No. Pornography isn’t like cigarettes or gambling. A tiny number of porn consumers have a problem with addiction (0.4% of our survey of 1000 consumers). But up to one third of Australian adults consume some kind of pornography ever year, and for over 99% of them it’s just a small part of their lives.

When such a small percentage of consumers become addicted to something we don’t classify the practice itself as addictive. Pornography is like exercise, or reading books. A small number of people do become addicted – but that doesn’t mean that exercise, books or pornography are bad things. The problems lie with the individuals who, because of their unique psychological make up, respond in that particular way. As a society we must do all we can to help these people – but the correct response is not to ban exercise and books.

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Preventing violence against women is an area both Catharine and Kath have researched, written about and worked in. All the authors of The Porn Report are strongly opposed to violence, including sexual violence. We know that sexual violence against women and children remains epidemic and that we have a long way to go in changing male behaviours and attitudes.

While there it’s often assumed that there’s a link between watching pornography and having bad attitudes to women our research suggests that people who consume pornography tend to have more socially progressive attitudes towards women than those who don’t. One of the most likely explanation for this is that they are less likely to have old-fashioned religious or politically conservative attitudes to women.

It is true that research has found that it is possible to use pornography in a laboratory to produce negative effects. But it is difficult to do this. Firstly you need to use people who don’t normally choose to watch pornography. Secondly, you need to produce an uncomfortable viewing situation for them – for example, put them in a stressful environment, in a university setting, surrounded by strangers and scientists. Thirdly, you have to get them to watch the pornography in quite a strange way. You have to make them watch it (as noted above, in a public place, surrounded by strangers) for extended periods (up to an hour). And, of course, they can’t masturbate or have an orgasm during that time. At the end of all this, some researchers have found that they have managed to make the research subjects aggressive.

However, this doesn’t bear much relation to how people actually use pornography in real life. They usually watch pornography voluntarily to start with. They choose what they want to watch, and they watch it in situations where they feel very comfortable– and usually sexually aroused. They don’t usually watch it for an hour without masturbating – typically they watch short amounts and either masturbate to orgasm, or have sex with a partner. Although things are changing with couples ‘fantasy’ videos, much pornography isn’t really designed to be watched for long periods – the plots are often not well developed, there is often not strong characterisation, acting, and the directing, lighting and sound are all often basic. This means that watching many porn videos for an hour can be extremely boring. This might help to explain why scientists have managed to create aggression in this way.

In contrast, in real life, after masturbating, or having sex, to the point of orgasm, most people tend to be more calm and relaxed rather than more aggressive.

Porn consumption is like any other area of media consumption – people come to it with their own values and beliefs. Men who see women as objects to own or use will feel reinforced by looking at pornography. Other men will enjoy porn that shows women as active sexual agents.

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Pornography objectifies women and men in the sense that viewers of pornography are watching their bodies perform and taking sexual pleasure from it.

But when most people worry about porn ‘objectifying’ women they mean something different – they are concerned that pornography suggests that women are passive objects to be used for men’s sexual pleasure. In fact, our research suggests that the opposite is true, at least in the mainstream pornography we analysed. According to our detailed content analysis of best selling videos, women in pornography are more active than the men are - they are the ones who most often initiate the sex. They also have a wider variety of body types and shapes than we are used to seeing in mainstream media. DIY pornography is also extremely popular with porn consumers and in that genre you can see women of all ages and body types participating in sex with real enthusiasm. Certainly there’s a lot of pornography that shows women being very sexually active.

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Young people have been looking at porn for a long time but the internet has certainly made it easier to access. Given that disconnecting the computer entirely is not really an option in most modern households we need to be talking honestly and in an age-appropriate way to our children and teenagers about the existence of sexually explicit material. We need to give them sex education that lets them know sex is not something you do to someone else, it’s something you do with someone else. We need to make them feel comfortable about talking to us if they come across something that disturbs them. We also need to be realistic about the fact that teenagers are often sexually active and that they are probably going to seek out sexually explicit material.

Finally, we need to do more research on what messages kids are getting about sex, sexuality and relationships and what role parental values, formal education and the media play in this.

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