ABSTRACT
It is now conventional wisdom that there is overwhelming scientific evidence linking pornography with sexual violence. The link ‘is considerably stronger than that for cigarette smoking and cancer’, Every woman announces in its introduction to the transcript of the public hearings organized by Minneapolis City Council in 1983 to collect the latest evidence on pornography and sexual violence in support of proposals for new legislation against pornography, the Minneapolis Ordinance. (Everywoman, 1988:5) ‘I doubt that anybody disputes the data’, the psychologist Edward Donnerstein, a leading figure in pornography research, breezily announces at these same hearings. (Every woman, 1988:22) Well, anybody except himself, perhaps, and his fellow researchers, who, in their more scholarly writing, not only confess that their research on possible links between pornography and violence has been misunderstood and misused, but add that whether their laboratory experiments tell us anything at all ‘about real-world aggression, such as rape, is still a matter for considerable debate’ (Donnerstein, et. al., 1987:174). That debate, however, has not so much been opened up as closed down by much of the recent writing and activity around pornography.
