You make an impressive arguement, Fox. Not being as well educated as you are, I'm going to have to fall back on my own experience (always dangerous, since a sample size of one is useless).

I began playing the AD&D Role Playing Game back in 1978 and, not too long after that, newspapers and magazines began carrying stories about D&D being satanic and leading to teen suicide. There was (of course, as always) talk of banning the game in the interests of protecting children. Fortunately, nothing was accomplished and by the mid-80's the furor had died down.

Subsequent to that, it was established that, during a two year period in the early 80's, there had been two million people playing D&D on a regular basis, of whom only ten killed themselves during that time, which is vastly below the number that chance would have predicted and, predictibly, led to the counter-arguement that playing D&D gave children something so fascinating to do that they had no interest in killing themselves (or, probably, time in which to do so!).

A similar phenomena occured with "men's magazines" (in this case Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler). Studies showed that most convicted rapists read one or more of those magazines regularly, so it was concluded that "soft porn" inflamed men to commit sexual assaults. Later studies that reversed the question discovered that subscribers to those three magazines were less likely to be convicted rapists than non-subscribers. (Note the change of wording from "regular readers" to "subscribers".) This strengthened the argument that soft porn (or any porn) provided a cathartic outlet for sexual aggression and was, therefore, a societal 'good'.

It is my opinion that the truth in these matters lies elsewhere. It's entirely possible that people who play RPGs are inherently more emotionally stable (and thus less prone to suicide) than the societal average. It's also possible that people who are rapists (or potential rapists) are attracted to hard porn more than to soft porn. Alternatively, if feminists are correct that rape is a crime of violence, rather than a sex crime, it may be that rapists are biased against sex magazines in general.

I feel the same is probably true of torture and snuff stories (and, in a different sense, of pedophilia stories). I doubt if anyone would read one those stories and become a sex murderer, though I wouldn't doubt for a moment that someone who had already made that decision would troll for 'better' ideas on how to do it. (In the case of pedophilia stories, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that exposure to such increased the rate of recidivism, but I would still not believe that it was a root cause.)

I hope Fox won't be offended by this, but his arguement reminds me of a common gimmick used in bad porn. That of putting a 'frigid' or otherwise resisting woman in a room full of nudie magazines with a VCR playing porn films 24 hours a day and having her come out a nymphomaniac (or, at least, much more receptive) after a couple of weeks. Maybe I'm naive, or maybe I have greater faith in human nature, but I simply can't accept that people will do bad things without having a predisposition to do those things (which is why I don't believe that it's possible for someone to be "entrapped" into committing a criminal act, but that's a different argument that I'll save for my Father!).