The John Next Door

[homasse]

The John Next Door
The men who buy sex are your neighbors and colleagues. A new study reveals how the burgeoning demand for porn and prostitutes is warping personal relationships and endangering women and girls.Men of all ages, races, religions, and backgrounds do it. Rich men do it, and poor men do it, in forms so varied and ubiquitous that they

Comments

[homasse]

...I love how damn near everyone is focusing on the inclusion on porn more than once in a month on the john/not john side of things instead of looking at the important parts of the article.

Way to go, y'all. -_-

[serious_mccoy]

Fucking aggravating. Oh, human trafficking? well that's bad I guess but OH MY GOD DON'T YOU DARE TALK BADLY ABOUT MY PORN!!

[homasse]

Exactly. So far, ontd_p is not looking very good in my eyes. -_-

When I was formatting this to post, a little voice in my head went, "I just bet everyone's gonna hard on the porn thing, just watch, 'cause of all the love everyone has for their porn." Reading all the comments so far... :/

Priorities, y'all, seriously.

[homasse]

lol "go hard on the porn thing," lol

[chaya]

I'm... sorry? The reason I was annoyed with the inclusion of porn in the study is because, as I said above, actual prostitution and especially the johns do not get analyzed enough and to over-broaden such a study seems like widening the scope to things that have already been studied several times over. The rest of the article had good meat on its bones, but most of it, including the anecdotes from the prostitutes, reinforced what I've already learned in college and brought no comment from me other than "this system is fucked".

[homasse]

But in the end, honestly, it made up a TINY part of the whole article, and in fact the study DID include guys that just watch porn in the non-John side of things. They started out broadly, it looks like, looking for men that didn't pay in any way for something sexual, and discovered oh, hey, they couldn't find any--which I think alone says something--and so they broadened it to men that only did so once a month.

Instead, we just get a rehash of "but porn isn't that bad!!!" comments. No, it's not, and it's also NOT THE POINT. Especially since the john category, which yeah, may include some men that only watch porn more than once a month, was also the category of men where eighty fucking percent of them said they would rape a woman if they thought they could get away with it. Which clearly indicates something very, VERY fucked up.

[homasse]

Sorry, correction, were eight times more likely to rape a woman if. Too much going on in my brain right now with me trying to work at the same time.

[chaya]

It wasn't the amount of the article it took up, it's that that was how they grouped the men.

the study DID include guys that just watch porn in the non-John side of things

AHA, that is what I did not catch - my whole annoyance was conflating the two and not getting solid data just from those who bought women.

And re: the 8x more likely to rape, that creepy shit is exactly why I was so upset that it seemed like they were watering down the data of legitimately dangerous men who need to be better studied.

[stevie_jane]

in fact the study DID include guys that just watch porn in the non-John side of things

Indeed it did. This comm, seriously, sometimes I could scream.

[homasse]

That part got completely glossed over, which is why I'm shaking my head at all this.

[chaya]

If you're talking about my comment/thread, the purpose of it was to ask why something relatively trivial was being included in a study that had so many more important aspects (like those involved in human trafficking).

[baked_goldfish]

I said it up the page a bit, but I wonder if that didn't damage their findings some.

[chaya]

My guess is watering down the percentages of "do not care about the well-being of women" and related attitudes. Guys who watch porn are far from pure little lambs, but their likelihood of seeing and treating women as meat isn't in the same ballpark as those of johns.

[baked_goldfish]

Yeah, I mean many guys who watch mainstream porn have some...interesting. ideas about sex and women. It's just - limiting non-buyers to men who haven't purchased sex, lap dances, erotic massages, etc., and who have also not consumed porn more than once in a month seems very strange to me, and it leaves me with questions like, "If the buyers group includes guys who watch porn three times a month, but who don't do anything else in that definition of buying sex, then how does that affect their findings?"

[squeeful]

Because if you're looking at how sex for sale and a sex industry affects people's, particularly men's, perception of relationships, sex, and women you have to include porn. Leaving it out would be egregious and skew the data. Not porn is evil! or porn is okay! but flat-out porn affects people and it affects how people see and relate to women.

[chaya]

If your thesis must be how sex for sale and a sex industry affects etc etc, then I completely agree that to leave out porn would skew the data. The reason I expressed disappointment was that their exploration was that broad - the affects of porn on etc etc has been studied up and down. I was excited and interested to see that the focus was finally going to someplace less explored and more volatile/dangerous (johns! More likely to harm, more likely to perpetuate harmful stereotypes) subject. Then reading that they'd included the sex psych equivalent of "do cell phones cause cancer? Study #5,482!" disappointed me.