NEW YORK — The Wall Street Journal published a column over the weekend purporting to discuss “what porn does to teen brains.”
The article, by the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper’s “Family & Tech” reporter Julie Jargon, attempted to reach a middle ground between the standard “porn addiction” panic pieces that mainstream editors constantly commission, and a more-balanced approach that explained some of the actual science behind compulsive behavior in general.
The title of Jargon’s article — “What Porn Does to Teen Brains—and How to Keep It Off Their Devices” — would have suggested one of the many “porn addiction” pieces based on debunked pseudoscience. But the writer craftily stopped short of endorsing that controversial view.
Jargon toed close to that line by quoting a standard 2014 study by Cambridge University researcher Valerie Voon that concluded that “when shown pornographic images, the men’s brain activity mirrored that of drug addicts who were shown photos of drugs.”
She even implied an endorsement of the “addiction” argument by using similes and comparisons. “Imagine a 24-hour candy store where kids could gorge on sugar, without parents there to stop them,” she wrote. “That would be bad for their bodies. So what can such readily available porn do to kids’ brains?”
Research, she also claimed, “shows that younger people’s brains are more wired for pleasure than adults, with higher spikes of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine released in anticipation of enjoyable activities.
Because of this, many researchers believe young people are more vulnerable to compulsive porn use, which can lead to unrealistic views on sex,” she added.
However, Jargon veered off from the standard “porn addiction” panic narrative by clearly stating that “psychologists say it’s important to talk to kids about porn without making them feel ashamed. Some exposure to it can be a natural part of development, they say, and porn shouldn’t be shunned in a way that creates a taboo. They do, however, recommend using tech guardrails to reduce the chances that younger kids see things they’re not ready to see.”
Jargon even quoted researcher Nicole Prause persuasively arguing that “if we shut down conversations and say, ‘Don’t watch porn, and if you do, it’s an addiction and it will rot your brain,’ that’s terrifying
“It’s some of the messaging that’s making it worse,” Prause added.
A Study Hijacked by the ‘Fight Porn Addiction’ Industry
But Jargon did not include some of the key elements of the 2014 Valerie Voon study, which clearly illustrate its misuse by the lucrative “fight porn addiction” industry.
As The Guardian’s Science section reporter Chris Chambers pointed out back in 2014, “the upshot of Voon’s study is that there could be a shared brain network associated with many compulsive disorders, regardless of whether they involve consumption of drugs or more ‘natural’ rewards such as sex.”
But “do these results mean that compulsive viewing of pornography is an addiction like dependence on cocaine or heroine?” Chambers in unequivocal: “No, and Voon is keen to emphasise this point in both the published article and the press release issued by Cambridge University. Addiction can’t be diagnosed with a brain scan, and even if it could, we still don’t know enough about CSB for it to be recognised as an addiction in mainstream psychiatry.”
Chambers praised Voon herself for producing a nuanced report of her conclusion, one that explicitly discourages the kind of generalizations and fault causation that are regularly trotted out by anti-porn crusaders.
“Do the results tell us that online pornography itself is addictive like a drug?” Chambers asked. “No. Do they say anything at all about the non-compulsive viewing of pornography? No. Do they allow us to conclude that pornography ‘damages’ or ‘changes’ the brain in any harmful way? No. Do they even translate to all sufferers of CSB? No – the study tested a small sample of men only and, in any case, we can never draw strong conclusions from a single study alone.”
But yesterday, another Rupert Murdoch publication, the New York Post, rehashed Jargon’s Wall Street Journal piece and, crucially, re-inserted all the “porn addiction” panic propaganda that the more prestigious financial daily had shied away from.
“Children and teenagers who are exposed to pornography online are more likely to develop an addiction to smut than adults, according to researchers,” wrote the New York Post’s Ariel Zilber, continuing with a lengthy tirade about this made-up “addiction.”
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