Exactly. This article is poorly written, with no basis for its conclusions.
Oh for petes sake. Hers the graph this article is based on.
“a redesign was implemented in 1993; the area with the lighter shading is before the redesign and the darker area after the redesign”
The big drop was post 1993, ie after the redesign.
This seems to me to at least partly be due to some kind of change in surveying methods. The timing in the large drop is far too suspicious.
Otara.
They say they compensated for the redesign.
However, I agree with Mosier that Der Trihs makes a compelling argument. Rape and misogyny exist and change independently from the availability and use of porn. And I agree with most other posters that the issue is complex and that quite likely other factors have a far bigger influence, and that 70’s feminism was about politics, not science.
What exactly, influences the incidence of rape is another debate.
But I think that my OP can be answered with a clear yes: Feminists in the seventies claiming that porn would cause objectification and rape were wrong, and insofar as I believed that too, I was wrong too.
Thanks for fighting my ingnorance.
“They say they compensated for the redesign.”
I find that awfully dubious given the vast change that happened at exactly that changeover.
At the very least I would ask people to provide similar data points from other similar societies before taking it as credible. It should be easily found in the UK, Oz, Europe etc as a general trend if internet porn was a large driver for the reduction in rates.
Otara
Speaking only about my own life experiences, and kind of rambling at that.
In the 60s, women I knew began complaining loudly that men should not judge what women should do, or should think, or should feel. And more to the point, men should not try to enforce the desire to do so on women, as a group, or individually. I found it rather hard to refute the basic premise. I also found it disconcerting, because I didn’t really feel that I had been doing any such thing.
Then came the seventies, and the rhetoric from the men stink fringe got a bit more strident. Looking with lust upon women became an affront to their dignity as people. In fact looking at them at all became a bit chancy, socially. And the social issues and political mix was just as confusing. Equal pay for equal work was too simple an idea to be wrong. Of course it was true. But why didn’t that apply, in analogy to equal parenting?
The eighties rolled in, and I began to hear that men should be more aware of their feelings, and more willing to discuss the relevant matters of their relationships. I was assured on every side that men’s attitudes about their own emotions and thoughts were wrong. Somewhere I had misses the turn. Wasn’t this all about not deciding what someone else should think, feel, or do? Why was it a one way street? And the prescription attitudes were everywhere… Her opportunities to define her life choices trumped my desires to have choices at all, and my desires to have my life choices were some sort of enslavement. Her sexual satisfaction was my responsibility. How come I was responsible for both her satisfaction, and my own?
Porn was, of course the ultimate expression of it. Porn was almost exclusively produced by men, and consumed by men. It ignored feminist attitudes entirely, it was blithely unconcerned with whether the feelings and emotions it portrayed and elicited were meaningful. It didn’t need any relevance. It was sex, for no purpose other than sex as a purpose in itself. And like all forbidden things, it ignored one barrier, and so began to move beyond them all. Seeing pornography always involved being exposed to both the things you enjoyed seeing, and things that disgusted you, and shocked you as well. Marketing, you know. And self deception, and lots of other little emotional consequences, including desensitization to those shocks, and feelings of disgust. Eventually, of course it desensitizes you to sexual arousal, but not the desire for it.
Then the nineties came. Women began to make porn. Women began to speak out about what was desirable in men. Size mattered. And the entire time, women’s magazines about women showed photos of women in starkly erotic imagery. I remember laughing through the tears one afternoon when I saw three prominent women’s magazines all with big color splashes on the cover about “what women want in men” and what they found sexy, and vital statistics about the most eligible bachelors in the world. In every case it involved either things you can buy, things you do to get money, or money itself. Girl porn.
I pretty much stopped being a feminist that day.
Tris
Otara, Wikipedia has an article, not just on rape, but on rape statistics. It yields a good overview of the different difficulties in getting rape statistics. However, that is another debate.
Im a psychologist who works in the family violence area.
Its precisely those kinds of issues why Im baffled this claim was taken seriously. Either its being claimed this effect is so large those other potential errors are nullified, or the original claim is being made without acknowledging those error potentials.
Which means it should be easily checked in other countries either way. If it is found then its an effect so large it overcomes those other errors, or it wont be found, making the claim of this finding in the US extremely suspect.
I think I can bet which way it will go.
Otara
It has been studied in other countries; Canada, the UK, Denmark, W. Germany, Sweden and Japan. None of these places found data in support of pornography causing violence. In Japan it was correlated in a ‘dramatic decrease in sexual crimes’. This does not mean there is a causal link, but it does explode the myth that higher incidence of porn leads to higher incidence of rape.
Otara, yes, it would be interesting to see what international rape statistics trend did in that those two decades. But I can’t find a cite just now.
What is your best educated guess what rape statistics have been doing between 1970 and 2005? Gone down, or up?
I guess Id want to look at more since 1950 if things like porn are being considered so you’d get a better baseline regarding the increase in its general availability in general media, ie playboy etc.
Overall violence has generally trended down in Western societies with all sort of caveats. I would expect rape to have done similarly but thats a guess rather than something I would feel confident about, I could also imagine it being fairly flat given the large majority of rapes are done by someone the person knows and the problems with convictions etc.
Because of the general decline in violent behaviour, I think its an extremely long bow to claim the major cause of any reduction is porn, unless one is claiming violence in general is caused by ‘sexual frustration’ and/or that ‘sexual frustration’ is significantly addressed by porn, which I would view as two very large claims. Im not aware of porn being considered of major therapeutic benefit for rapists for instance, but I guess it could be argued as a preventative effect and by the time someone has become a rapist its too late. One problem with this whole issue is that the mechanism of prevention seems to be somewhat undefined.
Its quite possible for porn to be an added risk for rape and for rape in general to have gone down, given the variables involved. Its a multifactorial issue and the errors are so large we cant really know either way. We’re also at very early days as far as intergenerational effects from ‘porn saturation’ goes, the internet is still really a very recent effect.
Otara
I apologize for this being off-topic but I had to post the ad that showed up on the bottom of this thread:
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That is not the same as finding a large reduction in rape rates due to porn - not finding evidence of any effect is entirely different from claiming evidence of a reduction, particularly in the context of highly problematic reporting rates.
The only cite claiming a specific reduction is the Japanese one. Again given the errors involved Im dubious, but will have to check it further and respond later.
My understanding is there are multiple research areas on this topic. Schools tend to cite the ones that fit their views and ignore the ones that dont, which makes the whole area a tad irritating at times.
Otara
I’ll have to re-read it to find the cites, but Nadine Strossen, former President of the ACLU, wrote Defending Pornography. It’s been a number of years since I read it, but I recall that she looked at the data connecting the availability of pornography and a decline in sexual violence.
See this is the thing its a large area and you’ll find books both defending and attacking it. All in the context of some very unreliable data and some rather strong social agendas.
In my view noone here can give a definitive ‘state of the research’ comment only cite from various sources without being able to give a balanced synopsis of them or their quality, and all thats really occurring is a repetition of the wiki article on the social effects of pornography. The short answer is that when its checked in the laboratory various negative effects are found, when its checked at the societal level there arent and no real reconciliation of those different findings has occurred. This is not uncommon with these areas of research.
Which in my view means the most likely answer is theres a small effect, probably negative, but possibly positive as well, and overall at this stage its being swamped by other social factors making it a fairly moot point either way. The people to view sceptically are the people claiming a large effect in either direction.
Otara
Otara, I don’t mean to call you out specifically on this, but I think you might be missing a rather subtle distinction here. You seem to be arguing against the idea that increased porn results in less rape.
(all bolding mine)
I don’t think people are arguing that porn reduces rape (although if that were true, I can only imagine what legislation might result :)). Rather, the argument seems to be that porn does not lead to rape. It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one, I think.
Appologies if I’ve mischaracterized or misunderstood your position.
Actually, I think both. I don’t buy that porn causes rape. And I do think that it probably reduces the number of rapes, at least to some extent. It just seems logical that there are going to be a number of sexually frustrated men who are amoral/desperate enough to rape, but who won’t bother with anything that risky with a safer means of relieving their urges easily available. But that’s not an effect that the old-line feminists could ever admit existing since it flies in the face of the rape-is-always-about-power doctrine.
Its the explicit claim of the original link provided.
Ie ’ The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.’
And he claims that the finding provided is evidence of such.
I sort of wonder how many people actually read it.
Otara
Why can’t the results go both ways ? I can see a somewhat anti-social young man wishing to act out a fantasy generated by porn as much as a more stable young man satisfied by the porn stimulation towards masturbation.
Definitive results can only be net results and the incidence of rape more likely to be affected by other social factors.
I can’t speak for the OP, but I made it perfectly clear in my comments that,
Which you unfairly construed into,
Things that have happened at the same time that rape has decreased:
- atmospheric CO2 levels have risen
- average college tuition has increased
- growing incidence of type II diabetes in young children
- more Mexican immigration
- income gap has widened between rich and poor
- decline in male veterinarians
- porn has become more easily accessible
Question to the class: Why should we infer that the increase in porn has anything to do with a drop in rape?
Porn very well could increase rape incidence (I doubt it, but it’s possible), but this effect may have been masked by other trends causing an opposite effect. Increased incarceration rates come to mind. Or it could have negative effect. Or it could have no effect whatsoever and is simply a confounding variable. Simply put, a rise in porn in the face of decreasing rape doesn’t “prove” anything about the claim being disputed, because there are so many other things that have to be accounted for before that conclusion is validly reached.
As often as the old adage “correlation doesn’t equal causation” is mentioned here, I’m surprised that to see I’m the first to say it.