Hard Copy has previously reported on the rise of AI “dating” and “relationships”. Researchers and academics are reporting that teen boys are increasingly turning to AI “girlfriends” for companionship. Experts warn that if young people start replacing real relationships with AI interactions, they may end up building fewer real-world connections. These real connections are important […]
Gender Transition and Psychological Health
Gender-affirming care for young people has long been advocated on the basis that it improves their mental health and can be life-saving. A new study from Finland, based on the entire population of young people under the age of 23 who were seen at the country’s two gender identity clinics between 1996 and 2019, calls […]
Incels Target Underage Girls
A study of posts to the online incel forum www.incels.is, newly published in the Journal of Sex Research, suggests a heightened interest of this community in justifying sexual access to pubescent girls as young as 12, corresponding to what psychologists classify as hebephilia. One commonly finds messages like “get her young, before some chad her […]
Where Adolescent Sexting is Healthy and Common
A study following 743 Norwegian teens at ages 14, 16, and 18 documents the frequency and nature of their sexting experiences as they mature. Girls were slightly more likely than boys to send sexts: less than 8.8% by age 14, 34.7% by 16, and 40% by age 18. However, girls were much more likely to […]
Why Do Some Women Like Violent Pornography?
It is surprising, but well established in previous research that women are more likely than men to access pornography that emphasizes themes of dominance, submission, bondage, gangbangs, and even rape scenarios. These themes also pervade many romance novels read by women. A recently published study of 561 German women tested their responses to sexually explicit […]
On Men Who Blame Progress for Their Pain
A recently released Netflix documentary on the “manosphere” is making some big cultural waves. In it, Louis Theroux, a British filmmaker and journalist, interviews prominent young and charismatic male influencers who feel victimized and ostracized in a world that’s been improved by feminism and other pursuits toward sociopolitical justice. According to the BBC, the manosphere […]
Saving Face
The Face: A Cultural History by Fay Bound-Albert is a fascinating and recently published cultural anthropological project that explores how human societies have interpreted and valued the face over time. Bound-Alberti analyzes how those interpretations influence identity, power, and social hierarchy in the here and now. The face is also something that contemporary gendered and […]
Do You Regret Your Last One Night Stand?
Why do people sometimes regret one-night stands? An international team of researchers studied this question by conducting a survey with 1,044 participants (649 females, 395 males; more than 40 nationalities) who retrospectively evaluated their most recent one-night stand. Only a minority evaluated their last such encounter negatively: women were more likely to do so, but […]
Same-Sex Relations in the Animal Kingdom
We noticed a plethora of sex stories about non-human animals in circulation while we were organizing our March 1digest. This extensive study from Nature Ecology and Evolution found that same-sex relations are common in nonhuman primate species, and the research illuminated some potential fascinating reasons as to why this may be the case. The study’s […]
How Big a Threat is AI-Generated Child Porn?
An article in the New York Times in July 2025 reported that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) claimed to have received over 485,000 tips about AI-generated child pornography in the first six months of the year, a dramatic increase relative to 2024. Most of these came from Amazon AI Services. But […]