In this porn news post I linked to a news article in the Sydney Morning Herald (via UK The Telegraph) called Children damaged by a diet of pornography. The article details meta-research carried out for the Children’s Commissioner for England by a number of British academics. They looked at 276 different pieces of research and concluded that young people were being raised on a “diet of porn” and were:
“more likely to have underage sex, develop “casual and hedonistic” attitudes, experiment with drink and drugs and indulge in sexting, when explicit pictures are taken and sent to others using camera phones. Boys were much more likely to be exposed to pornography than girls, it was found, resulting in “beliefs that women are sex objects”… It quoted other studies that found a relationship between explicit materials and “higher acceptance and engagement in sexually permissive behaviours…”
In that post I said: “I’m inclined to be skeptical when a ‘permissive attitude to sex’ is seen as a negative outcome.” Because, really, what’s wrong with being open minded about sex, sexuality and differing sexual practices? Surely “permissiveness” is not a bad thing? And that’s about as far as I went with looking at this particular bit of research.
A comment on that post by Justin quoted the commissioner’s findings has made me realise that my passing comment wasn’t really good enough. So I want to state more clearly my ongoing skepticism of some porn research and the way it is reported in the media. Too often, articles such as the one above give very simplistic overviews and often seek to cast the research in an ideological light. In the case of the Telegraph report, the ideology is typical “somebody think of the children!” panic. Because that gets good page views.
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The questions that pop into my mind when I look at that article are:
- What type of porn, exactly?
- How did they define “porn”?
- How did they define “children”?
- How did they define “harm”?
- Who did the research and where did their funding come from?
- What was their pre-disposed ideological stance before the research was conducted?
I ask this because a lot of “studies” into porn are actually very dodgy surveys conducted by religious groups seeking to find “evidence” that fits their anti-porn ideology. Plenty of them assume that “porn addiction” is a real thing. Certainly a lot of porn articles start from the default position that all porn is bad or inherently sexist.
Even supposedly rational people can’t help but bring their sexual biases into their research, as we saw with Australian Clive Hamilton. His anti-porn stance has been revealed to come from a rather conservative attitude to sex, perhaps best shown when he couldn’t bring himself to write the word “vagina” in a piece called “Rescuing sex from porn“. It was Clive who, along with Michael Flood, defined the harm of porn as making young people more accepting of “‘open’ sexual lifestyles (e.g. acceptance of casual and extramarital sex, multiple partners, etc.) and ‘unnatural’ practices (e.g. anal and oral sex, homosexuality).” And it was Clive and co who trumpeted research about the terrible effects of porn on “children”, despite the rather important fact that their research involved 16- and 17-year-old boys (a demographic group vastly different from what most people think of when they hear the word “children”). Clive used this to push the government to introduce a mandatory internet filter, a policy that has only just been dumped by the government after 10 years.
So this is why I tend to feel skeptical whenever I see “porn harms children” research. It’s also why I welcome the new Porn Studies journal which seeks to take a more neutral attitude to research.
At the same time, I do understand the concern regarding what young people are learning from porn. It is a topic that was discussed often at the recent Feminist Porn Conference. We all know kids look at porn and we all worry about what they hell they’re taking away from it. We don’t want them to not use it as sex education. We don’t want boys to grow up feeling sexually entitled. We don’t want girls to think they HAVE to give oral sex on the first date. And I’m not going to raise my sword and stoically defend porn from all criticism, especially if it has solid evidence to back it up.
So now I’ve now looked (albeit briefly) at the actual meta-study, entitled “Basically… porn is everywhere” | A Rapid Evidence Assessment on the Effects that Access and Exposure to Pornography has on Children and Young People. And, what a surprise, it’s not as black and white in its conclusions as that SMH/Telegraph story made it out to be. The researchers identified plenty of problems within the literature they reviewed and made this summary:
Overall, there were seven significant concerns about the reviewed evidence base:
1. The lack of consensus within the literature regarding what was being examined, or even about who could be considered a child or young person, meant that it was difficult to generalise or extrapolate.
2. Problems with operational definitions of key terms made comparison challenging. These problems included limited knowledge of children and young people’s conceptions or understanding of pornography.
3. Why do we still not know anything about causality? Maybe it is time to ask different questions.
4. Has the nature of the issue changed qualitatively or merely been exacerbated by the pace of technology and people’s uncertainty in a climate of rapid change?
5. Very little research has been conducted that keeps children and young people’s experiences at the centre.
6. The impacts of cultural differences and cultural context are rarely acknowledged or examined.
7. Few papers reviewed for this REA – whether they were included or excluded – even began to consider the effects of pornography on children and young people who were: an ethnicity other than the majority for the country in which the research was conducted; a sexuality other than heterosexual; transgender; or anything other than able-bodied and with full capacity (relative to their development).
Essentially, the researchers themselves have identified why I tend to feel skeptical about these kinds of studies. They’ve also made a very handy list of what future researchers should avoid when they create their research.
Nonetheless, the Children’s Commissioner research does include plenty of things to be concerned about, including the finding that porn does have an influence on children’s sexual beliefs. Thankfully, the report supports education as the best solution, recommending that the UK Department of Education beef up its sex education curriculum and include discussions of porn and relationships within that sphere.
Meanwhile, today sees a new bit of research that contradicts what I’ve just written: it says porn doesn’t really have that bad an effect on people.
Does Viewing Explain Doing? looked at the porn habits and sexual behaviour of 4600 people aged 15-25 in The Netherlands…
”There is this popular belief that if people see something on screen they will act it out in their private lives,” he said. ”But the link is not so direct. The people who are more adventurous in terms of sex are more likely to consume porn. Consuming porn is not causing them to have more adventurous sex.”
The study, published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, found 88 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women had viewed porn in the previous 12 months.
While there was an association between viewing the material and a variety of sexual behaviours, such as group sex and same-sex experiences, it only accounted for slight differences in sexual behaviour.
Professor de Wit said pornography had led to the mainstreaming of practices once considered risque, such as Brazilian waxing. ”But it’s a two-way street,” he said. ”The interest in that practice has to exist already.”
You say tomayto, I say potahto.