including its association with gender-based violence and sex inequality.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Pornography: The Politics of Legal Challenges, and reported the following:
Although the page 99 test does not provide a distillation of the essence of the book's analysis or conclusions, it works well in exemplifying its depth and analytical rigor. That is, the book's central argument stands on three pillars:Learn more about Pornography: The Politics of Legal Challenges at the Oxford University Press website.An exhaustive analytical review of the best empirical evidence to date of the exploitative conditions of production of pornography, i.e., how the people having sex on camera are used and abused, and what the effect of watching pornography has upon the viewer in terms of becoming more sexually abusive toward women and desensitized to such behavior.Each of the three "pillars" of the book needs to be solid—if one is not, it breaks the foundation and relevance of the others. Page 99 illustrates that no stone is untouched by this book and that readers will find, thoroughly illuminated, all the necessary components for a politics of legal challenge to pornography.
A feminist, political, intersectional, and legal theory of how to mount a legal challenge that empowers those multiply disadvantaged and disempowered by pornography, either in its production or by its consumers.
An empirical test of the theory and analysis of the extent such legal challenges could be successful and to what extent alternative challenges exist.
Page 99 deals with the nitty-gritty details of dissecting studies in psychology. Since most serious psychologists accept the overwhelming evidence that consuming pornography makes men significantly more likely to adopt attitudes supporting violence against women and behave sexually coercively toward women, the debate has shifted to what extent these effects are harmful. Page 99 is part of a section of the book that identifies misleading studies published by relatively respected researchers. For example, an often-referred survey of the association between pornography and rape myths for no good reason "controlled for" similar variables, in this case, among other things, "hostility toward women." Such a research design is "akin to asking, 'Does hostility lead to hostility?,'" page 99 concludes.
Furthermore, page 99 shows how other studies made similar statistical errors termed "post-treatment bias," which means that the researchers statistically soak up the visible effect of pornography on sexual coercion by adding questionable control variables that are not independent of the causal pornography variable (e.g., sexual promiscuity or hostility toward women). Men tend to become more promiscuous and sexually aggressive toward women due to viewing pornography, which means promiscuity and hostility toward women are not appropriate controls. The effect of promiscuity and hostility toward women on sexual aggression in part originate from pornography consumption; thus, the statistical model minimizes these true associations under the false impression of promiscuity and hostility being independent "control" variables.
While psychologists have often been goaded to "control for" as many variables as possible, doing so can falsely attribute the effect to variables that may themselves be partial outcomes of pornography consumption, such as a sexually aggressive predisposition. Several studies have made this statistical error. However, this mistake is difficult to identify for readers new to the literature on pornography and aggression and unfamiliar with common statistical problems. Yet, these studies are often referred to by those wishing to downplay the harms. Like the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries, which long denied the harmful consequences of their activity by distracting the debate, pointing to misleading research to say that the science was "inconclusive," these filibustering techniques of the apologists of pornography is a pernicious political problem. Any book intent on making a meaningful intellectual contribution to its legal challenges must thus address it.
--Marshal Zeringue
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