At first blush, I was dubious, but I find it hard to argue with the methodology.

The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

Oddly enough, the reason I agree is also the reason I am philosophically opposed to pornography.

Porn is generally considered a substitute for sex, but like rape, I think they are both substitutes for love. I compare it to a couple of two year olds playing on the floor. What I observed on many occasions is that as one is enjoying a toy, the other will attempt to take the toy away. When the first infant finds another toy, the second will attempt to take that one away as well--what is going on here?

Well it helps if you understand that its not about the toy, its about the enjoyment of the toy. The second infant desires the experience that he observes the first having, and mistakenly assumes that the toy is the source of the pleasure.

From my point of view, this society's obsession with sex is essentially a misguided search for love, and rape is an infantile attempt to take what can only be given freely.

I think porn, while less obviously a social pathology than rape, is nonetheless problematic on some subtle levels. As the research indicates, porn is a substitute, but not just for sex, but for human contact. The research was polling for rape statistics, but what about just plain sex? If rape is down, is sex down too?

I wouldn't at all be surprised.

The demographic crisis in Europe...coming to a country near you.

Wired covers the Adult Entertainment Expo 2007 and notes the explosion of non-James-Brown sex machines.

Describing the number of such devices as many times greater than shown at last years show, one has to accept that the market is large and growing, which means of course that there are a large number of people with no recourse to traditional sexual relations...with other people.

Here's a family friendly policy for Mitt Romney to flesh out :

Utah's governor and state legislature has lent its weight to efforts to persuade Congress to pass laws requiring adult content providers to stay off port 80, which generally carries HTTP web surfing traffic......

Censorware, or internet-filtering software, is supposed to achieve the same results. But port-exile advocates say their way of blocking internet porn is better.

The technical obstacles to implement CP80 are considerable, and the scheme calls for an arbiter of public taste (i.e. a censor) to decide what kind of content is fit for inclusion of the mainstream internet. The difficulties of getting the .xxx top level domain established also point to another set of potential problems.

Supporters of Internet Community Ports Act argue that the approach preserves all current URLs and current naming conventions, unlike the .xxx top level domain plan.

I'd deal with the censorship issue by first making the scheme voluntary. My guess is that would knock out 75-95% of salacious websites from inadvertent viewing. If there's still a severe residual problem, sure consider 'censorship', but it really isn't censorship if adults are free to access it. It's child protection. If we can forbid plying children with legal drugs, we can forbid sliming them with porn. It might improve the work environment too.

[Ed Note]

I thought I should add a bit of an explanation for those readers without the necessary technical background to understand what this all means:

CP80 essentially wants to turn one door into two. All web traffic comes across port 80, but the proposal wants to redirect porn to a different port. Since firewalls operate by enabling or disabling ports, theoretically, the entire on-line porn universe could be blocked, preventing accidental or surreptitious viewing by minors.

In the realm of things you already knew but couldn't prove:

PR.com: "Do you find that the climate of the adult industry changes when there is a Republican administration versus Democratic?"

Jenna Jameson: "Absolutely. The Clinton administration was the best years for the adult industry and I wish that Clinton would run again. I would love to have him back in office. I would love to have Al Gore in office. When Republicans are in office, the problem is, a lot of times they try to put their crosshairs on the adult industry, to make a point. It's sad, when there are so many different things that are going on in the world: war, and people are dying of genocide...I look forward to another Democrat being in office. It just makes the climate so much better for us, and I know that once all our troops come home, things are going to be better and I think that getting Bush out of office is the most important thing right now."

As the aphorism goes, "sex sells", but apparently not as well as it used to.

"Our publishing and domestic entertainment businesses continue to face unprecedented change in the way consumers access and use media content," Chief Executive Christie Hefner said in a statement accompanying the quarterly results.

Media content. Is that what Playboy sells?

Frankly, having caught a glimpse of Playboy's "The Girls Next Door" on the 'E' channel, I think the real problem for Playboy is that its characterization of fantasy sexual partners is mired in a 1950s model of voluptuous virgins waiting for an experienced man to initiate them into the joys of sexuality. One does not have to be a consumer of porn to realize that the dominant sex culture nowadays is gay sex.

Ann Coulter noted that the popular HBO sitcom Sex In The City was no more than a female template for the sexual fantasy of gay writers, and apparently mainstream porn has followed that model with women acting as heterosexual vessels for gay fantasies, including a distinctly gay male sex drive and willing participation in gay sex acts.

Notably, other porn companies have been experiencing the same adjustments from DVD to online access, and are not losing money.

Relevance?

I just wonder where this is all going. Before you know it, we're throwing Christians to lions...

One thing that gives me some hope--culturally, is that the excesses of a liberal society always generates backlash. The Hippies had kids who looked at the sex, drugs and rock & roll and just walked the other way.

GQ has an interview with Marston Hefner, yes--the 18 year old son of Hugh Hefner. Kimberly Conrad, a former playmate herself and Marston's mom, clearly hopes that the kids won't be using Dad as a role model.

“You know what? I really believe that every person is wired differently. Whatever the boys decide to do, it will be… They have integrity. I don’t think they’ll be one of these young bucks running around Hollywood—guys in their twenties and thirties—that have five girls going. My personal feeling is they’ll be one-on-one kind of guys.”

Looks like she may be right.

“The ones I find attractive are brunet, blue eyes, and that’s about it. An intelligent woman that I can have a conversation with.… That centerfold in the magazine probably wouldn’t be my girlfriend, because I wouldn’t find her attractive. I don’t care about fake boobs if the girl has a good personality, but most girls with fake boobs I don’t find attractive—because of why they got the fake boobs in the first place.”

I guess it just begs the question--how do you have a Playboy empire with playboys in committed monogamous relationships?