Sexual Stratification, Pornography, and Rape in the United States**Paper presented at the American Society of Criminology annual meeting, Denver, November 11, 1983. The research reported in this paper is part of the Family Violence Research Program (FVRP), and the State And Regional Indicators Archive (SRIA). A bibliography listing papers and books of the FVRP and SRIA is available from the Family Research Laboratory, University of New Hampshire.We are pleased to express our appreciation to participants in the FVRP seminar and Kersti Yllo for many helpful suggestions and criticism of an earlier draft, and to the Graduate School of the University of New Hampshire and NIMH grant T32 MH15161 for financial support.

Abstract

This chapter presents the three hypotheses derived from feminist discussions of rape, using the 50 states and the District of Columbia as the units for analysis. From the perspective of feminist theory, the findings suggest that the combination of a society that is characterized by a struggle to secure equal rights for women, by a high readership of sex magazines that depict women in ways that may legitimize violence, and by a context in which there is a high level of nonsexual violence, constitutes a mix of societal characteristics that precipitates rape. To the extent that this interpretation is correct, it suggests social policies directed toward eliminating or mitigating the conditions that make rape more likely to occur. These steps would include reducing the cultural acceptability of violence, of which rape is a part; and restructuring male gender roles in both sexual and nonsexual relationships to specify equality, warmth, and supportiveness, rather than dominance, aloofness, toughness, and violence. Such a restructuring of relationships between the sexes, while it will not eliminate rape, could reduce the high-incidence rates that currently characterize American society.