Turning R then L.: The difference with murder stories and the like is that the stories usually indicate that murder is wrong, that people who murder exist outside the norm and that murderers end up worse off for their crimes.

Whether or not we are looking at real or simulated rape is, from a viewer perspective, neither here nor there. Nobody cared whether the Marlborough Man was actually enjoying a smoke or just pretending to be.

So what is the porn narrative? What is the outcome or narrative 'truth' conveyed to viewers? Does the sexually aggressive performer listen to the recipient's protests and stop? Is the aggressive partner ever anything but sated and victorious ?

- and for those creatures who are not included in things like the UN Declaration of Human Rights because of course they are not human - who speaks for them ? What about their dignity and some sort of entitlement to be treated so.

Where advertising is concerned; look at how the Marlborough Man has been disgraced. Do you agree or disagree with that? Should he be restored to his previous grandeur - if so why. If not, why not?

Whitty: You may insist on empirical evidence. One hopes that you understand the limitations of empiricism especially when qualitiative information is excluded. I hope you understand that empiricism is never value free and never complete.

I ask you who defend porn so avidly to consider the humanity; or lack thereof, of what you enthusiastically promote.

Pornography harms women - ten studies complete with abstracts. Included at the bottom of the second link are the harms to men and children.

http://geekette.mysite.orange.co.uk/

http://geekette.mysite.orange.co.uk/

Thanks EoTN, that was a nice try. However the social sciences are just as precise as the physical sciences, and one must read even abstracts with care.

Study 1) "Results revealed that men exposed to degrading material, regardless of explicitness, were significantly more likely to express attitudes supportive of rape, while explicitness had no significant main or interactive effect on these attitudes."

In other words, sexually explicit porn wasn't a problem, it was degrading material regardless of explicitness. Thus the study is endorsing exactly what organisations like the Eros Foundation propose - Non-Violent Erotica.

Study 2) ".. the female experimenter found the gender schematic males who had viewed the pornographic video to be significantly more sexually motivated than subjects in the three other conditions."

People feel sexual desire after watching sexually explicit movies. Who would have thunk it?

Study 3) "Results indicate no relationship between sexually liberal attitudes and rape, but that sex magazine readership, urbanization, poverty, and a high percentage of divorced men are each significantly associated with the incidence of reported rape."

Perhaps the other correlations should be compared?

Study 4) "There were no differences in response between the R-rated teen sex film and the X-rated, sexually explicit, nonviolent film..."

Another study which indicates that it is not the sexually explicit material that is the issue.

Study 5) OK, this one constitutes an empirical study that correlates exposure to pornography to violence.

Study 6) Irrelevant.

Study 7) A meta-analysis.

Study 8) "high pornography consumption added significantly to the prediction of sexual aggression."

A study of sexual obsessive-compulsive disorder?

Study 9) "This meta-analytic review...under laboratory conditions"

No further comment necessary.

Study 10) "...quantitatively summarizes the literature.."

Yet another meta-analysis.

Lev good summary.

I found the follwoing interesting
"Further analyses revealed that the predictive utility of pornography was due to its discriminative ability only among men classified (based on their other risk characteristics) at relatively high risk for sexual aggression"

There seems to be a lot of confusion between cause and effect, sexually aggressive people are more likely to use porn (and probably hard core porn) than others does not mean porn harms people or causes sexuall aggression.

Someone watching porn in a controlled situation (even if private) may well leave the experience substantially turned on but sexually frustrated. What a surprise.

None of the abstracts I read showed a real link to harm to women resulting from porn usage.

My understanding is that for the vast bulk of porn users porn has little effect other than pleasure. For other more sexually agressive users porn provides a release which lessens the chances of them taking what they can't otherwise get and for a small group hard core porn provides inspiration for abuse.

It's that middle group those who talk about harm to women from porn should be most focussed on if reports of falling rates of sexual assual in conjunction with increased access to porn are correct.

R0bert

Good posts Lev and Robert

EyeOfNewt Regarding specific studies into pornography: taken from some posts I made in another thread

This link

http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=commstudies

for a controlled test.

Paraphrasing the conclusions: “no effect” between exposure to pornography and the desire to engage is a sexual assault.

A Danish study, across four countries, suggests the rate of assault declined after Pornography was legalized.

http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/proceedings/14/kutchinsky.pdf

This report might imply a ban might well increase the incidence of rape (simple logic, if removing a ban reduces the incidence of event, reinstalling a ban will increase the incidence of an event).

I would further note, authoritive long term trend data is hard to find. The US Dept of Justice has plotted the incidence of “forcible rape” from 1960 to 2006.

The incidence of per 100,000 of population, progressively increased between 1960 (9.6) through to 1992 (42.8) and since then has progressively declined by 2006 (30.9), the last year of available data.

The rate of annual decline post 1993 is almost the same as the rate of annual increase pre 1993.

Not sure what happened in 1993. I am certain it was not a prohibition on pornography.

I use links which have some credibility, government reports or government statistics department data, research papers which describe fully the processes and methods used etc.

I find the link you supplied gave prominence to a Star Wars stormtrooper and published abbreviated summations under “Porn Sudies”

I looked up “sudies”, it must be a made up word, maybe like the words of those 10 supposed studies, used to support your case.

I will not bother to read the rest. I am sure Lev’s summary is are perfectly adequate analysis of the twaddle
.
I will ask you this, you were arguing from the position of a person who deserved general respect on a presumption of being an objective independent voice

You are now someone who relies on reference data from a site whose agenda is “to campaign against the sex and pornography industries”.

Somehow I think whilst you might still be here, your “credibility“ has left the building.

Two points pynchme:

You say I defend porn avidly. I don't. I oppose censorship avidly.

You state: "The difference with murder stories and the like is that the stories usually indicate that murder is wrong, that people who murder exist outside the norm and that murderers end up worse off for their crime."

'Usually.' So would you condone the banning of action films where the murderer outwits their pursuers? It might make for a clever film.

This 'difference' appears very weak to me.

The fact of the matter is, you are dictating to people what they should, and shouldn't be watching. I simply can't abide that.

I've never watched rape pornography and think it's disgusting.

My defence is against the well meaning, but misguided people who think censorship is the answer. I view it as an attack on our rights.

Generally, I wouldn't mind too much if rape pornography was banned.

But I don't trust any of the anti-porn brigade, and the posters here have given me no reason to believe it's just rape porn they're concerned with. It strikes me as far more likely to be a trojan horse to attack pornography in general.

What next? Banning rough, albeit consensual sex? S&M?

At the end of the day, it's not up to you. Or anyone. That's the viewer's business.

Restrictive social engineering isn't right. Passive, (i.e. advertisements, messages) yes, okay. But you can't engineer what people do and don't like.

That's what makes people who they are, and even if we don't like them, that's their business. If they actually commit a rape or an illegal act, then we stop them.

But it's not up to us to change these people, if they're not hurting anyone.

If it's known somebody watches rape pornography, they will undergo social alienation. People will respect them less. This is all well and good, and I don't have any issues with that.

But taking the matter that step further, to censorship, isn't right.