Porn

[flexibeast]

Further to previous posts i've made on the issue of porn (such as the ones here and here):

The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past
25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to
teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show
that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The
reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.

[ http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=913013 ]

[B]efore the fall of the Soviet Union, places like Croatia were not exactly hubs of the porn trade. However, since the fall of the evil empire, porn is now readily available in Croatia, as well as the technology to view it and to download it. So you've got a pretty neat lab setting to do a before-the-influx-of-porn and after-the-influx-of-porn study. And that's exactly what researchers like Milton Diamond have done. Here's what he reports:

"We've just finished a porn study in Croatia. As a post-Communist country, it shows, like all the other countries we've looked at so far, despite a major influx of available porn, there was NO increase in sex crimes."

[ http://www.goofyfootpress.com/weeklycolumn/the_latest_on_sex_the_internet.php ]

Comments

[scopo.livejournal.com]

but ... have you even seen any of that Eastern European porn? So many of
the girls (and they usually are 'girls' - barely 18 or 19 most of the time) look so scared. It's 'deer in the headlights' stuff, and I would postulate that as such it fills a particular niche market: those for whom 'the modern woman' as represented in mainstream US porn is too assertive and too self-possessed.

[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

i've only seen a bit of Eastern European porn, but on the basis of that, yes, i've seen what you describe at least some of the time. Still, is it correct to assume that the majority of porn accessed in Croatia is of Eastern European origin? It would be interesting to know whether the study in question examined this . . . .

[scopo.livejournal.com]

I don't know - and I haven't yet read the articles you've linked, so I won't postulate too much until I have. I s'pose it was just my gut reaction that the spread of porn into Eastern Europe, and out from it as an export, is worrying on a number of levels: I think of it as a pretty 'unreconstructed', macho society (also one recovering from numerous very recent wars and revolutions) and also as a bit of a Russian Mafia-driven 'wild west' where all sorts of things can go on unpoliced. If there is snuff being made, it's most likely to be coming from Eastern Europe ...

But, wild assumptions, so I'll shut up for now! ;)

[gendertrash.livejournal.com]

Amen! there is nothing wrong with porn, and it does not cause rape or other sexual violence end of story. in a sex and the media course i took last spring there were some really incredable readings about porn (the prof's area of study is porn) anyway one of the really intersting ones we read was about how porn can serve as a cultural educator about sex and have really positive implications given that often people (particularly those socialized female) are not given the opportunity to learn about their bodies in terms of sexual activity...

[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

how porn can serve as a cultural educator about sex and have really positive implications

Indeed . . . . but unfortunately, it can result in negative 'education' too. i knew a woman who was doing community work in the Solomon Islands; she had experiences with the local men who, having watched porn and come to the conclusion that "all women really want it", treated the local women badly. :-/

This once again highlights the importance of the context of imagery: these people were unfamiliar with the notion of fictional vs. "non-fictional" television and movies (for exmaple, some of them were under the impression that the events in Independence Day really happened), because they simply hadn't grown up in a society where television and movies, and the conventions surrounding them, were 'everyday'.