Early next week, the European Union Parliament is planning to vote on a resolution calling for a sweeping ban on pornography in the name of gender equality. If it passed, the resolution could be the first step towards a continent-wide ban on pornography on a wide swath of media. The Parliament vote scheduled for next week would recommend this resolution on gender equality which includes the porn ban to the EU Commission, which would then turn it into legislation which would then, finally, be enacted into binding law by the Parliament.
But if the ban were to make it into the final law, it would likely do more harm than good. There is, however, empirical evidence that it reduces the incidence of sexual violence. One study by Todd Kendall compared the rates of crime between U. I find that internet access appears to be a substitute for rape; in particular, the results suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in internet access is associated with a decline in reported rape victimization of around 7. Moreover, I show that the effect on rape is concentrated among states with the highest male-to-female ratios, and that by age, the effect on rape is concentrated among teenage men, who are the prime consumers of pornography, and for whom the internet induced the largest change in availability.
Moreover, pornography bans defeat feminist aims in a more direct way: they result in restrictions on feminist and pro-LGBT speech. However, such terms mean different things to different people: feminist literature often contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault, and, to a right-wing evangelical, same-sex sexual activity is intrinsically degrading. Pornography crackdowns also tend to spillover more broadly, restricting free speech more broadly and stifling the real tech innovations often of use to, say, Middle Eastern revolutionaries created by online porn.
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