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From: adam@mtund.UUCP (Adam V. Reed)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,net.legal,net.singles
Subject: The Evidence on Pornography
Message-ID: <780@mtund.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 12-Sep-86 23:11:28 EDT
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Posted: Fri Sep 12 23:11:28 1986
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Meese commission:
> 	In an attempt to approximate a ``real world'' situation, Malamuth and
> 	Check (1981) had male and female subjects view full-length features
> 	as part of a campus cinema showing.  The films --*Swept Away* and
> 	*The Getaway*-- represented sexually violent fims wheras control
> 	subjects viewed a non-violent feature film.  Dependent measures were
> 	obtained after a week in a questionaire presented as a separate
> 	sexual attitudes survey.  These measures included rape myth acceptance
> 	measures, measures on the sexual beliefs, measures on the acceptance
> 	of interpersonal violence as well on adversarial sexual beliefs,
> 	measures developed by Burt (1980).  Results showed that exposure to
> 	sexual violence increased male subjects acceptance of interpersonal
> 	violence against women.  A similar trend, though statistically
> 	nonsignificant, was found for the acceptance of rape myths.  There were
> 	nonsignificant tendencies for females in the opposite directions.  In
> 	addition to the advantage of external validity from the field
> 	experiment, the problem of demand characteristics in some laboratory
> 	situations is quite effectively dealt with in this study.
Me (Adam Reed):
> > darkness, flickering lights, depiction of violence. In the light of
> > what we know about human behavior, pornography was not really
> > necessary to produce the reported result. In all probability, Buggs
> > Bunny cartoons would have worked equally well. The obvious follow up ...
> > which in fact was never done, leading to certain obvious conclusions about
> > the scientific motivation of the investigators) is to eliminate crowding,
> > darkness, and flicker, and then compare the effects of a non-violent
> > sex video with those of a Buggs Bunny cartoon of equal duration. Anyone
> > care to bet on the result?
> > 				Adam Reed (mtund!adam)
Mark Terribile:
> Given the fact that controlled studies *were* done (not by the Commission,
> which had not the wherewithall to fund them), with a reasonable attempt to
> eliminate the effects which you describe, your ``obvious conclusions about
> the scientific motives of the investigators'' may fairly be regarded as
> unsubstantiated and unreliable.

I stand by my observation that *appropriate controls*, namely controls
differing from the "pornographic" stimuli only in the defining
characteristic of "pornography" - sexual arousal, according to Mark -
were never done. The "pornographic" materials used by Malamuth (et al)
were in fact *violent* as well as pornographic, and the element of
violence is known to be capable of eliciting the reported results *by
itself*, i.e. *even in the absence of sexual arousal*. Moreover,
Malamuth uses a significance level of .05, so that *even with proper
controls* the probability of any single contrast yielding a spuriously
significant result would be .05. The study described above, according
to the Meese commission summary, involved at least 5 contrasts , so the
probability of at least one spuriously significant result is .23, about
one in 4. And this is the *best* of the studies cited by the commission.
Not much to go on, is it now?
					Adam Reed (ihnp4!mtund!adam)