I’ve spent a lot of this week collecting references for some papers I’d like to write. One attempts to challenge the very pervasive belief that being aroused by fiction sexually, emotionally, sentimentally or fearfully is somehow fundamentally negative – that it impairs our judgement completely and renders us quivering idiots (no, that’s not quite how I word it in the paper). The other seeks to defend the seemingly indefensible: the eroticization of fictional depictions of rape. So, I’ve been collecting a lot of papers, research from a wide set of disciplines. I’ve also being paying more attention to debates I’ve, until recently, had little interest in.
Take the debate that porn leads to rape. The more porn, the more easily accessible it is and the harder-core it is, the more it will influence people and cause them to rape. Well, no. This turns out not to be true in the general population. In fact, several large scale studies in various countries indicate that the opposite is true. (D’Amato, A. (2006). Porn up, rape down. Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series.). In a significant survey of many of the studies done on this topic, Ferguson puts it thus:
Real world rape data clearly does not support the belief that pornography contributes to rape in a negative sense. Rather data in the USA, Europe, and Japan supports the catharsis hypothesis that pornography is inversely related to rape. However, as this data is correlational in nature it is not possible to make a causal attribution
(Ferguson, C. J. (2013). Pornography. In Adolescents, Crime, and the Media: A Critical Analysis, Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development (pp. 141–158). New York, NY: Springer New York.)
A study done specifically on the effects of pornography consumption on sex offenders ( Mancini, C., Reckdenwald, A., & Beauregard, E. (2012). Pornographic exposure over the life course and the severity of sexual offenses: Imitation and cathartic effects. Journal of Criminal Justice, 40(1), 21–30.) suggests that adolescent exposure to porn has some correlation to levels of victim harm, but that,
…although findings from the current study support the view that pornographic exposure (during adolescence) can lead to increased victim harm, little conclusive evidence exists to support the view that pornography use consistently impacts an offender’s propensity to become violent during a sexual attack. On the contrary, findings from this study also highlight null effects—that is, offenders who viewed pornography during adulthood did not inflict significantly more more violence during the crime. Not least, results indicate as well a potentially beneficial, cathartic effect—offenders who used pornography immediately prior to the offense were significantly less likely to physically injure their victims.
We now have some very useful data. Exposure to porn doesn’t cause people to rape, but there is a correlation where adolescent exposure is concerned. This gives us good guidance: we should not let our children watch porn. That’s good to know, since most responsible parents do their damnedest to limit their children’s exposure to it anyway. However, the study doesn’t say that adolescents who watch porn become sex offenders. It says that sex offenders who’ve been exposed to porn during adolescence are affected. This is still cor-relational, not causal. There are very probably a lot of reasons why people become sex offenders, and it would be foolish to heap all the blame on porn, or even a small portion of it. We know this because, over the centuries and all across the globe, people have been raping other people since time immemorial, and very few of them have been exposed to porn at any age.
Although data shows that rape rates are coming down (D’Amato, 2006), people have refuted the veracity of this data by arguing that it is based on reporting rape, and that perhaps levels of reporting have gone down. However, this is an argument that cuts both ways. It could very easily be argued that reporting has gone up, since being a victim of rape is no longer as socially stigmatized as it once was. In the absence of any evidence that there has been a dramatic fall in reports of rape in the past 25 years, I will take the good news.
Now, if we could just widen the effect of whatever it is we’re doing and exert some influence on places like the Democratic Republic of Congo – which at the moment seems low on democracy and sky high on incidences of horrific and violent rape – we’d be even better.
But… many won’t. I’ve encountered a very shrill, insistent dismissal of research results in some of the ‘rape culture’ discussions I’ve come across. These voices are well-intentioned. They believe passionately in trying to keep women safe from harm. They are fighting for a world in which women have better lives. And it’s not as if they are making a fuss over nothing. Women are getting raped. There are many, many women the world over living awful, miserable lives. But how does doggedly clutching on to a belief that may not be true help these women? There are reasons why men rape and why women, proportionally, are treated so poorly in society. It’s important to find out the real causal factors and deal with those. But my suspicion is that porn is an easier enemy to take aim at than the real ones. The social and psychological mechanisms that allow one person to see another as a non-entity whose feelings don’t matter, whose life doesn’t count, whose success should be feared are probably very complex. They were around long before even photographic pornography began. We’ve been treating each other like shit for centuries.
On an equally emotive and contested topic, a large longitudinal study (11,000 participants) has just been published on the psycho-social effects of TV and video games on children. (Parkes, A., Sweeting, H., Wight, D., & Henderson, M. (2013). Do television and electronic games predict children’s psychosocial adjustment? Longitudinal research using the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Archives of Disease in Childhood.) It turns out that there is very little, only on TV watching, not game playing, and only when children watched 3+ hours of TV per day.
I’m not a huge fan of porn. I find it facile, artificial and annoying. Similarly, I find video games – especially the really violent ones – disturbing. Intuitively, I would have thought that porn might cause some men to be more likely to commit rape. Intuitively, I would have thought spending hours shooting shit up on a videogame would make children more violent. It would be gratifying to believe that my aesthetic judgement is borne out in statistics that show how evil these things are.
But it turns out my intuition is wrong, they’re not. And personally, I’m happy to hear this, because it means that we aren’t doing awful shit to ourselves consuming this stuff. What disturbs me is the number of people whose agenda so depends on these results being different that they simply discount them and ignore them and keep on repeating and disseminating blatantly false information.
And if you thought this had any political stripe, you’d be wrong. Because there are literally millions of people who refuse to acknowledge that global warming is causing a rise in sea levels, even when the scientific data is overwhelming. (Bulkeley, H. (2013). Cities and climate change. Routledge.)
I don’t think simple confirmation bias explains this. I think people become dogmatic about what they want to believe, what seems ‘right’ to them, and they weave it so deeply into their lives that to consider they might be mistaken or working without valid information threatens their sense of self and sometimes, even, the purpose of their lives.
I guess the purpose of this post is just to say that although there is nothing wrong with questioning the data that science provides, it is also equally important to question ourselves. Why do we want something to be true/not true? What is our emotional investment in the debate and is that getting in the way of accepting new information and reconsidering our earlier assumptions?
Because if we cannot do this, then what is the point in having a debate at all? What is the point in using data at all, if the aim is only to gratify our egos by being ‘right’.
Very interesting compilation, thank you. I’d read some of the older research reports, but this is not a topic on which I’m current (though I am familiar with the highly consistent lack of effect of violent TV — the child might be imitative of a TV scene while being violent, but is not particularly more likely to be so). There’s also new research showing the same nothing on violent video games (can find a source if you like).
On a personal note, I find overly aggressive porn of any stripe, including rape porn, viscerally unpleasant and will not engage with it. But that is not an argument for censorship.
This is not meant as an equivalence, but a second thought this triggered: I’m not aware of studies on “virtual” child porn (*waves to FBI*), perhaps in large part because it would be extremely challenging research to do in most societies that might want to. But I wish it could be studied — there’s at least a plausible hypothesis that it could reduce molestation and exploitation.
I bet there are Japanese studies on it. But they often publish in Japanese, and don’t get translated.
I think you’re right that people become dogmatic. Part of it is that many people do not know how to assess data quality. Stepping back and imagining people reading multiple contradictory news articles, perhaps without access to the original papers or knowledge of how to assess them if they had access, it’s easy to see why the gut feeling would become so important. I often check things for my mother, for example, because as a former science journalist I have training in what marks quality data. I’ve noticed from her perspective that she perceives everyone as saying, “But science!” and can’t always tell what’s behind these various claims. While things like peer review obviously aren’t perfect, it’s important to pay attention to whether information is part of a scientific consensus, etc, and I think many people don’t know how to do that. (In your climate change example, there are still certain people with credentials who say it’s not happening, and I think casual observers struggle to decide how much weight to give that).
And I think you’re absolutely right that it’s important to ask ourselves what we personally have at stake in any debate. A nuanced discussion might involve speaking the way your previous commenter does, who separates personal reaction from discussion of the data but addresses both. I think some people feel silenced by data, so they try to deny it. It’s important, I think, to affirm that any individual can still have feelings (for example, to dislike certain types of porn), independent of whatever data says about something’s effect on society. It’s fine to say “that makes me feel this way or that way,” but maybe it’s harder to do that when it feels individual rather than societal. I think there’s a strong impulse to generalize one’s feelings, to feel better about a claim if it can be made for everyone (“all people need to eat more vegetables” or whatever).
You make a very good point. In cases of counter-intuitive results, feelings can be at great odds with whatever reality the data might show. And that is a problem.
To take it out of an emotive space: I really hate – I mean HATE – reality TV. I have very strong feelings against it. I think the dissemination of public cruelty and humiliation as mass entertainment and spectacle feeds a very nasty part of our social psyche that doesn’t need nurturing. No amount of data saying it doesn’t have any lasting negative effect is not going to make me hate it less.
RG,
Thus the debate goes on… Obviously adolescence are affected by what they ‘take in’, as anyone. After all corporations wouldn’t throw billions to the advertising industry and ad agencies wouldn’t be around. Teens desire to learn how things are done. A boy in his teens knows nothing about sex and the emotional make up of a female. It’s logical that he desires to learn and know about sex, curiosity moves naturally to porn, therefore after watching hours of internet porn what would be his conclusion? Women are objects to be used, its his reality until he gains real experience with a real woman with real emotions. The same is true of TV & video games, these things can become an individuals ‘reality’ and thus affect them adversely. Here in the states there is an incredible amount of advertising for the military. “Be all you can be.” “The navy, a global force for good” “The few the proud the marines”. I read an article about when the Sean Connery movie “The Hunt for Red October” was released, young men were lining up, they all wanted to be submariners, the navy had to turn them away. After returning from a military tour, many find the reality of the experience to be complete opposite of the advertisement. Yet, there is a percentage that obviously embrace and buy into the propaganda fed to them, a large percentage I might add. I also believe there is a percentage that embraces, conscious or not, the propaganda that porn feeds the viewer. That is, it objectifies women. Eventually leading these viewers to confusion, frustration, anger, and finally the rape scenario may or may not occur. I personally find internet porn to be like fast food, (remember I live in the USA) it’s quick, convenient, cheap, and after its eaten you ask yourself “Why did I do that?” No value or real substance.
The Congo situation you mention is very sad and I believe its the combination of environment and choices made by the individual, both of these aspects build on each in a negative way. I believe the responsibility there lies with the men and their idea of what a real ‘man’ is and the traits they pass on to the young boys. So many males father children yet refuse to be a “Man” by raising and teaching the boy right and wrong, that takes tremendous time and effort.
Global warming, I do not trust surveys, and I do look at scientific data with skepticism. Are all studies free from bias? Everyone has an agenda…(Your probably squirming in your seat right now)…with that said, there is obviously something going on. When the world has billions of automobiles dumping tons of co2 into the air something is gonna happen. The demand for power and convenience is the cause and will have an effect. I believe the immediate environmental concern has to be Fukushima and the disturbing quantities of radio activity material being dumped out into *our* environment. Oh, not to worry Tepco has it under control.
Corporations…*Shivers*
To answer the questions at the end of you excellent essay is this. The corporations and masses fear change, yet change is inevitable. We as individuals must take in information, weigh, process, then act accordingly with reason. Many individuals will move the mass…the debates must go on!
Thank you for your words, RG!
~TFP
Thanks for your very thoughtful comment, TFP.
Can advertising change people’s minds? Quite clearly it does. And could a constant diet of porn change the way young men or women interact with one another sexually – undoubtedly. However, your conclusion that it would be: “Eventually leading these viewers to confusion, frustration, anger, and finally the rape scenario may or may not occur.” This seems not to be borne out by the research. And that should be a honking big red light to researchers and the public that the act of rape has probably got very little to do with sexual arousal and more to do with two extremes: raging feelings of entitlement or extreme sense of powerlessness. When you add the ability to depersonalize to the mix, my guess is that is where the puzzle lies.
I don’t know if you read the Mancini, C., Reckdenwald, A., & Beauregard, E. (2012) study, but there was one very surprising result. In cases where adult offenders raped shortly after consuming porn, there was a very significant drop in the violence present in the attack. Just musing here, but I would say this could suggest that the ‘energy’ powering rape is actually surprisingly unsexual in nature, and that the sexual arousal actually ‘bleeds off’ some of those energies.
Rape is a very complex thing. It is semiotically very powerful. It has come to stand, in our culture and our languages, for a very special kind of violence that effectively erases the victim. Ask yourself why we don’t see rape in the light of other physical violence committed by one person on another? It’s not as if, in terms of actual physical damage, a serious beating in an alleyway can’t cause more physical harm. It’s the psychological harm it does to the victim that makes it such an ugly crime.
It is worth remembering that the way we see rape – as a greater violation than other forms of physical violence – is not a universal truth. It’s socially constructed. Personally, I feel that in elevating this crime, historically and culturally, as heinous above other crimes of physical violence, we have done a disservice to both the victims and empowered the victimizer in a way he (usually) doesn’t deserve.
Culture has made rape into the bigger gun. And then told rapists how to use it.
“Culture has told rape is the bigger gun.”
That is an interesting point that causes some pondering. Several years ago in my community a woman was kidnapped from a local grocery store parking lot raped by two men and released unharmed physically, other than the rape, though a horrible fearful experience I’m sure. The men, not being to bright, were apprehended because the woman was very observant of the men and her surroundings. They were convicted and given 25 years to life in prison, remaining incarcerated to this day. Several months ago a man was beaten nearly to death in a local bar, he was in a comma for weeks and will have life long injuries. The offender was given five years in prison and released after 14 months. Crime and punishments have baffled me at times, I know there is much that goes into the sentencing but sometimes it doesn’t make sense to me.
Or anyone. Sentences for convictions of possessing child porn (not making it or distributing it – just having it) are longer than any crimes other than kidnapping and murder. They seem to be based on our collective social outrage rather than as a reflection of direct harm done.
None of this surprises me, especially the tendency of people to be close-minded to anything that goes against their sense of what is ‘right’. That, in itself, is the cause of much of the misery in the world.
Isn’t there a natural sense of right and wrong imbued to a certain extent?
You’ve asked a question that philosophers have argued about for centuries. Is there a natural sense of right and wrong? Is it given to us by God, or is it an agreed-upon set of values we have constructed as a culture?
The one thing we know for sure is that there is no ‘natural’ about it. Take a look at nature, at natural selection, at biological competition. Nature is hideously cruel.
Perhaps that poses another question, are we different from animals? We as humans know we are humans. Does a chimp know he is a chimp or a dog or cat know what they are, when they look in the mirror? Then again I agree that nature is cruel yet man constructs far greater horrific cruelties than found in nature.
I think there is some evidence that some primates do exhibit what would be considered self-recognition. And certainly, mating would be very unsuccessful if animals couldn’t differentiate themselves and their species from others. But as to how conscious that is, it’s very hard to tell. We study things from a human-centric position. We ask human questions and observe in human ways.
I think it is fair to say that humans are animals, but very sophisticated ones. That doesn’t completely inure us from nature, but it does remove us, to some degree, from certain very basic natural environmental pressures. But it seems we’re very adept at constructing new, artificial ones for ourselves.
But when it comes to a ‘universal’ morality, I have to say, I don’t think there is one. I think we construct sets of moral precepts through culture and language and social organization – and this is why they change over time.
Consider that one of our most dearly treasured concepts of fair social order – democracy – originated in a culture (Ancient Greece) where slavery was ubiquitous and there is no evidence that they felt any moral qualms about it at all. We want the world to be black and white, but it isn’t. We’re a messy species.
But, just because we are the creators of those rules instead of a deity or some universal natural order, I don’t think this makes them any less valid. I’d argue they are more valid because they are, in a way, a negotiated set of moral precepts.
As to whether man constructs the greater cruelty, I’m split on that. We do some awful things, but nature brings about total extinctions of species without blushing. On a personal level, I’d say that jewel wasps and certain types of parasites are pretty fucking nasty.
Intuition is useful when answers are needed quickly, but it’s not always good for more complex problems. There have been a couple of books about this recently; Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Daniel Gardner’s The Science of Fear. Both cover similar ground, though I thought that Gardner’s was easier to follow. For them, intuition is fast thinking; slow thinking requires us to (slowly) work through a problem, rather than accepting the immediate answer.
Of course, it’s said that we are all under time pressure today, so it could be argued that we rely more on fast thinking; we get semi-digested gobbets of what are presented as facts, though so often these turn out to have been prepared to fit the agenda behind the supposedly neutral organization. These ‘facts’, or as politicians today tend to call them, ‘the truth’, are little more than propaganda and aggressive lobbying, but it can be difficult to recognise this.
Climate change ‘deniers’ have jumped on the ‘fact’ that temperatures haven’t risen during the last 17 years. Curiously, I’ve never been clear if such people accept that climate change has happened in the past—think ice ages—and that it’s almost inevitable it will happen again. No, the lack of temperature rise ‘proves’ it’s all a myth (conveniently for business and commerce); and we’ll ignore that the rise in Arctic temperature hasn’t been factored in to the calculations.
A few years ago, Camden council blamed Spearmint Rhino for the increase in rape in their district. This was forensically dissected by Dr Brooke Magnanti, who was able to show that rape had decreased after the club had been opened. But then, the council seems to have wanted to close the club.
It’s not just confirmation bias, lack of any numerical ability or statistical knowledge, or even attempting to fit the facts to your agenda which are problematic; Wikipedia has a long and alarming list of our cognitive biases. There are so many that it’s amazing that we can sometimes actually make a correct choice or judgement.
So. why do we want to be right? Well, some scientists have spent a life pursuing their interest. For example, George Cantor (I think it was he) attempted a complete formulation of mathematics, as the apex of his work. Unfortunately, Russell pointed out that Cantor’s work led to an irreducible paradox; Cantor, unsurprisingly, found this hard to swallow, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to create a ‘work around’. Gödel’s ‘Incompleteness theorem’ hadn’t been discovered then; it might have provided an escape route.
So, what is left of us if our carefully constructed (world) view can be destroyed at a stroke? Surely, we are unwilling to accept this, and will ‘fight our corner’; to destroy our work is to destroy us, to say that despite our labours, it was all in vain. It took several decades before Neils Bohr’s quantum theory achieved general acceptance. When asked why, Bohr is reputed to have replied, ‘they all died’. Some of us have such cherished ideas, that we simply cannot face the consequences of their being wrong; we continue in a state of ‘denial’. And, of course, aging and the hardening of our beliefs is associated with an hardening of the cerebral arteries, making us even more resistant to change; a sort of vicious circle.
I wonder if this idea, that we hold onto our cherished ideas as a way of preserving our conception of ‘self’ could be taken a step further. Suppose it becomes apparent that one (or more) of our beliefs are shown to be based on a false premise; we can choose to utterly reject this newer belief, and let the old ones become completely entrenched. Or, we might recognise that, yes, these dangerous new ideas are correct and what we believed was wrong, therefore much of our thinking and our ‘self’ was wrong; might one response be a collapse of mental cognition in the face of overwhelming forces, with a ‘mid-life’ crisis as the expression of this?
Interesting point korhomme,
Consider an individual that has been taught something their whole life, preached it as truth, because it was their honest belief. The individual is recognized by others by his/her perceived truth in the community, has a good reputation, and is well respected. Yet as the individual gets older they begin to learn new things and deep within sees their truth differently, much differently.
Imagine the internal struggle. Do you see the great social issues issues involved with their family, friends, and community?
Don’t you think as we get older, we may soften and realize there is a larger picture other than or own ideas and perceptions? I’ve grown to respect sincerity even if I truly believe it’s wrong, on the other hand, bitter insistence is the root of many difficulties.
Wow. Excellently put, Korhomme!
I am curious about these studies…have the effects of pornography only been studied in males or was the cohort inclusive of females too? It seems to be forgotten in this article that males are not the only viewers of porn or rape offenders. x
That’s an interesting question. The paper on sexual offenders was, if I remember correctly, all male, but you can google them and look them up. I believe the abstract defined the parameters of the study. The other refs – both the book chapter and the legal article are based on a collection of all the studies they could find done to date, and would be simply looking at either reported rapes or convictions and comparing them with porn access in a society, i.e. US, UK, Japan, etc.
Although there certainly are sex offenses committed by women, (see this literature review http://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/research/forum/e082/082m_e.pdf ) the numbers are very low (I’d hazard a guess that in cases of statutory rape, it’s almost never reported). This may be because sex abuse committed by women often goes unreported or unprosecuted. But it could also speak to the nature of our society and the way we bring up boys and girls differently. Men tend to be taught to act out their anger, whereas women are taught to direct it inwards.
helpful info – just a note – there are adult entertainment ( porn?) pictures in caves, the pyramids – specifically Queen Hapshetsut having sex with her boyfriend Senmut (?), and erotic poetry in The Bible – it’s here to stay!