Men's Group

One is that porn reduces rape, which I think is a fairly spurious assertion- my personal hunch is the two things simply don't have a ton do with each other, at all.

The other, as you allude to, is the idea- not just promoted by Dworkin/MacKinnon and their devotees, but actually so central to the philosophical worldview it could be considered a near-religious dogmatic article of faith- that porn, increased availability of porn, nasty mens watchin' nasty porns and doin' nasty mans things while watchin the nasty mans porn, etc... WOULD cause rape, increased numbers of rapes, etc.

Well, it doesn't take a genius level IQ to see that in the time between the early 80s when they were whispering this gibberish in the ear of Ed Meese, and anyone else who would listen, and today, the easy availability of sexually explicit material by and for adults has exploded exponentially. And concurrently, there is really no conceivable way to manipulate the statistics- which all seem to show a decline in rape which matches the decline in other violent crimes- in such a way that would reflect the societal doomsaying effects of porn that Dworkin predicted.

The easy, simple, flat-out obvious answer is, "okay, she was clearly wrong".

But that's too difficult an admission for some to make, apparently.