The not-entirely-safe-for-work players present:
Some drip has observed the reactions of 52 women and 38 men to two-minute snippets of pornographic films (interspersed with landscape photography as a control) and from this has come to the conclusion “that [straight] men tend to get excited by images of women, gay men are aroused at images of men—and women, well, they seem to like them both.”
Oh, for God’s sake.
It’s something of a parlor game these days to take down the shortcomings and absurd leaps of logic in “soft” science studies like this one. —A game that skirts perilously close to anti-intellectualism, yes, and one that depends on skimming and generalizing from puffed-up grant-grubbing attention-grabbing press releases rewritten by sensationalist editors trying to justify the Science section of the paper to the next quarterly budget review rather than actual, you know, studies, with footnotes and cites and such; it’s a parlor game, after all, and not to be taken seriously. But studies purporting to examine sex, gender, and sexuality are unbelievably ripe for this sort of take-down, this armchair quarterbacking, this huffing-and-puffing-and-Fisking-your-house-down moralizing. Sex and gender and sexuality are unbelievably important in how we define ourselves, after all, and for a lot of us in this unevenly distributed 21st century floating world, it’s contested to an unprecedented degree: how we define it, how it defines us, how others do both. We cherish our myths and received wisdoms, hold them closely, and fail to see how they blind and blinker our supposedly objective judgments. (As a not entirely fair example to J. Michael Bailey [whom I’ve already called a “drip,” so it’s a bit late for civility, I guess], I offer up this take-down of Eric Raymond’s inexplicably well-received but thoroughly amateur study of “bad porn” from a whiles back—as an example of the short-circuits of logic that creep into one’s supposedly objective investigations of one’s troubled desires.)
So. Let’s amuse ourselves by shredding Bailey’s study, since, after all, it purportedly challenges myths and received wisdoms that I myself hold dear.
The sample size, for one, is terribly tiny. 52 women; 38 men. —Not in and of itself a crippling factor, when dealing with, say, the measurement of a brute force—whether one’s aroused or not, for instance. The criteria for arousal have been carefully defined. It’s either there or it isn’t, right? So long as you’ve been scrupulous in your selection process to weed out any selection factors that might bias the results, and there’s a body of research to compare it with and the expectation that the study will be repeated to check its results, there’s no reason why one can’t speculate from such a small sample size.
But while arousal might be a brute force, the psychology behind it—what triggers it, and how, and how we react to it—is quicksilver slippery. What was done to link what was being measured—girth, or darkness (basically, increased blood flow to spongy tissues in both cases)—with the thing purportedly studied—the brain, and its construction of and reaction to the arousal? What was done to establish a benchmark between the male and female scales, to allow for accurate comparison? How were potential differences in physiology accounted for? (Hmm. Maybe we do need a larger sample…) A brief reference is made to transsexuals who took part. Why only male-to-female transsexuals? And how was that benchmark established and compared, and how were those physiological differences accounted for? And how many were tested?
Also, any such study that makes no mention of cultural factors is automatically not just suspect, but ridiculous. Ours (here in this unevenly distributed 21st century floating world) is a culture based rather heavily on the [straight] male gaze. It’s getting better, Lord knows, and hurrah for that, but. The default image of what is sexy and sexual is the female form. Women grow up and construct themselves and their sexualities in a cultural environment which lauds, applauds, and constantly hypes images of women as being sexy and sexual. Sexualized imagery of men is nonexistent, or carefully ghettoized—or sexualized in much more heavily coded and subtextual ways. Also, think of the relative levels of hostility in the culture at large to the ideas of male homosexuality versus female homosexuality; think lesbian chic and [straight] male fantasies; look to which sex is more likely to fall back on “gay panic” as a defense in assault cases. It’s not hard to construct alternate theories to explain the results of this study that don’t leap straight for the hardwiring of male and female brains.
And: to think one is measuring someone’s reactions to sex and arousal, the decisions they make in their lives dealing with and based on desires articulable and unacknowledged (“Since most women seem capable of sexual arousal to both sexes, why do they choose one or the other?” Bailey asked. “Probably, for reasons other than sexual arousal”), by measuring their reactions to porn, is, well, it’s easy to quantify, perhaps, but it’s also rather like drawing conclusions about the circumstances of people’s lives by noting their movie preferences. (“He likes buddy movie action comedies, so his life must be madcap, a little stressful, and replete with non-threatening homoerotic subtext.”) —And hey: what kind of porn was used? Soft-focus dimly lit red shoe erotica, or sweaty grindhouse hardcore? It does make a difference—after all, males are supposedly attracted solely to visual stimulus, while females supposedly require situation, character, and emotional interaction. Or was this bit of conventional wisdom not taken into account?
A lot of the answers to these questions are doubtless to be found in the more detailed write-up of the study. And just because we can construct alternate theories doesn’t mean we’ve invalidated Bailey’s theories; it just means we need to test and re-test, refine and come at it again, and compare and debate and compare some more. —However, his contretemps with the Washington Times demonstrates why this is unlikely. Studies of sex, gender, and sexuality, after all, deal with terribly important, hotly contested issues of self-definition. It’s no wonder people get all het up over them. But it’s no excuse to hide our heads in the sand and pretend we know everything already and there’s no use studying what turns us on, and why. Otherwise, we just end up with our cherished myths and received wisdoms reinforced by whatever soundbite memes break through our attention span, and horny frat boys get to use clippings like this to try to convince their girlfriends that really, she’d like a threesome if she’d just, you know, try it.
What it comes down to: and this is as much if not moreso on Lucio Guerrero’s shoulders as J. Michael Bailey’s; Bailey’s not entirely responsible for how the Sun-Times chooses to hype his study’s hype, but: the first line of the article is worthwhile, and says something about the research that we can accept at face value: “When it comes to watching pornographic movies, it appears women are less selective then men.”
After that?
Feh.
(Says me, with my cherished myths and received wisdoms clutched to my bosom. Fuck l’difference! Biology is not destiny! La la la I can’t hear you! —Your own mileage may, of course, vary.)
Commenting is closed for this article.
Grunt. Sex good, science bad.
Bad science can very easily be disproven and dismissed... In theory. It's been a long standing pet peeve of mine that reporters will take a study, which may in fact be perfectly good and draw misleading, extreme, or simply ignorant mistatements from it. Study finds that pillows consumed in large quantities can be harmful to your health. NEW FLASH! PILLOWS ARE LETHAL! One of my favorite pieces of flagrant pseudo-proof was a page listing celebrities who died young, using this as evidence that celebrities died early, and therefore you should embrace Christianity and eschew immorality and stardom. (Not that anyone even asked me to be a movie star.)
For all we know, maybe the women were turned on by the landscape. And what's with the discrepency between male and female numbers? Or maybe they'd start daydreaming. Scientifically valid sample sizes and testing methods, people! My point probably being that this sort of sensationalism and stupidity isn't limited to reporting on sexuality findings. But it is one of the harder things to scientifically evaluate, especially when so many people start with an unfounded set of assumptions.
Rnat, rant.
Ooh, don't get me started! You should read some of the so-called 'studies' on left-handedness. According to some, all left-handers are criminally disposed alcoholic wasters with a low iq who are prone to dying an early and violent death. The sample for that study? Baseball almanacs.
Obviously some alleged scientists failed Statistics 101.
Oh the other hand, not sure how you'd set up a double blind porn study, but I'd be intrigued to find out. ;-)
The sinister cabal of left-handed have also demonstrated a tendency to type "rnat" when they mean "rant", according to an exhaustive study done earlier today.
Oh c'mon! Everyone knows babes are all really bisexual. Don't y'all read alt.sex.stories?
*8)
DC
I can't speak for men - well, hell, I can't speak for women either - but extrapolating in a completely unscientific way from my own reaction, I'd say that a sample of women who would be willing to have the engorgement of their vaginal tissue measured by instruments while watching various flavors of porn might not be completely representative of womankind as a whole.
Just, qualifiedly, saying.
Margin of error is..... The envelope please. Yes! Let's hear it for plus or minus 200%!
Cue music.
Dman rnating left-handers... ;)
Julie - very good point about the whole self-selecting sample issue. I should imagine that would be quite a problem and must be difficult to normalise for. Well, in those studies that bother, anyway.
If women were measurably excited when viewing pictures of sexy women, how much was due to the thought: "Suppose that was me, driving men mad with desire, oooh... Of course in my own self I would never pose like that, but suppose I did, suppose I was a porn star who didn't care what anyone thought, and what if I did that in front of [name of S.O.]..."
Or: "Hey, that's like what I did with [S.O.] last time we made love. Damn, that was great, wish he was here right now."
Or: "If I ever got [sexy rock star] alone in a hotel room, that's just what I'd do. Mmm. But better, of course."
In other words, the study apparently failed to take into account that women have imaginations, and they forgot about projection, identification, memory, and other second-order effects of a fantasy-rich sex life.
Well, there's nothing to say that the men couldn't have been thinking that either. It seems unlikely, but what do I know?