Porn and Rape

A lot of Catholic commentators want to connect porn and rape. I understand their wish, but it ain't happening.

Consider the facts:

On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, inviting collaborators....By January 1993 there were fifty Web servers across the world; by October 1993 there were over five hundred... The Web was first popularized by Mosaic, a graphical browser launched in 1993 by Marc Andreessen's team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)...

Now, look at this:

Given the explosive growth of the internet and the access to free porn that it makes available (statistics here), can anyone honestly argue that the incidence of rape increases as porn use increases? Seriously?

OK, if you still hold that porn use increases the incidence of rape, we should see high per capita incidence of rape in cities with high porn usage. We happen to know which cities have high porn usage, because, every year, Pornhub publishes the list of cities and countries with the highest porn traffic rates. Compare their list to Statista's list of the US cities with the highest rape rates (I couldn't find a world list of cities with high rape rates, or I would use that). Notice how there is ZERO overlap:

US Metropolitan statistical area (2019)	Rape Rate per 100,000 population	Top porn-using cities, worldwide (2019)	Porn Traffic Rank
Anchorage, AK	178.4	New York, NY	1
Rapid City, SD	129.3	London, England	2
Danville, IL	121.2	Paris, France	3
Fairbanks, AK	116.1	Los Angeles, CA	4
St. Joseph, MO-KS	115.6	Chicago, IL	5
Niles, MI	109.5	Osaka, Japan	6
Lincoln, NE	106.4	Sydney, Australia	7
Jackson, MI	102.4	Melbourne, Australia	8
Jonesboro, AR	99.5	Houston, TX	9
Gainesville, FL	93.7	Bangkok, Thailand	10
Springfield, MO	92.5	Rome, Italy	11
Odessa, TX	92.4	Warsaw, Poland	12
Altoona, PA	91.2	Dallas, TX	13
Lubbock, TX	88.9	Milan, Italy	14
Lansing, MI	88.8	Yokohama, Japan	15
Victoria, TX	88.3	Toronto, Canada	16
Watertown, NY	86.8	Washington, DC	17
Casper, WY	85.5	Seoul, South Korea	18
Wichita Falls, TX	85.2	Brisbane, Australia	19
Kalamazoo, MI	85	Atlanta, GA	20
Carson City, NV	84.7
Lawton, OK	83.9
Fort Smith, AR-OK	82.9
Bismarck, ND	80.7
Battle Creek, MI	80.6
Grand Rapids, MI	79.4

Not a single city on the high porn use list has a high rape incidence per capita. And, keep in mind, the rape list from Statista goes out to the top 50 cities. There's a couple of university towns in the top 50 (including Urbana-Champaign, IL, which surprised me), but exactly none of those top 50 cities were on the top porn usage list. 

OK, well, let's try this another way. Let's compare highest porn traffic levels per country to highest per capita rape rates by country. Surely THAT will show the correlation between rape and porn, right?

Country (2019)	Rape Rate per 100,000 population	Top porn-using countries (79% of all porn traffic in 2019)	Porn Traffic Rank
South Africa	132.40	United States	1
Botswana	92.9	Japan	2
Lesotho	82.7	United Kingdom	3
Swaziland	77.5	Canada	4
Bermuda	67.3	France	5
Sweden	63.5	Germany	6
Suriname	45.2	Italy	7
Costa Rica	36.7	Philippines	8
Nicaragua	31.6	Australia	9
Grenada	30.6	Mexico	10
Australia	28.6	Brazil	11
St. Kitts/Nevis	28.6	Spain	12
Belgium	27.9	Netherlands	13
United States	27.3	Poland	14
Bolivia	26.1	India	15
New Zealand	25.8	Ukraine	16
Zimbabwe	25.6	Thailand	17
Grenadines	25.6	Russia	18
Barbados	24.9	Argentina	19
Iceland	24.7	Sweden	20

Oh, dear. According to Internet porn traffic, nearly 80% of all porn traffic world-wide goes to Europe, Southeast Asia and North/South America, with the US using more porn than the next several nations combined (because we are the 3rd most populous country, after all, and have a larger population than the next several nations combined). The areas with high Internet porn traffic should be absolute hot-beds of rape. But, apart from the United States, that simply isn't true. All the rapes are happening in Africa, small island countries, Central America and Australia. There is only ONE country on both lists, and that is the United States. And even there, the correlation is not great - first by orders of magnitude in porn traffic, but only fourteenth in number of rapes per capita.  

It gets worse. Apart from Australia, the list of countries with high per capita rape rates are countries too poor or too geographically isolated to have a lot of internet connections. Thus, they rapiest nations have the worst access to porn, comparably speaking. 

So, to sum up, the countries with superb Internet (and porn access) cannot hold a candle to the rape rates of poor countries and island nations. This is called an INVERSE correlation. The more porn, the fewer rapes, the less porn, the more rapes. Christians who want to tie the two together with a positive correlation have it exactly backward.

And, to add to the injury, two of the greatest doctors of the Church would take issue with the argument many modern Catholics make. As St. Augustine pointed out: 

“If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.”

and St. Thomas Aquinas agreed:

Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace: take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil-smelling place.

Their opinion was given well before erotic imagery was widely available, yet their point seems to be borne out in today's rape-porn statistics. As porn use increases, rape decreases. In fact, the same thing happens with violent movies - the more violent a movie is, the more it suppresses actual violent acts out in reality. 

Sorry if you find this offensive, modern Catholics, but that appears to be the reality. Being Catholic is all about being in contact with reality. Stop pretending something is true when we know perfectly well it isn't.

If we, as Catholics, wish to argue against porn, we will have to find a better argument than "It causes rape!" Because it doesn't cause rape. In fact, it arguably reduces rape, as our own Catholic theologians (both Doctors of the Church) predicted it would. 

Argue against porn because it is intrinsically evil, it consumes too much electricity, it uses too much Internet bandwidth. Use arguments that you can back up. Don't use arguments that are stupid on their face.