Terrifying trade-offs
The Irish Independent reported briefly on a conference, hosted by the Limerick Rape Crisis Centre, titled Pornography: A Violence Against Women. The programme is a bit vague, but I gather the theme is the relationship between pornography and rape, especially since the lead speaker, however, is Diana Russell, a retired sociologist at Mills College, who is an advocate of the view that pornography leads to rape. In this view, pornography and rape are complementary. Pornography triggers a hidden desire for sexual violence, and so leads to rape.
By coincidence, I have been reading an academic paper on rape and pornography Todd Kendall of Clemson’s economics department. Kendall offers evidence that rape and pornography are substitutes, that is, that rape and pornography satisfy the same desires, and so can be substituted for one another. His specific empirical finding is that increased availability of internet porn lowers the (strangers) rape rate. (Whether rape is about sex or power is not important here. What matters is that porn and rape serve the same function, whether that is obtaining power or sex.) Anthony D’Amato, in a more polemical paper, pointed to the negative simple correlation between the availability of pornography and rape (since about 1980, a big rise in the availabiliy of pornography and a steep drop in the rape rate) a rise to make the same argument. D’Amato, moreover, treats this claim as a defense of pornography.
Suppose the “porn and rape as on net substitutes” claim is correct. It implies an ugly trade-off. Suppose, as seems plausible, it is true of child pornography and child rape as well. (There has been a drop in the rate of child rape over the last decade or so.) D’Amato noted the rise of pornography and the fall in the rate rape. Whatever the consensual status of the making of ordinary pornography, there is no doubt that the making of child pornography involves rape. But on the substitution argument, efforts to restrict the rape involved in child pornography would lead to an increase in other child rape. If I am right, this is I believe a stomach turning example of what Calabresi and Bobbitt famously called tragic choices.