I'm very strongly in support of directly attacking the issue of sexual coercion, with or without attention to regulation of what Dr. Malamuth refers to as, and what I concur is, an unregulatable Internet. I think we can certainly all agree that there is an utterly unacceptable level of sexual coercion and violence generally, but not always, directed against women.
Then the question becomes for all of us around the table, how do we address that very directly? In studies of pornography and aggression and three-way interactions with the anti-social personality, we're making fine theoretical points that account for very little—something like 4%—of the variability in sexual aggression.
I was delighted to show my class the tea vignette. We spend vastly lopsided amounts of time directed at women, coaching them on how to modify their behaviour and constrain their lives to avoid sexual assault, and grotesquely little time directed directly at men. This is a very big issue.
I would add, I am the senior author, together with Mike Barrett and Alex McKay, of Health Canada's Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education, which was authored, I believe, in the late 1980s. I'm having a senior moment. It was designed on the basis of the best research to create an educational immunization against the lopsided sexist and gendered violence that, unfortunately, characterizes our society.
I've sometimes said wistfully that pornography does us a favour. When you see pornography you're aware that you're looking at something that nonetheless is still a little out of the ordinary. Yet when you see the routine sexism of every TV show, it doesn't raise any red flags, and that's what scares me. When you look at children's books and you see that women are inside and women don't have professions and women are ironing, that's a very big deal.
Broadly speaking, I'm very supportive of education. I'm concerned about stigmatizing sex in general, which might be an inevitable consequence of trying and failing to regulate the Internet. What do we know? We know that individuals who are most anxious about sexuality have the toughest time looking after their sexual health. So I'm strongly supportive of, and I'm happy to find common ground here with, a direct method of addressing the problem that has been lurking in the background of this discussion: does pornography cause X, does pornography cause Y? There's some dispute about that.
However, there's no dispute about the very high levels of coercion, sexism and maltreatment of women in society, and the common ground is perhaps that we could craft ways of directly addressing that, educationally and otherwise.