Over the last few years, I’ve managed to peek through my fingers, with some trepidation, to look at the postings of the enfant terribles of our tech-startup-blogosphere, those of Jason Fried, DHH and the 37Signals^[1] cohort.

And I’ve been able to get by with a silent shaking of a head and maybe the occasional chortle or two.

But this article was the final straw:

Never Read Another Resume

It was just too much.  I couldn’t silently let this one pass.  I feel provoked to comment on it.

Along the lines of their recent book Rework^[2],  this article is advice from Mr. Fried on how to run your business in a “non-conventional way,” specifically, advice on how to hire for a tech startup. And like much of Mr. Fried’s work it is written with the underlying theme of “advice contrary to convention.”  Mr. Fried starts with the following, presumably the advice that lent the article its imperative title:

Once we begin vetting candidates, we also behave a little differently. For one thing, we ignore resumés. In my experience, they’re full of exaggerations, half-truths, embellishments — and even outright lies. They’re made of action verbs that don’t really mean anything. Even when people aren’t intentionally trying to trick you, they often stretch the truth. And what does “five years’ experience” mean, anyway? Resumés reduce people to bullet points, and most people look pretty good as bullet points.

What we do look at are cover letters. Cover letters say it all.

Does this sound even remotely plausible? Ignore resumes, really? Let’s say two candidates came in:

Candidate 1                      Candidate 2
Stanford, MS CS, top marks       State school
Facebook (aka hot startup)       Doing Java at HP

You’d ignore this information, and go straight to the cover letter?  Really? … Really? Well no, maybe not ignore, maybe just scan for the big points: education, firms, titles, length of tenure, career progression, etc.

It sounds like Mr. Fried has reinvented, from first principles, the idea of scanning a resume.  Now is Mr. Fried the first person in Corporate America to scan a resume?  No. But, why the chip on the shoulder? Why the feeling of being mislead?

One can almost hear the feelings of shock and disappointment:

In my experience, they’re full of exaggerations, half-truths, embellishments — and even outright lies.

Welcome to the working week, Elvis Costello.   Most people learn this lesson at their first job. In the beginning, their boss pulls them into a few interviews, then maybe they do the telephone screen for their boss, then they help hire for the project their working on, then they hire for the group they are running, and so on and so forth.  Through this, they are learning both from their direct experience but also from their mentor’s past and the cultural/organizational knowledge of their team. Now, I don’t know Mr. Fried’s work history, but from this post, and others, it’s pretty clear that they had to figure out all of this stuff on their own from the ground up.

And herein lays the root of this buggery with Mr. Fried and his 37Signals cohort.  All of their advice has a Pernicious Lack of Perspective (PLP).

They should be pleased with themselves; they figured out the answers to the set of problems and opportunities they faced with their business. They found solutions that worked for their business and for themselves personally. Great. Job well done. “Outsider Art,” if you will.  Self-taught, never institutionalized, but hey, “it works.”

Where things get dicey is when they choose to start broadcasting this as advice that is applicable to others. The Pernicious Lack of Perspective (PLP) is metastasized through the entire corpus of their “business advice” work.

Help Needed

As you read this latest piece of theirs, looking for help on your current hiring problem, very early you are confronted with this:

I’d like to share a bit about how we go about hiring at 37signals. Hiring is something we rarely do — we’re intentionally small at 20 people — but we’ve developed a method that has worked very well for us. It allows us to find the right people and keep them happy.

Huh, ok.

I talked to a CEO last week, they have a killer product: SAS, targeted at enterprise, 3+ yrs in development, deep technical rocket science. Last month a customer brought them in 3-days before the end of a 4-month sales cycle with all of his competitors, and they won the business. And that’s his issue.  He sees his lesser competitors signing up deals and he knows that if he’s on the short list, he’ll win the business.  He says he needs 2 – 3 Enterprise SAS Salespersons ASAP.

Mr. Fried?

It’s easy to say, “There’s gotta be stuff you’d like to do if you had more people.” And, of course, there is stuff I’d like to do. But I believe it’s good to operate at the limits of your organization. Limits force you to come up with creative, elegant solutions. Being forced to get more done with fewer resources is the right kind of pressure.

Yep. Yep. Good points, but, you see, I have this problem here…

A smaller team keeps you focused. It crowds out all the things you’d like to do and replaces them with the things you have to do. It forces you to prioritize and focus on the next most important thing instead of the next “wouldn’t it be cool if…” thing. There are always plenty of those.

Again, can’t disagree. But my problem, sir…

How do you know if you really need someone? A good rule of thumb is this: Have you already tried to do the job yourself? If you haven’t done the job, you don’t really understand the job. Without that fundamental understanding, it’s hard to judge what constitutes a job well done.

Hmm, well, I am not sure this is practical for my CEO friend. He’s done the handful of sales that they’ve closed in recent months, but those have been reactive responses to inbound queries.  He hasn’t gone about generating a proactive outbound prospecting campaign. Should he take the next year to become a self-taught expert in Enterprise SAS sales? Do this to solve the problem of how to evaluate an Enterprise SAS Salesperson?  Is that the best use of his time? His initial idea on how to solve the “evaluation” problem is to go out and hire a top-tier VP of Sales, one who’s done it before but is hungry for his first homerun. But for that you need good advice on how to hire ;)

But Mr. Fried has taken his own advice on “trying to do the job yourself:”

We’ve learned this lesson with other positions, too. Before we hired our first customer service person (Sarah), I did all the customer service, about two years of answering e-mails. David, my business partner, and Jamis, one of our programmers, did all of our system administration before we hired our first system administrator (Mark). We found great people because we thoroughly understood the jobs.

Customer Service. Did it really take two years to learn this role? You had enough work for a full-time person, and yet you held off hiring for two years? To learn the work?

Sysadmin.  I’ve worked with the best can-do, miracle workers. One of our current sysadmins has been called “God on Speed.”  I have also worked with the surliest “re-install NT” types.  I know both. I know what both do; know it to my core. But knowing either doesn’t help me one lick in finding and getting the miracle workers.

I am the biggest proponent of stay lean / quality growth, so I have no beef with Mr. Fried there.  But to whom is all this verbiage about it directed? Most of the startups I see are doing just that.  Mr. Fried has constructed a “conventional way” to oppose from Steve Carroll’s The Office, Excite@Home circa 1999, and a dash of Office Space TPS Reports. There are not a lot of CEO’s of startups out there today hiring for the “luxury” of managing more people (ha!).

Most of the time as an entrepreneur growing your company you are standing pat, steady as she goes.  But there are times, for real reasons, that as an entrepreneur, as a manager, as a practitioner, as a mensch you’ve got to act.  Sometimes there is more risk in standing pat then acting.  Sometimes the people on your team are being ground up because of the lack of a few key managers. Sometimes you see the brass ring, the reason you got into this whole thing to begin with, within reach. These are real reasons. Myself, my advisors, my investors and the people I work with have seen these real reasons in: clients, companies they advised, companies they worked for/started, portfolio companies, companies that pitched them, companies they pitched, companies they’ve bought, companies they’ve sold, etc.

And when you are faced with a situation where you need to act, as a practitioner, you want advice on how to do it well- how do you build that kick-ass team when the time is right.  What you don’t need is advice on how to stand pat. That’s easy enough to do!

What’s with the Strident Insistency(SI)?

It is clear that Mr. Fried has not had exposure to all of these varied “real reasons” for hiring. Mr. Fried has not seen 100′s of companies in different stages of growth with different risk/opportunity sets. The more you read from Mr. Fried and the 37Signals cohort, the more you start to feel that every article should be sub-titled:

Advice On How To Run Our(37Signals) Business.

Or:

What We’ve Learned On How One Should Run Our(37Signals) Business.

It’s fine to write up all these things as anecdotes or amusing stories if you have an audience for it, but why package this Pernicious Lack of Perspective (PLP) as advice?

And why with such a Strident Insistency (SI)?

Where does the “I-know-better” and the “they-just-don’t-get-it” tone come from?

The Chicago Connection

Unfortunately, I think the answer is: Chicago. I’ve lived in Chicago. I lived there for a few years.  It’s a great town with great institutions(UofC). It is also a town where it seems like everybody works for the Chicago Park District (or is working on their uncle for a slot). It’s a town where discussing neighborhoods you’ll still hear things along the line of “it’s where a lot of the young people live.”  And as far as those young people, if they work in tech at Motorola in “Schaumburg” or do IT at a law firm—hell, you’ll practically own the town.

It’s in this environment that Mr. Fried and the 37Signals cohort, “came into their own.”  They had money coming in, they figured things out, on their own, and they became successful—they even attracted fans!

Economically and opportunity-wise, Chicago feels very much like a closed-system. It feels like everybody is re-circulating the same dollars among themselves.  Somehow, who knows how, the value got trapped here long ago and we just keep re-circulating it, knowing that every trip through a little bit fritters away.

Into this closed-system, Mr. Fried brought New Money, not just New Money…. INTERNET MONEY.

The town must have opened up and been laid before his feet. The mouths of the Lessor’s Agents, Bank Salesmen and Car Dealers must have been agape every time Mr. Fried slyly dropped “oh, were growing,,, oh, we’re profitable,,, you know,,, internet.”  I am imaging shopkeepers scurrying around tidying, while profusely apologizing and bringing their daughters out from the back.

This gives a person a fat head.  And the business environment contributes: all the old school companies that have suites in the same building as Mr. Fried’s, the old school companies that all of candidates Mr. Fried interviews work for and all these Park District Employees everywhere, desperately searching for a shrub to trim. I am sure Mr. Fried eventually wanted to scream, “They don’t get it! What the hell are they doing with their lives!?! Can’t they see what I see??”

Humility is Endless

It’s nearly impossible to get that idea in SF. In fact, quite the opposite.  Usually what one comes away with is “Danm, how the hell did they do that?”  It’s a common experience to be at a social soiree in SF, maybe feeling good because you’ve busted your ass for the last 2-years and got your revenues up to $1 million per year and they’ll be somebody from not-quite-a-competitor-but-kinda-in-your-space and you’ll be talking and they’ll mention “we’re going to do $10 million this year.”  Eventually that happens enough and you really get the idea, that if you ever did come back to that party with $10 million in revenue, you are going to bump into the guy that’s working at the company doing $100 million.

Also you’ll hear little tidbits about competitors or friends companies. You’ll be talking to your buddy and he’ll say something like “I ran into so-and-so, they’ve got 7 million users.”  And that’s 5x what you though it was.  “Damn, how’d they do that?”

And when you go to recruit, you’re recruiting the top guys from the top companies and they are telling you about the rocket ride days at Netscape, Paypal, goog, fb, etc.  Wow, heady stuff.

Bottom line is SF is a Company Town. And “the Company” is the tech industry.

And maybe with that, the final note on Mr. Fried’s piece:

We look for effort, too. How badly does this person want the job? Pestering is not the same as effort, though. We hired a designer named Jason Zimdars because: 1. He was good, and 2. He made more effort to get the job than anyone else. He built a special website pitching his skills just for us. So few people make the extra effort like Jason did.

In that quote, I hear a guy that’s been interviewing a lot of guys doing IT at law firms.  I hear a guy that knows he’s got something going on in a town that doesn’t have a lot of that.  And he wants a little ass smooching.  Not a lot, but he know he has something of immense value (New Money, growth!), so immense that it exceeds the worthiness of all candidates, and he just wants a little acknowledgement of it.

The foible of piquing one’s ego once in a while aside, in the end, the galling from Mr. Fried and the 37Signals cohort, comes from that potent combination of Pernicious Lack of Perspective (PLP) with Strident Insistency(SI).

You hope the real players and the kids with quality that are coming up in the industry plain ignore this stuff. You hope it’s clear to everybody.  You’re sure that it’s transparent to everybody. Along the lines of “Nobody’s really going to vote for McCain, right?”

But eventually, it just goes too far. You can’t in good conscious just hope for the best anymore.

You’ve got to take a stand.

.

Mr. Fried. I am watching you.

.

1. 37Signals.com [link] [↩]
2. Rework, Crown Business, 3/2010. Potential readers, don’t be mislead by the 288pp  page count, it has wider margins than a Scott Olsen High School Essay! link] [↩]

Great post Scott! Juice!

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

First, there’s “Open”.

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

Second, there’s the “full web”.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

Fourth, there’s battery life.

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Fifth, there’s Touch.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Conclusions.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs
April, 2010

The iPad is the first Personal Computer-- what you have is a work computer.

I think that the iPad will be one of the fastest selling products in history- here’s why.

Over the past decade most of us have shifted to using laptops, making it possible to work on the go, watch YouTube videos in the living room, watch a tv show over dinner, and catch up on Charlie Rose in the morning. There’s a problem with that, though. It’s awkward to have your laptop in the living room- you can’t kick back and relax with a laptop. No matter what you do, no matter what the form factor, it’s a work computer, with a capital W and a capital C. Email beckons, Photoshop files cry out for attention, assignments are in need of completion, IM windows chatter, Skype calls ring. You cannot relax with a computer, because we all have work computers.

People have asked what the killer app of the iPad is. It’s obvious! The killer app of the iPad is chilling out. You don’t sit it down in your lap, the screen doesn’t come up and block reality- it’s something you pick up and hold. And, like a book, you can simply put it down.

Reading a Kindle in a coffee shop is a casual thing, you can sip your coffee as you linger over the words, taking breaks now and again to people watch a bit. Reading on your laptop is intense- you fall into the world of the glowing rectangle, and shifting away from that world feels awkward, stilted.

The iPad lets you use a computer like a book. You pick it up. You watch a YouTube video. You watch a tv show. You play some music. You check your email. However, each of these things happen in isolation. You are checking your email, you are watching a YouTube video, or you are reading Huffington Post. There’s no in-between. You aren’t consumed by the device, because there’s no ability to be efficient while working on it. It is a device that’s functional enough to be useful, and stilted enough to be inefficient. It’s the first Personal Computer- good for hanging out in the living room, terrible for ‘real’ work. That’s why it’s fantastic! You can leave your ‘pad on the kitchen table, wake up, make yourself a cup of coffee, and browse a couple sites as you sip coffee. Then, when you’re done, you walk away and go to your ‘real’ computer to get work done.

The iPad is there for 1 or 2 hours a day, after work, before work, at the coffee shop, on a plane. Everywhere that your goal is specifically not to be efficient, but rather to chill out. The iPad’s a personal computer. Right now, we only have work computers.

Porn: Good for us?

Scientific examination of the subject has found that as the use of porn increases, the rate of sex crimes goes down.

© Comstock / Corbis

Pornography. Most people have seen it, and have a strong opinion about it. Many of those opinions are negative—some people argue that ready access to pornography disrupts social order, encouraging people to commit rape, sexual assault, and other sex-related crimes. And even if pornography doesn’t trigger a crime, they say, it contributes to the degradation of women. It harms the women who are depicted by pornography, and harms those who do not participate but are encouraged to perform the acts depicted in it by men who are acculturated by it. Many even adamantly believe that pornography should become illegal.

Alternatively, others argue that pornography is an expression of fantasies that can actually inhibit sexual activity, and act as a positive displacement for sexual aggression. Pornography offers a readily available means of satisfying sexual arousal (masturbation), they say, which serves as a substitute for dangerous, harmful, and illegal activities.

Some feminists even claim that pornography can empower women by loosening them from the shackles of social prudery and restrictions.

Related Articles

The Reduction of Seduction

Sperm Motility Secrets Revealed

New Role for Pheromones?

But what do the data say? Over the years, many scientists have investigated the link between pornography (considered legal under the First Amendment in the United States unless judged “obscene”) and sex crimes and attitudes towards women. And in every region investigated, researchers have found that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased.

It’s not hard to find a study population, given how widespread pornography has become. The United States alone produces 10,000 pornographic movies each year. The Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry–lobbying group, estimates that adult video/DVD sales and rentals amount to at least $4 billion per year. The Internet is a rich source, with 40 million adults regularly visiting porn Web sites, and more than one-quarter of regular users downloading porn at work. And it’s not just men who are interested: Nelsen/Net reports that 9.4 million women in the United States accessed online pornography Web sites in the month of September 2003. According to the conservative media watchdog group Family Safe Media, the porn industry makes more money than the top technology companies combined, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon.

No correlation has been found between exposure to porn and negative attitudes towards women.

To examine the effect this widespread use of porn may be having on society, researchers have often exposed people to porn and measured some variable such as changes in attitude or predicted hypothetical behaviors, interviewed sex offenders about their experience with pornography, and interviewed victims of sex abuse to evaluate if pornography was involved in the assault. Surprisingly few studies have linked the availability of porn in any society with antisocial behaviors or sex crimes. Among those studies none have found a causal relationship and very few have even found one positive correlation.

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. Significantly, no community in the United States has ever voted to ban adult access to sexually explicit material. The only feature of a community standard that holds is an intolerance for materials in which minors are involved as participants or consumers.

In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless, since most men have at some time used pornography. Looking closer, Michael Goldstein and Harold Kant found that rapists were more likely than nonrapists in the prison population to have been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster, while other research has shown that incarcerated nonrapists had seen more pornography, and seen it at an earlier age, than rapists. What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing. Richard Green too has reported that both rapists and child molesters use less pornography than a control group of “normal” males.

Now let’s look at attitudes towards women. Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn’t see those movies, and studies by other investigators—female as well as male—essentially found similarly that there was no detectable relationship between the amount of exposure to pornography and any measure of misogynist attitudes. No researcher or critic has found the opposite, that exposure to pornography—by any definition—has had a cause-and-effect relationship towards ill feelings or actions against women. No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women.

There is no doubt that some people have claimed to suffer adverse effects from exposure to pornography—just look at testimony from women’s shelters, divorce courts and other venues. But there is no evidence it was the cause of the claimed abuse or harm.

Ultimately, there is no freedom that can’t be and isn’t misused. This can range from the freedom to bear arms to the freedom to bear children (just look at “Octomom”). But it doesn’t mean that the freedom of the majority should be restricted to prevent the abuses of the few. When people transgress into illegal behavior, there are laws to punish them, and those act as a deterrent. In the United States, where one out of every 138 residents is incarcerated, just imagine if pornography were illegal—there’d be more people in prison than out.

Adapted from “Pornography, Public Acceptance and Sex Related Crime: A Review,” Int J Law Psychiatry, 32:304–14, 2009. http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2005to2009/2009-pornography-acceptance-crime.html

Milton Diamond is a professor in the department of anatomy, biochemistry and physiology at the University of Hawaii and director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society.

References

F. M. Christensen, Pornography: The Other Side. New York: Praeger, 1990.

M. Diamond, “The Effects of Pornography: An International Perspective,” in Pornography 101: Eroticism, Sexuality and the First Amendment, J. Elias et al., eds., Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press, 1999, pp. 223–60.

M.J. Goldstein, H.S. Kant, Pornography and Sexual Deviance. A Report of the Legal and Behavioral Institute, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

R. Green, “Variant Forms of Human Sexual Behaviour,” in Reproduction in Mammals. Book 8, Human Sexuality, C. Auston & R. Short eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 68–97.

B. Kutchinsky, “Pornography and Rape: Theory and Practice? Evidence from Crime Data in Four Countries Where Pornography is Easily Available.” Int J Law Psychiatry, 14:47-64, 1991.

M. Popovic, “Establishing New Breeds of (Sex) Offenders: Science or Political Control?” Sexual and Relationship Therapy, 22:255–71, 2007.

N. Strossen, “The Perils of Pornophobia,” The Humanist, 55:7–9, 1995.

E. Tovar, et al. “Effects of Pornography on Sexual Offending,” Porn 101: Eroticism, Sexuality and the First Amendment, J. Elias et al., eds., Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press, 261–78, 1999.