More Violence Would be an Improvement
We can dismiss the feminist (and sociological) charges of porn increasing sexual violence and leading to sexism. The USA, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands and Japan were just some of the countries that suddenly went from no legal pornography to quite widespread availability and consumption of it. These studies all found that greater availability of, and exposure to, pornography does not increase the rate of sexual assaults on women, and probably decreases it. Japanese porn is quite frequently violent and yet even there rape decreased from an already very low base. It’s interesting that an increase in porn exposure decreases sexual violence only, and has no effect on other crime. Economists would put this down to a substitution effect.
I tend not to view such results in a positive light. Suppose this is right. And suppose similarly that rates of violence and crime decrease as a result of increased video-game playing. Is that a good thing? Probably not. Overall, I think it would be better if men didn’t play video games or watch porn, and instead left the house more, even if that meant getting into trouble a bit more often. Since women are always complaining about prolonged male adolescence, they’d probably agree.
Zietsman has some further results that confirm that way of thinking for me:
The sociological and religious charge that pornography undermines monogamy and family values does however receive support. From GSS (and controlling for IQ, education, income, age, race and ideology) I found that men who are pro legalizing porn are less likely to marry and are more pro cohabitation. There was no such association for women. A higher propensity to watch porn movies is also associated with a lesser likelihood of marrying but is unrelated to cohabitation attitudes—in both men and women. So a pro porn attitude is consistent with a reduced respect for marriage.
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Being pro the legality of porn, and porn viewing, are associated with unhappiness with the family or marriage – especially for men. Those who are pro porn also tend to have a greater number of sexual partners and are more likely to have a sexual affair. This supports the 1984 and 1988 discoveries of Dolf Zillman and Jennings Bryant that the effects of repeated exposure to standard, non-violent, commonly available pornography includes: increased callousness toward women; distorted perceptions about sexuality; devaluation of the importance of monogamy; decreased satisfaction with partner’s sexual performance, affection, and appearance; doubts about the value of marriage; and decreased desire to have children. Later research studies further confirm their findings.
This is a case where there are simply trade-offs. I myself would strongly prefer to see porn disappear.
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On topics of this sort, people often adopt an “if it doesn’t hurt anybody it’s not wrong” attitude. This is morally obtuse, because it always ignores subtler sociological and psychological implications.
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On his front page, Zietsman declares that he has an IQ of 185. But his blog is called ‘FreakoStats,’ which is embarrasingly derivative, and doesn’t even work as a pun. Odd.