>Would you still think it progress if you were to be convinced by
>empirical studies that porn socializes men to be sexually violent
>toward women?
If someone could show that "porn" did encourage violence against women, I'd be rather disturbed. But: 1) "porn" covers a very wide variety of material, so I doubt that there's any such thing as porn-in-general, much less that it has a measurable effect; 2) I'm pretty close to a free speech fundamentalist, so while I think violence against women, sexualized or not, should be punished, I don't think texts should be criminalized. As Susie Bright suggested in her response to you, the Bible has encouraged people to extraordinary acts of violence, individual and collective, but I wouldn't want to ban it. Slasher movies are far more violent than almost all porn - should we ban those too?
Doug