[Until about a month ago, I worked at the periphery of the porn industry in video-on-demand services, and followed these issues pretty closely. I can assure you that database management was never sexier. Well, I got to attend last year's AVN Award Show, which was equal parts cool/lame.]
Cheers, J T.
On 8/26/06, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
> [Courtesy Sam Smith's Undernews]
>
> [This is probably a silly, superficial correlation. But it beats the hell
> out of the opposite silly, superficial correlation. So it could be of fun
> rhetorical use.]
>
> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=913013#PaperDownload
>
> EVIDENCE THAT PORN REDUCES RAPE
>
> ANTHONY D'AMATO, NORTHWESTERN SCHOOL OF LAW - The incidence of rape in the
> United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to
> pornography
> has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan
> Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced
> social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced
> social
> violence. . . The decline [is] steeper than the stock market crash that
> led to
> the Great Depression. . . There were 2.7 rapes for every 1,000 people in
> 1980;
> by 2004, the same survey found the rate had decreased to 0.4 per 1000
> people. .
> .
>
> Official explanations for the unexpected decline include (1) less
> lawlessness
> associated with crack cocaine; (b) women have been taught to avoid unsafe
> situations; (c) more would-be rapists already in prison for other crimes;
> (d)
> sex education classes telling boys that "no means no." But these minor
> factors
> cannot begin to explain such a sharp decline in the incidence of rape.
> There
> is, however, one social factor that correlates almost exactly with the
> rape
> statistics. The American public is probably not ready to believe it. My
> theory
> is that the sharp rise in access to pornography accounts for the decline
> in
> rape. The correlation is inverse: the more pornography, the less rape. It
> is
> like the inverse correlation: the more police officers on the street, the
> less
> crime.
>
> The pornographic movie "Deep Throat" which started the flood of X-rated
> VHS and
> later DVD films, was released in 1972. Movie rental shops at first catered
> primarily to the adult film trade. Pornographic magazines also sharply
> increased in numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. Then came a seismic change:
> pornography became available on the new internet. Today, purveyors of
> internet
> porn earn a combined annual income exceeding the total of the major
> networks
> ABC, CBS, and NBC. "Deep Throat" has moved from the adult theatre to a
> laptop
> near you.
>
> National trends are one thing; what do the figures for the states show?
> From
> data compiled by the National Telecommunications and Information
> Administration
> in 2001, the four states with the lowest per capita access to the internet
> were
> Arkansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, and West Virginia. The four states with the
> highest internet access were Alaska, Colorado, New Jersey, and Washington.
> . .
>
> While the nationwide incidence of rape was showing a drastic decline, the
> incidence of rape in the four states having the least access to the
> internet
> showed an actual increase in rape over the same time period. This result
> was
> almost too clear and convincing, so to check it I compiled figures for the
> four
> states having the most access to the internet. Three out of four of these
> states showed declines (in New Jersey, an almost 50% decline). Alaska was
> an
> anomaly: it increased both in internet access and incidence of rape.
> However,
> the population of Alaska is less than one-tenth that of the other three
> states
> in its category.
>
> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=913013#PaperDownload
>
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>
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