Honest Dear, I Was Doing Research For My Blog!
It seems that for most of history it has been an accepted fact that people were going to have sex. Most ancient cities that are unearthed have brothels in them. Communal baths were the norm. Nudity and sex were a fact of life.
It has only been in recent times, it seems, that we have tried to outlaw sex and any depictions of it.
Today prostitution is illegal in most places. Premarital and extramarital sex is frowned upon, and pornography is blamed on everything from the breakdown of the family to rape.
I’ve always found it amusing that the anti-pornography crowd seems to think that men become hormone-enraged rapists after viewing porn. I would have thought that pornography would provide an outlet for sexual tension that would prevent men from seeking a less acceptable outlet.
A report in The Chicago Tribune seems to support that view. According to the Tribune, “… in the last two decades, we have conducted a vast experiment on the social consequences of such material (porn). If the supporters of censorship were right, we should be seeing an unparalleled epidemic of sexual assault. But all the evidence indicates they were wrong. As raunch has waxed, rape has waned.”
“Rape is down 72 percent and other sexual assaults have fallen by 68 percent. Even in the last two years, when the FBI reported upticks in violent crime, the number of rapes continued to fall.”
This in spite of the fact that the internet has provided easy access to porn for everyone with an internet connection. “… the United States alone has a staggering 244 million Web pages featuring erotic fare. One Nielsen survey found that one out of every four users say they visited adult sites in the last month.”
“How can it be explained? Perhaps the most surprising and controversial account comes from Clemson University economist Todd Kendall, who suggests that adult fare on the Internet may essentially inoculate against sexual assaults.”
“In a paper presented at Stanford Law School last year, he reported that, after adjusting for other differences, states where Internet access expanded the fastest saw rape decline the most. A 10 percent increase in Internet access, Kendall found, typically meant a 7.3 percent reduction in the number of reported rapes. For other types of crime, he found no correlation with Web use. What this research suggests is that sexual urges play a big role in the incidence of rape — and that pornographic Web sites provide a harmless way for potential predators to satisfy those desires.”
Still, the anti-pornography activists continue the attack. “‘Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice,’ wrote feminist author Robin Morgan. In 1986, a federal commission concurred. Some kinds of pornography, it concluded, are bound to lead to ‘increased sexual violence.’”
With the decline in rape nationwide, the Tribune concluded “If expanding the availability of hard-core fare doesn’t prevent rapes, we can be confident from the experience of recent years that it certainly doesn’t cause such crimes.”
So what do you think? Is porn so evil that it must be eradicated? Could it, in fact, be the cause of the lower incidence of rape these days? Does it alarm you that the Nielsen survey found that one out of every four internet users visit porn sites, or are you like me and think 1 out of 4 is probably a bit low?