When the author of a study that is your sole example to make a scientific claim in a court case repudiates his own work, what does that leave you with? Not much. That is now the case with the federal trial revolving around California’s Proposition 8. Sure, the trial was a mockery in and of itself, with the Pro Prop 8 site offering virtually nothing in the way of testimony to demonstrate why gays should be discriminated against. They did go after a legal argument though, whether homosexuality was an immutable condition. In other words, can you change, or are you born that way?

That is a legal argument that does little to explain why gays should be discriminated against, and goes more towards the argument that they should be discriminated against because they chose to be gay. It is their own fault. They could change if they wanted to. How can they be a protected class if it is a class of their own choosing? With that same reasoning, though, you could also argue for discrimination against people based on their religion.

Virtually the entire scientific community rejects the hypothesis that you can simply change your sexual identity. There is an exception. His name is Dr. Robert Spitzer, and his peer reviewed study arguing that homosexuals can change and become heterosexuals was published in the October 2003 issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Spitzer himself is a highly respected researcher. He was a leading voice in the early 1970s to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association.

His work was cited in the Prop 8 case- it is pretty much the only work of its type to be available to cite. It has been cited by virtually every anti-gay organization. Now, though, Dr. Spitzer admits that his work was flawed. And wrong.

Spitzer even apologized to the gay community for the harm that his flawed research caused, writing, “I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some ‘highly motivated’ individuals.”

The problem with this and any similar studies is that it negates the entire concept of bisexuality. If I am bisexual with a predominant interest in men, but still have some interest in women, then marrying a woman because my religion and society tells me that is the only acceptable choice is not such a big deal. It is a big deal, though, if I were at the far end of the Kinsey scale with no sexual interest in women at all. Until you eliminate this factor from the study and only look at men with no interest in women who were converted to a new found sexual attraction to women, then your study is meaningless.

We can see problems right away with Spitzer’s study. It was self selecting for men and women who were Christian with religious beliefs that told them that homosexuality was sinful. That was true for 80 percent of the respondents. They were motivated by their religion to change. Did they lose their same sex attraction? Only 11% of the men claimed that they did.

The real flaw of the study was noted in the letter by Spitzer to the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior. He wrote: “” The Fatal Flaw in the Study –- There was no way to judge the credibility of subject reports of change in sexual orientation. I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the subject’s reports of change were credible and not self-deception or outright lying. But the simple fact is that there was no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid.”

It was self-reporting by people who were highly motivated by their religion to make others believe that homosexuality could be cured- even if they themselves in actuality did not find a cure for themselves. As Spitzer pointed out, it answered the question of what people who had undergone reparative therapy and claimed it was successful had to say about it, without looking more deeply at what really happened to them. It did nothing to screen out those who had failed changing their orientation, but were motivated to lie about it by their religion to offer others hope that they could change.

There is no question these people were highly motivated to change. Their religion made them absolutely miserable about being gay. Over a third had seriously contemplated suicide over it. What the study failed to ascertain is whether anyone had experienced any real change. It was a bad study. It answered no interesting or even relevant questions.

Spitzer wrote in the conclusion of his original study, “the mental health professionals should stop moving in the direction of banning therapy that has, as a goal, a change in sexual orientation. Many patients, provided with informed consent about the possibility that they will be disappointed if the therapy does not succeed, can make a rational choice to work toward developing their heterosexual potential and minimizing their unwanted homosexual attractions.” He was the only mainstream psychologist making that claim, a claim he now retracts.

That leaves the anti-gay movement with no serious peer reviewed research to cite. Not that they will stop citing his original study, despite being repudiated by the author. His retraction of the study is important, because it pulls away the last vestige of scientific respectability to the reparative therapy movement.

Sexual orientation is not something that can be changed through therapy. Spitzer’s retraction puts the final nail in the coffin of one of the cruelest scams ever to be perpetrated on the desperate- men and women who were made desperate by the hate filled rhetoric of their fellow believer, the very same people who were pushing this sham therapy on them.

Narth. No, its not what Pinky of Pinky and the Brain used to say. NARTH stands for The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, and it has now hit a new milestone. It is, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, now the main source of anti-gay junk science. As SPLC points out in their report, anti-gay groups decided that they could no longer rely on mainstream science with its pro-reality agenda. As notorious homophobe and pseudo-scientific crank Paul Cameron of the anti-gay organization the Family Research Institute said, “We can no longer rely on – almost all pro-family organizations do today – on gleaning scientific ‘bits’ from those in liberal academia. We must subvert the academy by doing original, honest research ourselves.” Honest research means reporting anything, regardless of the facts, that puts homosexuality in a negative light. NARTH promotes the idea that homosexuality can be cured, an idea opposed by every legitimate medical and psychiatric organization. Their founders see homosexuality as a mental illness. As reported in the SPLC Intelligence Report: “In 1995, for example, NARTH featured Scott Lively, co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, at its annual conference. Lively’s book argues that the Nazi Party recruited gay men because of their inherent savagery and that gay men largely orchestrated the Holocaust — a claim roundly rejected by all reputable historians. NARTH has also promoted the work of Paul Cameron, who remains director of the Family Research Institute despite being ejected from the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association (ASA). The ASA declared, “Dr. Cameron has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism.” An excellent example is the NARTH claim that the work of Seton Hall professor Theodora Sirota showed that children raised by gay parents had worse outcomes than those raised by heterosexual parents. The problem with this claim is that the research did not look at children raised by gay parents- it looked at outcomes in families where there was a gay husband married to a heterosexual wife. As Dr. Sirota wrote: “[N]o conclusions about gay or lesbian fitness to adopt children or quality of active gay parenting can be drawn from the findings of my research. No conclusions about the well-being of children who are or were actively raised by gay or lesbian parents can be drawn from the findings of my research.”

Many pseudo-scientific organizations or organizations with a purely religious agenda give themselves names to make them sound mainstream and legitimate. One of those is the American College of Pediatricians. It sounds like a purely medical based organization,  but in fact, it is a socially conservative and religiously driven group. Like NARTH, they are also in the business of creating fake research and statistics to demonize gays. ACP head Dr. Joseph Zanga, described his group this way: “essentially a Judeo-Christian, traditional-values organization … open to membership for pediatric medical professionals of all religions who hold our core beliefs … that life begins at conception and that the traditional family unit, headed by an opposite-sex couple, poses far fewer risk factors.” You’d never get their agenda from the name of the organization, though, so when they put out statistics or research, they seem to have a lot of credibility when in fact they do not. They distort the findings of other researchers, according to the very researchers whose research they cite. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, stated: “It is disturbing to me to see special interest groups distort my scientific observations to make a point against homosexuality. The information they present is misleading and incorrect.”

AIDS Healthcare Foundation. The name sound legitimate. At one time, it probably was. But now, they have been taken over by leadership with a bizarre agenda- enforcing the use of condoms in the adult industry at any cost. They made alliances with anti-porn advocates. They successfully got a mandatory requirement into city law that all non-studio porn shoots in Los Angeles use condoms even for oral sex. This requirement has done little more than force non-studio shoots to move outside of the city of Los Angeles, because there is no market for that type of porn anywhere in the world. No one wants to see oral sex scenes with all the sex organs covered up. They belittle the use of testing that has been so successful that not a single incidence of AIDS has occurred since 2004, and even before that it was rare.  AHF put the main testing facility used by the adult industry out of business. They lie about statistics, they distort the facts, and they have long since ceased being a reliable source of information. Their agenda borders on the fanatical. They believe in condoms and abstinence only. They even oppose a drug Truvada that may help in preventing transmission of the AIDS virus.  In a press release, AHF stated: “AHF has long been critical that PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) will not work on a large-scale basis because, consistent with poor medication adherence rates for most diseases, people will not be able to take Truvada as directed. Because of this, there will be little or no preventative effect, and drug resistance and drug resistant strains of HIV will develop. In addition, people who falsely believe they are fully protected against HIV very likely may engage in riskier behavior, thereby increasing their risk of HIV infection.” Finding a way that people can prevent transmission has been a huge goal of AIDS researchers, but AHF seems to believe they should not even try. Condoms are good enough. Forget testing. Forget research. We are going to put condoms on everyone whether they like it or not. The next thing I suspect they’ll try to enact is a law that forces married people to wear condoms, insisting on safe impregnation through artificial means. Gay fanatics trying to dictate to straight people what they should do does not seem to be any better than celibate religious fanatics trying to dictate the sexual practices of heterosexuals.

There have been many studies that show no link between abortion and mental illness, despite the repeated claims from anti-choice advocates. We looked at the issue at the end of last year back on the December 30th Sex and Science segment, where we talk about meta analyses. In that segment, we show the difference between good research and bad research. One of few studies to show an abortion mental illness link published in a major journal was in 2009.  It was roundly criticized when it came out. A new report in the February 2012 Journal of Psychiatric Research offers even more proof that the study does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.  The original study was done by Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University in Ohio. It was not well received when it came out, and we reported on it negatively at the time. This latest analyses shows that Coleman and her colleagues  included mental health ailments not only after abortion, but all across the life span, making it impossible to know whether the psychological problems came before or after the procedure. In other words, a woman could have a mental breakdown at age 20 and an abortion at age 30, and it would be included as evidence for a link between abortion and mental illness. According to researcher Julia Steinberg, an assistant professor in the University of California, San Francisco’s department of psychiatry, “This is not a scholarly difference of opinion; their facts were flatly wrong. This was an abuse of the scientific process to reach conclusions that are not supported by the data. The shifting explanations and misleading statements that they offered over the past two years served to mask their serious methodological errors.” Coleman has admitted that she looked at lifetime mental illness rather than at mental illness that could conceivably be linked to abortion, and now claims that the study which has been so widely used by anti-choice forces never asserted that there was an abortion mental health link, ignoring the fact that the language of her study repeatedly claims such a link. The Journal that originally published Coleman’s paper comes down on the issue this way: “Based on our joint review and discussion of the debate, we conclude that the Steinberg-Finer critique has considerable merit and that the Coleman et al. (2009) analysis does not support their assertions that abortions led to psychopathology in the NCS data”. Case closed.

The study title is Oral contraceptive use is associated with prostate cancer: an ecological study. That is a little strange since men get prostate cancer and women take the pill. The study comes from David Margel and Neil E Fleshner of the Division of Urologic Oncology, Princess Margaret Hospital, University of Toronto and was published in November of 2011.

From the official study: Several recent studies have suggested that oestrogen exposure may increase the risk of prostate cancer. A significant association between OCs and PCa has been shown. It is hypothesised that the OC effect may be mediated through environmental oestrogen levels; this novel concept is worth further investigation.

The newspaper headlines, of course, were Birth Control Pills Linked to Prostate Cancer. That is absolutely false. This is the classic problem of a failure to establish a causal link, something the authors admit.

Here are other explanations for the findings. The pill has the highest use in developed countries. These are countries with better medical care more likely to detect prostate cancer. There could also be environmental factors. This study really does not answer any questions as to the actual cause, assuming that they are correct in their conclusions.

The problem with this study is that it feeds into the myth, used by the anti-contaceptive forces, that hormones from birth control pills are infecting our water supply. That is not true. Synthetic estrogens as a byproduct from industrial waste are a problem, but the amount of hormones from birth control are minimal.

There are lots of chemicals with strong linkages to prostate cancer. I don’t have the background to know how good the science is here, but I do know that the reporting is way off the mark, and studies like this naturally lend themselves to those with an agenda.

This 2009 study from the University of British Columbia is a little sad for Mitch Hedberg. In a test they showed sexy videos and the least sexy comedian they could find- Mitch Hedberg. Hedberg died in 2005, so he probably won’t take offense, and his comedy did contribute to science. The study was to see how well men could control their sexual responses. The men were told to control their responses to the videos, and as you might expect, most were able to control their mental and physical responses. The study found that the men who were best able to control their response to the pornographic videos were also able to control their response to Mitch Hedberg. Men who were more easily excited were less able to regulate; while guys who tended to be sexually inhibited because of performance issues were better able to prevent having an erection. Frankly, I do not know that this study tells us anything particularly interesting about sexual response, but it does tell us something important about comedy. Get your audience sexually turned on first, and they’ll laugh their asses off at your jokes. That is breakthrough science for those of us who try to make people laugh, and also explains why those horrible burlesque comics were able to get a response from the audiences. They were already turned on.

So, just how much skin should a woman expose to best attract a man? According to 2009 research at the University of Leeds, their scientifically derived number is 40%. These studies were done in clubs to see what got women the most attention. According to study leader psychologist Colin Hendrie, “Any more than 40 percent and the signal changes from ‘allure’ to one indicating general availability and future infidelity.” Or maybe it was sending the signal I am too hot for you and you don’t stand a chance with me. Other factors they considered included wearing tight clothes and dancing provocatively. And what was covered mattered. Bare midriffs got the most attention. They did not test to see how much attention bare butts and breasts got. Is it just me or does this seem like nonsense?

Take the pseudoscience of sexual addiction treatment, and ratchet it up a notch with cruelty, and you get reparative therapy. This horrendous scam claims to use “therapy” to cure homosexuality. This gets our number one spot because it feeds off of the misery of gay people living in a homophobic society while promoting a fundamentalist religious agenda. While the sex addiction industry may be bigger, the individual cost to the person seeking treatment here is greater. Its a triple threat scam.

Treatment can be amazingly expensive, and since it basically does not work, you’ll be in therapy a long time. Not only does it foster the assumption that homosexuality is a disorder, contrary to the general consensus of the medical community, it also ignores the existence of male bisexuality as a possible explanation of the very few documented “cures”, and provides nothing in the way of documentation to demonstrate any overall effectiveness.

Independent scholar Anemone Cerridwen and her co-author Dean Simonton of the University of California at Davis did a study of 914 mainstream films to see if they did better at the box office with the inclusion of sex. Their results were published in the November 2009 issue of the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts. They concluded “Analyses of 914 films released between 2001 and 2005 indicated that sex and nudity do not, on the average, boost box office performance, earn critical acclaim, or win major awards.” They also believe it may have hurt the film’s chances for an Academy Award nomination or win.

I’d have to really go in depth on this study to know just how meaningful it is, but this does prompt some obvious responses. We aggressively rate any type of sex or nudity with an R rating, hence making it less available to a larger audience. These movies are seen as more adult, so fewer people will take their children. That means a smaller potential audience automatically. And I should mention that the highest grossing movie ever, Titanic, had a prominent nude scene. And it did pretty well at the Academy Awards.

The authors of this study state that what really sells is violence and not sex, which is sort of a sad commentary. The amount of violence in American films is magnitudes greater than the amount of sex, which is much less than what you find in European films. I wonder if scenes of violence were as harshly rated as sex scenes were if these conclusions might be very different.

Another factor that skews these results is that mainstream films just don’t generally have sex or nude scenes. Sure, teen comedies and similar lightweight fare do, and I suspect they do better at the box office than they would have without the nudity- since sometimes the nudity is the only thing in the movie. But they never will be Oscar contenders.

And the researchers used ScreenIt, the parents website for movie content reviews to set their criteria. I’m thinking they would have done better with Mr. Skin reviews that aren’t focused on children. Sure, they factored in ratings, but unless they only looked at R rated movies, I don’t think this was a level playing field. And I am quite a bit suspect that they are all that expert about the movie industry. They claimed that “sex is cheap with respect to production costs. Female actors can be hired for less than male actors, and can be urged (i.e. coerced?) into displaying more sexual nudity/activity; and for various reasons, sex scenes may be less expensive to shoot. And yet, mainstream cinema still can’t get an additional buck out of the practice.” This displays a stunning amount of ignorance about the movie industry. They are basing this on the notion that Male action stars do get paid more generally, but this is completely irrelevant. What actors get paid is largely a result of their perceived box office potential, not their gender. And A list stars are going to cost you a lot of money, male or female. And most of them don’t do nude scenes, no matter how much coaxing you do. In most movies, the nude scenes, which are often gratuitous and simply involve background performers doing things like dancing in a strip club, use unknowns. And those unknowns, male or female, are going to get SAG minimums most likely, plus a little extra for doing a nude scene. And when A list stars do nude scenes, it gets a lot of attention and probably helps box office. Swordfish was not a very good movie, but probably made more money because of the Halle Berry nude scene. And they had to pay her more money to do it- an extra half a million. When she appears nude, the movie is going to make more money. And she won Best Actress in Monster’s Ball, in which she also did a nude scene. And would anyone have gone to see Dancing at the Blue Iguana if not for the name nudity? So it is actually more about context. Who is the actor or actress appearing in the nude or sex scene? How well did the scene move the story along? And actually, shooting porn is relatively easy, but shooting a sex scene for a mainstream film is really complex. You have to worry about what might bump up your MPAA rating- something which is almost a black art but which could hurt your distribution. It is usually a difficult scene for the actors to do. These take far longer to shoot than just a scene of dialogue- or even a simple action scene that does not involve a lot of big explosions or complex choreography. And action scenes tend to be lengthy, whereas sex scenes in U.S. movies tend to be extremely brief- so it is impossible to compare the two. So, I suspect, based on the ignorance of these researchers about the movie business, that this study is not all that useful. Crappy action films that appeal to teen boys will generally make money, while higher quality and more artistic films with a little sex will generally have a smaller market- but the notion that producers will figure out that sex does not sell and stop using it is ridiculous. American Pie without any sex and nudity? What’s wrong with these people?