ONTARIO, Canada – It seems every other day or so a new “scientific study” purports to indicate something significant about the act of watching porn.

Sometimes, these studies claim watching porn shrinks our brains or causes our penises (for those viewers equipped with such, at least) to stop working. Other times, we’re told watching porn does good things for its viewers, like making them less likely to commit violent sex crimes.

At its most reasonable, “porn science” sometimes tells us essentially nothing at all, due to inherent weaknesses in methodology, survey populations and data sets. Often, this means the best the researchers can say is: “It sure looks to us like in this case the correct conclusion might be Conclusion A — but it still totally could be Conclusion B. We won’t know for sure until we have more data, another big lump of grant money, a time machine and a new espresso maker.”

This month, people who don’t want to believe watching porn is gradually (or perhaps rapidly) turning them into woman-hating rape machines are pointing to a new study published by researchers at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), which suggests (kinda/sorta/maybe) people who watch porn have more positive views of gender equality than those who don’t watch porn.

This conclusion — or perhaps “notion” might be the more appropriate word here — will be hotly contested by people like Gail Dines and Robert Jensen, the latter of whom has famously said “porn is what the end of the world looks like.”

These anti-porn activists/academics will, no doubt, rush to point out weaknesses in the data, seizing on anything they can in order to proclaim the study “bad science.” What they won’t do, ever, is concede their own studies and analyses suffer from the same issues (and then some).

Reading over the UWO study, the researchers score a certain number of credibility points precisely because they avoid the emphatic, conclusory and unequivocal language that seems to be favored by Jensen, Dines and many other researchers who wear their anti-pornography agenda on their rolled-up, activist sleeves.

“Results did not support hypotheses derived from radical feminist theory,” the researchers wrote in the paper’s abstract. “Pornography users held more egalitarian attitudes — toward women in positions of power, toward women working outside the home, and toward abortion — than nonusers of pornography. Further, pornography users and pornography nonusers did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward the traditional family and in their self-identification as feminist. The results of this study suggest that pornography use may not be associated with gender nonegalitarian attitudes in a manner that is consistent with radical feminist theory.”

Weigh the tone of the above paragraph against some of the essentially unsupported, but quite unequivocal, proclamations Dines and her ilk make with regularity, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue the researchers from UWO are less scientific in their approach than are their openly anti-porn peers.

For example, when Dines says something like “The venture capitalists, the banks, the credit card companies are all in this feeding chain. This is why you never see anti-porn stories. The media is implicated. It is financially in bed with these companies,” what you won’t hear from her is any proof, or even anything which could be realistically considered evidence, to support her claim.

Like a Bible-thumping preacher, people like Dines and Jensen often simply declare their own words to be The Immutable Truth — facts painfully obvious to any honest observer, like them, and only debated because of the complicity of Big Capitalism, the Department of Justice and The New York Times in promoting the pornification of the entire known universe.

Of course, to those of us working within the adult industry, some of whom have seen their bank accounts closed due to a mere association with the adult industry — without so much as a claim the account holder did anything illegal or untoward to deserve the closure of the account — Dine’s remarks are absurdly comic.

It’s akin to suggesting the FBI is in bed with its list of most-wanted fugitives because agents are always trying to find them. Pretty suspicious behavior to engage in with known criminals, if you ask me. One should think if the FBI were really aboveboard and all about law and order, as they claim, they’d would want to stay as far away as possible from all those awful fugitives.

The sad part of this is while people like Dines and Jensen probably ought to be regarded as abject nutjobs and summarily ignored, instead they get interviewed incessantly and invited to testify before Congress.

This fact probably presents no real threat to the future of the adult industry, but it’s still indicative of just how useless are some of the things that occupy the time of our nation’s highest legislative bodies. Even five minutes spent listening to hysterical ideologues of Dines’s ilk is five minutes that could have been spent on something more useful — like trimming toenails, conducting an investigation into a U.S. President being sucked off by an intern or renaming a post office.

The good news for anti-porn crusaders like Dines is within the next four days or so, a new study will come out saying porn really is super-duper bad for people. Hell, given all the ways raw data can be contorted, interpreted and reinterpreted, the new anti-porn study might even come to this conclusion based on the same data from the General Social Survey used by the UWO team.

In the meantime, porn will be watched, and reacted to, in ways that are stubbornly opaque to researchers of all stripes, because what they seem unable to absorb, again and again, is human beings are individuals, not data points.

We humans don’t, won’t, never have and never will, all react in the same way to the same stimulus, whether it’s porn, an action movie, a Beethoven composition, or a Miley Cyrus video.

Granted, I don’t really have any empirical data to back up this claim…. But it must be in the Bible somewhere right?