The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (13 page)

The natives of Melanesia watched the supply chain of the war machine lurch into full capacity. First Japanese and then American troops occupied their islands. Airstrips and planes brought
clothes, medicine, food, and weapons in vast quantities. In a short amount of time – and from seemingly nowhere – manufactured goods were delivered in far greater volume and variety
than the natives had ever known before.

Ordinarily, someone might have taken the time to explain to the Melanesians what was going on. But by the time the troops arrived, missionaries and aid workers had already been evacuated.
Without
anyone to explain the situation, the islanders relied on their own experience. What sort of event would have the power to direct these supplies to the islands? They
logically concluded the armies obviously had the attention of some very powerful deities.

After the war, the supply flights halted. The troops who had lived on the islands disappeared. Cargo deliveries stopped turning up. So, the Melanesians did whatever it took to make the planes
come back. They decided to imitate the people who had occupied their islands.

Melanesians took over the abandoned air bases, wearing headphones carved from wood. They built new control towers and assembled life-size model planes out of straw. They dressed in the style of
US soldiers and performed parade drills, all to attract the favourable outcome. These methods had, after all, already worked so well for others. Traditional religions were abandoned – the
gods previously worshipped by the Melanesians had never been as generous as the ones who supplied the occupying armies.

The islanders were imitating what they saw, without realising what manufacturing and technological developments in far-away countries had caused it to occur. These imitations developed into what
is known as a cargo cult.

The planes did not return. The supply lines were not revived. As time went by and nothing happened, the Melanesians stepped up their efforts. The ceremonies became more ingrained. The cults
gained prominence, because if people did enough, if they believed enough, then the gods should deliver the result they were after.

The John Frum cargo cult is still active in Vanuatu today. Followers believe Frum sent the American servicemen during the war, and will return to the islands one day. Islanders organise
ceremonial military marches and raise flags on 15 February, John Frum Day. Elsewhere in Vanuatu, Prince Philip is worshipped as a deity, and his followers request goods such as a Land Rover, rice,
and money.

What happened in Melanesia has since become shorthand for a kind of mistake in logic made by people throughout history. Because the Melanesians had not encountered the full scale of Western
technology before, and live simple lives even today, their assumptions were understandable.

However, it also happens with groups of people who have the means to know better. In particular, cargo cults can take hold when people try to replicate the look and feel of
scientific research, without understanding its underpinnings. And it’s rife in the kind of research produced by Constellation Makers.

For the most part, imitating successful people is something we do every day. At the same time we like to think we’re savvy enough to tell the real from the counterfeit.
When you walk down to the shops in your favourite team’s away kit, you’re imitating successful sportsmen. But no one’s going to stop and ask when you were signed to the side,
since most of us can tell the difference between a fan and a player. Discerning the two takes little effort.

But when confronted with things – such as statistical analysis – where the details are not as widely known, it’s harder for most of us to tell the real from the fake. So, we
look to trusted guides to tell us whether or not the interpretation is real. These people act as translators to the layman. Official translators might include advisors to the government; unofficial
ones include people in the media, such as journalists. They may be Constellation Makers; they may not. The problem is, it’s difficult to know.

Even trusted guides can be fooled by reports that, to the untrained eye, look legitimate. Such reports might use the same terminology, albeit incorrectly, or cite the right kinds of sources
without properly examining the data. In the chapter on sexualisation, we saw how some papers were misinterpreted and taken completely out of context to ‘prove’ unrelated points.

This is even more likely to happen when talking about subjects that inspire strong emotional reactions. If the results seem like something we already assume, or fear, to be true, they are more
likely to be accepted without close examination.

Respected physicist Richard Feynman was the first to coin the term ‘cargo cult science’. This refers to studies that have a veneer of believability, but are missing ‘a kind of
scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought’. Just as with the original cargo cults, such errors are no barrier to being widely believed.

So, what do cargo cults have to do with lap dancing? It turns out
one of the most widely quoted recent studies on erotic entertainment and crime is nothing more than cargo
cult social science. And because the results sound like things many people would like to believe, it is still positively reported – even years after some of its major errors were pointed out.
This is the story of how to effectively debunk a constellation.

The borough of Camden in north London is a vibrant and diverse quarter of the city. From the Bloomsbury of feminist hero Virginia Woolf to the leafy expanse of Hampstead Heath, it embraces a
colourful past and present. In the modern iconography of London, Camden Lock is as famous for its nightlife as Kentish Town and Chalk Farm are for their music venues. At night the area comes alive,
hosting almost 2000 pubs, 130 licensed entertainment venues, and 7 lap-dancing clubs.

To the uninitiated, Spearmint Rhino may look like any of the similar clubs in the area. In fact it’s been the epicentre of controversy since its opening. Not only was it one of the first
establishments granted an all-nude licence in the 1990s, it also paved the way for identical clubs in London and in other cities around the UK.

Spearmint Rhino was notable not only for full nudity but also for its style. It gained a reputation for having a less seedy atmosphere than previous clubs in Soho. Comfortable leather chairs
curl around customers who patronised Britain’s first all-nude strip club. The topless dancers at Stringfellows were modest titillation by comparison. Spearmint Rhino’s arrival signalled
a new era of adult entertainment in the capital.

Customers responded by making lap dancing the talk of London. ‘Table dancing has moved into the mainstream,’ wrote Ben Flanagan in the
Observer.
‘The clubs, previously
perceived as sleazy and hostile, are now seen as ideal venues for a corporate night out or a bit of celebrity-spotting.’

So when a 2003 study reported a 50 per cent rise in rapes in areas surrounding lap-dancing clubs, people were aghast. Even worse, the number of rapes was claimed to be three times the national
average. As a statistic, it sounded shocking, but it also had the ring of truth to it. Lap dancing was as controversial as it was popular.

Rape and all sexual assaults are terrible crimes, as I and other
survivors can attest. They are also, thankfully, and as this chapter will show, becoming rarer. Particular
care should be taken with research in this area. Why? Because funding is hard to come by, the crime itself is not well understood, and survivors can need intensive support that varies from person
to person. Sending the cavalry in one direction when the enemy is in fact somewhere else could actually harm, rather than help, victims.

One of the problems with reports like the one carried out in 2003 is that once in the news cycle, they are difficult to dislodge. It’s widely thought that fact-checking in the media is
more the rule than the exception. Unfortunately, however, this may not be the case. And there are a number of people – let’s call them Evangelisers – who seize on any story and
repeat it endlessly simply because its suits their viewpoint. In this way, something that might otherwise have been a relatively unimportant small paper becomes something of a media phenomenon. The
effects multiply rapidly.

So, when news outlets all over the UK reported the results as evidence for why the UK should not give in to the creeping infestation of high-street lap-dancing chains, it looked like success for
Evangelisers who closely follow issues around adult entertainment. But was the reported claim actually true? And, if not, what is the truth about lap dancing and rape?

The report that sparked the headlines, ‘Lap dancing and striptease in the Borough of Camden,’ was produced by Lilith R&D, part of the Eaves charity. The
connection of a purported 50 per cent rise in rapes to the existence of a handful of lap-dancing venues was widely reported, and continues to be. It was a result that brought a lot of attention to
Lilith and to Eaves.

Eaves was founded to support homeless and vulnerable women in London.
⁶⁰
The stated aim of Lilith, according to its website, is ‘to eliminate all
aspects of violence against women’. A very worthy ideal, and an important issue. But the intentions of the authors don’t make the relationship between their stated concern (violence)
and the subject of the paper (lap dancing) any more reliable than anyone else’s. I consider that it raises the distinct possibility that Constellations and cargo cult science will feature
strongly in their results.

The first flaw in the report is the lack of connection between the outcome (rape) and the supposed cause (lap dancing). In a robust study, you expect the researchers to
show some connection between the thing being studied and the outcome being measured. Otherwise, what you have is a case of ‘correlation is not the same as causation’. Just because two
things happened at the same time doesn’t make them related.

The complete lack of cited research about stripping causing sex crimes is unsurprising, because no such results exist. A lot of reports have claimed the two are related, but repeated studies
from many fields have all failed to connect them in any real way.

But that’s not the main fault in the paper. The giant red flag announcing cargo cultism is an evident unfamiliarity with calculating reliable statistics.

According to the Lilith report, rapes in Camden had been on the rise since 1999 and showed no signs of dropping. The number reported in 1999 in the borough was 72 rapes. By 2000 it was 88, 2001
had 91, and for 2002, the number of reported rapes in Camden was 96. Supposedly, the numbers spoke for themselves.

Only there’s a bit of a problem with their maths. And here’s where the evidence for the paper being more cargo cult than reliable research starts to show through.

If you look at only the numbers themselves, the difference from 1999 to 2002 is the difference from 72 to 96. That’s a difference of 24 rapes, which is a 33 per cent increase – not
the 50 per cent originally claimed. A pretty basic error in mathematics, and one that was surprisingly resistant to being corrected. It was only years later, in 2008, that the
Guardian
reported this elementary miscalculation
⁶¹
and started to include it when discussing the report.
⁶²
The original
claim of 50 per cent is still widely reported without being corrected, even in the same paper.
⁶³

But actually, it turns out the increase wasn’t even 33 per cent. Rather than making conclusions from raw numbers, we need to calculate rates using the changes in population to make valid
comparisons. Using rates, rather than raw numbers, is one useful way to distinguish real statistics from cargo cult results.

Let’s look in depth at one year’s change in rape statistics in Camden.
In 1999, the Metropolitan Police recorded 72 reports of rape. In 2000, the number was 88.
The Met numbers are available to the public so can’t be disputed. And those numbers went up. This much the Lilith report got right. But is that all there is to the story?

The problem with numbers on their own is they don’t say anything about
context.
The number may rise from year to year, but if the population is going up as well, the rate might not
be changing at all.

Imagine, for instance, if a paper claimed London has 1000 per cent more Chinese restaurants than it did forty years ago, but didn’t report the relative populations for those years. You
wouldn’t think much of the numbers. Of course the raw number would have gone up – the population got a lot bigger from 1970 to 2010. Without context, the numbers don’t mean very
much.

When the population grows, you have to take that change into account. What you need is not just the raw number of crimes reported, but also the population of the area from one year to the next.
This is used to calculate not the number of crimes, but the rate. Rate and number are two different things, but many people (even those who should know better) use them interchangeably, and this
creates confusion.

You don’t have to be a London native (or even a
Daily Mail
reader) to know the population is going up. It’s on the rise in Camden. But is it going up enough to make the
rate
of rapes look different from the
number
? Let’s see.

Whenever numbers of incidents are reported, they should be used to calculate the rate of occurrence. This gives you an estimate of how many times the crime occurred per 100,000 population. So,
let’s look at those rape numbers again. For the year 1999, we have 72 rapes reported in Camden and – according to National Statistics – a population of 195,700 people.

To determine how many rapes occurred per 100,000 residents, we divide the number of rapes by the total population. Then we multiply by 100,000:

This tells us that in 1999, there were 36.8 reported rapes for every 100,000 residents of Camden. Performing the same rate calculation
for 2000, when the
population was 202,800 and the number of rapes 88, gives us a rate of 43.4.