Science as propaganda

There have been lots of utterly worthless studies but I think this one takes the cake. It's purportedly a study of men who buy sex. Why it says so right in the second paragraph.

This research study compared 101 men who buy sex with 100 men who did not buy sex, matched by age, ethnicity, and education level.

Okay, you have a picture in your head of who is being studied here? I read that and I think, ah, we're comparing men who pay for sex with prostitutes versus those who don't. Well, that's not at all what the researchers mean.

And yet buying sex is so pervasive that Farley’s team had a shockingly difficult time locating men who really don’t do it. The use of pornography, phone sex, lap dances, and other services has become so widespread that the researchers were forced to loosen their definition in order to assemble a 100-person control group.

Ah. So who did they study.

“We had big, big trouble finding nonusers,” Farley says. “We finally had to settle on a definition of non-sex-buyers as men who have not been to a strip club more than two times in the past year, have not purchased a lap dance, have not used pornography more than one time in the last month, and have not purchased phone sex or the services of a sex worker, escort, erotic masseuse, or prostitute.”

 That's a pretty broad definition of buying sex. It's also a comparison that is pretty much guaranteed to set up a stark contrast. Imagine you wanted to do a study of non-Christian versus Christian people and you defined non-Christian as anyone who didn't go to church at least 40 times a year or who had broken the hardest of of the Ten Commandments (e.g "false witness") in the last month and or who had broken certain others at any time of their life? That would make your Christian control group a pretty rarefied selection bound to have significantly different beliefs and attitudes from the rest. That is trick the researchers have used here.

It also raises a question: Maybe the problem here is that the researchers are in denial about what normal male sexuality looks like?

By the way, these quotes come from a Newsweek article and that article gives away that this is junk science in one telling line:

In a new study released exclusively to Newsweek, “Comparing Sex Buyers With Men Who Don’t Buy Sex,” Farley provides some startling answers.

Real scientists present their research to their peers for serious assessment. Political activists release directly to the press.

And the confirmation that this is really just political activism is right on the website of the organization that did the research:

Prostitution Research & Education (PRE) is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that conducts research on prostitution, pornography and trafficking, and offers education and consultation to researchers, survivors, the public and policymakers. PRE's goal is to abolish the institution of prostitution while at the same time advocating for alternatives to trafficking and prostitution - including emotional and physical healthcare for women in prostitution. The roots of prostitution are in men's assumptions that they are entitled to buy women for sex, and in racism, and women's poverty. 

Here's the question though, how much of the "science" that makes it into the papers is like this?