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SHE was a hitchhiker. He was a man away from home on business. The circumstances of the rape were only mildly contested in court and the jurors were in complete agreement on the ‘guilty’ verdict. There was, however, less agreement on what would constitute a fair sentence. As might be expected, women jurors were more severe than men; they suggested a sentence nearly 30 per cent longer. Less expected, and much more insidious, was the effect of pornography on their judgment: men who regularly watched pornographic videos suggested sentences half as long as those of other men.

Fortunately, this was not a real trial. The jurors were volunteers participating in a re-enactment of a rape trial to test the effects of exposing people to different amounts of pornography. This experiment is one of a growing number of studies which suggest that pornography changes the attitudes and behaviour of those who use it. And in the real world, these are not just a few dirty old men in raincoats.

Pornography is big business. So-called ‘top-shelf’ soft-porn magazines will sell over 20 million copies this year in Britain and will be read by about 5 million people. Several companies in Europe will secure multimillion-pound turnovers on pornographic magazines and videos – a business with an estimated worldwide value of several billion pounds. The ‘product’ in this vast business varies considerably and it caters for all tastes. At the extremes of hard-core pornography are sadomasochism, paedophilia and bestiality. In both American and Australian classifications of pornographic magazines, a quarter of all titles concerned some such form of sexual deviance. Less extreme hard-core pornography portrays petting, intercourse, oral sex and group sex. By far the most widely available and most widely read pornography is the top-shelf group of magazines, such as Playboy, Men Only, Fiesta, Escort, Club International and Penthouse. These portray nudity and include poses and gestures suggestive of sexual acts but do not show any form of sexual contact. Their content has, however, changed over the years. A study by John Rosegrant, an American psychologist, found that between 1971 and 1984, Playboy centrefolds have shown a clear increase in both genital explicitness and the incidence of fetish symbols such as whips and bondage equipment. In the early 1970s, most covers of pornographic magazine showed a woman posed alone. By the early 1980s, such covers appeared on only 10 per cent of magazines; bondage, group sex and transvestism now feature on almost a third.

A worrying trend is the increasing use of violent imagery in pornography. In 1980, Neil Malamuth, then working at the University of Manitoba, reported that the number of images showing sexual violence in Playboy and Penthouse pictorials, increased from 1 in a hundred to 5 in a hundred between 1973 and 1977. Similarly, Don Smith of Florida State University found that in ‘adult-only’ novels, the average number of rape scenes doubled between 1968 and 1974. And in a recent study of 45 widely available video cassettes, Gloria Cowan at California State University at San Bernadino found that more than half of the sexually explicit scenes were predominantly concerned with the domination or exploitation of women.

Critics of pornography, such as Carolyn Itzin and Corrine Sweet, writing recently in The Independent, also claim that pornographic imagery is increasingly concerned with children. This does not, and indeed cannot legally, involve pictures of children, but rather shows women with shaven pubic hair, in children’s clothes, such as school uniforms, and in scenes reminiscent of childhood.

To many feminist writers, such material degrades women and has obvious links to rape and child abuse. In their view, even soft porn portrays women as objects, reducing them to something available purely for male gratification and without any form of emotional attachment.

The publishers of pornography, meanwhile, maintain that an interest in female nudity and sexuality is normal, healthy and can be educational. In addition, they argue that pornography can provide a vehicle for sexual release, without which marital infidelity, the demand for prostitutes, and sexual assault would increase massively.

In the middle of this highly charged debate, scientists have been trying to answer the central technical question: does pornography change men’s attitudes or behaviour towards women? For soft-core pornography, the answers have been difficult to find. A short-lived increase in the frequency of sexual activity between married couples was the only behavioural effect reported in two studies, published in the technical report of the US Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in 1971. Several other studies have applied great technical ingenuity to proving beyond doubt that sexy pictures stop being sexy after several viewings. Most studies, however, have failed to find anything harmful in the way that soft-core pornography affects men’s attitudes towards women.

One notable exception was an experiment conducted in 1982 by Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant of the University of Indiana. They gave a sample of college students varying levels of exposure – either ‘massive’, ‘intermediate’ or none at all – to explicit pornography which was nonviolent but depicted women in degrading or subordinate roles. In the ‘massive exposure’ group, the students watched a total of 4 hours 48 minutes of pornographic film over a six-week period.

Following this, the students were asked to do several psychological tests, including the rape trial re-enactment described above. Men who had not watched the films suggested sentences of 7 years 11 months on average, while those in the massive exposure group sentenced the rapist to only 4 years 2 months.

The researchers assessed the students’ sexual callousness towards women using a questionnaire which included an evaluation of statements such as, ‘A woman doesn’t mean no unless she slaps you’, and, ‘A man should find them, fool them, fuck them and forget them’. Students in the massive exposure group had significantly higher callousness scores than those who had seen no pornography. Massive exposure also led men to give higher estimates for the proportion of people who practise group sex, sadomasochism or bestiality and to adopt more liberal attitudes towards the censorship of pornography.

Two other studies by Zillmann and Bryant, published in 1986 and 1988, shed further light on the effects of soft-core porn. They found that prolonged exposure significantly reduced the subjects’ sexual satisfaction with their partners. In particular, the subjects exposed to pornography rated their partners’ physical appearance, affection, sexual curiosity and sexual performance less favourably than the controls, who had seen no material, and attributed greater importance to having sexual intercourse without emotional involvement.

A taste for violence

In another, more devious experiment, subjects were again exposed to varying amounts of pornography over a six-week period. In the seventh week, they were given a series of psychological tests and were told to expect further tests the following week. When they arrived for the tests they were told there would be a delay because of equipment failure and were shown into a room containing a television and a selection of videos, which varied in content from light entertainment (non-sexual) to hard-core pornography (bondage, sadomasochism and bestiality). During their 15-minute wait, the use of each video was electronically logged. Those students who had previously experienced massive exposure to soft-core pornography were more likely to view the hard-core porn videos (see Figure 1).FIG-mg17154201.GIF

Studies on the effects of hard-core pornography have been much more consistent in their findings. The main conclusion is simple: pornography with violent imagery does change men’s attitudes about sexual aggression towards women. For instance, studies by Malamuth have shown that watching a brief video of violent pornography increases the subsequent number of rape fantasies that a man has and lessens the extent to which a rape victim is judged to have suffered. Edward Donnerstein at the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that exposure to hard-core porn increases the attempts of male subjects to inflict ‘experimental’ aggression on a woman accomplice who was deliberately annoying before the showing of the video. More prolonged exposure to such material tends to make men enjoy the videos more. It can even make them think that the films are less violent that they had previously thought.

But different portrayals of sexual violence have dramatically different effects, and not all people react in the same way to pornography. Early studies of people’s reactions to violent pornography, conducted during the 1970s, produced mixed results: some studies showed that the material resulted in strong sexual arousal, whereas others showed none. In some cases, there was evidence of disgust and revulsion. Later studies by Malamuth, at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1982, discovered that the viewer’s response depends on the way in which the sexual violence is portrayed. He found that sexual arousal is inhibited by pornography that emphasises the abnormality of the sexual act or the suffering experienced by the woman. But equally violent pornography is highly sexually arousing if the woman is shown to enjoy, or at least end up enjoying what had happened to her.

This effect, called disinhibition, has an extremely potent influence on male attitudes and behaviour. One example comes from Malamuth’s study of students at the University of Manitoba in 1981. The researchers asked them to sign up for what were apparently two separate experiments. The first was a study of films’ certificate ratings in which the subjects were asked to watch two films on consecutive evenings. Half the students were shown films with scenes that contained sexual violence against women but which produced a positive response from the victims. The other students watched neutral films, with no violent scenes. The second study, conducted several days later, was a survey of sexual attitudes with questions about sexual violence embedded in it. The results showed that exposure to the sexually violent films increased male students’ acceptance of ‘rape myths’ – for instance, that women actually enjoy being raped – and also made them more accepting of violence against women in general.

The finding that different people respond in different ways to pornography came from another study by Malamuth. He showed that the male population can be divided into those who say they might commit rape if they could be assured of not being caught and punished, and those who say they would not. Alarmingly, his findings revealed that 30 per cent of men admitted to some likelihood of raping women: the researchers called them the ‘LR’ group. A further 30 per cent admitted some likelihood of using some force to coerce a woman into sexual acts. This leaves only two in every five men who claim they would never engage in sexual violence. In response to pornography, LR men are less inhibited by violent imagery than other men. Indeed, several studies have now reported that LR men find depictions of rape significantly more arousing than depictions of sex where both partners consent.

Researchers have not overlooked the fact that these arguments could be circular: that is, exposure to violent pornography may make men more aggressive, but aggressive men may find violent pornography more attractive in the first place. There is not sufficient evidence at present either to support or refute this possibility, although a recent Canadian survey by Dano Demare at the University of Winnipeg in 1988 found that men who were classed as LR did report using violent pornography more than average.

We can conclude, however, that certain types of violent pornography worsen the attitudes of certain types of men. At the extreme, LR men who had been shown a video of a rape in which the women ended up aroused came to believe that one in every three women would actually enjoy being raped.

The obvious prediction from this, and the acid test of all the research, is that pornography should increase the incidence of sexually violent crimes against women. Case studies and anecdotal evidence tend to support this prediction. In 1987 and 1988, two studies of a total of more than 130 convicted rapists and child molesters have found that most used pornography while preparing to commit an offence. Another study, by researchers at York University in Toronto in 1987, reported that 39 per cent of battered women had at some time been upset by their partners trying to get them to do what they had seen portrayed in pornographic material.

The first attempt to test the prediction that pornography promotes sexual violence was published in 1971 by Berl Kutchinsky, a criminologist at the University of Copenhagen. The data seemed to disprove the prediction: after the legislation on pornography in Denmark was liberalised, pornography became more widely available, but the incidence of sex crimes decreased. This study continues to be quoted as the authoritative evidence, but researchers began to question the data only two years later, by Victor Bachy of the University of Louvain in Belgium. The main problem was that sex crimes had not changed uniformly. Minor crimes such as indecent exposure and ‘peeping’ did indeed fall, but serious crimes such as rape and attempted rape increased, at least for a few years after pornography became more widely available.

In Australia, the federal government has tended to relax its controls on pornography since 1970. Different states have, however, implemented these changes to varying extents and, as a result, have unwittingly conducted an interesting experiment on the effect of pornography. Queensland, the most conservative state, has maintained the strictest controls on pornography and has a comparatively low rate of rape reports. By contrast, South Australia, the most liberal state in relation to pornography, has seen escalating reports of rape since the early 1970s (see Figure 2).FIG-mg17154202.GIF

A more complex study in the US, by Larry Baron and his colleagues at the University of New Hampshire in 1984, attempted to plot the circulation figures of pornographic magazines in different states against the incidence of rape reports. The researchers found a strong relationship: on average, every increase of 2 per cent in the circulation of pornography was linked to a 1 per cent increase in the incidence of rape reports.

It would be a mistake to think that any of this criminology data proves that pornography makes men rape women. Correlated trends between two sets of data may be caused by some so-far undetected third factor. For example, young people tend to read more pornography and commit more rapes than older people, and so differences in the age structure of populations in different states might explain both the Australian and American results. In fact, this particular theory was tested in the American study using a statistical technique known as multiple regression, and was found to be irrelevant. But the possibility remains that any number of social or cultural factors could be the actual cause of the apparent relationship between pornography and rape.

It would, however, be an equally serious mistake to dismiss research on pornography as inconclusive and so irrelevant. The weight of evidence is accumulating that intensive exposure to soft-core pornography desensitises men’s attitude to rape, increases sexual callousness and shifts their preferences towards hard-core pornography. Similarly, the evidence is now strong that exposure to violent pornography increases men’s acceptance of rape myths and of violence against women. It also increases men’s tendencies to be aggressive towards women and is correlated with the reported incidence of rape. Many sex offenders claim they used pornography to stimulate themselves before committing their crimes.

Few of these conclusions could stand alone without qualification or without being challenged by some inconsist ency in the experimental evidence. Each one, however, is supported by at least one significant experimental result and, as Zillmann and Bryant have pointed out, these have greater scientific credibility than the inconsistencies. Anomalous findings can be the result of poor experimental design as well as genuine underlying inconsistencies.

Taking all the current evidence together, I question whether the British government’s policy, established by the Williams Committee on pornography in 1979, is still valid. The committee concluded: ‘It is still possible to say . . . that there does not appear to be any strong evidence that exposure to sexually explicit material triggers off antisocial sexual behaviour.’ Earlier this year, David Mellor, the Home Office minister, commissioned two researchers, Guy Cumberbatch of Aston University, and Dennis Howitt of Loughborough University, to ‘review the available research on the effects of pornography’. They are due to report their findings to the Home Office, ‘sometime later this year’. Meanwhile, a group of Labour MPs headed by Dawn Primarolo has launched a new anti-pornography campaign that aims to ban the sale of ‘soft-core’ magazines at high street retailers.

Do we still know too little about the effects of pornography to seek to control it? I argue that there must come a time when the demand for conclusive proof gives way to ‘evidence beyond reasonable doubt’.

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1: The appeal of pornography: for men only?

WOULD you buy a magazine with a naked person on the cover? Pictures of full frontal male nudes are much less effective in selling magazines to women than female nudes are for men. In an American study of reactions to the magazines Playboy and Playgirl in 1976, women rated Playgirl much less interesting than men rated Playboy. For example, twice as many men as women said they would choose to look at the photo-essay or centrefold. Eighty per cent of the women said they would not buy future issues of Playgirl; by contrast, 84 per cent of men in the survey said they would buy future issues of Playboy.

Despite this, several studies have found that women find pornography arousing. Sexually explicit films or pictures produce physiological signs of sexual arousal in women, such as an increased volume of blood circulating in the vaginal area, which closely parallel an erection in a man. When men and women are asked to assess how aroused they feel in response to pornography, the patterns are again similar for both sexes, although in some of the studies the average level of arousal reported by men was higher.

Exposure to pornography will even change women’s attitudes towards sexual violence against women, to some extent. In Zillmann and Bryant’s study at the University of Indiana, women who had been exposed to ‘massive’ amounts of pornography reduced their recommended sentence for rape almost as much as the male subjects on the study (from 12 years to 6.5 years). In the Manitoba experiment, however, viewing films with rape scenes did not increase women’s acceptance of rape myths, nor did it increase their acceptance of interpersonal violence against women.

If women are aroused by pornography, why don’t they buy it? This question was addressed by a follow-up questionnaire after the Playgirl/Playboy study. This showed that fewer women than men had previously read the magazine, fewer had recently bought any sexually-oriented magazine, and fewer thought that people in general would approve of them reading it. In describing their reactions to the magazine, one-third of the women said they felt guilty, dirty, cheap or bad. Most of the women said they would have preferred the male nudity to have been portrayed in the context of a relationship where nudity and sexual activity would be expected. As far as reactions to pornography are concerned, it seems from these findings that the differences between men and women are social and cultural, and not biological.

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2: Drawing the line – can we define pornography?

IMAGES of nudity and sexuality are becoming more prevalent. They have become a feature of several tabloid newspapers and regularly appear in magazines that are not ostensibly sex-orientated. In a recent survey of American detective magazines, researchers found that 38 per cent of the covers depicted women in bondage.

In trying to distinguish between what is and what is not pornographic, the literal definition of pornography, ‘the writings of harlots’, is no more useful than the 18th-century suggestion – ‘books you read with one hand’. British legislation hinges upon the concept of ‘obscenity’ and this is taken to be material that corrupts and depraves its viewer or reader. This has been recognised as an outmoded concept for many years, but the problem of finding something better has remained. Public opinion on the subject seems fragmented, and to make matters worse, the attitude of individuals can change quite dramatically. In Zillmann and Bryant’s study, massive exposure to pornography made people judge it as substantially less ‘pornographic’ and liberalised their attitudes towards the censorship of pornography, even concerning children’s access to pornography.

An American lawyer, Catherine MacKinnon, recently proposed a definition that distinguished pornography from erotica. Pornography, she suggests, portrays women being physically abused, in subordinate roles to men or dehumanised as sexual objects. Erotica, by contrast, shows men and women in equal power relationships that are based on emotional attachment. This distinction has the advantage of corresponding to the research findings: pornography, as defined, is linked to sexual violence whereas no such links have been found for erotica. This may end up being an important consideration in the future.

Dr Mike Baxter is a specialist in animal behaviour based in Aberdeen.