The question focuses on violent pornography. The first point I would emphasize—and I think that Dr. Malamuth and my other colleagues share this view as well—is that in this research area, there is no single definition of pornography. In fact, a recent review looked at about 42 different studies and didn't find two studies that defined pornography in the same way. That's number one, and it's a limitation in the field. An even more serious limitation that bears directly on your question is that exceedingly little research has focused on violent pornography.
Let me make a couple of observations. As part of his dissertation, one of my graduate students, Tony Bogaert—now a senior professor here in Canada—gave young men the opportunity to choose the kind of pornography they'd like to see in a research study. The least common choice was violent pornography. It's not a popular choice in general, although it may be popular with people with particular anti-social personality traits. Very few studies outside of the laboratory studies that have created violent pornography have dealt with this.
In the study that Dr. Malamuth and I have spoken about that involved sex drive, we found that men with a high sex drive, indeed, used more violent pornography than other people. In the couples study, in which we looked at 700 individuals, we found no comment about violent pornography—and these were all open-ended questions that were asked, so there are thousands of comments. This is a research area that we need to go into.
We know that when men and women are exposed to nonviolent pornography, the typical response is a slight increase in the kind of sexual things they already do with their partner or with themselves. We know from Meredith Chivers' laboratory at Queen's University that women and men are both aroused by nonviolent pornography. We know from Wendy Stock's unpublished dissertation that women were sexually aroused by rape themed pornography, although they didn't like it. We have very limited specific information on anybody's response outside the laboratory studies, the experimental studies. This is an area we need to look at.
I very much sympathize with my colleague that, you know, we've been asking the wrong question in part. How does this affect women? No one here seems to be able to tell you.