Young women find porn more acceptable study says

USAToday.com published a study that says that young women are more accepting of the viewing of sexual material as a way to express ones self sexually.  We can assume that young men are very accepting of sexual material.  This is encouraging in that it will hopefully keep our potential jury boxes and voting ranks filled with sex-positive citizens.

Here's the part of the study that I don't like:

"The study also linked regular porn use
with risky behaviors, Carroll says. Regular porn users were more likely
to go on drinking binges and more likely to have sex with multiple
partners.

Additional studies must be done to determine whether
frequent porn use leads to greater acceptance of such behavior, which
can put students at risk for a host of health problems, such as
alcoholism and sexually transmitted diseases, he says."

You gotta love how this is phrased.  What if this read "regular binge drinkers are more likely to have sex with multiple sex partners"?  You wouldn't be that surprised would you?  The old adage is that "correlation is not causation".  Too many times this is distorted by these studies.  What if I told you that on days where there were high numbers of beautiful women on the beach it was also sunny outside.  Was it the high number of beautiful women on the beach that caused the day to be sunny?  Or was it the other way around?  The way they phrase it implies that regular porn usage causes you to do those things.  They ignore that a myriad of other factors could contribute to all those activities.  Add to that the indisputable fact that there is no certainty in their assumptions.  Also it's worth noting that the sample data polled college students.  I'd say the simple fact of them being college students correlates to a lot of risky behaviors, but I wouldn't say that being a college student causes any of those things because plenty of college students don't participate in risky behaviors.  If we were to believe this study then apparently watching a lot of porn gets you a lot of sex as well.  Hell, we should latch on to that notion and market the hell out of it.  "Got Porn? Got Laid."

However, take myself for example, I'd say that I have way above average porn use, yet I don't really drink at all.  I don't do illegal drugs or have multiple sex partners.  So I represent the contradiction to so many anti-porn assumptions.  You could apply this to just about any statistical study where there isn't 100% indisputable evidence.  So it all becomes somewhat of a moot point.  All these statistical likelihoods are somewhat worthless in just about any application of them.  I'd chalk them up to the "well I'll be damned" category and forget them.  Thankfully we don't live in a Minority Report world.  There was a statistic that came out not too long ago showing the correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks, apparently Jaws feeds when the Ben & Jerry's is flowing.

Unless you have a consensus of say 90% or more there's not a lot you can do.  Let's say that we found that 66% of parents who were sexually molested went on to molest their children.  What do you do?  Do you say that those people sexually molested can't have kids?  Is that fair to the 33% who don't, is it fair to the spouses?  What percentage didn't honestly answer?  Are there any guarantees strong enough to base legislation on?