Are Guys Using Facebook as New G-rated Porn?

Facebook is hotter than me. Photo: Borkweb / Flickr

Good news for women who hate internet porn: Men are increasingly bored with the ‘ordinary’ porn. However, the bad news: Men are increasingly getting off to actual females they know via Facebook pictures.

The most common activity on the site is men looking at pictures of women, writes Amanda Marcotte for the Daily Beast as she explains the habit of straight guys using their friend lists to spy photos of cute girls in bikinis — photos that are standard for sharing among friends, but turn into PG-porn for men blessed with too much free time.

“You can stare as long as you want to,” explains one guy, somewhat creepily. “I can print out, bookmark and/or download the images I see on Facebook to look at again and again and again.”

And in some cases, Facebook is becoming a replacement for other, dirtier sites. “Porn seems impersonal and gross,” said a 29-year-old, who says eying photos of women on Facebook feels “semi-enlightened, in a way.”

And while “it’s hard not to feel optimistic if so many men are having fantasies about ‘real’ women,” writes Marcotte, “there’s an undeniable ick factor to the idea of men getting off to pictures you posted for your friends to platonically peruse.”

Marcotte’s evidence is thin and she might have been trying to gin up a trend story, writes Ryan Tate for the Gawker. But the idea that men get off on women to whom they “have a real-life attraction,” as one man tells Marcotte, is basically the founding idea behind the social network.

“It wasn’t just that Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook founder] had put up pictures of hot girls ,” writes Ben Mezrich in his book about the company’s origins, “but [he] offered up pictures of girls whom the kids at Harvard knew, sometimes personally.” [via Gawker and TheDailyBeast]