Ho-Hum.
'the never ending world-wide war against women.'
Thanks for the laughs.

Sweetcorn.
'Males need to raise themselves up to the womens level and not bring the women down to their level.'
So men are at a lower level than women huh? Maybe the wide availability of feminist soap boxes like this one is a factor in the way females treat males, and the way males see themselves.

Jokes aside, I think I aggree with R0bert the most.

The topic has merit in that porn can become addictive and can exploit men and women. The emphasis on 'can'. But the article I fear is pretty much your standard man hating tripe. There is so much more complexity than the authors depiction of men as brainless emotionless monkeys copying and acting out what they see on the internet.

There are plenty of pornographic sites that show women sexually abusing men. Where is the protest against those? Or are we in the familiar territory of double standards, where images of men abusing women must be 'real', while images of women abusing men are classed as 'fantasy'? The truth is that for most of the participants in pictorial pornography of any kind it is a dull casual job, with as much excitement as flipping hamburgers but a somewhat better pay rate.

Or perhaps Caroline Norma could turn her attention to the never-ending flood of 'female pornography' in the shape of romance books, shows and films. This is just as far from reality as male pornography, and just as dismissive of the opposite sex, in the way that it implies sexual activity should be reserved for god-like paragons of the manly virtues. Outrage alert! Let's get this appalling and dangerous nonsense locked away at once!

So its another dark age looming, but only for women of course. What does the author actually want?

A ban on pornography?
A ban on men?
A ban ob boys?

Not clear.

But “men” or “boys” are only portrayed negatively in the article.

No wonder the author is doing a Phd in an Australian University. Negative portrayal of men must be the only thing they currently teach.

There are several things that I could take to task in this article but the thing that really sticks in my craw is that it is appallingly badly-written. Is the author really supposed to be a PhD candidate?

Her first paragraph is a shocker: "We might estimate that more than half of the Australian population now has access to the Internet. Internet usage rates boomed from the year 2000". Who exactly is the "we"?

It may have been better if this 'clever' author had consulted ABS figures which for 2006 show that 63% of dwellings had access to the Internet at the time of the Census (see http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8146.0.55.001/). Given that the respective figure for 2001 was only 35% of Australian dwellings with access to the Internet, then we might estimate that the internet access figure for early 2008 is closer to 70-80%. Or perhaps even higher.

I also wonder why the year 1995 was plucked out of the air as being a birth year of note. I can assure the author that my two boys - born in 1987 and 1992 respectively - have had the Internet play a significant role in their school, home and social lives, and yet - amazingly - are not "drooling at the mouth" downloaders of porn. Far from it.

Additionally what is meant by “pornography”? Does Caroline Norma include the soft-core erotica which no doubt constitutes the bulk of what these teenage boys and men are looking at? And some teenage girls and women as well? These images may involve naked bodies and even naked bodies coupling but leave the humiliation and degradation of women out of the equation.

And as for the notion that “the coming decades are unchartered territory for women” with the shock-horror scenario of mass porn-consuming countries like Australia becoming “uninhabitable for women and girls”, how is this supposed to happen with increasing number of women being elected to Parliament and being involved in making laws and the majority of men still not even consuming any Internet pornography according to her own figures?

Is this wishful dark-thinking on her part?

I have to agree with other posters, who say this article is nothing more than a feminists rant against.

She completly does not mention the fact that there apparently are plenty of websites showing women in sexual acts with women, and using male animals to penetrate every orifice. And yet she states " it is difficult to see it as nothing more than woman hatred"

I suppose she claims that men made women carry out the above mentioned acts.

I would like to see much less porn available but this article is rubbish.

The study finding that “high pornography consumption added significantly to the prediction of sexual aggression” is here http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:17441011 Unfortunately this is only the abstract, but I suspect Caroline Norma may not have read the full article either. I haven't been able to find the full text, but a similar article is available here http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/malamuth/pdf/00arsr11.pdf

According to that article, high porn use does correlate with high levels of sexual aggression in a tiny minority (approx %1) of the sample. High porn use is a risk factor in certain high-risk groups. Caroline asks "Will mass porn consuming countries like Australia become uninhabitable for women and girls?" On the basis of the research, probably not.