"They pleasured themselves to death"

[Major Nikon]

11. Remember that the people making these determinations are all fervent anti-pornographers

Last edited Wed Nov 27, 2013, 11:46 AM - Edit history (1)

So it's not as if you have a non-biased evaluation of any of the criteria they specified. Who knows what they mean, but clearly they already had an idea of what they wanted to say and they patterned everything to fit that notion. The study, if you can call it that, does nothing more than feed red meat to anti-pornographers and completely ignores all the relevant questions they should be trying to answer, but aren't.

The methodology of this study has obvious flaws, and even if it didn't it provides no useful information to anyone who is interested in answering questions about cause and effect. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if dozens of similar "studies" exist, but the impact factor demonstrates that even among Women's Studies journals, few are citing what's in it and those who do are probably a small circle of others who are producing similar studies of dubious methodology.

So why would someone produce a study that isn't answering the right questions? I have no idea, but the simplest answer is influence peddling. People like Reisman are hot tickets on the speaking circuit and if they are able to snag grant money with your tax dollars, they can sit back comfortably and make all the junk science they want. It's a racket if there ever was one. The scientific community realizes they have a serious credibility problem with exactly this kind of thing and it isn't just limited to anti-pornographers. There is currently an effort underway to filter out all of the gibberish masquerading as science, but given the thousands of scientific journals out there with more appearing every day, the task is not an easy one. Until then, if then, there's going to be no end to this garbage and laymen and even policy makers who have no idea how to tell a relevant study from one that isn't are going to be holding these things up pretending they mean something. Even among Women's Studies journals, this one ranks at the bottom of the pile. That alone should tell people something.

Edited to add:

One more thing. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the 88% figure is correct. Hell, let's just say it's 100%. Think about how the dots connect here. Remember the hypothesis is, 'porn causes rape'.

So if

A) All porn is violent
B) Correlative evidence is inversely proportional to the hypothesis
C) Causal evidence is inconclusive or supports (B)

What is this telling us?

I'm not sure the anti-pornographers are going to like where the logical conclusion leads us.

The very best you can say about it is it's banal nonsense. I can make a better case for Rock-n-Roll causes devil worship.