Feminist Looking Glass

There is nothing new about the conjecture that the increase of porn, especially because of the internet, has led to a decrease in rape.  But a July 4 article in the examiner.com again brings up the hypothesis and I thought I’d address it.  The evidence that is usually cited is from 2006.  For example, an October 2006 article in Slate discussed studies showing that access to the internet had reduced the number of rapes, specifically that “a 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes” and that “States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines.”  The author acknowledged that psychologists had found that male subjects, immediately after watching pornography, were more likely to express misogynistic attitudes, but concluded, without statistical proof, that “All that Internet porn reduces sex crimes. Really.”

Actual statistics showing that watching porn correlates to a decrease in rape came earlier that year in a paper by Northwestern University Professor of Law Anthony D’Amato titled “Porn Up, Rape Down.”  D’Amato looked at statistics from the United States Department of Justice that showed “there has been an 85% reduction in sexual violence in the past 25 years.”  He stated:

Official explanations for the unexpected decline include (1) less lawlessness associated with crack cocaine; (b) women have been taught to avoid unsafe situations; (c) more would-be rapists already in prison for other crimes; (d) sex education classes telling boys that “no means no.” But these minor factors cannot begin to explain such a sharp decline in the incidence of rape.

There is, however, one social factor that correlates almost exactly with the rape statitistics. The American public is probably not ready to believe it. My theory is that the sharp rise in access to pornography accounts for the decline in rape. The correlation is inverse: the more pornography, the less rape.

D’Amato found that the states with the least internet access showed a large increase in rape (as compiled from police reports) and the states with the most internet access showed a large decrease in rape.

D’Amato had been a consultant to President Nixon’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in 1970, which concluded that there was no causal relationship between exposure to sexually explicit materials and delinquent or criminal behavior.  As he states, Nixon “was furious when he learned of the conclusion.”  President Reagan also appointed a Commission, this time packed with members who passed his litmus test, and the Commission this time “reached the approved result: that there does exist a causal relationship between pornography and violent sex crimes.”  D’Amato didn’t buy into that conclusion and wrote a law review article examining the result.

He concludes that there must be a negative correlation between watching porn and rape because:

if [the Commissioners] had been right that exposure to pornography leads to an increase in social violence, then the vast exposure to pornography furnished by the internet would by now have resulted in scores of rapes per day on university campuses, hundreds of rapes daily in every town, and thousands of rapes per day in every city. Instead, the Commissioners were so incredibly wrong that the incidence of rape has actually declined by the astounding rate of 85%.

D’Amato concluded his paper by stating:

Correlations aside, could access to pornography actually reduce the incidence of rape as a matter of causation? In my article I mentioned one possibility: that some people watching pornography may “get it out of their system” and thus have no further desire to go out and actually try it. Another possibility might be labeled the “Victorian effect”: the more that people covered up their bodies with clothes in those days, the greater the mystery of what they looked like in the nude. The sight of a woman’s ankle was considered shocking and erotic. But today, internet porn has thoroughly de-mystified sex.  Times have changed so much that some high school teachers of sex education are beginning to show triple-X porn movies to their students in order to depict techniques of satisfactory intercourse.

I am sure there will be other explanations forthcoming as to why access to pornography is the most important causal factor in the decline of rape. Once one accepts the observation that there is a precise negative correlation between the two, the rest can safely be left to the imagination.

I decline to draw any strict conclusions from these articles since statistics on rape can be horribly understated and since there are obviously differences of opinions among feminists on pornography.  Nevertheless, they show that there is at least some evidence that having men watch porn on the internet correlates to a decrease in sexual violence.