One book on my to-buy list is the recently-released The Porn Report by Alan McKee, Katherine Albury and Catharine Lumby. Until I get around to that, Danny Yee’s review has some juicy tidbits (ooherr).
[T]he common stereotypes are wrong: unsurprisingly, given that pornography users make up about a third of Australian adults, they are fairly representative of the broader population, with the major exception being that fewer than one in five of the respondents were women…
Detailed analysis of the most popular Australian DVD titles shows that, even with broad definitions, fewer than 2% of scenes have any kind of violence. The total ban on violence in the Australian X-rated category seems to have worked. Another finding was that “pornography does not really objectify women more than men… On some measures, men are the more active sexual subjects… on others, it’s the women.” The Internet is a lot more diverse, but despite extensive efforts the authors managed to find not a single site with actual rape photographs, and only a handful of sites with faked ones.
There is no evidence that pornography causes harm to its users: the studies that suggest this have involved pushing pornography on non-users in artificial laboratory experiments. In contrast, there has been almost no attempts to study the beneficial effects of pornography, even though consumers overwhelmingly report positive effects…
Part 2 of the book covers issues such as censorship, and notes:
“Protecting the children” has been a rallying call for censorship for a long time. It turns out that actual child pornography — the police prefer to call it “child abuse material” — is extremely hard to find. And evidence-based education has to be central to protecting children from harm, whether from cyberstalking or contact with material they will find disturbing.
Essential reading, I’d have thought, for anyone wanting to discuss censorship of the Internet, eh Senator Conroy?
/me considers offering my body to science as evidence
@jason: Can’t you just post photos of the damage, or something?
Thanks for the tip, Stil.
Sounds like this book will sit handsomely on my shelf next to Easton & Liszt’s The Ethical Slut: another fine read that completely blows apart the utter myth that pornography and polyamorous sex have no place in a mature, responsible and loving relationship… or, indeed, society as a whole.
When was the last time we had a clear month without some purse-lipped, reactionary dullard (yes, Tracee Hutchison, that includes you) insisting that anyone who enjoys pornography is automatically a signatory to misogyny and female degradation?
Such wooden imagination.
It’s painfully obvious that vanilla ideologues like these cannot or will not fathom the heady thrill of exploring their own repressed dom/sub fantasies in a safe environment… if, indeed, they’ve ever had any. Meanwhile, perfectly normal, respectful citizens — including women, Tracee — flock to Sexpo and adult shops in their thousands to buy toys and fantasy smut which they then take home and privately enjoy, thank you very much. This heresy has been going on for decades; probably more. But we’re still waiting for civil society to fall apart at the seams.
There are far too many good men and women in this world, whose relationships are genuinely nourished and strengthened by a healthy dose of pornography, for that happiness to be denied and punished by the Porn Is Bad choristers.
@Stephen Stockwell: This is, of course, another hallucination of the Hallucinating Goldfish: that society is actually structured as simply as the moralists seem to believe.
You may also like to read Sex, Life & Frilly Bits: For the Person who has Everything, the blog of the wonderful woman who edits Lucrezia Magazine and who Twitters as @chaosnoir.
Hi Stil, thanks 🙂
I hope you don’t mind, but I highlighted this post and posted the feed on Topix, in the sexuality section I recently became editor on, and the subject/topic is generating discussion.
@Anastasia: Link away! I have no problem whatsoever with being quoted or pointed to.