All publications are prone to mistakes, and the Santa Barbara View is no exception. But the View has made some major slips recently. Two weeks ago they transposed some key words in Sharon Byrne’s essay on moral philosophy, and today they have committed a much graver error, accidentally publishing draft notes—made by Loretta Redd, PhD on a variety of topics—as a single essay.

Professor Redd apparently created a draft post to collect her thoughts on a number of different topics—manipulation of the media, rape culture, technology and pornography, teaching healthy sexuality—but someone accidentally hit “Publish” on the lot. The result unfortunately (and most assuredly unintentionally) conflates healthy and unhealthy sexuality, pathologizes women’s agency, places Paula Deen alongside sexual predators, and gives the impression that Loretta Redd has no understanding of either technology or pornography.

One of Redd’s essays was apparently intended to juxtapose rape apologist Tucker Max with Anthony Weiner, Bob Filner, and Herman Cain, who have used their positions of power to (so far) avoid prosecution for repeated sexual harassment. No doubt the point was to illustrate how our willingness to excuse “bad boys” like Max and politicians like Weiner, Filner and Cain are equally dangerous aspects of rape culture. But somehow a short rant about Paula Deen was inserted into the middle of that piece, seriously disrupting the flow. Readers are likely to lose the thread, and wonder whether she’s writing about specifically male privilege or the entitlement of the powerful in general (or even that Paula Deen is also a sexual predator!).

Unfortunately things quickly get even worse for the unwitting reader, as another random bit of text has been tacked onto the end of that section:

The rapid decline of what once passed as morality seems to go hand-in-hand with the rise of access to our impersonal digital connections. Men aren’t alone in the decline; women who show their bodies on social media, who drink like fish, and behave like frat boys aren’t helping to chart a map for morality or do much to hold men accountable for acting out their fantasies.

Presumably this is a quote from Ross Douthat or some other benevolent sexist who Loretta Redd (PhD) was planning on critiquing. She may have meant to expand her article on rape culture to cover how the sentiments expressed in this quote—that women being able to choose how to present their bodies is dangerous, that women behaving in stereotypically masculine ways is wrong, and that women are responsible for controlling inherently irresponsible men—subtly reinforces the idea that women who “act out” are asking for trouble. But instead, the effect of this quote, coming right after Redd’s remarks about the moral depravity of Weiner et al., may lead the incautious reader to think that Loretta Redd, PhD is suggesting that Weiner’s behavior and the increasing autonomy of women are both aspects of the same (imaginary) moral decline.

We then make another jump. Redd was apparently planning on later publishing a piece about the impact of technology on pornography. It’s obvious that this was intended to be a subsequent article because she makes a cute reference to her article about Weiner and Filner:

I don’t know if Mr. Weiner or Mayor Filner in San Diego spend hours engaged in on-line pornography, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Her notes contain some statistics about pornography consumption by young people today:

Dr. Jennings Bryant, in a review of 600 third-year high school students discovered that 91% of males and 82% of females had been exposed to explicit on-line pornography.

With the advent of search engines, M. Ybarra and K. Mitchell of Internet Solutions for Kids, Inc., declare in their study on this subject that deliberate exposure to pornographic sites is now surpassing that of accidental exposure.

It’s hard to say what the objective of this column was to be, because these notes are mixed up with some quotes pulled from—I can only guess—the American Family Association:

Our children under the age of 12 are being exposed to pornography with devastating impact on healthy age-appropriate sexual development.

The imagery is far beyond their years and can permanently distort beliefs about sexual aggression or the treatment of women.

In decades past, teenage sexual curiosities were satisfied by peering at the nubile breasts or male nudity of some Old Master’s paintings or sneaking a peek at a big brother’s copy of Playboy. Today’s world is far more graphic, emotionally more jarring, and physically more dangerous because limits to access are becoming more difficult to maintain.

There isn’t anything healthy for anyone about internet pornography … There isn’t anything appropriate about pre-pubescent children gaining access to images that can distort their concept of human relations forever.

The result of this mistake, which I’m sure nobody regrets more than Loretta Redd, PhD, is to suggest that the fact that relatively fewer young people are accidentally stumbling across porn is itself a crisis, and that teens were healthier when their sexual desires were more stigmatized than they are now.

No doubt the former notes were the beginnings of Redd’s article on the need for more comprehensive sex education that encourages safety and consent instead of ignorance and fear, and the need not for internet filters but better porn that itself teaches healthy sexuality. And surely the latter quotes were to be gleefully torn apart as the moral panic of those with reactionary views of sexuality.

It’s too bad that these sketchy but promising ideas were published prematurely. And the second half of the essay is also peppered with some unrelated psychological musings on the possibility of sexual pathology as an explanation for why Anthony Weiner was compelled to ruin his career for a few dick pics.

I trust, however, that this error will be addressed, and that eventually we will see the full flowering of Loretta Redd’s intellect.