 ‘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.
The Porn Report by Alan McKee, Kath Albury and Katharine Lumby, Melbourne University Publishing, RRP $39.99.
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Is porn good for you?
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