Richard Bennett offers these great observations (over the course of several posts) by way of entry into the blogosphere porn wars:

Radical feminist Diana Russell has tried to connect porn with rape by doing retrospective studies of rapists, claiming that they nearly all have big porn collections, but she’s never published this stuff in a reputable journal. Part of the problem is that retrospective studies almost always confirm the researcher’s bias; the classic case is that virtually all prisoners will tell a researcher they were abused as children. They know the score.

But the issue is whether dropping a copy of Hustler into a man’s trailer automatically increases the odds that he’s going to commit a criminal offense, cheat on his wife, fall into emptiness, and commit bestiality, as Kevin believes. What’s more likely, especially if the Hustler reader is a teenaged boy, is that he will commit multiple acts of self-abuse, for which he will not feel guilty afterwards unless he is interrupted in mid-wank. The reason for this, Kevin, is that the purpose of porn is simply to stimulate enough arousal for successful masturbation, it’s not to oppress women, destroy families, or harm farm animals. If it’s used for these other purposes, that’s simply a perversion of its purpose, and we all know that anything, even the Holy Bible, can be perverted. Check out the Song of Solomon when you get a chance, and tell me if you don’t find it at least as stimulating as Hustler.

[…] the porn debate raises a couple of questions about law and human behavior that are worth exploring: first: ‘how and to what extent do memes influence human behavior?’ and secondly: ‘is the social cost of regulating porn worth the benefit to society gained by this regulation?’

The interesting side issues relate to the unholy alliance of radical feminists and theo-fascists bent on regulation, and the dubious research that they’ve tossed out in their defense, so to speak. After Canada adopted its anti-porn laws, at the urging of Andrea Dworkin and Katie McKinnon, Dworkin found her own books banned, because of their graphic rape scenes. That was poetic justice, of course.

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