[ad_1]
In a bid to curb Australia’s domestic violence crisis, the federal government is turning its attention to online pornography.
This month, the government announced it would spend $6.5 million to pilot age-verification technology. It follows a 2023 report that found 75 per cent of 16-18-year-olds surveyed had seen porn. Of those, nearly one-third saw it before the age of 13.
The measure aims to prevent children from accessing adult material and “tackle extreme online misogyny, which is fuelling harmful attitudes towards women”, the government said.
It’s concerned that violent or degrading pornography — particularly viewed at an early age — may fuel gender-based violence in adulthood.
But is there a direct link? And is regulation the answer or would other measures be more effective?
Pornography, misogyny and sex crimes
According to Caroline West, a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney, pornography is “sexually explicit material, either pictures or words that are primarily designed or used to produce sexual arousal in viewers or consumers”.
She’s been writing about the topic for more than two decades, most recently authoring a chapter on pornography in The Oxford Handbook of Freedom of Speech.
There are various — and often vastly different — sub-genres of pornography. These include gay pornography, feminist pornography, and violent or degrading pornography.
Dr West says that this last category is a concern for some feminist thinkers who believe there’s an association between the consumption of violent pornography and an increase in sex crimes.
She points to an increase in sexual choking, especially among younger adults, as one example.
“That can be linked in a pretty direct, linear way to increased depictions of choking in pornography, and it’s disproportionately women who are being choked,” Dr West says.
“Some disturbingly high percentage of real women say that … they haven’t been consulted before the choking happened in their real-life sexual encounters.”
Dr West says there’s a worrying gap in sex education in many parts of the world and pornography often fills that void.
“Young boys and some young girls, but mostly young boys, [are] viewing pornography, partly in order to learn how to have sex,” she says.
“And if the kind of pornography that they’re viewing is not respectful, if it shows women being degraded or brutalised … then that’s obviously a problem.
“This is kind of bad for men as well, you know. Men have to be the brutalisers and the dominators … I think a lot of people are worried about that.”
These concerns are shared by the Australian government.
This week, federal minister Tanya Plibersek told ABC’s AM program that the figures for sexual assault are “exploding“.
“Kids are seeing pornography that includes choking and anal sex before they’ve had their first kiss,” she said.
“Unless we begin to tackle it now, we are going to see a continued epidemic of sexual assault amongst teenagers.”
The UK government is currently trying to enact its own age assurance measures, although pornography regulation has proven problematic in the past.
Meanwhile, three of the world’s biggest porn sites are facing new requirements, including age verification, in the European Union.
It’s unclear how the Australia’s pilot will work, but if the eSafety commissioner’s 2023 Roadmap for age verification is anything to go by, it could involve anonymised digital tokens to prove a user’s age.
The pleasure factor
Misogyny and gendered violence aren’t constrained to the pornographic realm, says Louise Richardson-Self, a senior lecturer in philosophy and gender studies at the University of Tasmania.
“Violence against women is a massive problem,” she points out.
“[We see] objectifying representations of women in other forms of media, in advertising, but also in film and TV.”
She believes this is one reason why pornography has so many alarmed.
“[It’s] consumed within this wider context where the degradation of women — and stereotyping and violence against them — is everywhere,” she says.
But there’s another factor at play.
“The way we consume pornography is unlike the way we consume other media,” explains Dr Richardson-Self.
When someone watches porn, they create a connection between the embodied sensation of pleasure and the content, she says.
And this is where viewers could enter ethically murky territory.
“Even if you personally want to seek out the most ethical porn that there is … there’s a good chance that you’re going to run into degrading stuff along the way,” Dr Richardson-Self says.
“I think that there is space to talk about what … repeated exposure to degradation can achieve, [whether it’s] intentional or otherwise.
“Is there a role of subtle preference formation going on there?”
It’s not just the pornographic content itself that could be shaping viewers’ attitudes towards women.
Dr Richardson-Self says we also need to consider the text that accompanies a video.
Certain words, for instance, can denigrate the female participant — even if, behind the scenes, the adult performer was afforded a respectful work environment.
“It’s not necessarily that the sex act itself is exploitative or problematic or wrong,” says Dr Richardson-Self.
“But the way in which the sex acts are framed for people’s consumption might be problematic.”
The case for ethical porn
The correlation between consumption of violent or misogynistic pornography and gendered violence has not been empirically proven, says Dr West.
“It’s very difficult because there are so many confounding factors,” she points out.
Queensland University of Technology research fellow Zahra Stardust says that a lot of anti-porn literature is problematic.
She sits on the editorial board of the academic journal Porn Studies and has written extensively about sex worker ethics.
“Research about ‘violence against women’ in pornography is heavily distorted because violence is frequently conflated with consensual kink practices,” Dr Stardust says.
“It is based on representation only, without any reference for performer agency, negotiation, preference or desire.
“Women have been making pornography for decades and it is deeply troubling that our well-documented pioneering political interventions into ethical production and distribution are routinely ignored.”
Dr Richardson-Self understands why many women object to pornography being framed as inherently exploitative.
“There are many people who not only actively enjoy sex, but also enjoy creating their own content,” she says.
“To suggest, in a kind of blanket way, that this is exploitative, these women are oppressed, completely denies their agency with respect to their sex.”
However, Dr West says that even if some women find performing in pornography empowering, others may have different experiences.
In 2023, a panel of international experts, led by the University of Sydney, identified six criteria that constituted “healthy and ethical pornography”:
- A negotiation of consent on-screen
- Depictions of safe sex
- Ethical production
- A focus on pleasure for all participants
- A variety of sexual practices
- A variety of body types, genders, and races.
Dr Richardson-Self says that ethical porn minimises potential harm.
“If you kind of step back from the moral outrage of it all, and ask, ‘Is there anything wrong with people enjoying sex?’ [The answer is] no,” she says.
“If that’s the case, then presumptively there could be a space for pornography that is considered ethical, whether it’s … best practice on set, you know, everybody is consenting, there’s good communication, nothing is ever taken too far.”
Another aspect, she says, is ensuring the content is “inclusive and celebratory of sex, rather than viewing sex as as something that is done to someone else, or punishment imparted onto someone else’s body”.
Could porn be regulated, anyway?
Dr West says that strengthening age restrictions on access to pornography is an important measure.
She also believes that sex education could examine the messages and images that children may come across in online material.
“When they’re older and they probably have been exposed to some pornography, just having a critical reflective discussion of ideas about how to have sex and sexual equality,” she says.
Aside from Australia’s age verification pilot — the details of which will come to light in coming months — could pornography be regulated?
Dr Richardson-Self is sceptical.
“Even if you think in principle it’s the right decision, you have to ask whether or not it can be successfully achieved,” she says.
“With the internet being such a vast space, and with people consistently finding ways to out-manoeuvre bans on sites … it seems like censorship as a strategy would be one of constantly chasing one’s own tail, or like a game of Whack-A-Mole.”
“Just because something can’t be done perfectly isn’t, in and of itself, a reason not to do it to its imperfect best, but it does call for the need to actually step back and assess the problem and go ‘What are we trying to achieve?'”
In her earlier academic years, Dr West says she was much more in favour of regulating what she calls “inegalitarian pornography”.
Today, her views have changed.
“Regulation, just in general, is a bit of a blunt and treacherous weapon,” she says.
“If there are ways that we can challenge the harms, without regulating, [that] would be less costly and preferable.”
RN in your inbox
Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter.