Abstract
Years ago I made a site visit to the laboratory of a renowned expert on sexual offenses. In the company of other (all male) researchers on this subject, we arrived at the section of the agenda dedicated to viewing the pornographic stimuli used in the work. I did not want to participate in this evaluation so I exited the room under cover of darkness. After a short walk outside I returned to find a fellow visitor, another esteemed authority on sexual offenders, waiting in an adjoining room. His reason for leaving the viewing was that pornography makes him feel sick and he never watches it. When asked if this was not an impediment to his line of work, he replied that he always uses audio stimuli and never plays them through his own earphones! I too have done several studies of sexual aggression among college men where exposure to pornographic magazines was used as one predictor in multivariate models. And like him, I have found a way of working that avoids actually viewing the images. Some years later a Canadian colleague telephoned me and asked me to send him a packet with the December issue of Penthouse magazine disguised among a pile of scholarly papers. I asked why he did not go and buy it himself, as he lived in a major urban area and I lived in a small town where such a purchase would not go unnoticed, especially by a feminist professor. His reply was that he desperately needed this issue for research and it had been banned from importation into Canada. I remember the shock accompanying my realization that U.S. policy exposes me and other women, young boys, and girls to an influence deemed harmful by just a few miles to the north. Although I had attended a “sexual attitude reassessment” marathon workshop as part of clinical psychology training, by means of which I had been exposed to a wide variety of pornographic films made in the 1970s, I am not a regular consumer. I have not forgotten my utter revulsion when I eventually saw the photo spread that led to banishment. The pictures were most definitely not the tame, erotic but objectifying playmate photos I remembered from my youth. Instead, Asian women with shaved pubic hair so they would resemble children were photographed bound, gagged, and hanging from trees in positions associated with torture or genocide. This experience was my wake-up call that these mainstream magazines had metamorphosed into material indistinguishable from the hard core pornography I had studied in my training. How many other psychologists are unaware of kind of material that appears in men's magazines, such as Penthouse, Playboy, and Hustler available at your comer gas and grocery drive-in, let alone in the publications that you have to buy in an adult shop, order in plain brown wrappers, or download from the Internet under the cover of night? This book is your chance to make a field trip with an expert guide.
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