You have been comparing yourself to a casting call

I want to make a statistical argument, and I want to make it without any moralising, because the moralising is what has made this conversation useless for twenty years.

Set aside every question about whether pornography is good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, art or exploitation. None of that is the subject here. The subject is a sampling problem, and it is one of the cleanest examples of a sampling problem you will ever encounter in ordinary life.

Here it is. An adult performer is not a randomly selected man. An adult performer is a man who was selected.

That is the whole article. Everything else is elaboration.

What selection does to a distribution

Imagine an industry that hires professional basketball players and broadcasts them constantly. If that were the only place you ever saw human beings standing next to each other, you would form a sense of average height that was catastrophically wrong — not by a little, but by something like a foot.

You would also, crucially, not experience this as a distortion. You would experience it as observation. You would feel like someone who had seen a great deal of evidence, because you would have seen a great deal of evidence. It would simply all have come through the same filter.

Now notice the difference between the basketball case and this one. Everybody understands that professional athletes are selected for extremity; nobody watches the NBA and concludes they are short. The selection is legible, discussed, joked about, printed on the screen next to the player's name.

In the case we are actually talking about, the selection is invisible and never named. There is no caption. Nobody says, before the scene, "the following individual was chosen from a large applicant pool partly on this specific characteristic." So the filter operates silently, and the viewer's brain does what brains do with silent filters, which is treat the sample as the population.

Three more distortions stacked on top of the first

Selection is the big one, but it is not working alone. Three technical effects compound it, and all three run in the same direction.

1. 1.Lens and framing. Focal length changes apparent proportion — this is why portrait photographers use particular lenses and why a wide-angle shot from close range makes whatever is nearest the camera look larger relative to everything behind it. Commercial production is shot deliberately, by professionals, to be flattering. There is no version of this where the framing is neutral.
2. 2.Comparative context. What is in the frame alongside determines apparent scale. This is the oldest trick in visual composition and it does not stop working just because you know about it.
3. 3.Your own viewing angle. You have observed your own body, for your entire life, from directly above — foreshortened, at the precise angle that minimises apparent length. You have observed every other one side-on. This one is worth naming loudly, because it is not a media effect at all. It applies in a changing room, in a photograph, everywhere. You have never once seen your own from the angle you have seen everybody else's.

The arithmetic of exposure

Now put a clock on it, because the scale of the effect is what makes it different from every previous generation's version of this.

A man in 1975 might see a handful of these images in a year, on paper, in poor reproduction. A man today can see more in one evening than his grandfather saw in a lifetime, in high definition, from an effectively unlimited catalogue, from roughly the age at which he first has an unsupervised device — which is to say, from before the age at which he finishes developing.

That is not the same phenomenon at a higher volume. It is a different phenomenon. A reference distribution built from ten thousand selected observations, absorbed during adolescence, is not a bias you can talk yourself out of with one article. It is the substrate your intuitions are made from.

Which is why simply telling a man the average is about 13 cm frequently does nothing. He hears the number, he checks it against ten thousand stored observations, and the observations win. They are more vivid, more numerous, and more emotionally weighted than a figure in a paragraph. Vividness beats statistics; it always has.

So what actually shifts it

Here is my honest view, and it is more limited than the confident advice you will find elsewhere.

You do not fix a corrupted reference distribution with a single fact. You fix it the way you fix any miscalibrated instrument: with repeated exposure to correctly labelled measurements, over time, until the new distribution has enough weight to compete with the old one.

That is genuinely why this site works the way it does. Not one number, delivered once, in a reassuring tone. One number a day, from a named study, with the sample size and the method attached, guessed at first and then corrected — because a guess you got wrong is remembered far better than a fact you were handed. That is not a design flourish; it is the oldest result in the learning-science literature. Prediction, then feedback. Every single day.

It will not undo ten thousand observations in a week. It does, in my experience and in the messages this site gets, do something noticeable in about a month: the internal sense of "typical" starts to drift back toward where the clinicians have always said it was.

The part I want to say gently

If you are reading this and recognising yourself, I want to be careful, because this is the point in an article like this where someone usually starts issuing instructions about your habits and your character.

I am not going to. You did not do anything wrong by having eyes. The filter was invisible by design, nobody labelled it, and you were young when it was installed. Forming an inaccurate estimate from a biased sample is not a moral failure — it is the correct behaviour of a healthy brain given bad inputs. It is what any statistician would predict and it is what any of us would have done.

What you can do is stop treating the estimate as evidence. It was never evidence. It was a casting call, filmed well, shown to you ten thousand times.