Photo: Lara, CC BY 2.0
Gail Dines and I have a difference of opinion. She thinks pornography is “a public health crisis,” and I think she’s wrong.
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Gail Dines is a sociology professor and now the founder of a group calling itself Culture Reframed, and she recently had an op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Is Porn Immoral? That Doesn’t Matter: It’s a Public Health Crisis.” The subtitle read “The science is now beyond dispute.” She’s also wrong about that.
In the article, Dines cites a number of studies that she claims show these “beyond dispute” harmful effects of pornography, everything from making men more likely to commit rape, to hastening the age of sexual initiation in boys, to lowering the self-esteem of women dating “men who view pornography.” But when you actually look at the studies, some problems emerge.
Let’s discuss, for instance, the study that supposedly shows that men who watched porn in the last 12 months were more likely to admit they’d commit rape if they wouldn’t be caught, or else do something “sexual that [the woman] did not want to do.” The study was performed using surveys from 489 members of a fraternity at an unnamed midwestern university. Of those, 83% (405 or 406) reported seeing pornography in the last 12 months, meaning that the comparative groups were 405 in the “had seen porn” and 83 or 84 in the “hadn’t seen porn in the last 12 months.”
Part of the problem with a study like this is that it’s based on self-reporting. Aside from the fact that I don’t for a moment believe that 17% of guys who are members of a fraternity in America hadn’t seen any pornography in the past 12 months, there are other potential confounding variables: are the people unlikely to report having viewed pornography also less likely to answer yes to either of the questions about intention to rape and/or commit sexual assault? I’d argue “hell yes”: if you’re too prudish to admit viewing porn on an anonymized survey, then you’re certainly too prudish to admit to having violent sexual impulses.
The second problem with this study is the numbers themselves, which I’ll admit to having trouble parsing. I’ve talked to a friend who does chemistry (not sociology or stats — he’s a good guy and was all I could find on short notice, but I get the issue there), and he thinks the numbers seem a little weak. Here’s a screenshot:
As I said, I don’t know a great deal about statistics, but I do know that when your standard deviation ranges from 70% to 93% of your mean value (in the “likelihood of raping” category) things are a little shaky. And since they asked the students to respond on a scale of 1 to 7, it means it’d take as few as 12 out of 378 to put down a 7 to get a number like 1.19 for the average (again, have you met frat guys? how many do you think would lie just for kicks?). So I’d really like to see the hard data and have someone walk me through it, because combined with the self-reporting issues, it makes me really doubtful that this science, at least, is “beyond dispute.”
The article on women’s self-esteem only measured women’s perception of their male partner’s pornography use, finding that the woman’s belief that their partner’s viewing of pornography is “frequent” and/or “problematic” (both described as “heavy” pornography use by the study) had a negative impact on their relationship. This, again, makes perfect sense. If you think your partner is viewing pornography “frequently” (an ill-defined term) and/or think that your partner’s viewing of pornography is an outright problem, it seems pretty clear to me that that’s going to bias your responses.
As for initiating sexual activity earlier? Here, Dines is being outright dishonest. In her op-ed she quotes directly, but very selectively from the study. Dines writes:
The study writes:
That’s right: the study wasn’t about pornography at all. Unless, of course, you count talking about sex on tv as porn.
Look, the science isn’t “settled,” and pretending that it is is at best misguided, and at worst disingenuous.
But we do agree on one thing, Professor Dines and I. There is a public health crisis in America. We just disagree on what that crisis is.
Me, I think it’s our relationship with sexuality. In 2002, apparently, only 58% of secondary school principals considered their school’s sex ed “comprehensive.” More recently, a number of studies have shown disturbing facts, like as many as 40% of 18-19 year olds surveyed said they know “little or nothing about condoms,” or that only a third of girls are told about birth control before they first have sex (see page 8). I think the problem is cultural: pornography should not be used for instruction.
Porn is supposed to be fantasy, plain and simple. Where we’re failing our children is in not educating them about the difference between fantasy and reality. In the absence of proper sex ed, what are children and teens going to do to learn about sex? We can’t just stick our heads in the ground and pretend they’re not going to try things out. Assuming “just tell them not to have sex” will work is about as effective as saying “if we just tell everybody not to steal we won’t need door locks” — actually, scratch that, it’s probably less effective than that because our biology doesn’t automatically incentivize stealing by making it feel good. And as the above study showed, just hearing people on tv talk about sex was enough to lower the age at which adolescents try things out.
And it’s not just about STD and pregnancy prevention. We need to tell kids what healthy sexuality is like, about fantasy and reality. We need to teach them about consent, respect, and equality. We need create a society in which we teach young men not to rape, not teach young women not to be raped. We need to talk about empathy and partnership. These are all vital parts of sexual education — and ones they won’t get if the only place they learn about sex is from porn.
So when it comes to educating kids about sex and porn, we agree. I’m all for that, even if the science isn’t settled.
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Richard Ford Burley is a human, writer, and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.