When sex research misses the mark
The New Position
January 25, 2012 7:00 AM ADT
A recent study that just came out of the U.K. is receiving a whole lot of media attention. Miranda Horvath and her colleagues wanted to look at the role of men’s magazines in promoting sexist attitudes. To do this they picked quotes from several mainstream men’s magazines, as well as quotes from interviews with rapists, and asked a group of young men to report how much they identified with each quote. They also asked men and women if they could figure out which quotes came from magazines and which quotes came from rapists.
So what kind of quotes are we talking about? Examples from men’s magazines include such gems as “girls love being tied up … it gives them a chance to be the helpless victim” and “I think girls are like plasticine. If you warm them up you can do anything you want with them.” Quotes from the rapists included lines such as “There’s a certain way you can tell that a girl wants to have sex … the way they dress, they flaunt themselves” and “What burns me up sometimes about girls is dick-teasers. They lead a man on and then shut him off right there.”
So what did they find? First, neither the men nor the women were able to accurately identify where the quotes came from. This means that the rapist quotes and the magazine quotes sounded very similar. Second, the authors reported that the men were more likely to identify with the quotes from rapists than from men’s magazines.
Horrifying right? The authors conclude that including this type of content in magazines is normalizing sexist (and predatory) attitudes among young men. The underlying message, and the message that is being reported by some media, is that men have been socialized into being sexist, hostile towards women, and are walking around secretly identifying with rapists.
Although this study has received a ton of media attention, there are a lot of problems with this research and with the authors’ conclusions.
First, let’s talk about the quotes. To get the magazine quotes the authors pulled out eight sentences from four dozen magazines. Unfortunately, they don’t give us very much information about how they chose these quotes, or about how reflective the quotes were of the rest of the content in the magazines. For example, the authors might have picked the most extreme quotes. Now the fact that these types of quotes are even in magazines is definitely a problem, but without knowing how the items were chosen, it’s hard to draw conclusions about the study.
Similarly, to get the rapist quotes they chose eight sentences from a book that included 15 extended and detailed interviews with men convicted of rape. Did they choose the most extreme quotes? Did they choose quotes that reflected ideas that many different men expressed? Did the quotes capture different aspects of sexism? Again, without having more information, it’s difficult to draw conclusions about the actual overlap between the content of men’s magazines and interviews with rapists.
Second, there is a problem with the way the authors asked men about how much they identified with each statement. Men were asked to rate the degree to which they identified with each of the quotes. Ratings ranged from one (do not identify at all) to seven (identify strongly).
Although the authors go on to talk about how men “identify more” with certain types of quotes, they completely skip over the fact that the average scores on the scale are in the two or three range. This means that overall, most men are NOT identifying with the quotes. Furthermore, when participants were asked to categorize the quotes as degrading or non-degrading, the majority identified all but three of the quotes as derogatory.
Unfortunately, nowhere in the article do the authors acknowledge the fact that on average men did not agree with any of the statements (regardless of what source they came from.) They conclude that including this content in men’s magazines may normalize dangerous sexism for young men. Their data, though, actually suggests that young men do not see these types of statements as normal or something they endorse.
Overall, this research frustrates me. Are there men (and women) out there who identify with sexist attitudes? Of course! Is sexual violence a legitimate problem? Absolutely. But research that is designed to sensationalize a problem isn’t helping.
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