Once again this blog is Adelina's fault so if halfway through it you're asking yourself "Why the fuck am I reading this?" then go blame her.
In her blog, @adelina mentioned a Fox Business program that spoke about the "skyrocketing and unprecented availability of pornography" and somehow made a direct link between that and the decline of rape and sexual assault cases. I thought about looking for a video of the program but there is a problem with looking up videos about Fox news.
You find them.
For the sake of my already vulnerable sanity I decided to stick with any online articles I could find and was quite surprised with what I actually did find. Namely two studies that actually agreed with the Fox Business perspective. Now I didn't watch the story so they may simply have been quoting these studies but here they are anyway for your reading (dis)pleasure:
What is surprising to me is that both of these studies were published in scientific journals. Both studies are quick to state that no causation has actually been proven, just that the correlation exists. To that I say: "So fucking what?"
Just because one thing goes up and another thing goes down doesn't mean that one caused the other. I'm sure fast food consumption has gone up in the last ten years, does that mean that rapists are now too fat and unhealthy to commit sexual assault? Now rape and sexual assault are going down (60% in the last 15 years) and internet porn is in fact much more available but these are only single data points. There are simply too many other variables associated with sexual assault that aren't being accounted for. Are women protecting themselves better through martial arts training, availability of self defense products like pepper spray or firearms, do smartphones make calling for help that much easier, etc., etc. Is it also possible that the new rise of feminism has created greater awareness about how women are affected/vulnerable to sexual assault? Are rapists and those that commit sexual assault being captured and prosecuted at a greater rate than before thanks to the rise of technology? All of these factors and probably many, many more need to be addressed and reviewed in a proper study before any kind of causation can be declared.
At this point I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there is no causation. I'm not saying this because of the age-old (and very tired) argument of "I've watched porn all my life and I've never assaulted anyone" but because other media studies attempting to link the media to other behaviors in the past have failed to draw any conclusions one way or the other. I'll go ahead and age myself and bring up a claim in the early 80's about how children who played table top RPG's like Dungeons and Dragons were more likely to join religious cults. This claim was eventually proven false just like so many others.
The bottom line when it comes to "studies" like this is that they prove nothing and are meant only to reinforce already held beliefs. Its what I like to call the "Infinite Improbability Drive of the Mind." The basis is that if you want something to be true you will latch onto any bit of information that could support that belief no mater how low the probability that the information is accurate. To people like this the words "it could be" and "there is a correlation" are synonymous with "proven" and "fact." Worse than that some people like Fox News' Megyn Kelly use these terms as battle cries and ram them down their viewers/readers throats. I can't count the number of times Megyn Kelly has made claims of the existence of scientific data without ever actually presenting the data or in those rare instances when she does we see this same sort of single data point connection. What's really sad is that while this proves nothing it really isn't meant to. These studies exist simply as talking points in the larger debate. While its nice to have a fresh perspective at the same time just because someone calls the sky "a spectrum of colors from grey to light blue" it doesn't really get us anywhere. We need actual data and we need real facts not just "well this could have caused that."
