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Americans aren’t getting married, and researchers think porn is part of the problem
Washington Post ^ | 12/21/2014 | By Roberto A. Ferdman

Posted on 12/22/2014 8:22:56 AM PST by Responsibility2nd

There could be an unlikely contributor to the decline of marriage in this country. And it's free pornography on the Internet.

A team of researchers, who published their findings in The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany, determined that the rise of free Internet pornography is not only correlated with a pronounced decline in percentage of young adult males who are married, but might actually be contributing to the trend.

"The results in this paper suggest that such an association exists, and that it is potentially quite large," the study notes.

The researchers used data from the General Social Survey (GSS), a comprehensive, nationally representative survey, to analyze how 18-to-35 year-old men used the Internet between 2000 and 2004. They focused on how many hours each participant spent on the Internet per week, and how many reported having used the Internet to view pornography in the past 30 days, but also observed other activities, including the use of religious websites.

"We asked ourselves, what is helping determine whether people are married or not?" said Dr. Michael Malcolm, a professor at the University of West Chester, Pennsylvania, and one of the study's authors. "One of those things, we thought, could be the use of pornography."

~snip~

The reason, Malcolm explains, is likely tied to the relationship between marriage and sexual gratification. If pornography is viewed as a means of alternative sexual gratification, then it could be undercutting the need for marriages to serve this function, at the very least during a younger age. Think of it as a milder form of premarital sex.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: 68revolution; culturewar; feminism; hedonism; marriage; moralabsolutes; nuclearfamily; pornography; singles; smashmonogamy; smashthepatriarchy; trends; waronmarriage
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To: Albion Wilde

“cutting a peanut butter sandwich into a star for the kid’s lunchbox “

The best memories any child has isn’t the trips or things, it is the mom that did just that. The best thing in the world to be is a mom. The second best thing is being the dad and watching your little slugger nail a winning homerun in little league. Of course, we’ll give hat tip to the mom that then cuts the little slugger’s sandwich into a star and she knows she’s loved.


161 posted on 12/22/2014 11:39:00 AM PST by CodeToad (Islam should be outlawed and treated as a criminal enterprise!)
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To: wardaddy

Who knew you were a pissed off snarly woman?

By the looks of your screen name, one might presume you were a man.

As expected - I pushed your buttons and touched a nerve, huh? You really DID have a porn site open, huh?

Perhaps besides sharing your gender identity question issues (honey? Really?) you might now want to share some of the reasons WHY you think pornography is OK.

Start with child porn if ya like.


162 posted on 12/22/2014 11:52:33 AM PST by Responsibility2nd (NO LIBS. This Means Liberals and (L)libertarians! Same Thing. NO LIBS!!)
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To: Responsibility2nd
Porn is simply a symptom of the illness. The problem has been the attack on the family which began in a minor way under FDR but went all the way out under LBJ and most administrations since then. Government took over family. Government took over the place of dad earning wages for the family and mom staying at home raising the kids & not entering the job market until the kids were in their teens.

IOW there are likely as many persons involved in heterosexual activity but not doing so through a marriage commitment. Porn has been around since the ability of man to sketch, draw, images. I seem to recall back in the early 1970's some magazines in the school library hidden behind the books. Or so it was rumored anyway. Yet very few back then didn't marry. I even remember classmates who in the junior or senior year were married. Actually all were girls and their husbands had quit school to take jobs to support them.

Which had a more damaging effect on our nation? Playboy or the philosophies contained within? The magazine started out with mild porn but was filled with Hefner's and other liberals ideas much like the prevailing garbage that was being taught in colleges and universities. The porn was to get you to look at the book. It even went as far to have some decent feature writers like Jean Shepherd. Yes the Jean Shepherd who wrote Christmas Story about the kid with the Red Ryder BB Gun. I read it when I was a teenager back in the early 1970's. Guess where I first read it? But the magazine itself pushed specific Philosophies much more than Porn much like the rest of the magazines of that type of the day.

163 posted on 12/22/2014 11:59:36 AM PST by cva66snipe ((Two Choices left for U.S. One Nation Under GOD or One Nation Under Judgment? Which one say ye?))
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To: CodeToad

Loving the mother of his children, whom he is married to, is the highest good a man can do on earth.


164 posted on 12/22/2014 12:00:23 PM PST by Albion Wilde (It is better to offend a human being than to offend God.)
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To: edpc

True.

Except for the part where porn is the embodiment of the destruction of family and marriage as they have been traditionally defined.


165 posted on 12/22/2014 12:04:43 PM PST by reasonisfaith ("...because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved." (2 Thessalonians))
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To: cva66snipe
I remember hearing this sentence frequently in the 70s: "Playboy?— oh, I just read it for the articles." LOL
166 posted on 12/22/2014 12:09:14 PM PST by Albion Wilde (It is better to offend a human being than to offend God.)
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To: 4rcane

Just say it. It’s welfare. They get free bennies not being married.


167 posted on 12/22/2014 12:11:16 PM PST by sheana
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To: Responsibility2nd

Porn is a symptom, not the cause. The cause is that fewer men want to risk being raped in divorce court. Feminists have given so many advantages to women, and stoked their feelings of entitlement so high, that men are saying “no sale”.


168 posted on 12/22/2014 12:16:05 PM PST by SauronOfMordor (Socialists want YOUR wealth redistributed, never THEIRS!)
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To: Responsibility2nd
Youth today have been socially crippled by technology and are completely and thoroughly awkward, clumsy and inept when thrust into face-to-face contact with strangers, or friends, or even family. The sophisticated and acquired art of civil conversation, verbal repartee, human-to-human interaction, is slowly dying.

Kids carry around "phones", but ironically, don't use them to communicate verbally....they thumb their text and twitters in little hit-and-run snippets, rather than actually TALK for extended periods. They don't even assimilate the varied social interactions displayed on television, because they don't watch television. Who has time to watch TV, when you are busy enlightening the world with your brilliant, 140 character wisdoms? That they ultimately disappear in seconds is immaterial.

Above all, they have taken on a level of narcissism and megalomania that is frightening. Pages and pages of Facebook "selfie" photos and text, where I am, what I'm doing now, where I'm going to be, what I'm going to be doing.....etc., etc., in a nauseating flow of selfishness posted to "thousands" of their supposed intimate "friends"....texting and posting, texting and posting, but never really having the time to absorb, nor care about, the similarly rabid transmissions of their equally self-centered peers.

I see kids from several families brought to the parties of my generation, and some of these kids on the surface look ideally matched, a potentially "hot couple", yet rather than have conversation, a gaggle of them will sit and text all night. Unbelievable.

Sometimes we'll drop in to the local pub....a band is playing, but no one is listening or dancing, because they are all at their tables texting clipped comments in a scrolling, ephemeral stream of inanities, and posting selfies to some personal chunk of "the cloud", thinking that their likewise narcissistic "friends", doing the same thing at the same time, actually care. Who in his right mind could possibly care about such rapidly shifting textual diarrhea? Unbelievable.

I've been to conferences and at the ubiquitous rubber chicken luncheon, seated 10 to a round table, what do our fellow human beings do, especially the youth? Why they are texting and twittering, totally oblivious to the "living blob" seated on either side of them. Unbelievable.

How can we expect these emotional "Robinson Crusoe's", these techno-cripples, devoid of verbal ability, to meet and discuss marriage, if they no longer possess the most rudimentary and basic skills necessary to communicate face-to-face in a coherent and lucid manner?

It's enough to make a person with the future of the race at heart, despair.

169 posted on 12/22/2014 12:18:24 PM PST by Scooter100
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To: Responsibility2nd

Let me get this straight

I disagree with your silly personal interest thread and you respond by accusing me of looking at porn right this second

And not satisfied with that bomb you then progress to the notion I’m watching child porn

And then you declare genius that you hit a nerve...lol

That’s a proportional response in your universe?

I think you’re a damn nut lady....and bitter towards men for I’m sure to you what is a perfectly justifiable reason

And that you live here 24/7

With good reason.

You would a got on well with howlin


170 posted on 12/22/2014 12:30:23 PM PST by wardaddy (glenn beck is a nauseous politically correct conservative on LSD)
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To: Albion Wilde
I remember hearing this sentence frequently in the 70s: "Playboy?— oh, I just read it for the articles." LOL

And Buck Brown's "Granny" cartoon LOL. Hefner was selling his philosophy though and used some porn thrown in to up the sales. If anybody had read Shepherds actual story about Christmas or rather if they had used the literal wording he used Christmas Story would have been R-Rated due to the "Old Mans" language LOL. Ollie Hopnoodle's haven of bliss even more so. Buncha Sunday drivers buncha sona@@@@@@@s.

171 posted on 12/22/2014 12:33:20 PM PST by cva66snipe ((Two Choices left for U.S. One Nation Under GOD or One Nation Under Judgment? Which one say ye?))
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To: gawatchman; ansel12

‘Escort’ services advertise very openly. If you have money, sex is indeed available on demand.


172 posted on 12/22/2014 12:35:18 PM PST by Borges
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To: Responsibility2nd

IMO, porn is used not a cause as to why people aren’t being married, but it is used to compensate for not being married. The reason why they aren’t being married is because we’ve damaged marriage as an institution to the point where it’s just not worth it.


173 posted on 12/22/2014 12:51:10 PM PST by Jonty30 (What Islam and secularism have in common is that they are both death cults)
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To: cva66snipe

I must disagree slightly with your point. I think Hefner did not use porn to sell his philosophy, as if they were two different things. I think his philosophy was one and the same; he used obscenity to sell itself.


174 posted on 12/22/2014 12:54:35 PM PST by Albion Wilde (It is better to offend a human being than to offend God.)
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To: reasonisfaith

Problem is, you need to define porn. Is it just video and depiction of sexual acts? Would you go so far as nudity? Is Michealangelo’s David pornographic or just art?


175 posted on 12/22/2014 1:00:31 PM PST by edpc (Wilby 2016)
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To: edpc

Not a smart question.

You know it when you see it. There’s a lot more that can be explained about this, using higher level thinking if this is necessary.


176 posted on 12/22/2014 1:08:47 PM PST by reasonisfaith ("...because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved." (2 Thessalonians))
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To: reasonisfaith

It is a smart question, aptly pointed out by your answer. Whereas family and marriage have always had clear definitions, pornography can be open to interpretation.


177 posted on 12/22/2014 1:12:20 PM PST by edpc (Wilby 2016)
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To: edpc

In other words, I can provide a clear explanation for why this sort of question is a typical leftist attempt at “look at how brilliant and creative I am for coming up with this amazing question” while in fact is about equal to a low moderate sixth grade level. I’m a bit angry about the leftist influence on acceptance of pornography because this is yet another example where leftist ideology is rather dumb while masquerading as “intellectual.”

I’m not saying you necesarily take this leftist approach. But I know the influence of leftist mediocrity when I see it.

An IQ of perhaps 80 or less would not be able to distinguish between the aesthetic and the erotic. But our system of laws should not be limited to a reflection of the lowest common denominator.


178 posted on 12/22/2014 1:22:43 PM PST by reasonisfaith ("...because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved." (2 Thessalonians))
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To: Albion Wilde

“I know women who have had to spend their entire life savings and then live in poverty to defend against malicious custody suits brought by unscrupulous husbands and/or lawyers who knew she would do anything to keep her children from living at dad’s house with the steady stream of loose women, drink/drugs and porn.”

I’m sure you’re being truthful...but even so, MEN of my generation don’t see themselves as dominating women in the legal system to say the least - and it’s that PERCEPTION (real or not, but more real than not) that has pretty much ended marriage as an option for us.


179 posted on 12/22/2014 1:28:52 PM PST by BobL (I'm so old, I can remember when most hate crimes were committed by whites - Thomas Sowell, 2014)
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To: Borges

Yes, this gives me an idea on how to spend that Xmas bonus. Thanks!


180 posted on 12/22/2014 1:29:38 PM PST by gawatchman
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