Away, You Mouldy Rogue, Away!
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
A Clemson University economist, Todd D. Kendall, has delivered a paper at Stanford entitled Pornography, Rape, and the Internet.Borrowing Andrew Sullivan's syntax, the "money quote":
I find that internet access appears to be a substitute for rape.(Italics is Kendall's, in the paper's introduction.)
If you don't have multiple regression in your math background (I do, but it's been fading for 20 years now), I can summarize this procedure as follows, and I'm borrowing now from Steven Pinker, I believe: Correlational statistics doesn't tell us about causes but instead tells us what likes to happen with what.
In other words, the paper concludes that a reduction in rape statistics "likes to occur" when internet access increases, particularly for 15-19 year-old boys. Pornography seems to decrease rape, leaving other crime rates unchanged.
Keep in mind this conclusion doesn't immediately invalidate all suspicions and worries about porn. Porn could still dehumanize women, desensitize men, etc. But the paper makes a strong argument that porn works as a substitutive satisfaction. And this effect is powerful enough to overcome other factors, at least as far as decreasing rape statistics.
Well worth reading. And sure to cause controversy because Kendall -- like Steven Levitt before him applying mathematics to questions that really matter -- has the unmitigated gall to write clearly and thoroughly, with a broad audience in mind.
