A University Professor Wants You to Look at Porn for Science

Any excuse to look at porn is good. A new app being developed by researchers asks users to look at pornography for the purposes of scientific research. Professor Taylor Kohut specializes in social psychology at Western University and is working to develop an app that he hopes will map the specific characteristics of an image to determine if it can be considered pornographic and why. "The Porn Genome Project is an attempt to gain a better understanding of content differences in pornography," Kohut told VICE. The app has users flip through images and identify the various details. When they get bored of one, they can check out another. The idea stems from Kohut's background in investigating the mental representations of pornography. This involves techniques like distilling concepts down into discrete, identifiable features.