As rhetoric, it would fall flat b/c the guy has partisan fingers in the pie. First, in any debate with the radfems, his association with John, More Guns -- I use crappy methods -- Less Crime, Lott would cream him from the get go. Creaming him more would be his association with Donahue and Leavitt who were quoted by Bill Bennett to justify stupid claims about blacks, abortion, crime last fall -- claims which Leavitte pointed out at his blog, Freakonomics, weren't justified by their research.
But that wouldn't matter. It would be enough to smear him as a support of these blokes and, thus, it wouldn't be worthy research -- never mind that it was conducted by a man, which makes it suspect.
The cherry on top is that he served on the Nixon commission on pornography and has a bone to pick with the Meese commission.
Believe me, I'd love me some research so I could tell some of these people to put a cork in it for five minutes.
Aside from which, as far as they're concerned, even if it helped reduce rape, the women who are in pornography are being raped: on the set and by the men who masturbate to them. It doesn't matter. Porn is rape. In turn, it does not diminish the feelings men have about wanting to violently rape women, so what't the point. For the rads, the men beat off to it and then turn around and smack us around at home, keep us down in the workplace, sexually harass us, wolf whistle as we're going about our business, engage in street harassment, talk about public figures as if the only think that matters is their appearance, etc. etc.
On their view, this research would just support their contention that men who rape are sick and that male sexuality is sick in general.
At 11:48 PM 8/26/2006, Michael Pollak 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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