Yes, it’s an argument but there’s zero data to support it, in fact the opposite.

If this were true then widespread availability of pornography on the internet would have resulted in a massive increase in rape of adult females. When in fact, assault numbers have been on a steady decline for decades.

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IncreasePosts 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Why would general pornography lead to rape? Most pornography is not rape pornography. Would people watching a bunch of rape pornography lead to more rapes? I don't know, but that seems more likely than general pornography leading to rapes.

60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life: https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v1i2.29

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pessimizer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Most pornography is not rape pornography.

I'm not taking a position here, but the total amount of pornography is irrelevant to the argument. If the amount of rape pornography available has increased 500x as the total amount of pornography has increased 5000x, the proportion of pornography that was rape pornography has been reduced by 90%.

> 60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life

Someone looking for child pornography is somebody looking for child pornography, so their opinion about what the search might lead to seems a bit worthless. There's no reason to assume that they have any insight into what will happen next, but we know for a fact what has already happened.

That out of the way, though, and assuming that child pornography leads to child abuse, the good pro-pornography case that has been made is that when pornography is suppressed rather than regulated, the 95% of people who are exclusively interested in adult pornography will have to go through the same underground channels that child pornography flows through, thus having the perverse effect of exposing more people to child pornography (or at least obtaining access to it.) If exposure to child pornography causes child abuse, then the suppression of adult pornography would then lead to more child abuse.

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pembrook 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Does it need to be said that by making all pornography easier to access the internet obviously makes rape pornography more prevalent and easier to access as well?

Hence your theory should be easily visible in rape statistics, yet it’s the opposite.

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IncreasePosts 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It would be easily visible or not visible in the rape statistics if the world had a single variable. In any case, even if the world was extremely simple, 'rape porn' could increase rapes, and we could still observe a decrease in rapes if 'general porn' decreased the odds of rape to a larger degree than rape porn increased them relative to the population that consumed each.

	▲	pembrook 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes exactly my point...so it sounds like you're admitting this "availability of porn leading to action" theory isn't a very good one? And that in fact it leads to less action given it satisfies urges at much lower cost.