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Pornography and Rape

St.Michael

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St.Michael
Joined
Sep 16, 2006
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I’m trying to find articles discussing the arguments for and against the supposed link between access to porn and rape. I’m not having much luck using google, can anyone help out here?
 
My recollection is that the "evidence" consists of "most rapists look at porn," which strikes me as a bit hollow. Most of them likely eat fast food as well, but that doesn't mean that fast food causes rape.

Although, those commercials with the Burger King sneaking into people's bedrooms...
 
It does not correlate, but is tehre an anti-correlation ? I remember reading that the number of rape dropped in the last 20 years due to access to easy porn (www).
 
As I recall from a study done rather a long time ago, increased or legalized availability of porn has an effect in decreasing minor sex crimes such as exposing or "peeping", but none at all on the incidence of rape, one way or another.

The prevalence of porn currently leads to a situation where asking a convicted rapist if he'd ever looked at porn is like asking a heroin addict if he'd ever drunk beer....

I have noticed over the last decade or so a considerable decrease in the number of "exposing" cases we get. Used to be extremely common on campus, but hardly a report in some years.
On the other hand, we do get many complaints about individuals using the "public" computers in the library to view porn...
 
Aepervius said:
It does not correlate, but is tehre an anti-correlation ? I remember reading that the number of rape dropped in the last 20 years due to access to easy porn (www).
Click to expand...

But rape isn't about getting sex, it's about violence. If you cut off a serial rapist's penis do you think that would make him stop?
 
Alt+F4 said:
But rape isn't about getting sex, it's about violence.
Click to expand...

A lot of the time, certainly, but you can't say it like it's a slam dunk. It's about a lot of different things in a lot of different situations.
 
Alt+F4 said:
But rape isn't about getting sex, it's about violence.
Click to expand...
Rape can be 100% about just wanting sex and the other person refusing at the last minute. Or it can be 1% about sexuality and 99% about violently assaulting an irrelevant person. (If it is 100% about violence, then it should be simple a stabbing or murder or something.) Or anything between.

Easy availability of pornography intimate massage services should be expected to reduce at least some kind of rape cases. But also fake-rape porn is available, I would gladly ban them, so I don't need to wonder whether they inspire people to act as is shown in the material or not.
 
I think a serious approach to this case, in a way that is unbiased (As I remember a poster here who was raped as a child and thus in the consequent years, developed a biased vision of porn), would be trying to determine in a more general way if viewing images cause actual action that imitate those images. Not just porn.

So if viewing rape porn actually does cause rape desire, it should be expected that viewing violent images should cause violence and watching love images should case love.... and so on.

I believe an important study that may contribute to falsify this claim is the investigations on Mirror Neurons, as mentioned by dr V S Ramachandran. Despite the fact that the premise of the mirror neurons is that we have a device in the brain that blurs the distinction between observing an action and performing the given action, studies on this case have actually helped to prove the essence of feelings such as empathy.

I definitely think that the mirror neurons are the key to determining the veracity of this old claim about porn images and violent images.
 
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There was a fundie on campus who's girlfriend got raped by porn. See, he spent too much time looking at porn and not enough with her, so she left him for someone else and that person raped her.

Hence, as he says, "Porn raped my girlfriend."

I'm not kidding.
 
Alt+F4 said:
But rape isn't about getting sex, it's about violence.
Click to expand...

That's a political claim rather than an evidence-based, scientific one. As far as I can tell it was made up as a point of feminist dogma in opposition to then-popular memes that blamed the victim of rape for being sexy, or excused the rapist by saying that the urge to rape was natural.

As far as I know the evidence says that rape is to some extent about sex and to some extent about brutalising or dominating someone, and the extent differs in different cases. If you include date rape as rape (and I think everyone nowadays does) then date rapes are obviously cases where it's about sex to some significant extent.

As far as the OP goes I think we had a previous thread about this and the studies we found showed either no link between the availability of porn and sexual assault rates at the national level, or a slight decrease in sexual assaults as porn became more easily available. Of course the confounding factor is that the world is generally becoming a safer place (despite nonsense in the media about "spiralling crime rates) and the internet is generally becoming more widely available (the internet is for porn), so the correlation could be spurious.

If you cut off a serial rapist's penis do you think that would make him stop?
Click to expand...

It would stop them raping people with their penis. If they were mostly about brutalising and dominating people, they have other options.
 
As somebody wryly observed, ready access to pornography does not increase rape, but it does increase masturbation.
 
Alt+F4 said:
But rape isn't about getting sex, it's about violence. If you cut off a serial rapist's penis do you think that would make him stop?
Click to expand...
I don't totally agree. And I do think cutting a serial rapist penis off would indeed stop them in MOST cases. I imagine being devoid of a penis is a pretty good way to kill sex drive. In part I feel rape is spurred by our natural desire to reproduce. Also given males aggressive nature (fueled by testosterone) coupled with sex drive and sexual fustration, you get symptoms that are potentially causative factors (exhibited by date rape). If anything I believe pornography dampens sexual fustration and aggression that can stem from it.

Now I don't doubt that, in part, for some individuals it's simply about domination and control but I'd imagine you'd often times find a greater link to sexual desire if not sexual desire coupled with domination.
 
I don't know if I buy the claim that internet porn is doing anything for or against rape rates (or other sexual things). I suspect people fapped before the internet. It's likely just a convenience versus some magic cure-all.

Did rape rates go down after the VCR became available?
 
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