Let’s talk about control. No, not in a sexual context – maybe later, my pretties – I mean in a scientific context. We’ll start with an example.
Let’s say they want to study... oh, I don’t know... whether eating carrots makes dudes gay. Some homophobic sociologist sees a guy eating a carrot one day and it creeps him out because it looks too much like the guy is giving the carrot a blowjob (pretty much everything reminds homophobes of gay sex), so he decides to study it to be sure. The sociologist might approach this by going out and finding a bunch of dudes and asking them to eat a lot of carrots for a year, and then coming back after that year to question them and find out how many have turned gay.
Which is a good start, but as studies go he can’t stop there because there could be other factors involved. There could be outside influences impacting whether the men in this study group turn gay or not, having nothing to do with the carrots. Maybe he started the study right before DOMA got struck down, and suddenly men across the country who had just been waiting for their chance to become gay now see their opportunity, having nothing to do with the carrots. Or maybe #EmilyRatajkowski, #RubyRenegade, and #RobertaMurgo decided to open up a free sex clinic in the city – meaning a clinic where they give away free sex – and suddenly even the guys who’d been thinking about becoming gay have a great reason to stay straight, again, having nothing to do with the carrots.
So if our homophobe sociologist found out that all of the men in the group, or none of the men in the group, or 23% of the men in the group turned gay over the course of the year it wouldn't really help him. The result on its own, whatever it is, would be meaningless.
What the sociologist would have to do is create a control group. He’d need to find another group of men, as similar as possible to the first group, and ask them not to eat carrots for a year. And then he could compare the results of the “carrot eaters” with the results of his control group, and determine if the carrots actually had any kind of impact.
| If... | … and … | … then he can say: |
|---|---|---|
| lots and lots of the “carrot eaters” turned gay in that year | very few of the control group turned gay | Carrots make dudes gay!!! |
| very few of the “carrot eaters” turned gay in that year | very few of the control group turned gay | Carrots probably aren’t a causal factor in gay-osity. |
| very few of the “carrot eaters” turned gay in that year | lots and lots of the control group turned gay | The hypothesis was backwards – carrots prevent gay-ness! |
| lots and lots of the “carrot eaters” turned gay in that year | lots and lots of the control group turned gay | Further study is needed – and quick! Something’s going on! |
Only if the effects are noticeably different for the control group than they are for the test group is this study indicative of anything. If the results for the control group and the test group are very similar then it indicates that the thing being studied – in this case carrots – probably doesn’t have the effect it was hypothesized to have.
So why the hell am I writing about carrots? Actually my real point is about porn, and it’s this: it’s difficult to study the effects of porn on society because as time goes by we have less and less of a control group to use for comparison. Whether porn impacts us or it doesn’t isn’t necessarily obvious because if it does we’re all feeling the effects. Show me a person in our culture who doesn’t consume porn, and I’ll show you a person who lies about consuming porn.
I’m exaggerating a bit, of course. Not everyone consumes porn, and those of us who do aren’t all consuming it at the same levels or in the same amounts. There are, for example, very few blogs around like this one, devoted to porn, other than blogs by pornstars. I checked. (I still check, occasionally. Frankly, it would be nice to be part of a community, however small, rather than being the only pervert around blogging about porn...) But I think most people have consumed some porn, and I think on the whole we’re consuming more and more as time goes by.
Also, to a certain extent it’s a moot point as to whether society as a whole consumes porn. It’s more relevant to talk about whether college and university students, especially male students, consume porn. Why? Because they’re the ones who take part in most behavioural studies. If you’re going to do a large-scale study of the effects of something on society, whatever that something is, chances are it’s college students you’ll be talking to. But how the hell are you going to find a control group in that case?
“How did the survey go? Did you find people who consume porn, and people who don’t?”
“Well... we questioned 853 people, 420 girls and 433 dudes. 852 of the volunteers claimed to consume porn ‘regularly or semi-regularly,’ and one guy said that he never consumes porn, but every time we asked him about it he’d sniff his hand and get a weird look on his face. Also, he kept asking to be excused so he could use the bathroom.”
I don’t even think it’s as much of a male/female thing as it used to be. I think men are more likely to participate in studies in college/university, but I think girls are starting to consume porn nearly as much as guys are (which turns me on). So girls are also being impacted by porn. But are they being impacted the same way guys are? Are they being impacted as much? Are the impacts good, or bad?
I have some thoughts on this; I always do. So I’ll take a few posts to write on this topic.
No comments:
Post a Comment