The Sound of One Hand Slapping

If you ever found yourself in a conversation about pornography with a lockstep feminist back in the ’70s or ’80s, her opening gambit would be something like this: “Pornography is bad because it objectifies women.”

The problem with that argument is that it plays a lot better with women than with men. It’s human nature to celebrate beauty, and while one man’s celebration might be another man’s whacking material, it’s hard to demonize objectification in the abstract.

Sooner or later, the feminist would pull out the trump card: “Pornography leads to rape.”

But, again, that’s a tough argument to make with an actual consumer of erotica. I subscribed to Playboy back then, and I guarantee there was nothing about looking at pictures of naked women that inspired violence. I always figured the opposite occurred, and that a guy who spent too much time with his private collection would spend less time and energy seeking an actual partner. To me, pornography was more likely to lead to passivity and loneliness than to aggression and violence.

You could also flip the argument around: Do men in prison rape other men because they spend their days and nights looking at pictures of naked cowboys?

So now, thanks to this Internet thingy, anyone capable of Googling a few choice keywords has instant access to all the pornography he can handle. If pornography leads to rape, then of course the sexual-assault rate should be skyrocketing. It’s not, according to economist Steven Landsburg in this column for Slate:

What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, “More Net access, less rape.” A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

Landsburg also notes something else that’s news to me:

What happens when a particularly violent movie is released? Answer: Violent crime rates fall. Instantly. Here again, we have a lot of natural experiments: The number of violent movie releases changes a lot from week to week. One weekend, 12 million people watch Hannibal, and another weekend, 12 million watch Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

University of California professors Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna compared what happens on those weekends. The bottom line: More violence on the screen means less violence in the streets. Probably that’s because violent criminals prefer violent movies, and as long as they’re at the movies, they’re not out causing mischief. They’d rather see Hannibal than rob you, but they’d rather rob you than sit through Wallace & Gromit.

I say that’s the most probable explanation, because the biggest drop in crime (about a 2 percent drop for every million people watching violent movies) occurs between 6 p.m. and midnight — the prime moviegoing hours. And what happens when the theaters close? Answer: Crime stays down, though not by quite as much. Dahl and DellaVigna speculate that this is because two hours at the movies means two hours of drinking Coke instead of beer, with sobering effects that persist right on through till morning. Speaking of morning, after 6 a.m., crime returns to its original level.

That’s interesting, but here’s what I really want to know: Does the incidence of people doing crazy shit with sports cars decline after they’ve watched a Vin Diesel movie?

Tags: Tags: sex