Gibbons, M. Amelia, and Martín A. Rossi.
ABSTRACT
The increase in accessibility to pornographic material raised an important debate on whether there is a connection between pornography and rapes. We exploit an unusual natural experiment that provides a source of exogenous variation to pornographic viewing. On Tuesday October 16th, 2018, YouTube experienced a major and rare global service outage. This YouTube’s disruption was associated with an important increase in traffic on the online adult video site Pornhub, the world’s biggest pornography site. Using high-frequency crime data from the U.S., we document that in the 24-hour period following the outage, rapes increased by 30 percent. We interpret our findings as evidence of a positive link between pornography viewing and rapes. The underlying identification assumption for this interpretation is that there is no direct link between YouTube outage and rapes. To validate our empirical strategy we document that other crimes (non-sexual related) were not affected by the outage.
Comment about ASMR on Reddit:
Thoughts on ASMR? Some people say that it’s basically soft core porn. And although some of them do feel like that (and by some I mean all the ones where it’s ear eating, kissing, cosplay etc etc) but others don’t. Then there are downright sexual ASMRs which I’m not even going to mention, that’s just straight up Porn.
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