Nobody's Business

More Porn Equals Less Rape

A year ago, I wrote about the non-existent causal link between "violent" porn and sex crimes. I mused:

The Internet, now about ten years old, has made finding the offending material a quick and private matter, so you'd think that the increased availability of so-called violent porn would've produced a prolonged spike in rapes and sex killings, starting in about 1995. Well, no dice. Certainly, the perception that sexual perverts are everywhere is widespread — the result, I'd wager, of high-profile cases such as the Michael Jackson trial, and the media's insistence on bringing you the important news that thieves are after Jennifer Aniston's panties. But as for the actual data: no spike. On the contrary. There's been a pretty radical decline in serious sex offenses and other violent crimes in the last two decades. Almost every year, the picture improves.

Now comes further statistical support for that view: evidence that more porn consumption equals fewer sex crimes.

A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

OK, so we can at least tentatively conclude that Net access reduces rape. But that's a far cry from proving that porn access reduces rape. Maybe rape is down because the rapists are all indoors reading Slate or vandalizing Wikipedia. But professor Kendall points out that there is no similar effect of Internet access on homicide. It's hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it's easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.

If smut-protesting groups like Focus on the Family and Feminists Fighting Pornography really cared about reducing sexual violence against women, they'd drop their censorious efforts right now.

But wait, there's more! Much as the easy availability of porn reduces rape, so do violent movies reduce battery, robberies, and other mayhem, at least for a few hours.

What happens when a particularly violent movie is released? Answer: Violent crime rates fall. Instantly. Here again, we have a lot of natural experiments: The number of violent movie releases changes a lot from week to week. One weekend, 12 million people watch 'Hannibal,' and another weekend, 12 million watch 'Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.'

University of California professors Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna compared what happens on those weekends. The bottom line: More violence on the screen means less violence in the streets. Probably that's because violent criminals prefer violent movies, and as long as they're at the movies, they're not out causing mischief. They'd rather see Hannibal than rob you, but they'd rather rob you than sit through Wallace & Gromit. 

Cheek, meet tongue: The best thing the government's crimefighters can do if they want to lower the number of violent offenses, including rape, is start a free cable channel that alternates Dirty Harry flicks with Dirty Debutantes movies — thus trapping would-be criminals in front of their TVs for days on end.

Washington = "Burkina Faso With Cable"

Remember Bush promising to return bipartisanship to the halls of Congress? We know that hasn't worked out so well, but Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi drives home the point especially deftly (and unkindly) in recalling James Sensenbrenner's shameless shenanigans:

The GOP's "take that, bitch" approach to governing has been taken to the greatest heights by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee is chaired by the legendary Republican monster James Sensenbrenner Jr., an ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that makes you think he might have used one before in some other arena, perhaps to beat prostitutes to death. Last year, Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one. "Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn't in session, hoping that no one would show," recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. "But we got a pretty good turnout anyway."

Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out. "He was like a kid at the playground," the staffer says. And just in case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the microphones on his way out of the room.

Taibbi feels, not without reason, that the past six years were a watershed period,

when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula — a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.

Politicians' Soft Porn

Virginia candidate Jim Webb may have written a scene that further enraged the perpetually indignant, but he's not the only one to have discovered the Joy of (fictional) Sex. See here for descriptions of quivering nipples and fingers sliding into moistness; Slate dares you to match the steamy prose with the politician who wrote it.

Drugbusters Go Through the Looking Glass

From the Newspaper:

Prosecutors in Morris County, New Jersey on Thursday applied to keep permanently the family vehicles belonging to Gerard and Jane Trapp. The cars had been seized based on the accusation that their teenage son Gerald Jr., 19, had the painkiller Oxycodone in his possession. The teenage Trapp has not been found guilty in a court of law, nor has he been put on trial. Nonetheless, following a July 27 drug raid, the family of six lost their 1992 Cadillac SDV, a 1995 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, and a 1994 Toyota Camry.

"To take three cars over a conspiracy charge is over the top," Gerald Trapp Sr. told the Hanover Daily Record. "To seek to have the people buy back their own cars when they need those cars for their daily activities seems to me to almost rise to the level of extortion." Neither of the parents were aware of their teenage son's prescription painkiller use, nor were any of the cars registered in his name.

Forfeiture laws were written to prevent Porsche-collecting, mansion-dwelling proven drug dealers from keeping the material profits of their trade. Witness how far we've strayed from that idea: Not only has Gerald Trapp Jr. not been tried in court, much less found guilty; he's not even thought to have been dealing in drugs — he's a first-time offender charged with nothing more than possession. Of a prescription drug. On top of that, the confiscated property doesn't belong to him. The whole thing is a brazen rape of the Fourth Amendment, a mind-boggling abuse of police powers. Just like this case.

"I Had Music That Was Not Pleasing to God"

This blog does reach far and wide, into unlikely corners of the Internet. Commenters have belatedly come out of the woodwork in defense of Elder G. Craige Lewis, a crusader against hip-hop music I blogged about in April. One of his supporters writes:

The Holy Spirit revealed to me and my husband that other music we had was not good. We didn't own much hip hop but we did have music that was not pleasing to God.

Ma'am, I hope God can forgive you.

I had no idea that the Holy Spirit basically acts as the Lord's D.J. My iTunes playlists can be a bit predictable sometimes. Maybe I should check into this religion thing.

Washington State: 'Your Butt is Disgusting'

That's cigarette butt, you sicko. But if you were expecting to read something involving people's asses, who am I to disappoint you?

Buried in the comments section at Reason:

Last weekend I visited a couple State Parks here in Washington State and found that all outhouses in WA now include a little sticker on the door stating that is a violation of state law to smoke within 25 feet of an outhouse. Apparently, an outhouse qualifies as a public accommodation.

So it's OK for Washington State to give the public shit-stained johns without running water — but a wisp of tobacco smoke anywhere near said facilities, well, that's an intolerable assault on public health.

Save Free Speech — Neuter It!

When NPR organized a debate on the limits of free speech, the broadcaster had no trouble finding three 'experts' to argue that hurtful speech must not be allowed. Note their names: David Cesarani, a research professor in history at Royal Holloway, University of London; Mari Matsuda, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center; and Daisy Khan, the executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement.

Thankfully, they were no match for the participants who defended the idea that "freedom of expression must include the license to offend." Among them were Philip Gourevitch, the editor of the Paris Review, and Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens.

Gourevitch noted that Cesarani had argued that the Internet was imperiling freedom of speech because it was awash with bigotry and that [in Cesarani's words] "all that decent people can do is agree to reasonable limits on what can be said and set down legal markers in an attempt to preserve a democratic, civilized and tolerant society."

That's rich, isn't it? The Internet is "imperiling freedom of speech" because of the bigotry that's on it — so to ensure free speech, we must be prepared to do away with it.

"Who gives him the right to set up a chair in the antechambers of my mind and judge what I'm allowed to say and what I'm allowed to think?" Gourevitch replied.

He could have been a tad less hoity-toity about it ("the antechambers of my mind"? Dude, what the fuck?), but at least Gourevitch put his finger precisely on the key issue.

Hitchens' arguments also sounded this theme."Who will you appoint?" Hitchens asked the three speakers opposing the motion. "Who will be the one who says, 'I know exactly where the limits should be, I know how far you can go and I know when you've gone too far, and I'll decide that?' Who do you think, who do you know, who have you heard of, who have you read about in history to whom you'd give that job?"

That argument helped convince the fence-sitters:

The audience at the debate voted once before the debate started and once during closing statements. At the beginning, a large majority favored the motion, "Freedom of expression must include the license to offend": 177 favored the motion, 25 opposed it and 24 were unsure. At the end of the debate, support of the motion increased to 201; only 39 opposed.

Story here: audio of the whole debate here.

U.K. Nanny Update

The average Brit seems to become more like the average American every day: when they don't like something on 'moral' grounds, they clamor for it be outlawed. A video game about bullies? Ban it. A pole dancing kit? Let's declare it illegal, for the children.

Oh, and in order to protect the young 'uns, we must also dramatically raise taxes on alcohol.

Babes in Toyland

Play a record backwards and, with a vivid enough imagination, you can hear all kinds of upsetting language. Or you could just buy this toy and claim that its voice chip is teaching your kid dirty words.

A Fat Prize For Honest Politicians

It's a laudable initiative, but it might be more difficult to find qualified candidates than it is to find a chaste whore.