DADvocate

Yesterday I worked from home and listened to my favorite radio talk show host, Mike McConnell. Yesterday McConnell started off with with the discussing a column in the Chicago Tribune that pornography does not contribute to sexual assaults as many would have you believe. Although pornography is easily available via Internet, etc and "One Nielsen survey found that one out of every four users say they visited adult sites in the last month."

This is part of a broad decrease in criminal mayhem. Since 1993, violent crime in America has dropped by 58 percent. But the progress in this one realm has been especially dramatic. 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.

these researchers say:

I think it is better to expend our energies in two directions. 1) Make better pornography so that preferred role models are portrayed and more segments of society can come to appreciate or at least understand and tolerate its value23; and 2) turn our research to other directions to eliminate or reduce the social ills of rape and other sex crimes. The best place to look is probably in the home during the first decade of life. But it is only by research that we can continue to understand how to most effectively meet this social challenge. Governments as well as the pornography industry itself would do well to finance and encourage such research.

Todd Kendall, professor of economics at Clemson University concludes,

The results above suggest that potential rapists perceive pornography as a substitute for rape. With the mass market introduction of the world wide web in the late-1990’s, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary prices for pornography fell. The associated decline in rape illustrated in the analysis here is consistent with a theory, such as that in Posner (1994), in which pornography is a complement for masturbation or consensual sex, which are themselves substitutes for rape, making pornography a net substitute for rape.

Given the limitations of the data, policy prescriptions based on these results must be made with extreme care. Nevertheless, the results suggest that, in contrast to previous theories to the contrary, liberalization of pornography access may lead to declines in sexual victimization of women.

Very interesting and it makes some sense. While I'm not crazy about about pornography and have never seen the Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson tapes, my libertarian leanings say that freely consenting adults creating pornography is to be tolerated.

I've always found the feminist position of supporting abortion because "a woman has a right to control her body" but opposing prostitution hypocritical. Why can a person have sex with any number of others and it's perfectly legal until cash is exchanged? Another one of those mysteries of life.

Mike McConnell almost always makes me think. He certainly did this time.