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An early draft of the report seemed to several commissioners to be an overzealous reaction to such testimony. It had been written by a number of commission staff members and overseen by the group's executive director, Alan Sears, a former assistant U.S. Attorney and an ardent antipornography crusader. One panel member, Frederick Schauer, a respected University of Michigan law professor, criticized its oversimplification and reliance on the bizarre. To avoid having it become a laughingstock, he wrote a 200-page draft that became the basis for the main part of the final report. As a result, more consideration is given to the need to protect the rights of free speech and privacy as defined by the federal courts.
Nevertheless, two members of the commission, Judith Becker, director of the Sexual Behavior Clinic at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Ellen Levine, editor of Woman's Day, objected to the premise that there is evidence linking pornography and violence and wrote an 18-page rebuttal. In it they noted that the panel's "efforts to tease the current data into proof of a causal link . . . simply cannot be accepted."
The fundamental issue involved -- whether certain forms of pornography are harmful to the public and thus might be legitimately restricted by the government -- is unlikely to be settled by the publication of the Meese commission's report. Because the group had limited funds, it was not able to commission academic research of its own on the topic. Instead it relied on past academic studies, testimony from victims and law-enforcement officials, and "common sense."
A small amount of work done in the past decade does in fact suggest that hard-core pornography involving violence has a certain harmful effect. Other evidence, mostly of the anecdotal variety, is far more murky. Edward Donnerstein, a University of Wisconsin psychologist who has studied the effects of sexually violent material, was billed as one of the committee's star witnesses. But in his testimony he refused to make a direct causal link between pornography and violence. Although he does not repudiate the report, he suggests that the crucial variable is not explicit sex but graphic violence. Violent films without sex, like Rambo, he suggests, cause the same changes in attitude as sexually violent ones. "If you take out the sex and leave the violence, you get the increased violent behavior in the laboratory setting, and these 'changes in attitude.' If you take out the violence and leave the sex, nothing happens."
Donnerstein is particularly perturbed by what he sees as the pervasive depiction of violence toward women on broadcast television and in movies. "Why all the sudden talk about sex?" he says. "Why do people find it offensive and violence acceptable?" The emphasis, he suggests, should be on controlling violence. The columnist TRB in the New Republic pointed out recently that while the Reagan Administration decries the spread of sexual pornography, the President has invited Sylvester Stallone, whose movies glamourize violence (and whose wife appears undraped in the current issue of Playboy), to the White House on more than one occasion.