CONCLUSION

I believe that my theory that pornography -- both violent and non-violent -- can cause rape, can be adapted to apply to other forms of sexual assault and abuse, as well as to woman battering and femicide (the misogyny-motivated killing of women). I have done the preliminary work on such an adaptation to the causal relationship between pornography and child sexual abuse and plan to publish this work in the future.

In conclusion, I believe that the rich and varied data now available to us from all kinds of sources, when considered together, strongly support my theory.

• A high percentage of non-incarcerated rapists and child molesters have said that they have been incited by pornography to commit crimes;
• Pre-selected normal healthy male students say they are more likely to rape a woman after just one exposure to violent pornography;
• A high percentage of male junior high school students, high school students, and adults in a non-laboratory survey report imitating X-rated movies within a few days of exposure;
• Hundreds of women have testified in public about how they have been victimized by pornography;
• Ten percent of a probability sample of 930 women in San Francisco and 25% of female subjects in an experiment on pornography in Canada reported having been upset by requests to enact pornography (Russell, 1980, and Senn and Radtke, 1986);
• Many prostitutes report that they have experienced pornography-related sexual assault (Silbert and Pines, 1984; Everywoman, 1988; and Russell, 1993a);
• The laws of social learning must surely apply to pornography at least as much as to the mass media in general. Indeed, I -- and others -- have argued that sexual arousal and orgasm are likely to serve as unusually potent reinforcers of the message conveyed by pornography;
• A large body of experimental research has shown that the viewing of violent pornography results in higher rates of aggression against women by male subjects.

It is no wonder that Donnerstein stated that the relationship between pornography and violence against women is stronger than the relationship between smoking and lung cancer (see epigraph on page 11).

One of the effects of viewing non-violent pornography, discovered by Zillmann, is that "the more extensive the exposure, the more accepting of pornography subjects became" (1984, p. 133). Although females expressed significantly less acceptance than males, this effect also applied to females. Pornography has expanded into a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry, and I believe we are seeing on a massive scale some of the very effects so brilliantly and carefully documented in some of the experiments by Malamuth, Donnerstein, Zillmann, and their colleagues. Donnerstein's description of the desensitization that occurred in healthy pre-selected male students after only five days of viewing woman-slashing films may apply to ever-growing segments of our society (Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod, 1987).

Van White, the Chairperson of the Hearings on Pornography in Minnesota in 1983, commented as follows on the impact of the testimony by the survivors of pornography-related abuse:

"These horror stories made me think of the history of slavery in this country--how Black women were at the bottom of the pile, treated like animals instead of human beings. As I listened to these victims of pornography, I heard young women describe how they felt about... the way women's genitals and breasts are displayed and women's bodies are shown in compromising postures. I thought about the time of slavery, when Black women had their bodies invaded, their teeth and limbs examined, their bodies checked out for breeding, checked out as you would an animal, and I said to myself, 'We've come a long way, haven't we?'

Today we have an industry ... showing women in the same kind of submissive and animalistic roles" (1984).

United States' culture appears to have been affected by the very effects the research shows. The massive propaganda campaign is working; people now actually see differently. Pornography has to become increasingly extreme before people are disturbed by, or even notice, the violence and degradation portrayed in it. Very few see the real abuse that is happening to some of the women who are photographed. As Zillmann shows, "heavy consumption of common forms of pornography fosters an appetite for stronger materials" (1985, p. 127). What was considered "hard-core" in the past has become soft-core in the present. Where will this all end? Will we as a culture forever refuse to read the writing on the wall?