Monthly: May 2007

This morning’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age both have two major stories on porn.

The first’s headline is One in three porn viewers are women. Adele Horin sites Nielsen Netratings figures about how many Aussies are enjoying online smut (4.3 million in the last month), and says one third are female. Unfortunately, that’s not what the main gist of the article is about. It’s actually a leader into the main feature piece called How porn is wrecking relationships.

Yep, the Fairfax media has decided to run with the ogre of “internet porn addiction.”

It’s got the usual thing – wives devastated because their husbands became compulsive about their use of porn. Sex lives with too much anal sex and hair pulling. Brazilian waxes run rampant.

What’s different about this story is that while trying to ramp up the panic, the author still admits that the majority of porn users don’t have a problem:

For some Australians, the rising tide of internet pornography has offered a form of sex education. It has helped extend sexual repertoires, re-invigorated flagging sex lives, and assuaged anxieties or hang-ups. It has been, some argue, a liberation.

But internet pornography is also emerging as the new marriage-wrecker…

and

The problems may be confined to a minority, but it was surprisingly easy to find women whose lives had been turned upside down by their partner’s online activities.

and

Most partners are largely neutral about their men’s regular pornography use, the survey, published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy in 2003, shows.

But a significant minority – about one-third of the women – found it highly distressing.

and

It may not be strictly addictive but for a silent minority, internet pornography has brought anguish, shame and broken hearts.

So, my first criticism is this: if one third of all porn users are women, why does the story then revert back to the traditional idea that only men use porn and it’s the poor suffering wives who suffer?

Secondly, where are the skeptics in this article? Alan McKee gets a brief look-in but there’s no extensive comment from anyone who has something positive to say about porn. If Adele encountered enough evidence to keep repeating that the problem only involved a minority, why doesn’t the other side get a say?

I don’t doubt that for some men (and women), porn becomes a problem. Compulsive behaviour can manifest itself in many ways, and porn can be one of them. My suggestion here is that it’s not porn that’s the issue, but the psychological problems that cause compulsion and anti-social behaviour.

Unfortunately, “internet porn addiction” is the favoured tool of religious fundamentalists and censors, and I hate to see it rear its head here. Cue the moral panic and calls for the government to “do something.”

Interestingly, this article comes in the wake of an online survey by Adultshop that found that only 2% of Australians were offended by adult films.

Most respondents said they believed explicit erotic films actually helped improve relationships by enabling couples to communicate what they like and helping to spice up their sex life and more than half of those surveyed said they incorporated erotic films into their bedroom activities.

Interestingly, 52 per cent of females said they watched erotic films to help them get “in the mood” either to have sex with their partner, or alone.

We’re such a funny lot. Most Australians like their porn, but we still let a very small majority tell us it’s wrong and we allow it to be controlled and censored.

When do we get to see the stories on church addiction?