Any counterarguments to a rather "Socially-Conservative" scientific study that "Feminists" have been sharing on social media, that consuming "objectifying" media supposedly leads to real life sexual violence against women?

griii2 · 2024-03-12T11:19:11+00:00

The core of the study is this:

Five items from Burt’s (1980) research were used to assess attitudes supportive of violence against women.Response options varied from (1) strongly disagree to (7) strongly agree. Theitems andtheir corresponding descriptive statistics were:

‘‘Being roughed up is sexually stimulating to many women’’ (M =3.83,SD=1.63, 37.40 % ofmenexpressedatleastmodest agreement),
‘‘Many times a woman will pretend she doesn’t wantto haveintercourse because she doesn’twantto seemloose, but she’s really hoping the man will force her’’(M =3.21, SD= 1.62, 23.50 % of men expressed at least modest agreement),
‘‘Sometimesthe only way aman can get a cold womanturned on is to use force’’(M =2.24, SD=1.45, 9.60 % of men expressed at least modest agreement),
‘‘When women go around braless or wearing short skirts and tight tops, they are just asking for trouble’’ (M =4.17, SD=1.78, 52.40% of men expressed at least modest agreement),
‘‘A woman who is stuck-up and thinks sheistoo goodtotalkto guys onthe street deservesto betaught a lesson’’(M =2.42,SD=1.71, 16.00 % ofmenexpressedatleast modest agreement). M

If you ask me, these are very, very problematic attitudes and I am pretty confident they correlate with actual sexual violence.

At a first glance I don't see anything wrong with this study, other than the interpretation. Women often "objectify" themselves to gain benefits - Zendaya's sex robot performance being a good example of this behaviour: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/z-3po-zendaya-flashes-her-180223644.html

rabel111 · 2024-03-12T23:15:55+00:00

This was an online survey of 187 undergraduate college men aged 18-33 years (mean age 20.86 years), recruited from one site prior to 2015, including individuals identifying as white (78%), Hispanic (7.49%), Asian (7.49%), Middle Eastern (3.21%), and Black (3.21%).The majority of participants identified as Christian (56.68%), and the remainer Jewish (16.04%), Muslim (3.21%), Buddist (0.53%) or other religion (3.21%) or athiest (20.32%). Approximately 80% had engaged in sexual intercourse in the last year.

Survey responses from approximately 13% of participants were lost due to error, and the missing data imputed (methodology for imputation of data was not adequately described).

The results of the study are highly uncertain, given the small sample size and large proportion of missing data imputed. The reporting of pornography use was not problematic, but given the small sample size, use of online survey and convenience sampling of a specific population with unrepresentative sexual behaviours, the study was not broadly representative in any sense, and the results should not be extrapolated to other populations.

The causal relationship between pornography and sexual violence was based on the works of Martha Burt (1980), a radical feminist researcher who correlated sexual myths with early 'rape culture' theory, based on survey responses from another small unrepresentative sample of people in 1977. This study was extremely influenced by radical feminist theory and is not credible.

The key flaws to the current study include, the age of the social research being used to index contemporary opinions (50 years difference), the leading and often ambiguous language of the survey instrument (the meaning of key words was not adequately explained to responders, and responses were frequently translated into more radical beliefs), the use of a Ligert scale instrument which is prone to response bias (i.e. tendency to extreme responding and response fatigue), the conflation of several response fields to consolidate confirmation bias, the list goes on and on.

In addition, the study, just like Burt (1980), assumed that zero women consensually enjoy or seek out any of the behaviours associated with sexual violence in the study (i.e. feminist ideological framing of women's sexual behaviours and preferences is used as a surrogate for women's actual sexual behaviours and preferences).

Overall, the studies are extremely biased, have major fundamental methodological flaws, are highly unreliable, and the results of the studies should not be extrapolated beyond the small responder populations.

JACSliver · 2024-03-13T00:39:42+00:00

If that were true, I should have become a billionaire stock trader (Market Crashers/StreetPass Trader), a millionaire villager (Animal Crossing New Horizons), a guide for souls to reach the afterlife (Soul Bubbles), and an adept attorney (Phoenix Wright) by now. PS: I chose only 4 examples because I played so many videogames I lose count of all the stuff I could be if that study was true.

ButWhatOfGlen · 2024-03-13T01:00:11+00:00

Chicken or egg, really.

Smeg-life · 2024-03-12T12:42:14+00:00

A study based on 187 college age men from just one college.

That's not exactly a representation of most men in that college let alone in that college town.

It's an interesting study, but this is a wonderful paragraph

In this study, undergraduate men viewed various types of pornography and then interacted with a female confederate. Exposure to rape myth congruent depictions increased the sexually suggestive behavior of lower IQ men only.Itwas theorized that more intelligent men are less likely to deem scripts from entertainment media as appropriate guides for real-life opposite sex interactions.

Sounds more like an issue with 'lower IQ' men not being able to separate reality from fiction according to them. Might say something about the college perhaps, or even perhaps an opportunity to invest in children's education at an early age to understand media and improve bias recognition and critical thinking.

Vaudeville_Clown · 2024-03-12T11:25:09+00:00

Yes. You have to go into the theory a bit deeper but what they pose as truth is something called the "pyramid of violence" were at the bottom there's jokes about sexual assault, and at the top there's the actual incidents of sexual violations.

Naturally, it doesn't prove jack. What they've presented as technical evidence is just a geometric shape, but more importantly, it's really just a repurposed version of Karl Marx's old social class pyramid, alongside with other communist theories that have been thoroughly debunked.

This might be going a bit too far with a regular illiterate, but you can always try this.

If this was all true, it'd stand to reason that we'd be living in a nightmare of never ending gun violence. After all, there's all those computer games and movies were people are killed constantly. Like, don't even bother. The link between violence in entertainment and real life violence has been disproven thoroughly.

But sexism is supposed to be a completely different beast somehow? They have to argue why in that instance people can't tell the difference between fiction and reality, while everyone seem to be doing that just fine in every other regard.

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