In October of 1986 the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress released a legal analysis of the Meese Commission report. The article cited the 1973 Miller v. California case, which provides the legal definition of obscenity. That definition consists of three parts: "material is legally obscene only if (1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (2) the work depicts or describes, in a patiently [sic] offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable law; and (3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Failure to satisfy any of these conditions means that the material is protected by the Constitution, except in some instances involving minors. "Materials depicting minors engaged in sexual activity may be regulated regardless of whether they are legally obscene." Minors' access to pornographic materials may also be restricted (Reimer 11-12).

According to the article, even if the Commission's conclusions, which are controversial and subject to serious counterarguments, are accepted as valid, "they do not appear to approach the Brandenburg incitement standard which must currently be met before constitutionally protected materials may be regulated." (Reimer 12). The Brandenburg standard, which derives from the 1969 case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, states that speech cannot be proscribed unless there is a likelihood it will incite imminent lawless action (Fields: "LC Provides").

A report which analyzed the statistical methods used by the Commission was strongly critical. According to Tom W. Smith, the Meese Commission's analysis of public opinion "is marred by several factors. The most serious of these are (1) inappropriate comparisons between variant samples and question wordings, (2) omitting statistical tests of significance when comparing survey results, and (3) failure to use the best available data" (250).

In response to misrepresentation of their work in the Commission's report, Edward Donnerstein, Neil Malamuth and Murray Strauss all issued statements which attempted a more accurate portrayal of the evidence. The problems with the report include factual errors, conclusions which are unsupported by the empirical evidence, and a serious error of omission: "The single most important problem in the media today, as clearly indicated by social science research, is not pornography but violence" (Donnerstein & Linz 56).

They refute Commission's contention that since the 1970 President's Commission report, sexually violent materials have been "increasingly, the most prevalent forms of pornography". In one study, for instance, R-rated "Adult" films had more frequent and more graphic representations of violence than "Triple X" videos. In fact, a number of studies do show an increase in depiction of violence up until about 1977, followed by a decrease. There was no increase in aggressive images in either category between 1979 and 1983, and the difference between the two may be widening due to a decrease in violence in the Triple X videos (Donnerstein & Linz 56-57). One study of video cassettes showed that X-rated films contained what the authors termed more "egalitarian" and "mutual" sexual depictions than "Adult" (R-rated) films, as well as less violence (Linz et al. "Findings and Recommendations" 948).

Donnerstein and Linz pointed out that a 1986 content analysis of detective magazines found that "76% of the covers depicted domination of women and 38% depicted women in bondage. These magazines are not generally the domain of adult bookstores and have never been considered pornographic or obscene." Rather than call for stricter laws, the authors call for "educational interventions that would teach viewers to become more critical consumers of mass media programming" (Linz et al. "Findings and Recommendations" 952).

Certain themes seem to be particularly harmful. Films which depict sexual violence in which the woman is shown to become aroused and eventually to enjoy it seem to result in the greatest affect on the attitudes of men who see them. Yet this research can be tricky to interpret. In none of the studies cited "has a measure of motivation such as 'likelihood to rape' ever changed as a result of exposure to pornography." Men who are already predisposed to violent attitudes toward women may be more sexually aroused by violent materials, "but there is no reason to think that exposure to violent pornography is the cause of these predispositions." The results of these studies indicate that exposure to violent pornography is not causing callous attitudes, but reinforcing preexisting ones (Donnerstein & Linz 57-59).

Donnerstein and Linz's major criticism of the report has to do with its ignoring of the "inescapable conclusion that it is violence, whether or not accompanied by sex, that has the most damaging effect" (59). In a study in which subjects were shown one of three versions of a film, one of which showed sexual aggression and rape, the second of which contained only the violent parts of the scene without the sex, and the third of which had only the sexually explicit portions without the violence, the most callous attitudes and likelihood to rape were found in the men who saw only the violent coercion. Men who saw the X-rated version without violence scored lowest on both measures, and those who saw the version containing both violence and explicit sex scored somewhere in between (Donnerstein & Linz 59).

One difficulty with attempting to predict criminally violent behavior involves the relative infrequency of these events. Social scientists trying to predict such behavior have found it to be "virtually impossiblewithout at the same time erroneously identifying many 'false positives'" (Linz et al. "Issues Bearing" 178).

A point originally articulated by the women's movement and brought out by Murray Strauss, who was a witness in front of the Commission, is that "Rape is not so much a sexual act as it is a violent one. Rape is the use of sex to express aggression." Christie Hefner, president and chief operating officer of Playboy Enterprises, Inc., suggested that "If one examines countries that have serious problems of violence and abuse against women-such as South Africa, Iran, or the Soviet Union-you discover that these are countries that are not only politically repressive but sexually repressive" (27). Regarding images of bondage and rape in printed material, she pointed to Japan, where such images are much more prevalent than in this country, and yet the incidence of rape in Japan is one-sixteenth that in the United States. According to Hefner, the greatest public policy danger of the report is that "it misdirects sincere people's attention away from thinking about the real causes of violence and abuse" (29).

Programs which have shown considerable positive results, such as a Masters and Johnson treatment program for child abusers, have trouble getting funding from the government. When Dr. Lois Lee, founder of the Covenant House program to deal with runaways who become prostitutes, was approached by the Meese Commission to "have her kids testify about how their parents' use of pornography led to their being abused as children and their running away," she said that she simply had not seen that with the hundreds of kids she had dealt with. "She was never again contacted by the commission" (Hefner 46). It appears the commissioners chose only that evidence which would support the conclusions they had set out to prove. In their dissenting report, two members of the Commission noted that "visual materials presented to the commissioners were heavily skewed toward the exceptionally violent and degrading," which may have contributed to the impression of the prevalence of such materials. Brian L. Wilcox of the American Psychological Association reminds us that "even the clearest and least ambiguous research findings can be misunderstood or intentionally distorted" (942-943).

A workshop headed by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop provided essentially the only original research done by the Meese Commission. Given very little time and money to "develop something of substance" to include in the Meese Commission's report, it was decided to conduct a closed, weekend workshop of "recognized authorities" in the field. All but one of the invited participants attended. At the end of the workshop, the participants expressed consensus in five areas: (1) "Children and adolescents who participate in the production of pornography experience adverse, enduring effects," (2) "Prolonged use of pornography increases beliefs that less common sexual practices are more common," (3) "Pornography that portrays sexual aggression as pleasurable for the victim increases the acceptance of the use of coercion in sexual relations," (4) "Acceptance of coercive sexuality appears to be related to sexual aggression," (5) "In laboratory studies measuring short-term effects, exposure to violent pornography increases punitive behavior toward women" (Koop 945). According to Surgeon General Koop, "Although the evidence may be slim, we nevertheless know enough to conclude that pornography does present a clear and present danger to American public health" (944).

Neil Malamuth, one of the participants in the workshop, objected to the wording of the Surgeon General's report. Writing in American Psychologist, he said that, although the participants agreed "pornography that portrays sexual aggression as pleasurable for the victim increases the acceptance of coercion in sexual relations," they did not reach consensus that "this type of pornography is at the root of much of the rape that occurs today." Nor did they agree on other statements which Surgeon General Koop appended to their conclusions in his article. Malamuth concluded, "Obviously, the Surgeon General is entitled to his own opinions in this matter. However, it would be wrong to conclude thatthey were endorsed by all of the workshop's participants"

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