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From: adam@mtund.UUCP (Adam V. Reed)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,net.legal,net.singles
Subject: Re: Attorney General's Commission on Pornography
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Date: Wed, 10-Sep-86 11:24:25 EDT
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Posted: Wed Sep 10 11:24:25 1986
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>>[From Commissioner Dietz' statement]
>>The person who follows the patterns of social behavior
>>promoted by pornography is a person for whom love, affection, marriage,
>>procreation, and responsibility are absolutely irrelevant to sexual
>>conduct... We do not need research to tell us that such persons on the
>>average contribute more than other persons to rates of illegitimacy,
>>teenage pregnancy, abortion, and sexually transmitted diseases. 
Mark Terribile (mtx5b!mat) writes:
> If, on the other hand, you are saying that this behavior is not promoted by
> pornography, or by *some* pornogrpahy, or that *no* pornogrpahy promotes this
> behavior, we have a topic for discussion.

What is at issue is the assumption that the omission of certain
behaviors from books and films *promotes* attitudes which would lead to
the omission of those behaviors in real life. Now this assumption is, in
general, demonstrably false. For example, in real life, the requirement
that police detectives be accountable for their actions makes for a
great deal of tedious paperwork. This paperwork in almost never
depicted, and seldom mentioned, in a typical detective story. Does this
mean that detective stories promote the attitude that accountability is
irrelevant to police work? No: a normal person knows that films and
books, like all art, constitute a *selective* re-creation of reality.
The fact that police paperwork is not depicted in detective stories does
not lead the audience to lessen their expectation that the cops will
remain accountable for their actions, and does not lead the cops to omit
paperwork from their schedule.

Now let us suppose that behaviors required by love, affection, marriage,
procreation, and responsibility are indeed routinely omitted from fuck
films. Does that mean that normal people, who know that films are a
*selective* re-creation of reality, will be led thereby to omit those
behaviors from their own sex lives? I see no reason to suppose that
anything of the sort could be reasonably expected to happen. Indeed,
Dietz's statement would be somewhat puzzling if it were not for the fact
that its author spends most of his time studying violent criminals. Now
some violent criminals are notorious for their inability to distinguish
between reality and fiction; their crimes often resemble verbatim
reproductions of behavior read about in books or seen on the screen.
Dietz's assumption is an example of what we psychologists call the
Psychiatric Fallacy: making generalizations about human behavior on the
basis of clinical experience limited to severely disturbed individuals.
And it is reasonable to assume that Mark selected the most persuasive
excerpt from the commission report, so the rest is likely to be worse.

					Adam Reed (mtund!adam)