A Canadian researcher set out to study the effects of porn viewing on heterosexual males. He needed a control group—men who hadn't ever viewed porn—and couldn't find any.

“Guys who do not watch pornography do not exist,” Lajeunesse of the university’s School of Social Work said yesterday. So his study examined the habits of 20 university students who consumed X-rated material—that would be all of them—and the impact on their sexual identity and how it shapes their relationship with women.

The study found—with its small sample of mostly white university students blah blah blah—that porn is not a "neurotoxin."

As adults, their sex lives were pretty conventional, almost identical to their parents, Lajeunesse said. In fact, the men distinguished between fantasy and reality; they did not want their partners to look like porn stars, he said. “Well, maybe in their bed one or twice, but not in their life,” he said. Lajeunesse suggested that pornography has been demonized and that its effects are negligible.

If pornography is like a “neurotoxin” that “damages the brain” as some U.S. anti-pornography crusaders claim, then simply showing heterosexual porn to gay men could switch their orientation, he said. As for the persistent perception that pornography breeds crime against women, Lajeunesse said aggressive men don’t need porn as an incentive to be violent.