Professor D'Amato, a very learned man from all what it seems from his cv, has written an very thought provoking paper. In this paper, he claims that rape in the USA has reduced by 85% in the last 25 years. And there seems to be a correlation between the availability of porn and rape. While it is not clear, he argues:
Correlations aside, could access to pornography actually reduce the incidence of rape as a matter of causation? In my article I mentioned one possibility: that some people watching pornography may “get it out of their system” and thus have no further desire to go out and actually try it. Another possibility might be labeled the “Victorian effect”: the more that people covered up their bodies with clothes in those days, the greater the mystery of what they looked like in the nude. The sight of a woman’s ankle was considered shocking and erotic. But today, internet porn has thoroughly de-mystified sex.
Times have changed so much that some high school teachers of sex education are beginning to show triple-X porn movies to their students in order to depict techniques of satisfactory intercourse.
I am sure there will be other explanations forthcoming as to why access to pornography is the most important causal factor in the decline of rape. Once one accepts the observation that there is a precise negative correlation between the two, the rest can
safely be left to the imagination.
Now the problem is that I cannot replicate this study with other countries. Rape is considered to be a power trip, something that is related to men dominance while religious chaps think it is due to lust. See here for the causes of rape (mind you, the article is disputed on Wikipedia but it does not detract from the argument I am making!). So while the author is fulminating against religious reasons for the previous research, his pointing to availability of porn seems to further point to religious reasons behind raising lust (assuming that porn satisfies lust....).
On the other hand, countries where porn is banned or is severely limited still show incidents of rape. So not sure, what do you think?
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