War on porn

Men do use porn differently from women. Men tend to avoid “chick porn” that depicts deep relationships. They like porn women fast and loose and willing to go nasty, largely because men use porn as masturbation aids more often than women, who tend to view it with a partner. In fact, only 17 percent of female viewers in Hald’s study used it alone.

No hike in sex crimes
So if all those people are seeing all that porn, you'd think Denmark would be a chaos of sex crime. But it's not. In fact, in an influential 1991 study, Hald's (now deceased) compatriot Berl Kutchinsky of the University of Copenhagen concluded that in the United States, Denmark, Sweden and West Germany more and more porn did not equal more and more rape.

"In none of the countries did rape increase more than nonsexual violent crimes," he wrote. "This finding in itself would seem sufficient to discard the hypothesis that pornography causes rape."

But it didn't, of course, and some lab studies did show that exposure to especially violent or degrading porn beefed up male aggressiveness toward women, though a link with actual crime was tough to prove.

Eight years later, a lengthy 1999 paper by Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii's Pacific Center for Sex and Society and Ayako Uchiyama of Japan's National Institute of Police Science backed up Kutchinsky and found that more porn in Japan did not make for more sex crimes.

"In sum," they said, "the concern that countries allowing pornography would show increased sex crime rates due to modeling or that adolescents in particular would be negatively vulnerable to and receptive to such models or the society would be otherwise adversely affected has not been vindicated. It is certainly clear from our data and analysis that a massive increase in available pornography in Japan has been correlated with a dramatic decrease in sexual crimes."

An earlier study by Hald on the effects of porn might explain why. In this study, he exposed volunteer subjects — a representative sample larger than many other such studies — to video clips from those classics of cinema, Latex and Gigantic.

Hald's conclusions: “The study failed to confirm commonly feared adverse effects of exposure to pornography on nearly all measures. More specifically, the study failed to find any immediate main or stratified effects of exposure to pornography in regard to the following dependent variables: Acceptance of Interpersonal Violence, Gender Stereotypes, Negative Attitudes Toward Women, Positive Emotionality, Rape Myth Acceptance [belief in the myth that women secretly want to be raped], and Sexism.”

In other words, looking at porn did not turn men into rapists. It did not make them want to become rapists.

There was one potentially important exception. In a certain subset of people, those whose personality profiles ranked low on “agreeableness,” which Hald defines as “altruistic, modest, trusting, empathic, compliant, polite,” the porn did seem to “have a moderating effect on the relationship between Agreeableness and Rape Myth Acceptance (RMAS).” After performing statistical corrections, however, “all previous significant moderating effects of exposure to pornography turned non-significant i.e. disappeared.”

So what does that mean, exactly? I asked Hald if people who are not very agreeable come to accept the rape myth after viewing porn and might be more inclined to commit a sex crime.

“No. It is not a causal connection," he says. "Having a high level of rape supportive attitudes does not in and of itself lead to sexual aggression such as rape. Nor can you infer a causal connection between low agreeableness, viewing porn and having higher rape supportive attitudes.” Agreeableness, he says, is but one of many factors determining the RMAS score.

A popular pastime
So it seems adult porn consumed by adults doesn’t do much of anything other than get people worked up and make them wish their partners looked a lot more like Lexington Steele or Cinnabunz.

Well, you might say, Hald works in Denmark. And you know the Danish, all liberal and Euro and so very different from us. But Hald is now working at UCLA as a visiting researcher and, he says, “I strongly believe social context [and] norms are factors influencing the effects of pornography and consumption rates.”

But, he says, in both Denmark and the U.S. “we see time and again high prevalence rates of porn consumption, a general lack of research showing consistent adverse effects of pornography for the general consumer, and that individual differences are important mediators of effects. Research shows that this holds true for both the American and the Danish context.”

Maybe that special FBI squad should plant porn inside terrorist cells. You know, keep 'em busy.

Brian Alexander is a California-based writer who covers sex, relationships and health. He is a contributing editor at Glamour and the author of "Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion" (Basic Books).

Sexploration appears every other Thursday.

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