With regards to the feedback loop they talk about, wouldn't the increase in dopamine due to porn also make people happier, thereby leading to more positivity and positive action?

Also, the feedback loop can't be as simple as they present it because not everyone who watches porn is addicted to it. Despite the video making it seem like an inevitable downward spiral, there must also be some other behavioural and neurological pathways that in many people regulate the behaviour and potential addiction.

They don't mention the studies that supposedly show that watching porn makes you find reality more boring and your mate less attractive. Of course, anecdotally some people do experience this. But what about other people, who find that it keeps them interested in sex and by doing so maintains the attraction for their partner?

Finally, there's no mention of possible benefits to watching porn. Couldn't it be possible that watching porn releases sexual tension and makes the viewer calmer in everyday life? Like a substitution effect!

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Although I agree that men who watch porn excessively isn't exactly a good thing, and yes, they can definitely pick up very sexist messages and ways of thinking from it, I don't think just watching a little once in a while is harmful. I do that myself, and I'm a girl, so maybe I can't speak for men, but if I don't watch or read porn for a long time, I'm less relaxed and my stress levels really build up. Of course, I also read a lot of erotic fanfiction, where the two characters having sex have a prior relationship and it's not just mindless wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, so maybe that makes a difference too. It would also be interesting to see if yaoi has the same affect, since it's porn for women, but also ususally has an emphasis on emotions and relationships, not just the physical stuff.

I am interested and would like to know more. Are the references used to construct this video published in a peer-reviewed publication?

This video is a bit of ideological propaganda, sorely lacking in empirical data, that does not deserve to be posted here uncritically.

The first and worst problem that I see with it is that it fallaciously isolates pornography from among other internet activities as a source of dopamergenic response, Here's the thing - most of the popular ways we spend time online are identical in their impact on our dopamine levels to the way porn is described here. Facebook, Twitter and other social media heavily linked with dopamine spikes. The habits of refreshing emails, posting intimate self-disclosures, visiting dating or hookup sites, and (I'll go there) commenting in public forums like this one - all of those things yield a dopamine response no less acute than that which is sometimes associated with pornography.

See here: http://thecerebralcortex.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/facebook-and-the-dopaminergic-response/
And here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/01/1202129109

Facebook, in particular, accounts for vastly more of the world's time spent online than any other site, including all pornography put together, and imposes far more immediate social and privacy risks to its users. Its addictive qualities are hard to dispute. But are Moffit and Browne decrying the "Facebook epidemic"? Is the potential addictiveness of all forms of web-based social interaction reason enough to problematize it?

Here's where it gets worse. Without any useful comparison points, the video attempts to portray porn consumption as a uniquely problematic behavior by suggesting potential personal outcomes, none of which hold up to scrutiny. The funniest example - "it could lead to finding your partner less attractive." Well, so does familiaritty. And the advancement of age. Irrespective of porn habits, the vast majority of us grow less viscerally excited by our partners over time rather than more (if you're an exception to this rule, consider yourself a profoundly lucky outlier).

To say that professional porn fosters unrealistic expectations of sex and distorted body ideals is fair. At the same time, it is one band of a huge spectrum of information we consume that misleads us about sex and the body. Everything from romance novels and pop songs to Disney cartoons and (most especially, if you ask me) religious dogma contribute to the mess of contradictory and unrealistic notions of sex and relationships that go through our filters. And if you take a random sample out of the wide range of porn that's out there, you'll find a much wider range of body types represented than you will flipping through the channels on TV or the pages of every magazine at your local newsagent. In other words, porn is problematic for the same reason that the rest of the cultural landscape is.

Finally, back to the point about dopamine receptors, one very inconvenient detail is that masturbation stimulates them in the same way without pornography as it does with. Now, watch the video again but replace the word "pornography" with the word "masturbation." What do you get? Something more closely resembling a retrograde Bible-thumping sermon than a scientific lecture. I'd like to think that in 2013 we've moved past that.

Sociologists and readers, no matter how you feel about the content of porn, I implore you to not let your moral biases seduce you into accepting bad science.

Another thing, Gwen - your blog posts so frequently deal with hidden subtexts of gender roles in images that I'm kind of surprised that you didn't deal with the blatant heteronormativity in this video.

Not only did they gender the stick figures (!), for crying out loud, but they made the Male one the sole consumer of pornography and made the Female his sole plausible object of sexual desire. As if the sexually conservative agenda weren't already obvious enough, they (quite badly) drew it out for us in pictures too.

"Sexual activity to produce future life?" this narration is a perfect example of heteronomativity.

The YouTube page for this video lists exactly two references to research on pornography, and one of those is to a TEDx talk.