Saw an article about a recent study on prostitution, from Newsweek:
www.newsweek.com/2011/07/17/the-growing-demand-for-prostitution.html

Look, on my salary, I can't afford to pay for sex, right? (At least I don't think so, and I'm not really interested enough to go find out...) I've got some sympathy for the people affected here. But at the same time, whenever I read something like this where they take a fairly broad spectrum of behavior and then play off the worst type of it, while using statistics based off the full range, it really gets up my nose. Do people not see this kind of shell game going on?

Quotes:

"Sex buyers in the study used significantly more pornography than nonbuyers..."

Well, how did they define buyers vs. non-buyers? Hm, they did mention that...

“We had big, big trouble finding nonusers,” Farley says. “We finally had to settle on a definition of non-sex-buyers as men who have not been to a strip club more than two times in the past year, have not purchased a lap dance, have not used pornography more than one time in the last month, and have not purchased phone sex or the services of a sex worker, escort, erotic masseuse, or prostitute.”

Huh. Fancy that. Yes, if you take two groups of men and define them as "guys who look at porn once a month or more" and "guys who don't look at porn more than once a month", you're going to have way, way, way more guys in the first group. And, shockingly, they will look at porn a lot more! You know, I don't think I'd need to spend a million dollars to assume that people who never look at porn aren't associated with sex crimes either. Oy vey, is this what passes for sociology these days? Or more like, gee, you don't think it would be valuable to look at men who hire hookers and men who go to strip clubs and men who look at porn as three separate groups?

No, if your goal is to make it look like any guy who's ever looked at pornography is complicit in every sex crime committed anywhere against anyone. The fact that it's a dishonest way to frame things evidently hasn't stopped the researcher in question...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 08:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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