ving discussed the untruthfulness of the claims against pornography andshowing that pornography is not “evil”, it is now possible to consider theviolence issue. Are men who are exposed to pornography likely to commit violentacts, such as rape against women, more so than men who are not exposed to pornography? It is tempting to believe that media influences males and overstimulates them through pornography to the point that they become aggressive towards females. But this is completely baseless; just aspornography arouses or stimulates, it also satisfies. The American Commission onObscenity and Pornography performed a study in which several college students wereasked to spend one and a half hours in an isolated room with a large volume of pornographic media, as well as a large volume of non-explicit media suchas Reader’s Digest (Howitt, Cumberbatch 1975:80). The study wasconducted over a three week period over which time it was discovered that the malesinvolved in the experiment began to lose interest, or become desensitized to theerotic media nearing the end of the experiment, even if new material was added. Toaddress the argument that males are pushed over the “brink” into committing rape because of pornography, one may point to the evidence above; to coverthe female body would theoretically only increase male sexual desires. Fourmore separate experiments were conducted of which the above was one. Three other experiments came to the conclusions that pornography does not causeviolence against women and reported that the number of sex offenders that hadbeen exposed to pornographic material were smaller in number than theamount of sex-offenders that had not been exposed to pornography (Christensen1990:130; Harmon, Check 1988:28-30). These results can be offered as evidenceagainst the claim that males become overstimulated and thus dangerous whenexposed to pornography. Other experiments conducted in t...
