin?

http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Study+spoiled+s...

Study spoiled by scarcity of 'porn virgins'

Montreal researcher instead finds demonization of porn unfounded

By Charlie Fidelman , Montreal GazetteDecember 2, 2009

MONTREAL — A Montreal researcher's study of the impact of pornography on men is making headlines around the world.

Here's how two British papers described it:

"Porn-loving men ruin sex study," said The Sun.

"All men watch porn, scientists find," said The Telegraph.

When Universite de Montreal assistant professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse launched his project with men in their 20s, he wanted to interview subjects who had never been exposed to pornography — porn virgins.

But he couldn't find any.

"Guys who do not watch pornography do not exist," Lajeunesse of the university's School of Social Work said Wednesday.

So his study examined the habits of 20 university students who consumed X-rated material — that would be all of them — and the impact on their sexual identity and how it shapes their relationships with women.

Lajeunesse found most boys seek pornography by age 10, at about the same time that they become curious about sex. They chose what they wanted to see and quickly rejected what they found offensive — for example, bestiality or violence.

About 90 per cent of pornography is consumed on the Internet, while 10 per cent comes from video stores.

As adults, their sex lives were pretty conventional, almost identical to their parents, Lajeunesse said.

In fact, the men distinguished between fantasy and reality; they did not want their partners to look like porn stars, he said.

"Well, maybe in their bed once or twice, but not in their life," he said.

Lajeunesse suggested that pornography has been demonized and that its effects are negligible.

If pornography is like a "neurotoxin" that "damages the brain" as some U.S. anti-pornography crusaders claim, then simply showing heterosexual porn to gay men could switch their orientation, he said.

As for the persistent perception that pornography breeds crime against women, Lajeunesse said that aggressive men don't need porn as an incentive to be violent.

Genevieve Rail, principal of Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Montreal's Concordia University, said it would be far too easy to suggest all pornography is bad.

During the 1970s, feminist rhetoric deemed all forms of pornography as rape and demeaning to women.

It's also ageist and racist, but then there are different types of pornography, Rail said.

"There's the commercial kind on the Internet or purchased at video stores, and there's other kinds that are done by particular groups, for instance feminists, queers, and the disabled . . . and artists who use pornography as a medium for other things," she said. "It's not cut and dried."