Porn and Rape, Part 2

A new flawed rape study concludes that porn reduces rape, because greater Internet access is correlated with lower rape rates in the United States. The study in question is built around the substitution effect: watching violent movies is a substitute for murder, watching violent porn is a substitute for rape, and so on.

Naturally, the feminist blogosphere is aghast. The study itself is flawed. How can it not be? It has a limited timeframe (1998-2003), it’s restricted to within the United States, it doesn’t explain the plummet in American rape rates between 2000 and 2004, and it doesn’t control for such crucial mediating variables as inequality and median income, both of which are higher in states with better net access and correlate with less crime.

But too little of the criticism on the feminist blogosphere revolves around these boring issues. None of the the three above-linked blogs is anti-porn, but none of them is explicitly sex-positive, either. The two sex-positive blogs on my blogroll haven’t said anything about the study. The comment threads became hornets’ nests of misguided sentiments about what pornography is.

First, Evil Fizz at Feministe tries rebutting with a supply-side argument,

Now, without diving straight into the quagmire which is porn and feminism, let’s establish that some porn is, in fact, rape on video tape. Some of it is a damn convincing approximation. The fact that there is a porn star whose signature move is attempting to push the head of the woman he’s fucking into a toilet is prima facie evidence of the erotization of sexual assault. Not an open question.

Whenever people start going off about how extreme porn is, I ask the same question, courtesy of Avedon: “how do you know what porn features?”. I’ve looked at some fairly hardcore stuff, and none of it was ever rape. Even the damsel-in-distress pictures were clearly faked, encapsuling the difference between rape fantasies, which most people of both genders have, and real rape, which most people of either gender don’t commit.

Googling porn rape yields a first page with several articles about the correlation between porn and rape and several porn sites I’ll bet dollars to donuts don’t feature a single model who didn’t consent and don’t portray a single act that more than superficially resembles rape. For a while it even included my previous post about porn and rape, but not anymore.

Samhita, whose post about this is still far better, asks,

Furthermore, whether this decreases rape or not, does the use of internet pornography change the culture of rape, or does it justify sexual fetishization to an even greater degree. Don’t get me wrong, the less rapes the better, but is this a solution?

But social science is not public policy. A good rebuttal to “here are the facts” is not “the consequences of these facts are bad so I choose not to believe them” but “no, these facts are wrong.” Nobody is seriously suggesting increased porn use as a way of fighting rape.

As far as I can tell, the only reason researchers look into negative correlations between crime and media violence is as a way of rebutting arguments based on equally flawed studies saying that media violence causes crime, which are then used to justify censorship.

But as I said, the real gems are from the comment threads, especially on Feministing. There, one commenter brings up Susan Brownmiller (whose book has a lot of empirical arguments that suggest rape is no different from other violent crimes, and a factless theory that all of the world’s evils stem from the prehistoric discovery of rape). Another objects that some porn includes rape, so obviously porn must be about rape; presumably, since there exist Muslim terrorists, Islam is a terrorist religion.

Worse, too many commenters subscribe to an argument from personal incredulity. They can’t believe porn is a substitute for rape; hence, it can’t be. Their theory says porn equals rape; hence it must be true, and any conflicting data must be a lie. They’re afraid that any approach but the ineffectual “just say no to rape” strategy diverts blame from rapists; hence no social factors cause rape except the patriarchy and no social factors reduce rape except feminism.

I have fairly concrete ideas about what causes rape, none of which marks it as materially different from other violent crimes; I’ll post more on this later, since I’d rather talk more about factors influencing rape other than porn, which is a red herring.

Like other violent crimes, rape is influenced by several factors – poverty, law enforcement, alienation – none of which ever justifies it. Nobody is saying murder is justifiable because if the US had real gun control, its homicide rate would be 2 rather than 5.5. It’s understood that we must blame the perpetrator first and the social system underlying him second. It’s possible to accept a study that says rape has causes exogenous to sexism without blaming victims.