Friday, February 04, 2011

A thought about pornography and rape

A few years back, researchers came up with a startling claim; that areas with widespread use of pornography, especially Internet pornography, actually show lower rates of rape than other areas.  Now this is counter-intuitive; men who break societal rules to access images of women not their wife ought to also be more likely to break societal rules to access....well, women not their wife, and forcibly so, no?

Now certainly there may be methodological issues with the earlier study, but there may be a more basic reason that the earlier researchers were able to find this correlation. 

Read this article here, and note carefully that researchers are finding that men exposed to pornography are often incapable of finding ordinary women sexually attractive.  Well, if the population that ordinarily breaks our society's sexual mores is effectively rendered into "eunuchs" in real life by constantly viewing the antics of loose women with completely unnatural physical attributes (no, fella, those ain't real), we would expect that these men would not commit the rapes that they otherwise would have.

It doesn't make porn into a "good thing," of course, but perhaps it does explain what we see, and it's a tremendously sad thing to consider legions of men--and women--who have been so damaged that they cannot enjoy the love of a spouse, even if the rape rate is lower.

No comments: