Big Porn Inc contributors continue to get a significant run in the media. In the lead up to our Brisbane launch tonight, here are recent pieces by Dr Meagan Tyler, co-editor Dr Abigail Bray, and Dr Helen Pringle.
Pornography is great. Just a bit of fun. It doesn’t matter who you’re watching or what they’re doing, it’s mostly harmless. This is how it feels reading a lot of commentary on pornography in Australia.
Despite the growing international research highlighting serious problems with mainstream pornography, in this country anyone who dares suggest there may be harms associated with the production or consumption of pornography is generally greeted with hoots of derision and accusations of wowserism.
The visit to Australia earlier this year of US-based pornography researcher Professor Gail Dines is a prime example. During her appearance on Q&A, she was shouted down by several members of the panel, one of whom confessed that her own research on pornography was largely limited to having ‘googled’ it earlier that day.
But such reactions are perhaps to be expected in a country where, particularly if you are a member of the left, you are expected to be sympathetic to – if not outright supportive of – the plight of pornography consumers.
The Porn Report, based on a government-funded research project and written by three prominent Australian academics, is a case in point. Supposedly an objective account of pornography content and use in Australia, the project was conducted with support from the sex industry lobby group the Eros Association. Given this link, it is hardly surprising to find the report contains sections with titles such as Great Moments in Amateur Porn.
Unfortunately, this is the level of debate about pornography in Australia. As a result, positions critical of the pornography industry are frequently misrepresented. The pro-pornography position often relies on a straw-man version of anti-porn campaigners as ideologically driven, extreme feminists or religious loons.
But researchers critical of pornography have presented far more sophisticated and well-supported arguments than these caricatures suggest. Unlike the image of anti-porn campaigners often held up by the pornography lobby, very few scholars argue that all pornography contains overt violence. Many do, however, talk about the increasing use of violent acts evident in mainstream porn.
For instance, several large-scale studies over the last 20 years have documented considerable violence in mainstream pornography. Communication scholars Ni Yang and Daniel Linz, sociologists Martin Barron and Michael Kimmel, and psychologist Ana Bridges and colleagues have all found, in separate studies, that violence in mainstream pornography is common – about one in four of all films in each study contained violent acts.
To be specific, we are talking about acts such as slapping, kicking, hitting and choking. Indeed, there is now an entire sub-genre of pornography dedicated to the choking of women.
My own research into the US pornography industry’s accounts of mainstream and bestselling pornography, returned similar results. In fact, one of the most remarkable things about research in this area is that porn industry insiders (performers, directors, distributors) are very forthcoming about the shift towards more extreme and violent porn, with many pornographers openly debating whether or not this is a positive or negative development. This leaves our debate – about whether or not violence in mainstream porn exists at all – decades behind current trends.
But it is also misleading to suggest that instances of clear physical violence are the only problem with modern porn. Violence exists on a continuum. While most people, regardless of their position on porn more generally, agree that women being kicked and punched for the purposes of someone’s sexual arousal is abhorrent, the agreement fractures when we get to slapping, hair pulling, whipping and physical restraint, especially if the actors involved are shown enjoying what is being done to them.
And that doesn’t even begin to approach the issue of sexist and racist verbal abuse. After all, the sorts of phrases that constitute racial vilification on the football field are considered to be alluring titles for porn DVDs.
With the move towards more extreme, violent and degrading pornography, it seems logical that there are now more social scientists worldwide becoming critical of porn. But banning and censorship are not favoured solutions and have not been seriously considered since bell bottoms and platform shoes were in fashion.
There are few if any anti-porn scholars currently writing who argue that authorities should ban porn or that porn automatically turns all men into rapists. What many do argue, however, is that pornography is now a multi-billion-dollar industry that is gaining increasing cultural influence and, as such, that it needs to be subject to criticism in the same way that the pharmaceutical, tobacco and fast-food industries are held to account.
What many pornography researchers, like myself, are calling for is a more open and honest discussion about pornography, inequality, sexism and sexual desire. These claims are more reasonable than radical.
The consistent misrepresentation of current anti-porn critiques in Australia hinders this discussion, which, given the trends in mainstream pornography and the increasing pornification of popular culture, is needed now more than ever.
Dr Abigail Bray
ACCORDING to melodramatic pro-sex industry conspiracy theories, critiques of Big Porn are really totalitarian plots to censor the entire internet and destroy freedom of speech.
Apparently, an international secret society of radical feminists, right-wing Christians, Chinese communists and random sexually repressed middle-aged mumsie pressure groups are out to destroy “our” inalienable human right to dehumanising porn. Won’t somebody please think of the . . . wankers. . .
The new porn zeitgeist is hard-core sadism. Hard-core porn turns misogyny into sexual fascism and sells it as freedom. There are countless “18 and abused” sites showing young girls being gang-banged while crying, drunk, vomiting, with guns and knives to their heads. Incest porn with girls being bashed about sexually by fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers. There is bestiality porn with dogs, horses, with eels. Torture porn, where young women are tied up and strangled, defecated on. There is Nazi fetish porn, lots of racist porn.
Feminised gay men being beaten and anally raped by hyper-macho gangs. Granny porn where older women are subjected to the now compulsory triple penetration and spat on for being old. There is even “retarded asian porn”, “retarded and horny”, “full on retard porn . . . legless sluts being triple penetrated”, amputee porn, dwarf porn, anorexia porn.
Nothing to worry about, nothing going on here, move right along.
Dr Helen Pringle
A very common use of pornography is as sexual discrimination, itself a well-recognised form of harm in our society. And the evidence of pornography’s harm in this respect stares us in the face as we go about our everyday lives. Take your car to be serviced at a garage. Ask a lifesaver for his help in the clubroom. Call in at a fire station. Check out an army camp’s walls. Accompany Tony Abbott on a visit to the factory at Digga Manufacturing. Now ask me again about evidence of harm.
The walls of the garage, the clubroom, the fire station, the camp or the Digga factory form ‘an environment which itself amounts to sexual discrimination’. That phrase comes from a decision of the Equal Opportunity Tribunal of Western Australia on 21 April 1994.
See also: ‘Tony Abbott and that porn calendar: not oops or tacky but discrimination’, MTR
2 Responses
Porn has always had very negative connotations for me. My ex husband was constantly demanding that I act out scenarios for him and with him that he had read in porn magazines. It seemed he could never be satisfied because I just could not be one of those porn stars in the ways that he wanted me to be. This tore my self esteem to ribbons. Today it seems that everywhere I look, there are young girls dressed like wanna be porn stars, flaunting every inch of their bodies in a vain attempt to be accepted. It is time we females united for a change and took our power back, and demand that our credibility and worth be seen not in how “sexy” or “slutty” we are, but for the persons we are, for basic human qualities such as intelligence, empathy, kindness, assertiveness, individuality, personal strength etc.
“Porn is now morphing like never before. Film clips from the international TV show Embarrassing Bodies are now turning up on porn sites…” How can Fiona Patten fail to see that this is exactly the harmful effects those opposed to the proliferation of pornography are arguing about. The fact that clips from the program ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ are turning up on porn sites shows how porn has invaded every aspect of life. A woman now can’t even go for a medical examination without it becoming the focus of some man’s sexual gratification.