ABSTRACT
I N the late 1960s, the U.S. Congress, in Public Law 9O~100,found the traffic in obscenity and pornography to be "a matterof national concern" and established the President's Commis· sion on Obscenity and Pornography to investigate the matter. After an expenditure ofmore than a million dollars and the writing of no fewer than nine volumes of research reports, the commission reached the following conclusion (1970, p. 139):
This view stands in apparent sharp contrast to the views of a number of feminist writers who suggest that pornography· does indeed have effects that are personally and socially damaging to women (for example, Brownmiller, 1975; Gager &Schurr, 1976). Our purpose in this chapter is to reconsider the pornography research literature from the perspective of Bandura's (1977) socialleaming theory, especially as it applies to the feminist view. It will be argued that the Pornography Commission and the feminists do not in fact hold opposite views, and that social learning theory
can encompass both, thus providing a more parsimonious explanation of the research findings. In addition, it will be shown that social learning theory can generate additional empirically testable predictions about pornography effects, predictions not derived from the feminist position. First, however, let us consider the nature of the feminist view.
