How the Web Prevents Rape

[mongo]

How the Web Prevents Rape

All that Internet porn reduces sex crimes. Really.

By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Monday, Oct. 30, 2006, at 2:22 PM ET

Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems.

First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

OK, so we can at least tentatively conclude that Net access reduces rape. But that's a far cry from proving that porn access reduces rape. Maybe rape is down because the rapists are all indoors reading Slate or vandalizing Wikipedia. But professor Kendall points out that there is no similar effect of Internet access on homicide. It's hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it's easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.

much, much more:
http://www.slate.com/id/2152487/?nav=ais


Now, I will be carefull here and say that correlation does not equal causation, but this is some really great research that flies in the face of all those that use acedotal evidence to try to connect porn to rape.

[KyndCulture]

1. I call bullshit on that article.

Rape is a crime of control not sex.

[mongo]

2. Did you read the whole article?

Rape is a form of violence, and there is plenty of violent sex on the interent if you go looking for it.

If you're watching it, you're not doing it. They found a similar pattern with big box office violent movie releases and violent crime.

Now, again, I'm not saying the corelation is causation, but after hearing time and time again how porn causes rape -- this is some fresh air.

[stop the bleeding]

3. .

replying so I can find this thread later, cause I think there will be many many many responses.

[Lilith Velkor]

20. ...

Guess not. Oh well. :shrug:

[Fierce]

4. Y'know, I might buy that it reduces "stranger rape."

Especially because the article says Net access yields a decrease in REPORTED rapes. But because that is such a small part of the number of rapes that happen, I'm not really interested in promoting Internet porn use as a way to reduce rapes across the board.

[porphyrian]

5. Oooo, you done and did it now... - n/t

[bloom]

6. From Twisty Faster

and her I Blame the Patriarchy site:

...Blogger David Friedman flits along to a seminar to hear economics professor Todd D Kendall present a paper. The paper is called “Pornography, Rape, and the Internet.” Friedman reports back that the paper purports, among other unlikely novelties, to support the hypothesis that teenage boys ‘benefit’ from internet porn. This benefit seems to accrue in the shape of less jail time for rape, those lucky boys. Friedman appears to be under the impression that if you ask Todd D Kendall — whose gift to Western civilization was to analyze data concerning internet porn availability and rape arrests in specific locations — he’d tell you that increased access to internet porn decreases the number of rape complaints where the perps are between the ages of 15 and 19. Surmises Kendall, cheap and ubiquitous internet porn keeps the nation’s young ne’er-do-wells smacking off in front of their computers where they belong, rather than running the backstreets smacking bitches around.

Kendall’s paper is long and tedious and full of wobbly ‘facts’, and life is short, but before I cried uncle I did notice that he sees fit to include a paragraph wherein he wisely declines to actually endorse internet porn, since it (the porn) might have “other deleterious effects besides rape, both on the consumer and on society.”

Geeze, Todd, ya think?

Would it be very tiresome of me to complain once again that I am (a) less than devastated by the ‘deleterious effects’ on the bleary-eyed internet porn ‘consumer’, and (b) dumbstruck by the urgency with which dudes yearn to perpetuate the legitimization of porn? The latter is a goal toward which an enormous branch of patriarchal ’scholarship’, word, and deed is devoted, since it can be accomplished only when culture manages to fully dehumanize women....

Where Kendall’s mind is a kind of pornonuclear winter, our first representative, the aforementioned David Friedman, appears to live in a red satin wonderland — or at least to be wholly unacquainted with the physical mechanics of videography — when he calls porn “imaginary sex.” I guess he thinks the women in those videos are chimerical illusions made of faerie duste and Astroglide, and the directors are snuggled up in bed dreaming onto videotape with tube socks on their dicks....

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2006/10/30/more-tales-from-the-study-institute/

It is pretty funny to see you post this - since this is EXACTLY the kind of thing that you always argue against. Like studies that suggest that for people who watch porn - rape is normalized, etc.

Anyway - maybe a few more people will find their way to Twisty's site. She's pretty good.

[mongo]

9. Kind of blow a few holes

In all the "porn causes rape" crap sites that you've posted over the years though.

Like I said corelation does not equal causation -- in either case.

Like studies that suggest that for people who watch porn - rape is normalized, etc.

Ha! Since the overwhelming majority of porn is non-violent, consentual sex, how exactly does that "normalize" rape?

[Name removed]

12. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[TlalocW]

7. Go to this site

http://www.rainn.org/statistics/index.html

And look at the Rape Rates chart halfway down the page (the purple line chart). Rape/sexual assault crimes have more or less been declining since the late 1970s (with a few jumps), but there's a steep decline starting at 1993 and ending at 2003 (the last year on the chart) which corresponds to a 10 year period starting about when the internet was introduced to its popularity soaring exponentially every year after that. Of course, this is another correlation = causation argument which you can't rely on, but it shows the direct opposite of what anti-porn crusaders say should happen.

TlalocW

[Lilith Velkor]

8. Dunno about rape, but it does prevent cheating

Westerners tend to have a difficult time grasping the concept of catharsis, I've noticed. It's like we have a cultural mental block or something, probably due to religious terrorism in the past.

And of course, to heterophobic "feminists," it's all rape anyway... :eyes:

[mongo]

10. Oh no you didn't

And of course, to heterophobic "feminists," it's all rape anyway...

:toast:

Although most of the anti-sex, porn is rape "feminists" here are hetros, they just hate any kind of sexual expression outside of their own bedroom -- they hate competition.

[cally]

16. Your statement tells more about you and your stereotypes

than you probably realize. I've always found that those who claim feminists are anti-sexual don't understand women or women's power. I have seen many posts from feminists here who are pro-sex but you can't get past your own blinders and mysogeny. You might think you are making some point but I hope one day you realize that statements like these just lose your arguments for you.

[mongo]

18. I never claimed all feminists are anti-sexual

In fact, there's several really smart, well written ones right here at DU. But there's also the first wave contingent.

[omega minimo]

14. Wow. You go, girl

Although mongo claims someone said "porn causes rape" I've never seen that here, although I do stay out of rape threads that are obvious flamebait (and think those preoccupied with pro-rape, women-hating threads need their own forum or group) which mongo has confirmed with his gleeful reaction to your post.

The obvious connection is that porn dehumanizes women which affects the (mis)treatment of women in society.

(for the obvious misguided arguments to come: when the balance of porn does NOT dehumanize women and men are not trying to justify rape porn, THEN tell us that porn doesn't dehumanize women and affect the way they are viewed and treated in society).

[mongo]

15. when the balance of porn does NOT dehumanize women

What exactly would that entail? Describe to me what your idea of porn that does NOT dehumanize women is... because I know all sorts of women who buy porn, some with and some without their partners, and they seem to have individual tastes and preferences, so obviously it is not "dehumanizing" to them, even the ones that like the grittier, nastier stuff.

and men are not trying to justify rape porn

I don't justify or stand behind most so-called "rape" porn. In fact I don't sell it. But I will stand behind the fact that you can't ban a work because of an act. How many life-time movies deal with the subject of rape? Should "A clockwork Orange" be banned because of the rape scene?

[Lilith Velkor]

19. Why must there be a dichotomy between being human and being sexual?

I don't see women in porn as being dehumanized. They're just fucking. From what I hear, humans like to do that, and they like to fantasize about it.

Some humans like to go around telling other humans that their perfectly natural sexual urges are wrong and dirty. They make scapegoats of those who explore their sexuality and encourage others to treat them as beasts and criminals. By doing so, they encourage sexual repression, which combines with the repression of violent urges so that it spills out as rape culture.

Don't feed into the societal Virgin/Whore complex, it was created by the patriarchy to divide us so that we can be ruled and policed, for our own good of course. JMFO.

[HarukaTheTrophyWife]

11. I read an article recently saying that rape went down when Sweden legalized

porn. Now I can't find it. Surely someone else here has seen it.

[mongo]

13. Might be one of these

Of course, if porn really is such a danger to society, the effort might be worth it. The problem is, the research doesn’t support the worry. And if recent studies by Danish psychologist Gert Martin Hald of the University of Aarhus stand up, it’s not likely to.

Hald recently conducted a yet-to-be-published study on the usage of porn by men and women in Denmark that showed porn has become a part of the sexual lives of most people.

In a representative sampling of 688 young people aged 18 to 30, he found that 98 percent of men and 80 percent of women had viewed porn. About half of those women used it at least once per month. Men used it much more often. About 38 percent of men used it three times per week or more, which makes you wonder what these guys do for a living.

We’re not talking Playboy, either. Hald didn’t count such images as pornography. For the purposes of the study, porn included “any kind of material which aims to create or enhance sexual feelings or thoughts in the recipient and, at the same time, (a) contains explicit exposure and/or descriptions of the genitals and (b) clear and explicit sexual acts such as vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, oral sex, masturbation, bondage, sadomasochism, rape..." (Interestingly, this is pretty close to the definition used in many obscenity statutes.)

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9504659 /

The "Danish experience" is often held up as good example.

In 1969 Denmark lifted all restrictions on pornography, and sex crimes declined. For example, between 1965 and 1982 sex crimes against children went from 30 per 100,000 to about 5 per 100,000. Similar evidence was found for rape rates.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1986869.stm

[Odin2005]

17. Damn, you beat me, I was going to post something similar.

It's a fact that when the Scandinavians legalized porn the number of rapes dropped. That also indicates, IMO, that the assertion that rape is ALL about power is incorrect.

[bobbieinok]

23. in Denmark in 1970 we were surprised to find porn material in

vending machines located at train stations, etc.

[Touchdown]

21. Well, considering that erotica is a $Multi-Billion$ industry

...if what the anti-porn crowd says is true, then incedences of rape would be going through the roof with an increase of 5000 % since the early 90s. It hasn't happened. So, this might be plausible.

Of course, connecting porn to increased rape would also mean an increase in pizza deliveries, candy shop sales, plumber visits, vans, poolboy jobs, locker room benches and green doors.;)

[mongo]

22. a kick

for the usually more enlightened nighttime crowd.

:hi:

[TheWraith]

24. There's an argument to be made that less repression equals less deviance.

Look at it this way: a large percentage of the sexual activity of "celibate" priests is what you could call deviant sexual activity: sex with children and teens, and the odd raping of a nun. While there are plenty of priests who do not engage in such activities, there's a much larger proportion of deviants than you should find in a random sampling of the populace. This holds true for similar sub populations. So you can very easily make an argument that the more a person is sexually repressed, the more likely that their sex drive is to erupt in some inappropriate way, such as seeking sex with a child, rape, public indecency, whatever. It's why the anti-gay evangelicals get arrested for groping a male cop in a park at night. It's why the closeted gay Republicans go around soliciting teenage boys. Rather than express these deeply rooted biological urges in a healthy way, they're forced down until they become unhealthy.

So in a larger picture, a more open and less repressed attitude towards sex, as paralleled by the easier access to erotic materials, means less sexual repression, and thus fewer cases of urges turning unhealthy.