Abstract
IN the late 1960s, the U.S. Congress, in Public Law 90-100, found the traffic in obscenity and pornography to be "a matter of national concern" and established the President's Commis- sion on Obscenity and Pornography to investigate the matter. After an expenditure of more than a million dollars and the writing of no fewer than nine volumes of research reports, the commission reached the following conclusion (1970, p. 139): If a case is to be made against "pornography" in 1970, it will have to be made on grounds other than demonstrated effects of a damaging personal or social nature. This view stands in apparent sharp contrast to the views of a number of feminist writers who suggest that pornography' does indeed have effects that are personally and socially damaging to women (for example, Brownmiller, 1975; Gager & Schurr, 1976). Our purpose in this chapter is to reconsider the pornography research literature from the perspective of Bandura's (1977) social learning theory, especially as it applies to the feminist view. It will be argued that the Pornography Commission and the feminists do not in fact hold opposite views, and that social learning theory AUTHORS' NOTE: The writing of this chapter was supported in part by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship 452-81-3574, awarded to the first author. We wish sincerely to thank Gordon Barnes, Norman Endler, Bradley McKenzie Arie Nadler, and James Nickels for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the essay. Correspondence and requests for reprints: James V.P. Check, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3.
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