So before we continue our theme this week of lampooning fleet street’s utter failure to understand the basic principles of Science I’ll give you a break with this little gem of neanderthal level fire and brimstone I came across in the Washington Times this week. According to the article 1 in 6 women are addicted to porn. The headline should set off alarm bells right away. Who decided they were addicted?  Women in general? American women? Or just women who read a particular crackpot website perhaps?

NB: in many crackpot reports the working definition of “addiction” is just “use of X”. Thich explains in one sentence a lot of strange stats you may have seen refering to every type of addiction. (The case for this haphazard use of the word is supposedly that when you just go up and ask someone who uses “x” whether they are addicted to porn, alcohol cannabis or whatever, the standard response is “f*** off”.) The academically accepted definition however, requires distress of the individual sooner or later.

So after a brief look in to the referencing of this study we can see that this earth shattering finding was found by… no, not a study but a survey by “Today’s Christian Woman” presumably of Christian women (we are left to guess however because none of these crucial facts are  included in this three page long abomination, oh and it was conducted erm 7 years ago (What the hell, thats not even news!) Not only that but outside of this news paper article I can’t find any evidence anywhere on the internet that this study ever existed. It certainly doesn’t seem to have been cited by any other reputable media in the erm 7 years since it was published. There are a couple of mags and blogs with similar titles but they don’t seem to have any evidence of this survey. Which is a real pity because I was really looking forward to hypothesising why responders to a survery on a website for Christian mothers had such a massively higher level of pent up sexual angst than the average woman. (Put the pitch forks away that’s called a joke, if you didn’t get that you might as well sod off right now).

OK, well I could go on all day about the methodological and statistical catastrophes in this article but that would be missing the wood for the trees. (Why don’t you try it for yourself, this ones a text book case. TIP: Find who conducted the other study in this article and check what they actually found?)

The article goes on to cite some crazy lady Mary-Anne-Laydon a professor (please god no) of “women’s studies” at Wheelock College in Boston as saying (as if it were definitive fact):

“The more pornography women use, the more likely they are to be victims of non-consensual sex”

The article then continues on to chat about some other random bullshit without even attempting to address this second earth shattering statement in this story. Seriously, did she just say that? Yes. This illustrates superbly an extraordinarily basic  principle that newspapers in general don’t seem to get….

Correlation ≠ Causation

Obviously to any rational being there are most probably dozens of uncontrolled factors at work. Without some earth shattering evidence to the contrary, the fact that one bullshit study from a source too obscure to bother citing in a three page text that found that some women who were raped watched porn and some other women who said they didn’t watch porn didn’t get raped tells you absolutely, categorically, sweet, f*** all. It’s absolutely irrelevant to anything and everything ever.

Good day to you.

If you liked this, you may also like:

Same picture, different perspectiveOut With The Scientists, In With The Quacks (and religious zealots)Who wants to score some Digital Drugs!A masterpiece of our timeAPA Shut Down DSM-5 Blogger