On January 21, 2008, a Fox News segment "The Live Desk With Martha MacCallum" discussed Mass Effect with the heading "'SEXBOX?' New video game shows full digital nudity and sex." MacCallum stated that the game "leaves nothing to the imagination," features "the ability for players to engage in full graphic sex" where the player gets to decide what happens, cited critics as saying that the Mature-rated game is marketed to children and teenagers, and read a rebuttal from publisher Microsoft stating that the company abides by rating systems and provides monitoring tools for parents. Psychology specialist and author Cooper Lawrence and video game journalist Geoff Keighley were interviewed. The former described sexual content in video games as teaching their active users, adolescent boys, to consider women as objects of desire valued solely for their sexuality. She added that the game's player character is a man who decides how many women he wants to be with. Keighley focused on challenging the accuracy of previous statements, saying it is a choice to play the protagonist as a male or a female. He also described Mass Effect as having an optional, brief sexual situation as the culmination of a romantic relationship in a 30+ hour game. Adding to Lawrence's inaccuracies is the fact that the main character is not allowed to be with more than one individual, sexually and romantically. MacCallum and Lawrence admitted that they had not played the game.
On the 25th, Lawrence, who had since watched someone play the game for about two-and-a-half hours, retracted her earlier statements in an interview. She added that she had been told the game was similar to pornography, and noted that she "has seen episodes of Lost that are more sexually explicit." In the interim, largely as a reaction from an offended gaming community, her latest book attracted a number of customer reviews on Amazon.com which rated it one star out of five