The article is such worthless drek that it's hardly worth acknowledging. Percentages tell us nothing. What are the means and standard deviation? What are our sample sizes? What are out F ratios? Spouting out a bunch percentages with out references to these are worthless for truly understanding this sort of data.

And the sample data all comes from college students. Sampling only college students is hardly representative.

So he's maybe he's found that certain percentages of college students who were spanked as children have these tendencies? Just because there may be a correlation relationship (which we have no idea of just how strong that correlation it is) does not necessarily imply there is a causal one. There could be any number of other contributing factors, such prevalence of home violence, socioeconomic factors (we already know that these children come from homes with the ability and motivation to send them to college), religious and moral background, etc.

In order to say that corporal punishment leads to significant deviation in sexuality one must design a experiment to test this hypothesis. I very much doubt Straus gathered a random group of subjects as children and randomly assigned them to spanked and not spanked.

It also looks a lot like Straus taking any instance to mean trend:

In the fourth study, Straus asked 207 students at three colleges about whether they had ever been sexually aroused by masochistic sex: imagining that they were being tied up when having sex, engaging in rough sex, or by spanking, and if they had been sexually aroused by actually doing these three things.

Really? Ever? Even one random thought means one is a masochist?

And finally, what was the peer reviewed article Straus published this all in? Oh wait, he didn't. He presented at a conference. One that he's not even listed as a speaker at! A published write and foremost researcher in his field not being listed as a speaker he spoke at? And even if Straus was a last minute addition presenter, how was this information received by the other attendees at the conference? Did they accept it? Did they reject it?

-sable