From: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
Date: Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 1:03 AM
Subject: Oppressive Religion & Punishment for Porn Associated with Higher Sex Crimes
To: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
"So, if you want your child to be a little more likely to grow up to become a rapist or to commit other sex offenses, you need to punish them while young for looking at pornography, you need to teach them how bad pornography and sex are, and you need to ensure that they have far less access to pornography or information about sex than their peers. Hmmm.... which groups in society are already doing all this?"
Oppressive Religion & Punishment for Porn Associated with Higher Sex Crimes
Friday March 26, 2010
Conservative Christians like to complain that pornography and perhaps any sexually explicit material is harmful -- for example, by making sex crimes more likely. Extensive research has not only failed to find any link between access to and use of pornography with sex crimes, but what correlations have been found are just the opposite: more pornography may reduce the numbers of sex crimes.
Even more interesting is a recent finding about links between pornography and sex crimes because there is a subset of people whose exposure to pornography may be a problem: those who were raised to fear pornography as harmful and punished when found using pornography. The upshot seems to be that it's not pornography which is the problem, but negative teaching about pornography -- and that's associated almost entirely with conservative religion.
Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20-24 and 25-34, the people most likely to use the Internet.
The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic.
In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. Significantly, no community in the United States has ever voted to ban adult access to sexually explicit material. The only feature of a community standard that holds is an intolerance for materials in which minors are involved as participants or consumers.
Source: The Scientist1
The one other argument against pornography as harmful is that it teaches a harshly negative view of women as little more than sex objects -- basically, that pornography encourages misogyny. The science, though, doesn't really support this either.
Now let's look at attitudes towards women. Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn't see those movies, and studies by other investigators--female as well as male--essentially found similarly that there was no detectable relationship between the amount of exposure to pornography and any measure of misogynist attitudes.
No researcher or critic has found the opposite, that exposure to pornography--by any definition--has had a cause-and-effect relationship towards ill feelings or actions against women. No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women.
Now, maybe researchers just haven't found a good "measure of misogynist attitudes" yet but I'm inclined to doubt it. I think that if there were a connection, something would have been found even if it weren't quite conclusive. Then again, maybe pornography just isn't viewed quite enough to have the impact researchers are looking for.
What I mean is, maybe pornography would foster misogynist attitudes if it were viewed in large quantities over many years -- but if that were true it would largely undermine this argument against porn since such consumption is unusual. It would make a lot more sense to target the images of and messages about women which people do receive in large quantities: those in advertising, movies, TV shows, etc.
In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless, since most men have at some time used pornography.
Looking closer, Michael Goldstein and Harold Kant found that rapists were more likely than nonrapists in the prison population to have been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster, while other research has shown that incarcerated nonrapists had seen more pornography, and seen it at an earlier age, than rapists. What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing. Richard Green too has reported that both rapists and child molesters use less pornography than a control group of "normal" males.
So, if you want your child to be a little more likely to grow up to become a rapist or to commit other sex offenses, you need to punish them while young for looking at pornography, you need to teach them how bad pornography and sex are, and you need to ensure that they have far less access to pornography or information about sex than their peers. Hmmm.... which groups in society are already doing all this?
Sw
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Palash Biswas
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