Rejoinder to Kingston and Malamuth (2011)

Abstract

WethankKingstonandMalamuth(2011) for their interest inour article and comments on the methodology used in our study. There are considerations with which we agree and others with which we take issue. As we interpret their comments, they don’t argue with our aggregate findings. They do, however, caution that it is often wrongtoextrapolatefromaggregatepopulationdata toindividual behavior. And they offer several examples from the literature where that has been demonstrated. We agree that there is a risk in connecting disparate measures of behavior and a problem with making assumptions of individual behavior based only on aggregatedata.However,KingstonandMalamuthhavenot shownthat we have made such an erroneous connection within our findings, so they are talking in generalities. Actually, we did analyze our data to avoid possible bias caused by aggregation. To increase clarity in our original article, however, that analysis was not mentioned. Along with the data reported, we also obtained data on convicted offenders from the official Yearbooks of the Ministry of Justice in the Czech Republic, for the years 1979–2007. We analyzed the number of child sex abuse offenders and rape offenders for the period when sexually explicit materials (SEM) were unavailable (the time before the 1989 revolution) and compared these figures with the number of offenders recorded for the interval when it was available. There were significantly fewer child abuse and rape offenders during the period of porn availability (p\.001) (Diamond, Jozifkova, & Weiss, 2011). Our basic findings were that the significant increase in the availability of pornography in the Czech Republic had resulted in a significant reduction in all manner of sex crime as well as number of sex offenders while, in contrast, the same society experienced a dramatic increase in other social crimes, such as robbery andmurder,withacommensurate increase in thenumberofcriminals convicted for such crimes. Kingston and Malamuth stressed the existence of the link between pornography and both sexual and nonsexual aggression as mentioned by Allen, D’Alessio, and Brezgel (1995). Since all of the data we presented, about both sex and non-sex crimes, were collected the same way, we don’t think there was any bias in our data acquisition. If SEM did increase criminal aggressiveness, that should have been reflected by an increased number of sexually aggressive assaults and sex related murders. Neither were seen. With our data, combined with the knowledge that, in every othercountrywhere ithadbeenscientifically studied (Diamond, 2009, 2010; Diamond & Uchiyama, 1999; Home Office, 1979; Kutchinsky, 1991; Landripet, Stulhofer, and Diamond, 2006; McKay & Dolff, 1985; Ng, 1994), an increase in the societies’ availability of pornography was correlated with a decrease in sex crimes, we did hypothesize that SEM provided a displacement. And the displacement activity that we hypothesized was masturbation. The law of parsimony led us to propose this as the simplest explanation for what we consider to be a unique similarity in so many different societies. We believe we can safely assume that, in all of the societies studied, regarding pornography, masturbation decreased sexual arousal and thus can reduce motivation to engage in sex activity. M. Diamond (&) Pacific Center for Sex & Society, University of Hawaii, John A. Burns School of Medicine, 1960 East–West Road, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA e-mail: diamond@hawaii.edu