Surf pornography 'for science'; UWO prof wants to sequence 'porn genome'

[Five Inch Taint]

LONDON, Ont. - Their goal: nothing less than cracking the “porn genome.”

Their method: create fake company websites full of sex jokes to arouse curiosity, then launch a crowdfunding campaign where donations result in real sex toys from the fake companies.

Use that money to create an online platform and use crowdsourcing to get hundreds of people to analyze the thousands of genes that make up pornographic images.

Their mantra: Do it. For science.

London, Ont., researchers with an ambitious goal are embarking on an unusual campaign that sidesteps traditional grants — and the politics that go with them — by tapping ordinary people on the Internet to help do for pornography what DNA did for zoology.
“It is quite possible that we are completely out to lunch, I will throw that out there,” said researcher Taylor Kohut.

Kohut is a social psychologist at Western University who’s studied pornography for about 10 years, although this project is something he and others are doing on their own and isn’t connected to the university.

Kohut has faced his fair share of criticism for studying pornography, a widely popular but widely denounced activity for centuries. One anti-porn crusader calls him the Marlboro Man of porn.

“It is not always a pleasant place to be in, when you are that guy that does those things that people don’t agree with,” Kohut said.

That doesn’t bother him as much as the politics of pornography research that can predetermine results.

“There is a very strong component of our research community that is very anti-pornography and does its best to find ways to convey that it is terrible,” he said.

“And then a minority of people that say, ‘Well there are some terrible things that are there probably because of pornography but you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You are not really looking at your data carefully.’ And that is the group I tend to fall in.”

As troubling to him as a researcher, and a related issue, is the lack of a clear and comprehensive definition of pornography.

“I study what porn is. I study how it impacts the way people think, feel, behave and I would like to one day study why it is people choose what they do and not other things. To answer all of those questions you need to have an understanding of content,” he said.

The current research into pornography uses a butcher’s cleaver rather than a scalpel to dissect a huge body of work, Kohut said.

For example, it’s common for researchers to say that 88% of pornography is violent. But that percentage includes everything from rape to two adults agreeing to spanking, he said.

“It is unlikely to me as a psychologist that watching one type of material that is consensual would lead to the same sort of outcomes as forced sex. That seems implausible,” he said. “We want to be able to tease things apart in a much more precise way, so that we can study it. We want to know who uses what kind of material and why.”

To tease out the elements of porn, Kohut first needs money. Limited funding for research and erotophobia — a fear of sex — can both play a factor in being denied research dollars.

“So far we have not been successful in pushing this sort of agenda. I have tried a couple of times,” Kohut said.

So the researchers are going a different route: crowdfunding. And they took a back road to get there as well, by creating an online guerrilla campaign, the kind of curiosity-building effort used at times to promote movies and video games.

The campaign began several months ago with the appearance online of a company called Proctor and Lever, a “medical research center in Wilmington, Delaware.”

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[Frothy Afterbirth]

Why not just ask pornhub of their anonymous user data and searches? They usually put out them out publicly.