Sometimes good ideas take off. The Washington Examiner announces that New evidence points to porn’s destructiveness, echoing Mary Eberstadt’s popular The Weight of Smut from the June/July issue. Reporting on a press conference held by the Coalition for the War Against Illegal Pornography, Barbara Hollingsworth writes:
Citing numerous academic studies and her own clinical practice, Dr. Mary Anne Layden, a psychotherapist and director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program, says that porn meets all the clinical definitions for addiction except that obscene images can never be detoxed from the addict’s brain.
“There is no credible evidence to suggest that porn does not in some way damage everybody who looks at it,” she told The Washington Examiner. . . .
“There’s always an escalation process. We don’t know what the threshold is, and those with addictive personalities will start it earlier. But I see a lot of people who didn’t show any psychological problems before [viewing porn],” she said.
Layden is one of the authors in a book of substantial essays on the social costs of pornography soon to be published by the Witherspoon Institute, developed from a conference on the subject the institute sponsored. The institute has also published a booklet, The Social Costs of Pornography summarizing the conference’s findings and offering several recommendations for lowering those (great) costs.
Among other First Things articles on the subject (in chronological order, from newest to oldest): Mary Rose Rybak’s Dancing with the Pornographers (she is now, by the way, Mary Rose Somarriba); Jason Byasee’s Not Your Father’s Pornography; Robert T. Miller’s Romney’s Pornography Dilemma; and Frederica Mathewes-Green’s Internet Child Pornography.
June 29th, 2010 | 10:45 pm
I certainly agree that pornography is harmful, but Dr. Layden undermines her credibility when she says, “There is no credible evidence to suggest that porn does not in some way damage everybody who looks at it.”
Here, she is trying to prove a negative and shift the burden of proof. Instead of her proving that pornography is harmful, she is (with the statement) expecting porn supporters and defenders to prove that it’s harmless.
June 30th, 2010 | 9:59 am
re, Dimitri Cavalli’s comment: What little of Logic I once learned, I’ve forgotten, but I’m not sure how her comment demonstrates she’s trying to “prove a negative.” [Keeping in mind these comments are in a newspaper story, so their context and inter-relationships are a bit suspect.]
I read the “there’s no convincing evidence” comment as a conclusion, based on her clinical experience and research in the field. And, apparently, as a readiness to critique any offered “evidence” to support the assertion that pornography is sometimes harmless.
The thing that’s really startling is her insistence that pornography is always damaging in any exposure. That’s different from alcohol and (I think) from many other drugs.
June 30th, 2010 | 10:17 am
JW, I think Dmitri is right. There is no way to prove that pornography doesn’t do something. The best you can do is cite a lack of evidence that it does. Someone who maintains that pornography does damage has the burden of proof there. And while I agree that pornography is harmful, the contention that it always and everywhere harms anyone who looks at it at all seems a tad extreme to me and imposes a heavy-duty burden of proof.
June 30th, 2010 | 10:56 am
But why, Dimitri and Fred, does the burden of proof rest on Layden and not with the advocates of (some degree of) the legal provision of pornography?
If porn were a proposed drug that had demonstrated dangerous side effects upon some users, the FDA would insist that the company making it prove, as best these things could be proved, that it didn’t in some lesser way harm others. I don’t see why the situation for pornography is any differednt, especially as porn doesn’t help people as medicines do.
June 30th, 2010 | 11:56 am
Picking up on David’s comment, I would make the point differently.
This isn’t a Logician’s exercise. Layden is a clinician, who has studied the effect of pornography and drawn certain conclusions, which are only summarized in this excerpted news story (a Google search shows she’s written extensively on this topic). A researcher who is studying the impact of alcohol or some drug or in this case pornography can arrive at some limited number of conclusions: it has harmful impact, a harmless impact, a beneficial impact, or “we can’t know one way or the other.”
If this was research that concluded “X is harmless at least some of the time,” you wouldn’t say “the researcher has tried to prove a negative.” You’d look at the methodology, the data, and reasoning that led to the conclusions.
I repeat: Layden here is asserting two things. First, based on her clinical experience and research, she concludes that pornography is always harmful. Second, she also concludes (presumably by looking at other studies) that the evidence these other studies present — in claiming that pornography is either harmless or sometime harmless — is “not credible.”
Both seem quite defensible, quite reasonable, and quite logical.
June 30th, 2010 | 12:49 pm
David, I don’t disagree. But even in your example, the drug company is not trying to prove a negative. It too can only cite lack of evidence from the trials that the drug causes harm. And that is not absolutely reliable. Side effects do sometimes show up later, as they did in Fen-phen and Vioxx.
JW, I really don’t entirely disagree with you either. I must confess, I haven’t read Layden’s work or any critiques of it, so I can’t comment intelligently on how strong her evidence is. In my comment above, I didn’t say that Layden was wrong about pornography, I just said that what she says sounds so absolute and, to that degree, counterintuitive that her evidence needs to be extremely powerful to convince anyone not already convinced.
Also, from my admittedly limited knowledge of how these studies are conducted, isn’t it conventional to start from the null hypothesis, in this case pornography isn’t harmful, and then show evidence that the null hypothesis isn’t the case? If so, doesn’t that mean that the burden of proof (in the logical sense) is on the hypothesis, not the null hypothesis?
June 30th, 2010 | 1:31 pm
I said from the outset that I agree that porn is harmful. But when she says there is no evidence to believe it isn’t harmful, she is shifting the burden of proof. Let her make her case (i.e. porn is harmful) and present the evidence.
I once heard about a similar example involving Senator Joe McCarthy. At some hearing, it was pointed out that there was nothing in a certain person’s FBI (?) file that indicated that he was a Communist. McCarthy said that there also nothing in the file that showed that the person WASN’T a Communist.
Then there’s the scene in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” one of the judges asks one of the accused, (I am paraphrasing from the great film adaptation in 1996 with Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder), “If you don’t know what a witch is, how do you know you are NOT one?”
June 30th, 2010 | 10:51 pm
Layden’s statement is equivalent to “I believe porn damages everybody who looks at it.” This cannot be a scientific conclusion for the simple reason that Layden has not studied everyone or even most people who have ever looked at porn. She admits as much in her next statement, “We don’t know what the threshold is, and those with addictive personalities will start it earlier. But I see a lot of people who didn’t show any psychological problems before [viewing porn].”
In other words, Layden is admitting she cannot prove causation but will assume it anyway. Sorry, but this simply is not science.
I admit I am surprised by David Mills’ comment. He seems to think the FDA model is a good one for public policy in general and should be replicated outside the field of medicine. If we follow his recommendation, alcohol and tobacco products will both be banned in short order and we will all be driving electric cars with speed limits of 35 mph.
This political quip aside, the point is the FDA requires rigorous randomized control trial evidence for any new drug that goes to market. The article quoted above does not cite any randomized control trial study demonstrating long-term negative effects of pornography.
July 1st, 2010 | 1:12 am
He seems to think the FDA model is a good one for public policy in general and should be replicated outside the field of medicine.
No, I didn’t say that. I was simply making a point about the side on which the burden of proof is placed and how we deal with possible public dangers. It was a simple point.
But to continue: Whether Layden’s remark was “science” or not is not the most relevant point. Public policy has to made on the best information we have, and in cases like pornography the information will never be perfect — it will often be the kind J. W. Cox describes. This kind of insistence upon “science” serves only to justify the toleration of pornography.
July 1st, 2010 | 5:24 am
I was simply making a point about the side on which the burden of proof is placed and how we deal with possible public dangers.
Fair enough. And the counterpoint is that outside the field of medicine the burden of proof is almost always placed on those who want to restrict human activity in the interests of dealing with possible public dangers. Every day, we face the potential threat of car crashes, plane crashes, terrorist bombings, buildings collapsing due to earthquakes or extreme weather, disease caused by polluting chemicals, environmental and physical damage caused by oil spills and thousands of other known and unknown dangers out there. We regulate some areas to mitigate the dangers but the burden is almost universally on the one proposing the regulation to demonstrate it is necessary to mitigate a risk and will not impose unacceptable costs on others.
Since no scientific evidence has been presented regarding the harms of pornography, I’m not inclined to see obscenity prosecutions as a good use of my tax dollars. If you feel differently, you are free to register your vote at the ballot box.
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