Horrified by Pornified.

It's pretty clear the author and publisher of Pornified think I should be alarmed. Just look at that subtitle: How pornography is transforming our lives, our relationships and our families. Big stuff. And check out the testimonials on the dust jacket. One says we must read Pornified because it exposes pornography as "a poison eroding relationships between men and women and darkening our children's horizons." Wow, scary. Although, to be precise, poisons don't "erode." Acids erode.

And I don't know of a poison or an acid that can darken a horizon. But I suppose one should not quibble over mixed metaphors at a time when peril looms.

As the reader may have sensed, I am not alarmed by Pornified. At least not in the way its author and publisher intended. I am alarmed that this atrociously researched and absurdly alarmist book was published. I am also alarmed it has garnered reviews ranging from the respectful to the enthralled and that it may actually sell well, shape public opinion and, God forbid, influence legislators. And I am positively horrified that Pornified started as an article in Time magazine and is published by Times Books, a joint venture of Henry Holt and Company and the venerable New York Times. Pornified is apparently what some people in American publishing consider blue-chip investigative writing, which says something truly scary about the state of American journalism.

What's wrong with Pornified isn't its thesis. Maybe pornography is gnawing at society's threads. I don't know. But I do know that Pamela Paul doesn't come close to proving it is and that her attempt to make us fear that it is provides a textbook example of how some journalists sensationalize for fun and profit.

Most of Paul's case, such as it is, consists of profiles of men and women. There's "Austin, a 29-year-old musician from Chicago." And "Jacob, a lanky 33-year-old journalist, (who) has mixed feelings about pornography." And "35-year-old Gabe, who works in Houston's oil and gas industry." The people we meet in Pornified range from the boring and bland to the unwashed-and-disturbed, with the gap between those two bookends filled mainly with what the English would call nutters and tossers.

This is standard fare in the genre of what one might call pop alarmism. Introduce a sad / angry / pathetic / victimized / twisted individual. Tell his / her life story and how the subject of the book led this person to be sad / angry / pathetic / victimized / twisted. Add airy speculation and theorizing with only a tenuous connection to any empirical evidence. Introduce another sad / angry / pathetic / victimized / twisted individual. Repeat until you fill 300 pages or spend the advance, whichever comes first.

The masterpiece of this genre is surely Susan Faludi's 1999 opus, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, which featured elegantly drawn profiles of men ranging from a betrayed Cleveland Browns fan to a despairing Sly Stallone -- and not much else. Stiffed was about the crisis of masculinity. Remember that crisis? It was a hot topic way back at the end of the last century. Men were dazed and confused, families were crumbling, society was in jeopardy. Happily, we survived.

The central problem of most pop alarmism is summed up in a saying much loved by the killjoys who value reason and evidence: Anecdotes aren't data. It's a pretty simple concept. If I find one depressed teenager who listens to Goth music, stays up all night and dreams of being a vampire, I have not proved today's youth have been corrupted by The Cure and Anne Rice. It means I've found one messed-up teenager. And if I find 10 teens with way too much black in their wardrobe, it means I've found 10 messed-up teenagers. I have proven nothing about that generation of teenagers, much less the larger society. Anecdotes aren't data, no matter how you pile them up.

Paul writes with none of the grace of Susan Faludi but to her credit she, unlike Faludi, is aware that to actually prove her sweeping thesis she needs to do more than stitch together stories of wankers and the women who love them.

Her first strategy to fill the gaps is both clever and silly. "I interviewed more than a hundred people (more than 80 per cent male) about the role pornography plays in their lives," she writes. "While the scope of such qualitative research can never claim to be fully representative of all Americans, the people interviewed were expressly chosen to provide a broad spectrum." Her anecdotes aren't anecdotes. Oh no. They're data.

There are two problems with this gambit. First, Paul never says how these people were chosen. If I set out to study the role alcohol plays in people's lives, I'll likely get a different picture if I recruit subjects outside an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting than I would if I set up at a mosque. Sociologists call this "selection bias" and they go to great lengths to reduce or eliminate it. Paul doesn't tell us what she did. We're just supposed to take her word that she dealt with it. Maybe there wasn't enough room in her 300-page book to slip in that absolutely critical information.
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But that aside, it's absurd to suggest Paul's sample could be even partially representative. There are almost 300 million Americans. Eighty men and 20 women can no more meaningfully reflect 300 million people than 10 bummed-out Goths can stand in for all the teenagers of America.

Paul and her publisher also make a big deal out of a national poll she commissioned. But she rarely cites the actual wording of the poll's questions, which is crucial because badly worded questions can radically skew results. And she doesn't mention how many people were polled, when, or the margin of error -- details that are included even in short newspaper articles. She just tells us -- over and over again -- that the poll is "nationally representative." Maybe it is, but readers shouldn't have to just take the authors' word for it.

Paul also makes astonishing mistakes in interpreting the poll. Paul writes that "men who don't like pornography aren't as rare as fans think, or even as unusual as guys who don't like it suppose they are." To support this, she cites her poll, which found that just 27 per cent agreed with the statement "all men look at pornography." But given the question, the result is not proof of what people do, it's only proof of what people think others do. And it doesn't take a pollster to know there's a world of difference between the two.

Pornified is liberally sprinkled with statistics that may be impressive to the incautious reader -- they seem to have swayed some reviewers -- but her handling of these numbers ranges from the sloppy to the tendentious.

Most of the figures come from Internet polls, which are dubious when designed well and completely meaningless when not. Paul knows this. She admits as much in footnotes which note that the polls she's citing are "not nationally representative." But she doesn't let us in on the design of the polls. And immediately after admitting the polls' limitations, she adds that they are nonetheless "interesting and valid." But how do we know they are valid? Because she says so. (Warning for freshmen: Don't try this in your Sociology 101 term paper.)

It gets worse. Several times we are told that "studies show" or "psychologists point out" or "experts note" but we are not told which studies, psychologists or experts.

Weasel words abound. "It's easy for men to feel more powerful and in control when they look at pornography," she writes. "Women who pose for pornography must be stupid, many men say." Every journalist knows what the word "many" means. It means the writer doesn't have a clue what the real number is. It could be 10. It could be 10 million. But the writer wants the reader to think it's a lot. In this case, Paul quotes "Sandeep, the trauma surgeon" who really likes porn and doesn't think much of the women in it. So here, "many" definitely means at least one.

Paul can also be as credulous as a golden retriever. She cites a survey of Internet porn in the workplace that showed a heck of a lot of employees are surfing for smut on company time, mentioning in the text that the survey was conducted by "Web-filtering company Cerberian." Her footnote cites "Business Wire." What she doesn't say is that her information came from a Cerberian press release headlined "Survey validates need for Internet access management technology." And who do you suppose sells Internet access management technology? Why, Cerberian does!

A skeptic might say that a company whose business is dealing with a problem is perhaps not the best source of objective information on the scope of that problem, but there's not a lot of skepticism to be found in Pornified. At one point Paul supports her claim that "for many" -- there's that word again -- "pornography almost becomes equated with sex," by quoting "Jake," an anonymous columnist in Glamor magazine.

To be fair, Paul does occasionally turn to better sources than Jake. The scientific literature on the effects of pornography is vast and Paul breathlessly details several studies she says demonstrated various harms of pornography, particularly decades-old work by the team of Zillman and Bryant that found that men exposed to lots of non-violent porn develop negative attitudes toward women. The Zillman and Bryant studies, she assures readers, are among the most "powerful" ever done.
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Unfortunately Paul is either unaware, or chose not to mention, that other researchers made several attempts to replicate Zillman and Bryant's findings. They came up empty. And a scientific study that cannot be replicated is not "powerful." It's dead in the water.

The only moment in which Paul slips up and admits the scientific research is less than conclusive comes -- perhaps not surprisingly -- when she briefly considers claims that porn has positive effects. That's never been proven scientifically, she writes. In fact, "social science has had a difficult time scientifically proving that pornography affects men either positively or negatively." The emphasis is Paul's.

Lest that admission give rise to unwanted questions, Paul rushes on. "Though scientific proof remains out of reach, men who use pornography attribute to it a broad range of effects." Meet Rajiv, a 28-year-old New Yorker.

So when it comes to proving pornography's positive effects, Paul demands strict scientific rigor. But to prove negative effects, anecdotes, dubious polls, cherry-picked studies and "Jake" from Glamor will do.

From such flimsy materials are moral panics constructed. But there's another technique without which alarmist journalism would be impossible. Call it "the blind eye." Just as the scare-monger must hoover up any old number that adds something to the fear, he or she must avoid all contradictory data. It doesn't matter how basic those numbers may be to the story you're telling. Just don't see them.

In *Pornified*, Paul says the United States is so saturated in porn it's actually harder to avoid it than to get it. She particularly blames the explosion of porn on the Internet, which began in the early 1990s. And she says porn smashes up marriages, pushes people to twisted behaviour and messes up kids.

If all this is true, there should be signs of it in basic social statistics. The divorce rate should be up. Family violence and sexual assaults should be up. Teens should be getting into sex earlier with more bad consequences. And so on. One would think these would be the first numbers a journalist would investigate.

So what do the data show? The rate of violent crime in the United States has dropped enormously since 1992. Sexual assault has fallen in line with that drop. Family violence is half what it was.

Most other social indicators are headed in the same direction. Teenagers are having their first sexual experience later and having fewer sexual partners. Teen pregnancy peaked in 1990 and has fallen by 28 per cent. Teen suicide is down.

"There's even evidence that divorce rates are declining, albeit at a much more gradual pace," writes David Brooks, a New York Times columnist. "People with college degrees are seeing a sharp decline in divorce, especially if they were born after 1955."

Many other such numbers have shown improvement over the same period. Brooks and others see it as proof that after more than two decades with worsening social indicators, the United States is undergoing a revitalization. "Americans today hurt each other less than they did 13 years go," he writes. "They are more likely to resist selfish and shortsighted impulses. They are leading more responsible, more organized lives."

How does Paul account for all this? She doesn't. None of this appears in Pornified.

Of course Paul has the obligatory chapter about what should be done about the terrifying threat she has revealed. It's a confused thing, never making it entirely clear whether she supports censorship or not, but American officials, doubtless informed in part by her work with Time, are not so ambiguous.

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said he agrees pornography -- adult, consensual pornography -- harms families and he considers the investigation and prosecution of porn -- which is not protected speech under the U.S. constitution -- one of his top priorities. The U.S. Congress apparently agrees. It recently gave the FBI funding to set up a new unit to make war on smut, and so, in an era of suicide bombers and nuclear proliferation, G-men will soon be removed from other duties so they can sit around headquarters watching Internet porn.

Now that, I submit, is evidence of something alarming.

Dan Gardner*'s column appears Wednesdays and Fridays.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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