Close. The question is what are the effects of rape porn on the sub-population that are in some way predisposed to rape, on the margin as it were. Most people I suspect just treat the stuff as fantasy. The effects could go in either direction, as masturbation provides some release.
The next question is what are the effects of horror films or any other form of dubious entertainment on those predisposed to rape. I don’t see why we should single out porn, which is a fairly private activity and has less social sanction than more mainstream fare.
It’s a big if all around: I suspect the prevalence of rape-porn in Japan is over-estimated. I base that on tentacle-porn: I understand that most Japanese are unaware that their country is the world capital of the stuff: it’s just too culturally marginal.
One solid number we have is the lower Japanese murder rate: reporting of such incidents are reasonably uniform across high income countries. Anecdotally, there’s less fear of crime in that country. So I find it plausible that rape is lower. Plausible: not certain. Sexual assault and groping is another matter. Japanese anime has a pretty casual attitude to sexual harassment IMO, so I can believe reports that (illegal) groping in public transportation happens a lot more in Japan. I would advocate direct action, but that’s extra-topical.
Again this is purely anecdotal, but the impression I got from my Japanese coworkers was that they believed American pornography was much more explicit than Japanese pornography. I had zero interest in checking into the matter myself, but one of the American guys I knew over there once mentioned that he found Japanese porn really boring and just looked at American porn on the Internet.
While I don’t have any figures on this I suspect the (actual, not reported) rate of sexual assault is probably a much better predictor of the rape rate than the murder rate would be.
I have no problem believing that a higher percentage of rapes go unreported in Japan than in the US, but it seems unlikely to me that the difference is enough to make up for that.
To be fair Americas population being over 300M and Japans being around 110/120M as well as the fact that Japan is a very homogenous society and America is the complete opposite, should be considered when looking at the rape rate.
Why in the world would Japan being “a very homogenous society” make any difference? Even assuming they are homogeneous compared to us; I expect we look pretty homogeneous to them. America’s a pretty narrow, conformist society in a lot of ways.
Well, but that can still support the sample-bias hypothesis. Because the guilt-free porn culture is less likely to say “Fetish X is so sick and beyond the pale, no right-thinking human should even imagine it”, then such material does get produced, while some of those subjects, no sensible “respectable” American porn producer(*) will even dare try. That was my point, that the American pervert who wants to get off to that sort of stuff has to go for the import material, and after a while most of the web hits for Japanese porn will be for the more, um, unusual genres, disproportionately to their real home market share.
(*Of course, DIY creators on the Web are another story altogether…)
That’s still ignoring non-rape sexual assault, though. If the tradeoff is less rape but more women and even young girls getting groped in public on a regular basis then that doesn’t strike me as a big improvement. Now, I don’t have anything but anecdotes to support my belief that public groping is a worse problem in Japan than in the US and I have no evidence at all that this has anything to do with pornography either way. I’m just saying that the situation is complicated. (And Measure for Measure, I do acknowledge that you said basically the same thing when you first brought up Japan.)
The performers are never liable - they’re just fucking on camera, censorship (or the dispensation thereof) happens later in the production process. Or did you think they had to *wear *the mosaics ?
Wikipedia handles this:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Censorship laws
See also: Censorship in Japan
In Japan, under Article 175 of the Criminal Code of Japan people who sell or distribute obscene materials can be punished by fines or imprisonment. …[4] Showing pubic hair and adult genitalia was once considered obscene.[5] …video pornography routinely depicts explicit sex scenes with the participants’s genitalia obscured by mosaics. … Until the 1990s, the entire pubic region, including hair, was deemed obscene and unpublishable.[citation needed] … Many video production companies belong to ethical associations which provide guidance on what is acceptable and what is not. The Nihon Ethics of Video Association, the Ethics Organization of Computer Software and the Contents Soft Association are examples of three such organizations. …
There is also a thriving genre[citation needed] of underground pornography in Japan (called urabon)[citation needed] that ignores these censorship laws; it has become especially prevalent on the Internet, as there are no mechanisms in place to prevent its transmission from Japanese nationals to the outside world, or vice versa.[citation needed]
[/QUOTE]
Accidental groping is commonly played for laughs in anime, although it’s also clear that groping in public transit is illegal, disapproved of, but all-too-common. It’s rather appalling from my perspective but if Japan has a sharply lower actual incidence of rape (which I argue is plausible) my cross-cultural judgment is offset. I’ll note that Japan has a lower incidence of other property and violent crimes as well, some of which don’t have the pronounced reporting problems that rape has.
It’s sort of unsatisfying to say that we don’t have enough good information to draw conclusions, but there you go. I do claim that the relationships between porn-in-general and US sexual assault are more firmly ground as I discussed upthread.
You misread that, “can you be prosecuted”… unless you yourself are a porn actor, then it doesn’t apply to your trade. In other words, what would happen to purchasers (or “purchasers” online), or the distribution company, if Japanese police decided to enforce?
As I mentioned above, purchasing uncensored pornography is not illegal. Most distribution is done over the internet by companies located overseas, so they’re not subject to prosecution.
Because genius, being a homogenous society like Japan means most people have a lot of things in common with each other; attitudes about the opposite gender, history, how to behave in public, the whole honor thing. You would have to be clueless to not see how those things would effect a countries rape rates. Whereas America is a nation of immigrants where there isn’t a great deal of things that unify all the different people there, so the way one group of Americans would treat women can vary from the different ethnic, religious and cultural groups that live in America.
I never would have thought Japan being a homogeneous society would be a controversial notion. They’re quite proud of their homogeneity. They seem to think it’s yet one more thing that sets them apart from everyone else.
Of course, I’ve met Japanese who also thought having four seasons – winter, spring, summer and autumn – also set them apart from everyone else and were positively gobsmacked to learn some other places have four seasons too.
I think this needs to be repeated. I’m curious as to how many people who are into rape porn are into it because they identify with the aggressor, or with the victim. To the people who are concerned about the existence of this stuff: would you feel better about it if it could be shown that the overwhelming majority of consumers of rape porn fantasizes about being raped, as opposed to raping?
