Ms Naughty Porn for Women Blog

For years, anti-porn activists have campaigned against porn on the basis that it increases acts of violence against women. In essence, they say that porn causes rape.

Today I thought I might sit down and compile a few resources that refute that claim. Because as far as I’m aware, there is still no reliable evidence to suggest that watching pornography induces men to rape.

I think the biggest piece of evidence against the claim is self evident. In the last 15 years, internet pornography has become freely available to anyone who wishes to view it. Yet there has been no substantial increase in the rape rate in that time. Indeed, US government statistics reveal that in that time, the rate of forcible rate dropped steadily. If the “porn causes rape” claim were true, we would have seen an increase in sexual assault rates. Obviously that is a very simplistic argument but it’s one that anti-porn people need to deal with. And they don’t.

One of the more interesting academic articles dealing with this issue is by Anthony D’Amato from Northwestern University School of Law. His paper Porn Up, Rape Down discusses the idea that there was an 85% reduction in sexual violence over the 25 years to 2003 (and the rate has kept falling since the paper was published). He goes on to posit that not only does porn NOT cause rape, he suggests that it may actually reduce rape, either by serving as a release valve or by demystifying sex. He concedes that the correlation does not equal causality and suggests further research.

A similar 2006 paper by Todd Kendall entitled Pornography, Rape and the Internet points out that rape rates decreased in US states where the internet was rapidly taken up. Interestingly, the growth in internet use had no effect on the rates of other crimes. Slate summed up the research in an article How The Web Prevents Rape. The Register also covers the topic here.

An earlier, pre-internet paper looked at rape rates in countries that had legalised porn and came to similar conclusions. Pornography, Sex Crime and Public Policy by Berl Kutchinsky was published in 1991. He writes:

The aggregate data on rape and other violent or sexual offences from four countries where pornography, including aggressive varieties, has become widely and easily available during the period we have dealt with would seem to exclude, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this availability has had any detrimental effects in the form of increased sexual violence.

Our knowledge about the contents, the uses and the users of pornography suggests that pornography does not represent a blueprint for rape, but is essentially an aphrodisiac, that is, food for the sexual fantasy of persons – mostly males- who like to masturbate

It should also be noted that this same conclusion was reached by Richard Nixon’s first inquiry into porn in 1970. Anthony D’Amato writes about working on the commission in his “Porn Up, Rape Down” paper. He says:

The Commission [on Obscenity and Pornography] concluded that there was no causal relationship between exposure to sexually explicit materials and delinquent or criminal behavior. The President was furious when he learned of the conclusion. Later President Reagan tried the same thing, except unlike his predecessor he packed the Commission with persons who passed his ideological litmus test. (Small wonder that I was not asked to participate.) This time, Reagan’s Commission on Pornography reached the approved result: that there does exist a causal relationship between pornography and violent sex crimes.

It’s not scientific to reach a conclusion and then set out to find data that backs your case, ignoring contradictory information. That is ideology, not research.

If anti-porn activists can give me real evidence that porn does cause rape, I’ll change my mind. But at this stage, based on the simple fact of dropping rape rates, I’m not seeing it.

One more link and quote to finish this post: a summary article from Scientific American which looked at various studies into porn and found that it was not harmful.

Contrary to what many people believe, recent research shows that moderate pornography consumption does not make users more aggressive, promote sexism or harm relationships. If anything, some researchers suggest, exposure to pornography might make some people less likely to commit sexual crimes.

The most common concern about pornography is that it indirectly hurts women by encouraging sexism, raising sexual expectations and thereby harming relationships. Some people worry that it might even incite violence against women. The data, however, do not support these claims. “There’s absolutely no evidence that pornography does anything negative,” says Milton Diamond, director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “It’s a moral issue, not a factual issue.”

PS. Even though the sample was far too small, this 2 year Canadian study of men’s porn surfing habits does provide some illumination as to the real reasons why men watch porn. What it does make clear is that porn is clearly only fantasy and that men are easily able to distinguish between porn and real life.

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I’d like to thank ethicist Leslie Cannold for writing this on her blog today. It’s an excerpt from a longer essay called Pornography’s Effects: The Need for Solid Evidence by Ronald Weitzer. You can read the full thing here.

The essay, published in the journal Violence Against Women, points out that a lot of the rhetoric of Gail Dines and other anti-porn campaigners is not backed up by any solid established evidence. Instead, they rely on anecdotes, generalisations and assumptions.

It’s best if you read the whole thing for yourself but here’s a few choice paragraphs:

To evaluate these claims, it is crucial to ask if there is supporting evidence. Like Boyle’s book, Dines’ is evidence-thin. Although Dines cites a handful of academic studies, vir- tually the entire book is based on anecdotal information: (a) quotations from some men and women who attend Dines’ lectures; (b) her descriptions of some porn websites; (c) statements from a handful of actors and producers whom Dines met at the annual Adult Expo convention in Las Vegas; and (d) her accounts of selected scenes in porno- graphic videos. How does Dines use this impressionistic material and what alternative sources would be superior?

First, Dines did not conduct a systematic and rigorous review of porn websites or scenes, nor does she cite studies that do so. Neither are readers told how many websites or scenes she examined, nor how they were selected. Did she view 20 scenes or 2,000? She claims that they were representative—“these images are all too representative of what is out there on the Internet and in mass-produced movies” (p. xxi)—but we have no basis for believing that they were. With so much porn available today on the Internet and elsewhere, how could we ever construct a random sample from this universe to reach generalizable conclusions?

Second, grand generalizations are made throughout the book. Dines frequently refers to “men,” “women,” the “porn industry,” “fans,” and “performers” as monolithic categories. Also troubling is the jarring use of terms such as “never,” always,” “usually,” and “most.” Similarly, nowhere does she define some frequently used terms: “degrading,” “dehuman- izing,” or “empathy.” She does give examples of acts that she considers inherently degrad- ing; these include anal sex, ejaculation on a woman’s body, two or more men having sex with one woman, and multiorifice intercourse. Whether these acts are indeed perceived as degrading by viewers and actors does not figure into Dines’ argument. They are simply defined as perverted by fiat.

Third, nothing is said about gay male porn, lesbian porn, alternative porn, porn made by women—which, together, constitute a sizeable share of the market. A small but growing literature on these genres shatters Dines’ sweeping claims about “porn” (see Bakehorn, 2010; Collins, 1998; DeVoss, 2002; Stychin, 1992; Thomas, 2010; Tucker, 1991). The prolifera- tion of alternative genres renders any generalizations about “porn” ludicrous.
…..
Fourth, Dines acknowledges that there is very little data on actual porn consumers— those who watch porn in the real world (vs. in laboratory experiments)—but then proceeds to make many far-reaching claims about them. She writes that the “men who speak to me are not that different from the general population of men who use pornography,” but her source for the latter is another antiporn writer, journalist Pamela Paul (p. 89). Dines did not conduct a survey or in-depth interviews with a sample (let alone a representative sample) of consumers. A particularly troubling aspect of the book is her quotations from men and women who have spoken to her during and after her lectures. Blocks of sentences are quoted verbatim, bracketed by quotation marks, without indicating how these statements were recorded. How can readers have confidence that these statements were actually made by individuals with whom she had conversations? Was Dines somehow able to remember verbatim student statements consisting of two to four sentences at a time?

I think this article is incredibly useful and relevant – especially given that it is in a journal that looks at actual violence against women. Next time Gail Dines and her anti-porn cohorts wheel out their standard arguments, I’ll be linking to this essay. It does an excellent job of rebuttal in one easy swoop.

I am eagerly awaiting the publication of research by Dr Clarissa Smith and colleagues. They actually listened to porn 5,490 consumers via online questionaires. Understandably, it will take a while for the full results to emerge but they’ve uploaded some preliminary data here.

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There’s a logical fallacy called “cherry picking” which is essentially this: you come up with a hypothesis. You then seek out data to back your assertions. You ignore any contradictory evidence and only use the stuff that supports your theory.

Then you write a book about it. Cue the articles in major newspapers and interviews on TV. Suddenly, your delightful theory is accepted uncritically as fact.

Thus, we come to A Billion Wicked Thoughts, the book by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. It’s subtitle is “What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire” and it’s main idea is that the authors have revealed fundamental differences between men and women by looking at internet porn (or, specifically searches for internet porn). You’ll never guess what that fundamental difference is. Yep, men like sex, women don’t.

I’m a bit late with this blog post. Plenty of other bloggers have already pointed out the various problems with this book and the methodology used and I figured I didn’t need to add my voice to the protest. Indeed, I didn’t pay a lot of attention when it first came out.

But today I discovered that the researchers had asserted that the (alleged) lack of popularity of For The Girls was proof that women are only interested in romance fiction. And well, fuck that, I’m kind of angry.

Before I go there, let me direct you to the article (and assertion) in question. It’s this: Censored by the Wall Street Journal: The Female Sexual Brain in Psychology Today. Yes, the same Psychology Today that recently published an article saying black women are objectively less attractive.

Here is the main thing they have to say about the differences between men and women when it comes to sex:

“Men seek out visuals and go straight for orgasm. Women prefer stories and often favor conversation over culmination.”

Sound familiar? It’s the same thing Kinsey was asserting 60 years ago, back when there was no porn for women. It’s the same idea that is repeated ad nauseum in any discussion about women and porn. And it’s the same idea I’ve been battling for the last 11 years.

Note the blanket statement about what men like and what women like? No detail, no nuanced acknowledgement of the wildly varying sexuality and tastes of men and women. And no concept of bisexuality or homosexuality or queerness or transgenderism at all.

(Let me say this – I’ve been called out on this in the past, saying “women like this sort of thing”. And they were right. I’ve done my best to change my views. It’s wrong to say “all women like this” because it’s just too broad a statement to be accurate).

This use of search statistics to support the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” idea was apparent from the very beginning of their research. This was posted on Slash fan fiction sites in 2009:

We’re deeply interested in broad-based behavioral data that involves romantic or erotic cognition and evinces a clear distinction between men and women. (my bold) Fan fiction matches this criteria perfectly. Let us make clear, however: fan fiction is not the subject of our research. Our subject is the human brain. For us, fan fiction is a wonderfully rich source of data–like single-neuron recordings in rhesus monkeys–albeit a unique and invaluable one.

Suffice to say, the researchers fell foul of the fanfic community on whom they based many of their conclusions about women and romance – the response can be seen here.

So, on to the bee in my bonnet. It’s this:

The five most popular adult sites for men are all within the top 100 most popular sites on the entire Internet. All are webcam or video sites featuring anonymous graphic sex, such as PornHub, the most popular adult YouTube clone, which draws about 13.9 million visitors a month. In contrast, the most popular adult video site for women, For The Girls, draws a meager 100,000 a month (and up to half of those visitors are gay men). All across the planet, with women free to access any erotic content they wish, they mostly seek out character-driven stories of sexual relationships: romance novels, erotic romance (sometimes called EroRom or Romantica®), fan fiction, slash fiction, gay romance novels, and erotic stories.

The most popular “erotic” site for women is fanfiction.net, featuring more than 1.5 million visitors a month and more than two million stories, about half of which are tagged as “romance.”

The bit in bold is their assertion about For The Girls. According to them, FTG is a minnow in terms of traffic and half of our members are gay men. That’s quite the statement to make when you have never contacted the owners and don’t have access to a site’s statistics or membership details. Let me say this now: it’s totally inaccurate.

Today I sent them an email asking where they got the data to make such statements.

I can only assume they’ve come to this conclusion by looking at the figures on Alexa, an Amazon-owned company that keeps track of people’s surfing habits via a toolbar. As alluring as that data can be, it’s not very accurate. It relies on people willingly installing their software, allowing themselves to be tracked. And the info is often 3 months out of date. Interestingly, Alexa says our main audience is 65 year old women without children – exactly the kind of person who would unknowingly install spyware or a toolbar.

But wait! Here I read that the authors contacted fellow women’s erotica site Sssh.com. Interesting. Did Sssh give them the figures on FTG? If so, why would the authors listen to a competitor site who also does not have access to our stats? And if they contacted Sssh, why isn’t THAT site the one they quote in their Psychology Today article?

I’m not about to publicly bandy about the traffic figures for FTG. That’s given out on a need-to-know basis. But rest assured, we get a shitload more traffic that 100,000 visitors a month. A metric shitload.

To be honest, though, I’m more offended about the assertion about the gayness or otherwise of our membership. Assuming they relied on the dodgy data from Alexa… there’s absolutely NOTHING on there that discusses the sexual orientation or otherwise of site visitors (and if there was, well, damn, there’s bound to be a human rights violation in it). I can only assume this assertion is based on Playgirl’s readership figures – which have absolutely nothing to do with us.

The fact is, I have no idea how many of our members identify as gay. We don’t collect that kind of data. Asking would be rude. And, what’s more, it doesn’t fucking matter. What I do know is that the majority of names on members’ credit cards are female.

Yes, we do get men joining For The Girls but I don’t know whether they’re straight or gay. Given that our content is half straight hardcore and half nude men, I don’t think it’s remotely accurate to say we resemble a gay site or that we are trying deliberately to cater to gay men. Our target audience has always been straight women. I do get emails from straight men thanking us for offering a more positive version of porn or saying they joined to share the experience with their wife or girlfriend.

Beyond this, let me say that comparing FTG to a fan fiction site (or free mainstream tube sites) is not even remotely comparing like to like. Notice how the authors called us an “adult video site” as if we’re the same as Pornhub? We’re a membership site that requires people to be aged over 18. A great deal of our visitors arrive there having clicked on an ad, knowing we’re a commercial product. We self identify as a porn site and offer hardcore content but we’re also a magazine with articles and fiction. Compare that with your average free fan fiction site. It’s apples and oranges. What’s more… FTG doesn’t offer slash or gay fiction (although we’re changing that soon). So right there you’ve got a vast difference in individual tastes.

And that’s the problem with this research. It doesn’t seem to understand the idea that women’s tastes ARE different and different women will seek out different things on the net depending on who they are, how old they are and what turns them on at that very moment.

So to use For The Girls as “proof” of the assertion that “women aren’t visual” and are more turned on by romance novels or “conversation” is just a nonsense.

By the way, let me say I’m so disappointed in this research. The idea of looking at internet porn searches IS interesting. For one thing, it seems to suggest that Gail Dines’s assertion that men are seeking out violent porn is way off the mark. But I couldn’t in good conscience use this data in a debate.

If they can’t get the facts right about For The Girls, what other information did they fudge or fuck up?

If or when I get a reply from the authors as to the source of their assertion, I’ll add it to this post.

* Note: I thought I’d include the above image from the Billion Wicked Thoughts website. Nice indication of the gender stereotypes they’re selling.

——————-
Update 25th June
I’ve had a reply from Sai Gaddam. He says they emailed us in July 2009 and got no reply. I searched back, couldn’t find any emails from them. Perhaps they went into spam.

Sai says:

We used the web analytics services Quantcast and Alexa to obtain traffic and demographic estimates. Both report a monthly traffic of less than 100k.

Quantcast also reports that 54% of the visitors are male and the most correlated site are freebuddymovies.com and outpersonals.com, which are both categorized as Gay.

We understand that these numbers rely on random sampling and are estimates — but reasonably useful ones.

We will be happy to update these articles with more accurate information about your site if you can share any relevant data with us.

Quantcast is an analytics service that relies on websites to volunteer their own data by inserting code onto their pages. When a website does not use Quantcast (and For The Girls doesn’t), they estimate. I have no idea how they estimate, but the figures they apparently pull out of thin air look impressive. Thus, according to Quantcast, 54% of our traffic is male and the majority of our surfers are black. Uh, OK.

There’s also an “Audience Also Likes” feature which says “The people who visit forthegirls.com are also likely to visit these categories and sites.” Apparently our surfers are “likely” to visit Outpersonals, Ebaums World and Urban Dictionary.

The truthiness presented by this information was “reasonably useful” enough for our intrepid authors to present it as fact and then use us to prop up their assertion that women aren’t visual.

Not good enough. As I said, if they fudged the stats here, what else did they fuck up?

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Gail Dines is doing the rounds and she’s back in Australia promoting censorship of porn, saying that “there is no room for porn in a just society.” The response to that is a whole other blog post (although I have 2 comments on that story).

Today Joel Tozer, a freelance writer, offers his reply to Dines’ piece here. And while it’s mostly OK, I’ve got a problem with his basic assumption that porn is “addictive” and his use of a University of Sydney study to back it up.

Firstly, there is no scientific consensus on the topic of “porn addiction”. There is no diagnosis of pornography addiction in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Porn is not inherently “addictive” although some people may develop behavioural compulsions with it. The phrase “porn addiction” has become widespread thanks to its use by fundamentalist Christian organisations offering “cures” and anti-porn conservatives. It’s not helped by the numerous pseudo-psychological articles found online and the media’s constant unquestioning use of the term.

The whole dirty ball of lint will then be expanded by a piece of research which has been conducted by Gomathi and Raj Sitharthan at the University of Sydney. I can see that their preliminary statistics are about to propagate throughout the media and become a new “truth” about porn, even though their research doesn’t come close to being the whole story.

To quote from the Joel’s article:

A world-first study in Sydney has found that almost half of all adults first watched pornography between the ages of 11 and 13…

Preliminary results from the University of Sydney study show many men, and women, are spending massive amounts of time and money viewing porn. Of more than 700 adult Australians surveyed, about one-third looked at internet porn three to five times a week, while 28 per cent look at it almost every day – half of them for between 30 minutes and three hours. A few are spending up to 14 hours watching porn.

Co-researcher Professor Raj Sitharthan says many are becoming addicted to the safety of online pornography to the point where some are unable to achieve orgasm during intercourse.

Here’s the thing the article doesn’t tell you: that university study was created specifically to study “porn addiction”. It’s basic premise was that porn addiction is real and it sought to find participants who felt they had a problem with porn.

Here’s the abstract, taken from this University of Sydney Page:

The Impact of Internet Pornography
The purpose of this research is to further our understanding of Internet Pornography Addiction/ Problematic Internet-Enabled Sexual Behaviours .The study is exploring the support / treatment currently available for internet pornography addiction. The investigation is also exploring help seeking behaviour for internet pornography addiction and the barriers to seeking assistance.

When you click through to the survey, the questions are very specific in their tone. Under the heading of “The Impact of Internet Pornography”, the questions are:

How often do you find that you stay on-line longer than you intended?
How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time on-line?
How often do you prefer the excitement of the Internet to intimacy with your partner?
How often do you form new relationships with fellow on-line users?
How often do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend on-line?
How often do your grades or school work suffer because of the amount of time you spend on-line?
How often do you check your e-mail before something else that you need to do?
How often does your job performance or productivity suffer because of the Internet?
How often do you become defensive or secretive when anyone asks you what you do on-line?

And that’s just the first page of questions. There’s another page of very similar questions before things get specific about first use of porn, what kind of porn is used etc.

I actually wanted to take part in this survey because I thought it might be about porn use. When I encountered those first biased questions I realised that I did not not fulfil their criteria – or their agenda. So I filled it out anyway, hoping to at least even up their figures a little bit.

By the way, question 41 is “Would you like to seek professional assistance to manage your dependence viewing pornographic materials?”

Question 42 says “If you answered Yes to question 41, how would you like to receive assistance to manage your dependence on pornographic materials:
* send me booklets
* via the internet
* face-to-face individual counselling
* group counseling

So, it’s pretty clear that this is not research about porn use. It’s research about porn “addiction” and one of its aims is finding the best way to cure that “addiction”.

The problem with today’s SMH article is that the figures produced by this survey are being quoted out of context. The statistics are being used to imply that ALL Australians accessed porn early and that lots of people have some kind of problem with it or use it constantly. The article doesn’t acknowledge that the survey was designed to find people who already thought they had some kind of problem with it.

Now, watch the truthiness propagate out. These figures will start to pop up in mainstream media outlets without any fact checking. They’ll be repeated ad nauseum until it becomes The Truth.

Unfortunately, this is often the problem with a lot of research into porn. It often approaches the subject as if porn use is a problem that needs to be solved, or it has an anti-porn slant. This is why I’m really looking forward to the results of the Pornography Research Online study being conducted by Clarissa Smith, Feona Attwood and Martin Barker, three UK academics who are interested in studying porn use. They want to be as objective as they can with the results.

If you haven’t already, I recommend you take their private and confidential survey.

I also recommend the Sexademic’s excellent debunking of the “addiction” myth here.

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There’s a part of me that’s still rather stunned that in 2010, people are conducting research into whether “the vaginal orgasm” exists. Because for a while now, I’ve held the opinion that the concept of the vaginal orgasm is nonsense, and not just because of that lovely 1970 feminist essay The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.

For me, the idea was put to bed in 1999 when Dr. Helen O’Connell published her ground-breaking research that revealed our little friend the clitoris is a hell of a lot bigger than anyone thought. Her anatomical studies showed the clitoris extended deep into the pelvis and surrounded the vagina and that, given the reach of the little man in the boat, any orgasms achieved through vaginal stimulation occurred via indirect stimulation of the clitoris. It’s really the most sensible explanation.

Nonetheless there seems to be a continuing meme that says orgasms obtained via stimulation of the vagina or G-spot alone are somehow anatomically different. I don’t think the anatomy bears this out. If we consider that we don’t talk about male orgasms in terms of “penile orgasms” versus “prostate orgasms”, why do we keep making this distinction with women? Female orgasms originate in the clitoris but other forms of stimulation can set it off.

In any case, this rant has been inspired by the research detailed here which was looking into the relationship of the clitoris and the vagina during orgasm. They performed sonograms on a number of women, both at rest and when performing kegel exercises. The women were asked to identify their G-spot during the sonogram. The researchers found that clenching the pelvis brings the clitoris much closer to the vagina… and the G spot was the place where the clit came in closest.

Which suggests that the G-spot is a part of the vagina that can easily reach the clitoris. The fact that some women can’t find their G-spot can then be explained by natural anatomical differences. Indeed, the whole thing where 30% of women can get off from penetration alone suggests these lucky women won some kind of biological jackpot because their clitorises are closer to the vag.

This is speculation on my part but the research does seem to point in that direction. So, there’s your science lesson for today.

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I remember when I stopped reading Cosmopolitan in my first year of university. It was one of the best things I ever did. The endless fashion, diets and super-skinny models always left me feeling bad about myself so I decided that it would be best if I just disengaged from that aspect of “women’s culture.”

It’s 20 years on and Cosmo hasn’t changed. Still, it’s a hugely popular magazine that many women do enjoy and when they come up with a sex survey, I can’t help but be a little curious. If you can get past the very first question which reveals that absolutely none of the respondents identified as gay, there’s some interesting titbits in there.

Naturally I leapt on this statistic:

Have you ever watched porn?
37% said yes, I love it
23% said yes, but only with a boyfriend
15% said yes, once – but I didn’t like it
14% said no, but I’d be open to it
8% said no, I hate the idea.
3% said no, because it’s exploitative

That’s statistically larger than a lot of other surveys suggest. The average figure seems to be 30% (a la Nielsen Netratings) but UK Cosmo women are keener on their porn – whether enjoying it by themselves or using it as a tool within their sexual relationship. That’s 60% right there. Add the other 14% who didn’t have a problem with the idea and you’re pretty much saying that 75% of Cosmo readers are OK with porn. Quite the impressive statistic.

Also, I think I’ll gloat a bit that not a lot of Cosmo chicks are into Dworkinesque anti-porn feminism – a measly 3%. Seems the Stop Porn Coalition have a long way to go to win over your average woman into their “all porn is bad” campaign.

OK, so this was an online self-selected survey done by a commercial women’s magazine. The page doesn’t say exactly how many women did the survey (beyond “thousands”) or what the demographics were, so it’s not the most scientific bit of research out there. Nonetheless, if we consider the sheer numbers of women who do read Cosmopolitan, it certainly suggests that more and more women are openly enjoying porn.

Just to give an idea of some of the other trends, based on what was most popular:
Your average Cosmo woman has sex 2-3 times a week in the missionary position, doesn’t have an orgasm as often as she would like and rarely has an orgasm from penetrative sex alone (oral sex or manual stimulation is better). She will still fake orgasms occasionally, will rarely have sex on the first date and prefers men who make her laugh.

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SMH says: A report in the Australian journal Body Image has found that consumers respond positively to depictions of average-sized men in advertising. The survey asked over 600 students in their late teens to look at mock-up advertisements for products, some using muscle-bound men and others using thinner or chubbier male models. The results showed that the “buffed” models didn’t rate any higher than average guys.

Neither sex responded more positively to the musclebound bodies, and the males even found ads that showed just the item – with no accompanying model – more effective than those posed by classic hunks.

Some participants in the University of Queensland study ”may have attributed the models’ muscularity to vanity or homosexuality, characteristics which they may have found unpleasant or discomforting”, [study leader] Ms Diedrichs wrote.

It’s not surprising that male respondents preferred not to see a male model at all. This is not news; it’s why the guy’s heads are always cut off in porn films and why we never see naked men in mainstream film. To even look at another man carries hints of homosexuality for some people and therefore must not be tolerated.

It think it’s an interesting and useful study that also reveals a lot about gay stereotypes and how we allow men a lot more leeway in their appearance than women.

On a personal level, I don’t mind a nice six pack or well-defined muscles, although if the guy looks like a boofhead, I’m not so interested. I think a man’s smile and his eyes are very important factors in whether he is attractive or not.

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The Times Online has followed up last week’s opinion piece about teens and sex with an article headed Boys who see porn more likely to harass girls. The piece discusses Michael Flood’s report looking at existing research into the effects of porn on adolescents.

“There is compelling evidence from around the world that pornography has negative effects on individuals and communities,” he told the Times.

Naturally I sat right down and read the full report. And you know what? The “evidence” he found in various peer-reviewed journals isn’t all that compelling. Indeed, his summary of the existing literature looking at the “harm” or otherwise of porn found it was generally conflicting or inconclusive or not long-term enough or not particularly thorough. Almost every paragraph of the report says that while there’s plenty of concern that porn can cause harm, there’s no magic bullet that proves the hypothesis.

He says that porn doesn’t cause rape and that research is unable to “encapsulate the complex role that emotions and intent play both in the use of pornography and in sex, a role that may either enhance or minimise harm.” Essentially, a whole bunch of outside factors are the deciding influence as to whether porn is a good or a bad thing.

The point became rather repetitive. Research keeps offering the rather sensible supposition that a teenager’s attitude to porn and sex is usually shaped by their family, their peers, their culture, their exposure to other media and their education. That is, you have to take a holistic approach. If a teen – usually male – is using porn in a negative way you should probably look closely at pre-existing problems or bad attitudes before you blame the porn itself. Bad porn is more like the icing on a very bad cake than the recipe itself.

That aside, there was one aspect of Flood’s report that I found very disturbing. It’s his definition of what constitutes “harm” in the first place – and I think it’s something that needs to be discussed more often. Because in all the hysterical hand flapping of “somebody think of the children!”, nobody really sits down and says: “Well, what is it that we don’t want kids to learn or do when it comes to sex?”

Flood doesn’t claim these definitions are his own. He farms them out to “the community” in this paragraph:

Not surprisingly, given the high rates of adolescent exposure, concern exists that young people are being inundated with unwanted and wanted, and possibly violent sexual information before they are developmentally capable of constructively dealing with it. This may detrimentally transform sexual attitudes and behaviours and ultimately sexuality and intimate relationships. Concerns within different parts of the community focus on the potential of pornography to:

* interfere with normal sexual development (e.g. encouraging early sexual activity)
* foster ‘open’ sexual lifestyles (e.g. acceptance of casual and extramarital sex, multiple partners, etc.) and ‘unnatural’ practices (e.g. anal and oral sex, homosexuality)
* undermine physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing (generate shame, guilt, anxiety, confusion, poor social bonds, and addictions)
* undermine relationships and foster sexual violence (e.g. Jensen & Okrina 2004; Zillman 2000).

So folks, let’s have a look at these supposed harms, shall we?

Let me go for the obvious one first. Flood raises the terrible spectre of embracing “open sexual lifestyles”! Lord save us, people might actually take up butt sex! Casual sex, multiple partners, homosexuality… the horror! And all because they looked at porn!

I’m rather stunned that a supposedly scientific report would include such a conservative and judgemental definition of “harm.” Just because a “community” (and face it, we’re talking about fundamentalist Christians here) thinks these things are wrong does not prove that they cause verifiable harm to the individuals doing them.

I should point out, Flood later includes erotophilia as another “harmful” effect of viewing porn. If I may be lazy and include the Wikipedia definition:

Erotophilia is a term used by psychologists to describe sexuality on a personality scale. Erotophiles score high on one end of the scale that is characterized by expressing less guilt about sex, talking about sex more openly, and holding more positive attitudes toward sexually explicit material.

Um, I’m not sure about you, but how is this harmful, exactly? It seems to describe me quite well. Should I assume that I’m somehow psychologically damaged? More inclined to go on a homicidal ramapge?

The idea of “less guilt” when it comes to sex seems to completely contradict his third point that porn undermines “physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing” by generating guilt and shame. I would argue that any guilt or shame arising from pornography use comes from outside influences telling an individual that their porn use is wrong. Either that or it’s a pre-existing guilt arising from being raised to believe that sex is dirty and sinful.

Porn may encourage early sexual activity? How early, exactly? And what is “normal” sexual development? Some teens mature faster than others and make a conscious decision to have sex even before the age of consent (which differs, I might add, according to where you are). If a teen has safe sex and enjoys the experience without regret… is that “too early”? Again, it feels like there’s a judgemental, cultural yardstick being used here rather than any empirical standard of “harm”.

Now I don’t have a problem with some of the other definitions used in that list. If porn causes anxiety about body image or confusion about how to have good sex or how to maintain a healthy relationship, that’s bad. If it encourages unsafe sex, that’s bad. If it encourages pre-existing bad attitudes toward women or normalises a negative, possibly violent view of sex, that too is bad. If it becomes an obsession (note, I refuse to use the word “addiction”) and creates a dispute in a relationship, that’s bad.

Those things may actually result in problems for the individual viewing the porn (or their partners) and we should focus our attention and concern on those. And we should always look at those concerns within the broader context of the individual’s personality, upbringing and culture.

That’s the thing: I don’t want to come out swinging completely in favour or mainstream porn. I’ve expressed my distaste for it many times on this blog. I find a lot of it to be sexist, sex-negative, boring, cliched and sometimes cruel and we need to have a continuing discussion about the images and world view that a lot of porn presents. Because it is a part of our culture and it does have some influence on us as consumers.

I am, however, always worried when a study like this is used by media (like The Times) to say “There’s conclusive evidence porn causes harm, let’s ban it!”

That’s exactly what’s happened here in Australia with the internet filter. The whole idea of the filter was actually thought up by Clive Hamilton, who co-wrote a paper with Michael Flood in 2003 about the effects of porn on 16 and 17 year old “children”. They used the fact that almost all teen boys over 16 use porn to whip up hysteria about “children seeing porn on the internet”. This may be partly while I feel so antagonistic towards this latest study by Michael Flood. It feels as though he’s approached the issue from a pre-decided stance and done his best to make it say what he wants… even thought the actual evidence won’t come to the party.

Still, I can’t argue with his final paragraph which actually offers a perfectly rational solution to everyone’s concern about teens and porn: education.

Though restricting exposure will remain a priority, an over-reliance on this approach to protect against the perceived harms of pornography is problematic as it fails to recognise the realities of ready availability and the high acceptance of pornography among young people. Moreover, it fails to examine the holistic way in which adolescents’ sexual expectations, attitudes and behaviours are shaped in our society and the complexity of factors that give rise to the cited harms.

Protecting young people necessarily requires equipping them, and their caregivers, with adequate knowledge, skills and resources (e.g. media literacy; sex education; education about pornography and rights and responsibilities of sexual relationships; safe engagement with technologies) to enable successful navigation toward a sexually healthy adulthood, as well as tackling factors predisposing to sexual violence.

Interestingly, this is exactly the approach advocated by Joybear’s Justin Ribeiro dos Santos in this second Times piece.

“It’s out there and the reality is, we can’t stop that. French and Italian kids are allowed to drink at the dinner table and they don’t have our problems with binge drinking. Maybe it’s the same with porn. We need to stop being so prudish.”

Given the panicky headlines that Michael Flood’s research is going to create, I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.

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Just spreading the word about two academic researchers that need porn-loving women to fill out their surveys.

Firstly, a Women’s Studies MA student called Hayley is asking feminists for their views on porn. Here’s you chance to kick Andrea Dworkin in the butt again, girls. Tell her what you think here.

Secondly, PhD candidate Susana Mayer needs to know about the sexuality of post-menopausal women – especially those who like porn. If you’re over the hot flushes, click here to help her out.

It’s worth taking the time to help research into women and porn. For so long we’ve been hearing the “women aren’t visual” schtick. It’s nice to get some real science and research on our side!

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The New York Times has an extensive article on research into female desire and lust, profiling the hardworking scientists who are studying this relatively new field of human sexuality (i.e. nobody’s bothered to look into what turns women on. Go figure.)

What I found really interesting was the discussion about how the old ideas of romance and relationships aren’t what really get the juices flowing. It’s being lusted after that makes all the difference.

Definitely rings a bell with me.

The problem was how to augment desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she told me, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners. She rolled her eyes at such niceties…

“Female desire,” Meana said, speaking broadly and not only about her dyspareunic patients, “is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality as opposed to men’s.”

“Really,” she said, “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic” — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women’s erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. “When it comes to desire,” she added, “women may be far less relational than men.”

For evolutionary and cultural reasons, she said, women might set a high value on the closeness and longevity of relationships: “But it’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose they’re the primary source of women’s desire.”

…

From early glances at her data, Chivers said, she guesses she will find that women are most turned on, subjectively if not objectively, by scenarios of sex with strangers… “I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some point I’d love to do a study that would look at that.”

There’s also some interesting speculation about why women will get physically turned on by all sorts of things, even if their mind doesn’t register it.

Genital lubrication, she writes in her upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary “to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. . . . Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring.”

Evolution’s legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings.

It’s a very interesting article, well worth reading.

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Just wanted to add a further post about the recent survey of the sex lives of Australian women (previous post here)

News.com.au has an article unfortunately titled “The sad sexual secrets of women” which is rather misleading since the survey has plenty of positive aspects to it, including an increase in masturbation, a desire for more consideration from male partners and a general urge to explore one’s sexuality.

I wanted to quote this part of the article, which hearkens back to the various discussions about “why women hate porn”.

But, overwhelmingly, we’re bored in the bedroom, causing many of us to stray in search of sexual thrills – which might explain why more of us are watching pornography to spice up our sex lives.

One respondent was so disappointed with the quality of porn movies available, she starred in her own.

“A lot of women described how porn is OK, but they would like it a lot better if it was made by women for women and then they would like to look at it with their partners and use it as a stimulant,” Sauers said.

On the downside porn, while titillating, had added “a whole new level of anxiety, not just about the body but about performance”, Sauers said.

She said that, while porn does carry risks because a small percentage of men become addicted, “to dismiss porn out of hand as an enemy of sexuality and an enemy of relationships is a mistake”.

I found it refreshing to read a relatively pro-porn comment like that in a News Ltd media outlet.

The aforementioned sad aspect of women’s sex lives is that one in three women have experienced some form of sexual assault.

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An article in the New York Times and other media sources today cites new research that suggests straight women aren’t necessarily turned on by naked men. The study, by Meredith Chivers from the Center for Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto, measured the genital responses of women to various images. It found that women were often more turned on by other women, although the researchers concluded that it was what people were doing that made a difference.

Heterosexual women, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.

What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality. Even more than the naked exercisers, they were aroused by videos of masturbation, and more still by graphic videos of couples making love. Women with women, men with men, men with women: it did not seem to matter much to her female subjects, Dr. Chivers said.

“Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t,” she said. “For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. They responded to the level of activity.”

The study found that men, both straight and gay, and lesbians, were more gender-oriented when it came to visual arousal. This echoes similar research by Northwestern University in 2003.

The research is discussed in a documentary called “Bi The Way” and is seen as an example of the bisexuality of women.

What grabs my attention here is that the study hasn’t factored in the way that straight women aren’t trained to appreciate male bodies. Society constantly presents the idea that “sexy” equals “female” and this is drummed into all of us from a young age. Advertising, films, television and magazines reinforce this. We’re taught to see the female body as alluring and erotic, as something to be desired. Men’s bodies were rarely held up as sex objects – at least, not until recently.

On top of that, there’s the way that porn, a tool of arousal, is almost always focused on the female body. From those first moments when we stole a glimpse at a Playboy or Penthouse as kids, women are trained to admire and lust after other females.

So I’m almost not surprised that the nude woman doing aerobics produced a sexual response. It’s a little Pavlovian, really.

Beyond that, the research does back up the idea that straight women can get turned on by anything. I like that we’re so flexible. It does, of course, advance the idea you can’t define “porn for women” because you can never tell what women want. Even so, I’m going to keep using the phrase because it’s a nice way of creating a little happy space on the internet for horny chicks who are sick of mainstream porn.

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Another statistic to add to my collection. A survey of Swedish women by “yummy mummy” magazine Mama says that 28% of them have looked at online porn. This tallies with numerous other surveys which seem to always conclude that around a third of all women like to indulge in a little smut occasionally.

The survey also found that just because women become mothers, it doesn’t mean that they’re not also keen on sex.

43 percent of mums under the age of 29 own a dildo… 31 percent of those surveyed think their man’s freshly showered body is the greatest turn-on… 39 percent of the Swedish mums surveyed have had anal sex and 23 percent fantasize about other men or women during sexual intercourse. 37 percent of the younger mums (under age 29) have had lesbian fantasies. 2 percent have had group sex and 23 percent of mums under the age of 29 use handcuffs as part of sex play.

Ah, the freshness of Scandanavia! Cue the numerous cliches about blondes and jacuzzis and saunas and such.

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My decision not to have kids was hard to make, but it was the right one for me.

Now, it seems, I’ve been backed up by a psychologist who says that having children significantly reduces people’s happiness. Research from Europe shows that, while people are very happy when expecting a baby, this drops off when the child is born and the nappies start piling up.

Apparently all those cute moments of laughter aren’t quite enough to make up for the boredom and drudgery of looking after kids.

The scientific evidence shows people are very bad at predicting what will make them happy, said Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of the book Stumbling On Happiness. He said people’s happiness goes into steep decline after they have children, and never recovers its old level until the children leave home. As a source of pleasure, playing with one’s offspring rates just above doing housework but below talking with friends, eating, or watching TV, research has shown.

Part of why I decided I din’t want children is because I’m happy with my life as it is. I do what I want, when I want. I’m unchained from the 9-5 existence and I’m my own person. And I have a lot of creative things I want to achieve which I wouldn’t be able to if I had a baby. Why would I give that up?

What’s interesting about this happiness research is that most parents will tell you it’s bullshit. Professor Gilbert has an interesting comment on this point.

Explaining why the statistics conflicted with most people’s view of parenthood, Prof Gilbert made the unusual comparison to buying a pair of Armani socks.

“When people own Armani socks they can’t stop telling you they are the best socks, the most amazing socks,” he said.

“(But) I suspect that one of the reasons that people who own Armani socks think they are wonderful is because they have paid $US85 ($A90.30) for a pair.

“The psychologists tell us that we like things more when we pay for them – what does that sound like? It sounds like children.

“We pay for them in time, attention, blood, sweat and tears – what kind of idiots would we be to devote all of that to the rearing of our young if they didn’t bring us some happiness?”

Naturally this makes me feel very smug… and lucky. And relieved.

There’s a bunch of comments here, most of them obnoxious and refuting the idea, but there’s also a retort from Professor Gilbert himself where he says:

The studies aren’t mine. I’m just reporting their results. The studies show that on average, people become less happy when they have kids. You may well feel differently than the average parent does. But why would you insist that the average parent must necessarily feel as you do? Do you really believe that YOUR experience must be EVERYONE’S experience?

Sources: SMH, News.com.au

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The Porn Report seems to be making waves at the moment, with most newspapers giving the story a relatively positive spin. The Courier Mail, for example, gives Alan McKee plenty of column space here, with only lip service paid to the conservatives who argue against porn, albeit without any proof, by the sounds of it. I think that’s the cool thing about this book – it offers good, well researched statistics that can be used to counter all the usual hysterical arguments against porn.

The Australian has an excerpt from the book here.

The authors have also set up a site for the book, including a blog by Kath Albury that is already making for great reading. I’m going to include it in my blogroll because I think Kath has a lot of really worthwhile and intelligent things to say on the topic.

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