On Sat, 16 Mar 2002, [iso-8859-1] Cian O'Connor wrote:
[Kendall's porn stuff snipped]
> These seem like difficult things to prove. How do they
> go about it? How do they prove that the sort of people
> who would watch porn, wouldn't be the sort of people
> who would objectify women and be apathetic about
> sexual violence? What controls do they use? How come
> Britain is worse in these regards (being until
> recently a country with a lot of censorship) than the
> Netherlands, or Sweden (where there is very little)?
It seems tempting to just do these cross-national comparisons, but appreciate how this provides ambiguous data: if two nations differ in, say, rape rates, or rates of assaults against women, is this due to differences in access to porn, religious beliefs, economic disparities, or any of thousands of other socioeconomic differences between the nations?
The way social scientists try to provide clearer evidence of cause and effect here is to conduct field or lab experiments. Men are randomly assigned to watch films with different types of sexual or nonsexual content, and afterwards their behavior and/or attitude toward women are measured. In these studies, films with aggressive sexual content clearly provoke more negative attitudes and behaviors towards women.
Does this demonstrate the effects of long-term exposure? No. But some of the "sex positive" crowd don't seem to appreciate the scientific rigor of this work: as with exposure to other forms of aggressive media, aggressive sexual materials do provoke real-life aggression.
Now, does this mean all forms of "pornography" should be controlled or outlawed? I agree with Dennis about that: we should be wary of ceding yet more power over people's lives to the state. However, we do need to keep in mind that aggressive media content--including aggressive porn-- is a public health hazard.
Miles