"I think that this may be a case where no generalizable, population-wide correlation can be made but where there are individual cases where a causal, although not exclusively so, relationship exists. It's an interesting quirk of case study vs. demographic or statistical analysis.
No doubt the mechanism of action would be to push or kindle the fragile mind into devaluing women further, increasing the rate; however, porn probably acts as a sexual safety valve for some men, too, cutting the rate of abuse or assault. At a guess, they're probably either insignificant on a population basis or balance each other out or both.
Either way, and I don't mean to step back into last week's BPD discussion, people who score high in antisocial personality traits (through instruments such as the Pyschopathy Checklist) are very apt to attribute their deviant behaviour to external factors. That alone does not a psychopath make, but at the very least one should look at who, exactly, is making the attributions.
m."
Very right, especially at the end. The mere fact that any particular sexual predator demonstrably drew on porn for inspiration, or that hundreds of them did, proves nothing at all about porn as a causal factor. External impressions do, obviously, influence people. However, if, hypothetically, the generally prevalent level of media exposure of representations of the female body were to return to the state of affairs of about 1955, we would certainly find that those tamer representations would suffice to stimulate sexual predation just as much as today's more explicit ones.
The notion that one can control libido by covering up the body is a constant myth. I'm sure that under the Taliban men found something enticing about the rolling lilt of a woman's body as she strode down the street covered by her burka. Concealment is a challenge to fantasy. Sexual fantasy is eternal and constant.
By the way, I'm intrigued by something ravi wrote --
"aren't you assuming that kendall doesn't like porn as much as you do? your quote above seems to remove the context he".
Is Kendall a he? I've met shes with the name.
Also, Miles asked --
" That's what I don't get: who gets to decide what objectifies or demeans women? Is every sexually explicit film degrading to women? If not, what are the specific criteria? If Andrea Dworkin says "This is degrading to women," is that good enough?"
I recall examples of religious conservatives seizing on the work of people like Dworkin to push censorship of a straightforwardly anti-sexual kind, for example, trying to get libraries to ban OUR BODIES OURSELVES. The anti-porn feminists are really a sort of stalking horse for the religious right, and, at times, they seem to share much of the same view of women, as fragile, pure, and a potentially redeeming moral force.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema