The Sleeping Car -- Pornomag: 4 of 7

ornomag
[A Media Analysis of the Time Cyberporn Story]

Page 4 of 7 - Back to start

Electronic Frontier Foundation's Mike Godwin was asked by Rimm to review the legal footnotes of the study prior to publication. He refused, telling Rimm that it would be impossible for him to do so because Rimm had not given him a copy of the study or even of the abstract (Godwin 2; Meeks 4); Godwin could not review the footnotes independent of the study they were part of. After the article and study were published, however, Godwin realized a peculiarity to the method Rimm had used to "sell" the study to him. In an article for the web magazine Hotwired, Godwin quotes a November 8th 1994 email to him from Rimm stating
Given that you will be on campus tomorrow, there are two things I would like to discuss with you. First, I would appreciate an independent check of our legal footnotes, which to some extent are based on your postings and articles. Second, our preliminary data indicate that there are no significant differences among individuals in communities across the country in what kinds of erotic materials, including pornography (visual and verbal) and obscenity, they find of interest. In our experiment we began by assuming that there were indeed community standards which differed across communities - that is, that some communities of individuals had no tolerance for or interest in say, pictures of heterosexual anal intercourse. We then began collecting data to allow the evaluation of the ~null hypothesis~ - that is, that there are no differences. Our conclusions are very clear: there are no differences when communities are defined by telephone area codes. That there are no ~community standards~ on which communities differ. (Godwin 1)

Godwin quotes a similar letter from Marvin Sirbu, Rimm's faculty advisor. Rimm's and Sirbu's discussion of "community standards" is in reference to the Supreme Court's Miller v. California decision in 1973, in which the Court set forth the guideline that the obscenity of a picture should be judged based on the community standards of the area in which the picture is bought or received; thus something that is considered obscene in York, Pa., for example, might not be obscene in Greenwich Village.

While Rimm does mention this aspect of his research in the study, he devotes only one short paragraph to it in his discussion of one example court case (Unites States v. Thomas et. al., also known as the Amateur Action BBS case), and two other passing mentions (in an appendix and in the portion of his conclusions dealing with the Thomas case). He does not mention it in his section entitled "Summary of Significant Results of the Carnegie Mellon Study." In fact, Rimm's data has nothing to do with this subject; he mentions it only in the context of "questions the Thomas case raises" (Rimm "Marketing" 19). Godwin writes
given that a) both Rimm and Sirbu were reluctant to disclose much detail about the study, and b) the GLJ article, once it appeared, gave little attention to Rimm's "preliminary" finding that there is no appreciable difference among communities in terms of tastes in pornography, you have to wonder why they each chose to share this purported finding with me. I think it's because they'd read one or both of two articles I'd written in, respectively, summer and fall of 1994. (Godwin 2)

In these articles, Godwin had critiqued the "community standards" doctrine as "outdated" (Godwin 2), stating that with the advent of telecommunications technology such as the Internet and mass media the very idea of geographic community was no longer valid. Godwin states that
It seems likely that Rimm and Sirbu aimed to give me the impression that their work would support a particular thesis of mine, hoping that this would attract my support and even collaboration. Nothing wrong with that on its face, except that in this instance the tactic communicated a false impression of the focus of the research. (Note: at that point in early November, I had not yet been given a copy of the abstract -- the only direct information I had about the content of the study was that given me in those letters from Rimm and Sirbu).... This and other evidence suggest to me that a standard Rimm approach, when pitching his article as a serious contribution to scholarship, was to tell potential collaborators that Rimm's work complemented theirs. (Godwin 2)

Having realized Rimm's method in pitching the study to him, he then attempted to find out if he had used the same method with anyone else. Godwin found that Rimm had in fact done so with the three law professors -- Anne Brascomb, Catharine MacKinnon, and Carlin Meyer -- whose legal- and policy-oriented commentaries were printed with the study in the Law Review, and whom Rimm has cited extensively, since publication, in response to charges that the study was not subjected to academic peer review.

The "angles" of the study which Rimm pitched to each of them were so wildly divergent that Rimm was able to enlist both MacKinnon and Meyer, feeding each of them information about his study that would seem to be mutually contradictory. To MacKinnon, a noted anti-porn feminist, Rimm stated that his research provided evidence that pornography is widely popular and promotes the victimization of women. To Meyer, an anti- censorship feminist, he stated that the computer pornography studied did not depict women being victimized; furthermore, he stated that his research showed that censorship of pornography had become technically impossible due to advances in technology, and that therefore society would have to come to terms with its own interest in sexual imagery (Godwin 2-3).

Godwin describes Rimm's method as "the most basic of the traditional con man's bag of tricks -- [he] was exceedingly adept at telling people what (he thought) they wanted or needed to hear in order to want to help him" (Godwin 1). What he needed to tell Philip Elmer-DeWitt and Time magazine in order for them to uncritically accept his research was that he had a performed a study on one of the most hot topics then current, porn on the Internet; that the study had been endorsed by three leading law professors; and that he so admired Elmer-DeWitt's accuracy and journalistic insight that he was willing to give Time an exclusive scoop on his study.