Since it’s generally men that watch it, no.
My point exactly; I think you are giving porn more power than it has over people.
Eh, I’ve been hearing that an increase in childhood exposure to TV and movie violence would lead to more violent behavior since I was a kid. And indeed, the media I and my peers were exposed to was undoubtably both more violent in quantity and more graphically so then previous generations, but the violent crime rate has done nothing but shrink as we’ve come of age. Each year this argument appears less and less defensible, as a generation of amoral twenty something killing machines fails to emerge.
Of course, who knows. Perhaps we simply haven’t hit the point where all of a sudden TV is so violent that it does have the effect on people you hypothesize. But at this point, I really think we’ve more or less pushed violence as entertainment as far as its likely to go. Natural Born Killers came out 14 years ago, for example, anyone who watched it as a child is near their mid-twenties now. At some point, people saying that violent entertainment leads to violent behavior need to actually get passed hand waving arguments and show some evidence of the huge amount of violent movies and TV shows that have existed for decades have actually had the effect they’ve been saying it will.
I don’t discount it at all - in fact, that was my very point; it’s no longer a matter of it existing or not, because such porn does exist. It’s a matter of to what extent it exists as a percentage of the whole, because if it ever does get the point where a large amount of all porn is violently degrading then we’ll probably have a problem on our hands.
The question is whether a feedback loop of this kind is continually self-sustaining; violently degrading porn leads to more people interested in violently degrading porn which leads to more being made, and so on, or does it stop at some point? I would wager that it does, and I think you’re forgetting that the feedback loops idea applies to all demand. People who get their rocks off on other porn are going to seek it out, instead. And if we’re talking increasing the need through more people rather than the same peopel demanding more, then there’s the problem that a lot of people simply aren’t going to look for it in the first place.
In all honesty, while I agree these aren’t mutually exclusive, I don’t think that people are so unable to delineate between real life and fantasy.
I don’t remember kids shooting up schools when I was young. In fact, we could carry knives to school and there were shooting clubs. but we’re getting off on a parallel topic.
I can’t imagine that an increase in aggressive porn would yield fewer rapes.
Well, yes and no. I see easy access to porn as a greater influence on children and also the fringe in society who would be more inclined to rape in the first place. I agree that a normal, well adjusted person can distinguish reality from fantasy but as the level of social ability declines, that influence has a negative effect. If the rapists of the world come from the bottom 10% of society and they’re fed an increasingly negative message then it stands to reason that more such individuals will get sucked into the loop. We see normal husbands and fathers get addicted to porn so it stands to reason that lesser people will get addicted to misogynistic porn.
So the porn-haters keep hoping, and still it continues to fail to come true.
And…um… for the record, porn didn’t start with Playboy, and it wasn’t confined to cute titty shots until the 70’s. Hardcore, closeup, fetish material has been available since the advent of the camera and was available as art for thousands of years before that. On this subject, I am a genuine expert.
Furthermore (Remember, expert here), a lot of porn was once produced by ACTUALLY exploiting women and treating them as objects; specifically, by abusing mentally ill women housed in institutions.
Along with the faster, easier, more intense exposure kids get these days come a lot of other things, including the awareness that the women involved are choosing to participate, even in the violent stuff.
More meaningfully, the ready access to every imaginable flavor of sexual fetish and flavor, and the wide acceptance, the communities, helps people avoid the self-loathing that develops from closeting their sexual feelings in the belief that they are somehow “wrong”. Being able to connect with like-minded people is incredibly important to feeling secure in one’s sexuality.
It’s not perfect, it has it’s less fabulous aspects, but overall, porn is a good thing for society as a whole, especially if it is treated with casual acceptance, vs. horror and hysteria.
Perhaps I’ve missed it, but have you devoted any time so far to explaining how watching female-subjugating imagry will result in more rape? I don’t mean simply asserting it in different ways, I mean actually describing the mental process you envision occurring. And also how depriving the rape-inclined of those images will serve to quell those urges.
I’m very interested.
It was if you looked.
I’m female. I’m 51. When I was 9 or 10 I had already experienced the joy of beastiality porn.
(And no, I don’t engage in it today.)
This being GD and all, it would be nice to see some data. Do you think someone with an inclination to rape needs violent porn to touch him off? Rape was happening even when it wasn’t being reported in the papers.
Yes people do get addicted - but they got addicted even 30 years ago, when it was more expensive. If we’re just throwing out random thoughts, perhaps a man addicted to porn is at least staying home and not patronizing prostitutes.
Violent porn has increased, but so has non-violent porn and all sorts of specialty porn. I’d love to see statistics on percentages. But I’m sure people were bemoaning the declining state of the world when Titus Andronicus opened.
BTW, there was a shooting outside the cafeteria in my far from ghetto high school 40 years ago, and I remember the concern of adults over juvenile delinquents 50 years ago. There was never a real golden age.
I just finished watching the MST3K take on Ed Wood’s second film, about a porn making ring, which was filmed in the very early '50s. I’ve seen smoker reels from the '30s. and even rather nasty cartoon porn from around then.
I think the study is pointing toward the truth. The notion that rape is “about power” and “not about sex” is a falsehood. I think there are a variety of reasons people believe it, depending on the person.
The majority of men really, really want sex but never commit rape. So, they might reason, if rape is “about sex”, why don’t they commit rape? The question reveals the ambiguity in the phrase “about sex”. Men who commit rape are men who have a combination of three qualities: strong sex drive (found in virtually all men), inability to get sex through less violent means (a minority of men, but they exist), and a great willingness to use violence to get what they want. Most men don’t have the latter two qualities, so they get tricked into thinking that rape has nothing to do with the desire for sex.
The reasons that women might believe it are more varied and, I think, subtler, but I think I can pinpoint a couple of them. First, it phrases the issue in more directly feminist terms. If so much of feminist theory speaks of the hegemony held by men over the fairer sex, why not view rape itself as nothing but an expression of the male desire for power? Second, saying that rape has nothing to do with sex makes it seem that the number of men who might commit rape is very limited. Although the majority of men, I think, would never commit rape, millions of women have fooled themselves into thinking that seemingly normal guys - guys who don’t seem like stalkers - will never commit rape. In fact, the vast majority of rapes are committed by men who know the victim personally. Young women should keep their eyes out for potentially violent sexual behavior on the part of the men they hang out with.
Lastly, sex is viewed by people of both genders as being totally natural - indeed, what could be more naturally than the act that leads to procreation? To say that the desire for sex is a key component of rape would be to therefore admit that there is a natural component to something very, very bad (rape). This conclusion doesn’t appeal to those who view everything that is natural as good.
Interesting discussion. I do have to say that, when perusing the porn shelves at the local video shops, mainstream porn has tended to become more overtly misogynistic over the past decade. Abusive language, spitting, slapping and gagging have crept from D/s porn to regular releases. I’ve even seen this in long-running series like Britain’s “Ben Dover”. The directors put this stuff in to “up the energy”, and it just creeps me out. Personally, I blame Viagra and other hard-on pills that can turn nearly any guy off the street into a reliable “woodsman”.
Yes, but unfortunately laws and policies aren’t formed by the norm but by the exception. Nobody cares about the fifty million teenagers that don’t shoot up their schools, but everybody pays attention to hundred or so that do. Were Klebold and Harris influenced by violent media? Would they have shot up Columbine even if the video game Doom had never been written? Who knows? But if mere random chance isn’t acceptable (i.e. one teenage per hundred thousand is going to go violently nuts regardless of influences, good or bad), scapegoating starts.
Ban guns, ban porn, ban video games, accomplish nothing.
Nobody’s talking about banning anything.
So?
Rape is not about sex. It is about power, domination, humiliation and control. As such, it doesn’t matter whether they have access to porn or not.
Someone should really do a study to see if this is true.
It’s an overly-romantic mistake to assume sex is never about any of those.
The study presented in the op underwhelms. It is no more convincing of an argument than are the converse studies which demonstrate that rapists have had more exposure to pornography than have control populations (so therefore that porn exposure causes rape).
The premise proposed is absurd. Rape is caused by unmet sexual desire, internet porn allows for sexual desire to be met, therefore is protective from rape. Sorry but men don’t need internet porn to masturbate.
OTOH there is a long debate about how much repetitive exposure to violent imagery increases the risk of violent actions. Much of that debate has been focused on the exposure of children to violent imagery and it does appear that there is a “a small but significant association”.
Homicide rates have also declined since the internet was created; is the internet protective from homicide? Autism rates have increased; the internet must cause autism.
I am no expert on rape or on pornography but I see no evidence presented by either side that in anyway makes a case ether that pornography exposure (in particular violent porn) protects against or incites rape. We are left to believe what we each believe makes the most sense in the absence of any real evidence. The argument that men couldn’t masturbate without the internet is absurd and the converse, that repetitive exposure to violent sexual imagery predisposes an individual by some small marginal rate to be more likely to act upon violent impulses is not so absurd.
One other thought:
If one believes the premise that a ready availability of pornography decreases violence against women a consequence of having sexual needs met via pornography, then one should logically also believe that child pornography should also be readily available in order to decrease violent sexual acts against children (of course ignoring the violence involved in the production of the materials - perhaps only “virtual child porn” or child porn that is already in existence from times past?)
Do the same people who believe that porn reduces rape also support such a proposal?