How Pornography Prevents Rape

"Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience." - Bill Watterson

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HWMNBN was not convinced by data from Japan (previously linked) that linked pornography legalization to a decrease in sex crimes (fair enough, but at the very least it shows wild exaggeration on detractors' parts), or evidence from 4 countries (showing, as always, that the US is an outlier - and not in the good way) which showed aggravated assault moving in an opposite direction from rape, so I dug up:


Pornography, Rape, and the Internet

"Using state-level panel data from 1998-2003, I find that the arrival of the internet was associated with a reduction in rape incidence. However, growth in internet usage had no apparent effect on other crimes. Moreover, when I disaggregate the rape data by offender age, I find that the effect of the internet on rape is concentrated among those for whom the internet-induced fall in the non-pecuniary price of pornography was the largest – men ages 15-19, who typically live with their parents. These results, which suggest that pornography and rape are substitutes, are in contrast with most previous literature. [Ed: That's because most previous literature measures subjective feelings and attitudes rather than actual behavior and the relationship between variables.]...

Sociological and feminist scholarship over the last 25 years has typically treated rape as a crime of violence or “power”, not lust. Under this theory, therefore, consensual and masturbatory sex are not substitutable for rape. However, this view has been criticized by other scholars on empirical grounds (Ellis and Beattie, 1983), and through the arguments of evolutionary biology (Thornhill and Palmer, 2000)...

Interestingly, this is not the only recent research to find counter-intuitive effects of the media on social outcomes. In a similar vein to this paper, Dahl and DellaVigna (2006) find that film violence is a substitute for violent crime, and Gentzkow and Shapiro (2006) show that television viewing among children (mildly) improves test scores...

Most similar to my research is Wongsurawat (2006), who focuses on a different privacy technology for transmitting pornography – post office boxes. When he instruments the subscription rate to pornographic magazines with the availability of post office boxes in an area, he finds that rape and pornography are net substitutes as well...

In the third category of literature are a variety of laboratory studies in which, typically, male college student volunteers are exposed to pornographic content, and then tested in some way for attitudes towards women or rape. In a meta-analysis of such studies, Allen, et al (1995) find a generally small positive effect of exposure to violent pornography on acceptance of rape stereotypes and aggressive behavior. Marshall, et al (1991) find that exposure to videos of simulated rapes led to greater sexual arousal in men when exposed a second time to such materials. Zillmann and Bryant (1984) find exposure to pornography reduces subjects’ desire for society to punish actual rape offenders. However, as these are laboratory studies, only attitudes towards rape – or at best, physiological arousal – can be measured, not actual rapes. Moreover, when privately consumed, pornography is often associated with masturbation or consensual sex, and thus, laboratory settings may be quite dissimilar to the typical experience with pornography. In fact, by attempting to simply arouse subjects, such studies allow only for complementarity between pornography and rape, ignoring completely the potential substitutability with rape derived from the use of pornography to release sexual tension"

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Proof that Internet porn prevents rape (Part of this is a commentary on the paper above)

"Next, violence. What happens when a particularly violent movie is released? Answer: Violent crime rates fall...

University of California professors Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna compared what happens on those weekends. The bottom line: More violence on the screen means less violence in the streets. Probably that's because violent criminals prefer violent movies, and as long as they're at the movies, they're not out causing mischief. They'd rather see Hannibal than rob you, but they'd rather rob you than sit through Wallace & Gromit...

What about those experiments you learned about in freshman psych, where subjects exposed to violent images were more willing to turn up the voltage on actors who they believed were receiving painful electric shocks? Those experiments demonstrate, perhaps, that most people become more violent after viewing violent images. But that's the wrong question here. The right question is: Do the sort of people who commit violent crimes commit more crimes when they watch violence? And the answer appears to be no, for the simple reason that they can't commit crimes and watch movies simultaneously...

In other words, if you want to understand the effects of on-screen sex and violence outside the laboratory, psych experiments don't tell you very much. Sooner or later, you've got to look at the data."