Porn Haters are Just Dry Humping
Fundie “news” site One News Now is always reporting one moral outrage or another. A recent article is titled “Family activist says studies show damaging effects of porn use”.
Legal adult pornography, in most cases, appears to have little in the way of negative consequences to society. Therefore, it comes down to a matter of personal choice. The fundies have no right to interfere with other people’s entertainment choices.
Nevertheless, I am always interested in new data. If studies begin to find strong negative effects upon society, then I think it is worth having the discussion of how we, as a society, should respond to the new information. It was with this interest in mind that I read the One News Now article. It says:
A pro-family attorney says a recent study confirms that pornography has devastating consequences.
Well, I’d rather hear from the study’s authors. Attorneys are usually poor social scientists. In fact, they’re the last people you want running the country and making laws!
According to the study, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, 60 percent of males said that if they thought they would not get caught, they would be willing to force a woman to do something against her will, or even rape her.
First of all, I haven’t seen the study, so I don’t know how accurately this is reported. Nevertheless, this is a disturbing statistic. Could 60% of all men be that primitive?
Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Therapy, attributes those findings to prolonged pornography exposure.
OK. She still isn’t one of the study’s authors, but at least she works in the field and has some direct knowledge of these issues. The problem is, all this article does is tell us that she “attributes those findings to prolonged pornography exposure.” Is this attribution soundly based, or does she just have a hunch? One News Now refuses to tell us.
Pat Trueman is with the Alliance Defense Fund.
Trueman is the lawyer mentioned in the first sentence.
He says the wide availability of pornography has been especially harmful to college students.
At this point, the article veers off into left field. Trueman goes on and on about college students and porn, but there is no indication that the study mentioned at the beginning of this article is related. Rather than let him derail us, let’s jump down to the last sentence.
Individuals who have a porn addiction, he says, are prone to mistreating their spouse.
OK. Finally, we have a statement that might somehow be related to the study mentioned at the beginning of the article. Did the study indicate that pornography was the cause of 60% of men wanting to rape women? I don’t know. Nowhere was that ever discussed in the One News Now article.
It’s an incredibly bad article that actually had no facts in it, but it was nevertheless very well crafted to give the impression that pornography causes rape.
Reader Comments: One News Now Indecently Exposed
The comments section is moderated. They will not publish your comment unless it passes a litany of “thou shalt not’s”. That’s why I thought it amazing that they would print a reader comment that pretty much shot their article full of holes.
Reader Bret Fuller had this to say:
The only recent article in the Journal of Research in Personality dealing with pornography is a 1993 article entitled “Sexually Violent Pornography, Anti-Women Attitudes, and Sexual Aggression: A Structural Equation Model” by Demaré Dano, Lips Hilary M. and Briere John.
Wait a minute! You mean to tell me that these fundies are trying to pass off a 14-year-old study as “recent”? Something that pretends to be a news article should have a much narrower definition of “recent”!
In this article they talk about men who watch sexually violent pornography and the sample was university undergraduate men. So, the article above is misleading in that it states that “60 percent of males said that if they thought they would not get caught, they would be willing to force a woman to do something against her will, or even rape her.” This is only true of the males in the sample that watched sexually violent pornography and not those watching pornography that depicts regular sex acts. [emphasis added]
Fuller finishes with:
So the article above 1) doesn’t cite its source 2) uses old data, 3) overstated the conclusions of the study.
Once again, the enemies of pornography are shooting blanks.
Additional Note
The article I pulled the top image from is quite interesting. I recommend you check it out. Among the choice tidbits:
If the supporters of censorship were right, we should be seeing an unparalleled epidemic of sexual assault. But all the evidence indicates they were wrong. As raunch has waxed, rape has waned.
and:
Perhaps the most surprising and controversial account comes from Clemson University economist Todd Kendall, who suggests that adult fare on the Internet may essentially inoculate against sexual assaults.
In a paper presented at Stanford Law School last year, he reported that, after adjusting for other differences, states where Internet access expanded the fastest saw rape decline the most.
December 4th, 2007 at 10:43 am
“If studies begin to find strong negative effects upon society, then I think it is worth having the discussion of how we, as a society, should respond to the new information.”
That’s my attitude. I may not like it if such a correlation was found (my wife and I both do enjoy the pr0n!), but I’m willing to have a conversation about it…
On the other hand, there actually IS data that when owning a hand gun, it is MUCH more likely that you, your children, or somebody else in your family/household will be hurt or die from it than is likely that you will actually use it for self defense, but can you imagine the fundies supporting even the most miniscule of gun control measures?
December 4th, 2007 at 11:48 am
One thing not mentioned is how they define pornography. In art school when my girlfriend was many states away for a week, I… viewed… this quite beautiful classic work of art or was it this one.
December 4th, 2007 at 11:53 am
ParrotLover:
That’s a very good point. Fundies are one of the right-wing sub-groups that are very strongly pro-gun. They want to ban anything that has the slightest perceived risk to their precious children, but they don’t want you to touch their guns, which are a very real risk.
December 4th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Arkonbey:
That’s one of the big problems once you start banning anything. What about stuff that’s not quite so clearly within the scope? What are the edges? What are the definitions? Who decides?
Obviously, if we let the fundies decide, they’ll ban everything including under-dressed mannequins.
December 4th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Prolonged exposure to pornography creates primitive abusers of families and women?!
This is like stating that exposure to driving creates abusers. Or, exposure to eating fast food creates abusers. Or, exposure to sex creates abusers… yada, yada.
This is mentally-deficient information development on the part of Mary Anne.
If you have a high enough number of subjects engaging in a particular behavior (in this case porn-viewing) it will be highly probable that somewhere in this collective lies a sufficient number of scumbags and utter reprobates that will end up as killers, robbers and, in this particular case, abusers.
People who mistreat their spouse will do so whether they are addicted to vice or not. And if one has a capability to abuse a women it is only natural that this shithead abuses alcohol and porn and who knows what else.
I can safely say that porn is viewed here weekly (and with discretion) and my spouse is pretty much spoiled beyond comprehensions. Heck I just sent her cute ass flowers earlier this afternoon.
By the way Parrot, I don’t need to see a moron study telling me that a hand gun in the house spread across 223,000 (fantasy number) homes increases injury or death by firearm. Remove 50% of vehicles, power tools, slingshots, lightning and stairs from a vast swath of the midwest and you’ll see significant declines in human suffering. What the heck would you need a study for?
December 4th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Agile - That was one of my points. If they want to ban porn to “save the children” why aren’t they also calling for the banning of vehicles, power tools, slingshots, lightning (funny!), stairs, and guns? My second point was that they are taking a study and distorting the hell out of it to twist it to fit their agenda when there are already studies that very clearly express a different method by which they can “save the children” but they are quite opposed to it. It shows their hypocrisy. They are starting at the conclusion (pr0n is bad) and shoehorning an explanation and flat-out lying about supporting evidence… Sort of like how they do with Intelligent Design!
December 4th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Parrot-
Gotcha.
December 12th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
The “moral” and “religious” and other self-rightious “agendas” cannot be debated by using the agenda’s agenda, i.e., their vocabulary. Hypocrisy is not an argument against them. They suffer the cardinal sin, so to speak, as most people do: they BELIEVE and leave the knowing to no one. People believe in Global Warming for no greater reason than that “they” say it is so. That there is no evidence of global warming is irrelevent. As for handguns and guns in the home, it should be emphasized that if someone dies from the gun, then the gun WORKS as it was meant to. As for porn and rape: if a porn encourages a rape, the porn-viewer must be inclined to rape in the first place to realize any encouragement. But never mind! Believers believe.
December 22nd, 2007 at 12:40 pm
I am a conservative although not fundamentalist. I am a deout Christian although not a Bible-thumper. Pormnography is a knee-jerk specious issue full of edicts and pronouncements that sound plausible, but lack validity on the far-left and the far-right. Anti-porn feminists who view all men as the enemy say it will make men rapists, and the Kookie right says it will make men beat their woman. These are both patently absurd and patently false. Nothing scares the living be-Jesus out of people more than S-E-X as an issue. Humans want to keep this genie in a bottle because they are so afraid it will overtake them somehow. We are terrified that if it runs rampant through the streets we will be out of control individually and societally. We don’t know what to do with sex so we try to reign it in response to our communal fears. I don’t have the answers. I just know we all need to learn to grow up enough to get past our communal psychoses over this on BOTH the left and the right. I am a conservative and it is still taboo in our over-sexed society to talk openely about sex. Maybe we all need to grow up.
December 26th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
BIGGUY - “humans want to keep this genie” is a bit broad. There are plenty of (non-American) cultures in the world that do not view sex as this evil thing that needs to be suppressed. Additionally, sexually “open” societies tend to have less rape and sexual abuse. So, really, we have the answers. But since sex is a sin and the fundies have megaphones and even non-fundy parents get all paranoid about little Jimmy seeing a titty on the teevee (mostly due to misinformation from the fundies), we have the laws we have. Same goes for underage alcohol consumption and so on.