Intimate Interactions

Last session with Matt Sinkovitz, we talked about his story and I gave some examples from literature about my position around pornography abstinence. Since I did my degree in molecular genetics and not sex research, I first looked up journal impact factors which is how you can tell how important a given scientific publication is. The average journal is below 1, a good journal is anything over 3 but it depends on the discipline, how popular it is, how many journals there are, etcetera. And the gold standard for excellence is anything over 10. As a brief recap, I cited the Archive of Sexual Behaviour (JIF 3.458) where Zimmer and Imhoff in 2020 wrote this article, Abstinence from Masturbation and Hypersexuality. It states a “lack of evidence for negative health effects of masturbation” stemming from “perceived problems with pornography” and “from a psychological and behavioural addiction” where addiction is in quotation marks. It stresses that “higher abstinence motivation was related to a higher perceived impac