I feel I owe an apology to Simon Louis Lajeunesse on behalf of my (and his) gender.
The Université de Montréal researcher, studying the effects of pornography on its male viewers, looked for a control group of guys who had never been exposed to it.
He could find none.
“Guys who do not watch pornography do not exist,” he told the Montreal Gazette.
It’s encouraging that Lajeunesse found no evidence of ill effects often ascribed to pornography by its critics, because whatever dirty movies do to us, they seem to be doing it to pretty much every man and no small number of women.
The study’s subjects said they watched an average of 40 minutes a week. I hasten to mention that your particular boyfriend/husband/whatever is telling you the truth if he never sullies his eyes with such filth. Neither do I. Swear.
But your virtuous fella and I are obviously just about the only ones — complete statistical freaks. The rest of dudedom stands guilty as charged. Sorry about that, Prof. Lajeunesse.
We cannot deny your findings, and we are not proud. Despite its enduring popularity, it’s not as if the essential quality of X-rated cinema has improved vastly since 1975, when Erica Jong famously declared, “My reaction to porn films is as follows: After the first 10 minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first 20 minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.”
While Lajeunesse’s research somewhat disturbingly found that a guy’s first exposure to so-called adult entertainment occurred, on average, at age 10, he also saw no evidence of any effect on their relationships, or ability to separate fantasy from reality.
(This separation of fact and fiction, like so many things, seemingly does not apply to embattled golfer Tiger Woods, whose growing roster of “transgressions” allegedly includes porn star Joslyn James, a.k.a. Veronica Siwik-Daniels.)
According to Lajeunesse’s data, 90 per cent of the porn consumed by his interviewees came from — and this too may shock you — the Internet. A very smart woman of my intimate acquaintance expresses wonder that men get anything done all day with all that porn just sitting there at the other end of every keyboard.
This modern smut delivery system has its drawbacks, as a friend of mine discovered when he tried to explain to his wife why their computer had been laid low by viruses. He got emergency technical assistance from a computer-savvy buddy, and a little advice about safer surfing, but repairing things on the home front remained his problem.
