Want less Rape? Produce more Porn!

Generally speaking, academics are a not the most exciting bunch of writters known to man. Sure they know a lot more then most people but they are so bad at expressing it that it takes about 20 years for anyone to figure out what they’re saying. So I was both shocked an amazed when, nestled between articles with wordy titles like; Is There a Correlation between Scholarly Productivity, Scholarly Influence and Teaching Effectiveness in American Law Schools? An Empirical Study and The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age, was a paper simply entitled Porn Up, Rape Down. Not exactly what I envisioned on a scholarly site like SSRN. The paper was written by Anthony D’Amato, a law professor at Northwestern University and consigliere to dons the world over. It basically puts forth the idea that rise in access to porn has actually contributed to a reduction in the incidence of rape. It’s an interesting theory from a guy who was who on the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (link is work quesionable) started by LBJ and whose report was presented to and squased by Nixon. He basically highlights stats that suggest that as access to porn grew especially over the net, rape declinced. Its a good read and even better its only 6 pages. Needless to say theres lots of buzz about this article and there is a good rebuttal here.