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‘Porn professor’ Alan McKee takes on the wowsers with his new book, The Porn Report.
I was interviewed recently by The Age newspaper in my capacity as a Professor of Pornography (Yes, really. Well, Associate Professor).
I’ve just published a book about pornography, and the journalist wanted to ask me about pornography addiction.
He really, really wanted me to say that it’s a problem in Australia – that people across the country are getting addicted to porn, that it’s destroying their relationships and their lives.
The only thing is – addiction isn’t a problem for most people who use pornography.
When we recently surveyed over 1000 consumers of pornography for a research project, 0.4% had a problem with addiction to pornography.
When you compare that to the number of smokers, for example, who feel that they’re addicted, it’s tiny.
But that wasn’t how the journalist took it when I told him. “0.4%”, he repeated. “There are millions of people in Australia who consume pornography, so 0.4% of them – that would be thousands of people! That’s a real problem!”.
That’s the problem with public debates about pornography in Australia. Most of the people you hear from are like this journalist – they’re not very interested in facts.
They already know what they think about porn, and they’re not going to let a little thing like the truth get in the way. And so 0.4% of people becomes “a real problem”.
The journalist went on to write an article about the scourge of pornography addiction in Australia, and the thousands of people whose lives were being destroyed by it.
Perhaps this explains why, after three decades of public debate about porn, with politicians and religious leaders and newspaper columnists all weighing in with their views, we still don’t have many of the basic facts about pornography in Australia.
Who makes it? Why do they do it? Who buys it? What kind of stuff do they like? What part does it play in their lives?
And so a few years ago I got together with two friends and we applied for government funding to do a study, to find out these basic facts. And we’ve just published the book – The Porn Report.
Some of the facts were surprising. Some of them were just common sense. But they’re all useful in the ongoing public debates about porn.
Who makes porn, for example? If you listened to some of the people in the newspapers, you might think that everyone who makes porn does it purely because they’re desperate for money – probably because (the experts claim) they’re addicted to crack cocaine or smack.
True? Well, after interviewing the people who make porn in Australia, it turns out – no.
We don’t have a large-scale porn production business in Australia. It’s not like America, and so most of the people who make porn here – including a lot of women – do it for their own pleasure. They’re exhibitionists. They get off on the idea of showing off in front of people – it makes them feel sexy.
Or they can’t buy the kind of stuff they want to see commercially – like good lesbian porn – and so they make it for themselves.
What kind of stuff do people like to see in porn? Read the newspapers and you’d think that the Internet has opened the floodgates, spewing bestiality and rapes and child pornography into every living room in Australia.
But when we interviewed the consumers of pornography, it turned out that what they actually like to see in porn is people really getting into it – people who seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves.
And when we studied what people are actually looking at on the Internet, we found that the most popular porn sites are the amateur ones, where people are showing off for their own pleasure.
Yes, there’s bad stuff out there – some pornography production is unethical, and there is unpleasant stuff on the Internet. But it’s not the mainstream, and it’s not what most people like to see.
And what about the effects of pornography? I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve heard somebody in the media saying that “studies have proved” that pornography causes all kinds of bad effects – negative attitudes towards women, violence, rape, crime.
Imagine our surprise when we found out that the majority of people who consume pornography think it’s had a positive effect on them.
Thirty years of public debate and legislation have been based on the assumption that pornography’s dangerous – but what if it turns out that it’s actually good for you?
What are the main positive effects of exposure to pornography? And what about the rest of the things that we found out – like, how many men in porn have small dicks? What’s the most common sex act in pornography? Do men and women like different kinds of porn?
For the answers to these, and lots of other questions – including a lot that you’ve never even thought of asking – you’re going to have buy the book.
I love my job.
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