Will Internet Pornography Harm or Benefit Our Society?

There is one benefit and one harm that I see. Everything else is hogwash or not substantiated reliably (like links between rape and porn - you will find studies both ways).

Benefit: Free expression. Porn has more than once spearheaded the Free Speech movement and done a lot of good in this area, and porn is a big enough industry to pay for this fight, contrary to Free Speech idealists.

Harm: Porn depicts sex in a way that is not like we experience in the real world. Teens watching too much porn too early will form a wrong impression of what sex should be like. Our sex lives are already modified by porn (how many girls shave? compare that to 10 years ago).

All in all, I'm not sure about the overall effect. Like most things, it's difficult to say "good" or "bad", unless you have black-white world-view to guide you.

There are still a lot of articles online "explaining" the benefit of pornography:
http://ask.metafilter.com/94450/What-...

My conclusion is "out of sight, out of mind". If you don't watch it, you don't realize you need it. Go out and have some sports or healthy sex, then you don't need porn. But of course some might argue that healthy sex is hard to come by. I concur.

This is a pretty interesting prediction... I don't know how it is possible that porn can "benefit" a society, except in the way of financial benefits for those who produce the porn films/sites/whatever.

I don't have any updated stats on me right now, but I remember reading articles before that tie pornography with sex crimes. And even if some argue that the link is more of a correlation than cause and effect, there is no doubt that porn directs people's attention (esp younger males) away from other more meaningful activities such as sports and charitable volunteering.

I found a few older articles on the web about how pornography can benefit us. It is very interesting, though I cannot say I agree:
"Pornography has its benefits"
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view....
"Pornography benefits women, both personally and politically"
http://www.wendymcelroy.com/xxx/prefa...

I found more stat about the industry in 2007: http://www.everything-eli.com/inmylif...

* 89% of porn is created in the U.S.
* $2.84 billion in revenue was generated from U.S. porn sites in 2006
* $89/second is spent on porn
* 72% of porn viewers are men
* 260 new porn sites go online daily

What a big business. Regarding the social impact, can we compare it against tobacco and gambling? Perhaps the government is addicted to the tax from the industries as well.

Hard to argue porn will benefit our society. But it will always be around.

Porn is kind of like junk food. It won't kill you right away, but if you have too much, it will slowly eat your life away. It is something nobody needs, but a lot of people want it (yes, it's pretty obvious just by looking at the numbers above).

But we are living in an "I want" society. It is hard to take that away completely.