Or, how wingnuts get taken seriously, the sequel. Looks like it’s not just the fundies that “cook the books” when it comes to pushing their anti-porn and anti-sex agendas. This is a great example of something I often point out about data and research when it comes to topics like “porn addiction”, “sex addiction”, porn leading to rape or abuse, that MySpace is the leading cause of pedophilia, that teens need prayer and not condoms, etc. There simply is no unbiased data to prove the points. But here’s how it works…
Local anti-porn and anti-sex radical feminist Melissa Farley just came out with a new book about prostitution in Nevada (another one of her pet causes), and the researchers whose data she based her conclusions on are furious (and bewildered) to see their findings so distorted — and the distortions being eaten up by the mainstream media with their gold-stamped fourth estate spoons.
The thing to remember, besides that no one ever questions anti-sex propaganda in public, is that Farley is the person who in March 2007, testified in hearings against Kink.com‘s purchase of the San Francisco Armory, comparing the images produced by Kink.com to images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.
When Kink bought the Armory, local MSM — namely, the SF Chronicle, whom I write for — swallowed the anti-porn stance and ran with it. Which is why I wrote (in my Chronicle column, upsetting many) Kink.com and Porn Hysteria: The Lie of Unbiased Reporting. This piece is in the brand-new anthology Best Sex Writing 2008, I’m proud to say.
Farely’s data-distortions remind me of when I gave my last Google Tech Talk about sexual privacy: I wanted to give the talk after I heard that anti-porn pundit Shelley Lubben was going to speak there about the evils of porn and how it’s our biggest threat to families and children and she was going to plead Google to do something about it. I wanted to counterpoint and show data: in my presentation, I was told by an attendee that she canceled her talk after a couple people from Google offered to help Lubben come up with data and links to support her asssertions. (It’s all in the video, viewed 1,053,471 times, y4y!)
The details about Farley cooking the books (literally) from the POV of the researchers whose data she morphed are in Bewildered, academics pore over sex-trade hysteria – They try to figure out how they got steamrolled:
(…) For Brents and Hausbeck, who have spent more than a decade researching Nevada’s prostitutes, this was like watching an Etch A Sketch being hung in the Louvre. And it worked. The media sucked up sensationalized stories of women ground up like meat by the Vegas sex industry while the researchers were silenced in the stampede.
What happened? they wondered at a quiet academic gathering Sunday. And why was Las Vegas, that bastion of anti-puritanism with its short-skirted cocktail waitresses and its women direct to your room, so quick to hitch up to the anti-prostitution bandwagon? So quick to bite the hand that feeds it?
The duo was caught off guard by a media blitz over San Francisco researcher Melissa Farley’s self-published book, “Prostitution & Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections.” Days before Farley started selling it, the book was catapulted into credibility by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who swallowed Farley’s thesis — that sex work is violence against women and Nevada is the epicenter of that violence in America — and repurposed it for an article in which he declared: “There is probably no city in America where women are treated worse than in Las Vegas.”
This national coverage horrified the professors, who questioned Farley’s methodology and said she cited their academic work but misinterpreted it in her text. They say her research is anecdotal, not peer-reviewed, and funded by questionable sources.
Why didn’t Herbert, the professors asked, stop to suggest what their own research bares: That some women choose to sell their bodies. And why was Farley’s viewpoint presented as gospel by local reporters, though whenever either Hausbeck or Brents winds up in the media, asserting that not every woman is so helpless as to fall into sex work without a say in the matter, a reporter inevitably seeks out someone like Farley for a flaming counterpoint? Why, they want to know, does the quest for journalistic balance cut only one way? (…)
Link (thanks, anon tipper!).
