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Kath Albury will be blogging here regularly. Stay tuned!

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  • "Porn is unrealistic…

    • Because it only shows the fun side of sex, without exploring the full emotional and spiritual context of a sexual relationship".

    I haven't heard this criticism for a while, but it has held a bit of currency in the past. I often think of porn as being somewhat similar to a high-gloss cookbook. While some cookbooks are designed to really teach us about food, and how to cook it, others are designed purely to titillate.

    A glossy celeb cookbook, laden with flights of molecular gastronomy, doesn't really represent the reality of cooking. Those full colour pictures (and accompanying text) leave out the banal details of budgeting for groceries, then trudging round the supermarket. They never show the cook struggling to follow instructions, or realising too late he or she simply doesn't have a crucial ingredient, or utensil. You never see the mess on the bench, the sinkfull of dishes, or the spray up the wall from an accidentally uncovered blender of gazpacho.

    Cookbooks make cooking look easy and fun, and often disregard the cost and consequences of cooking and eating. Yet they are not 'fake' - they describe real meals, and provoke real appetites.

    Yes, porn can be ugly at times, and it can involve serious risks to the health and safety of the people who make it. But we need to look at it in context. It is 'fantasy material', and the depiction of fantasy necessarily involves subterfuge. That doesn't mean that the lived experiences of porn producers and porn consumers are not important - they are. But although porn often depicts 'real sex', a great deal of it is necessarily unrealistic.
     

    16/03/2008

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  • Community Standards

    • In Australia, our classification boards are instructed by legislation to consider 'community standards' when classifying films, games and publications. Obviously this can be problematic, given that the 'Australian Community' is actually made up of many sub-communities. Some of these sub-communities have political or moral objections to certain kinds of sexually explicit material - but their views are not always representative of majority attitudes. Sometimes groups or communities are offended by the mere acknowledgement of extra-marital sex, or same-sex relationships (whether or not explicit images are included).

    In some instances it seems to me that lobby groups are interpreting the term 'community standards' as a kind of aspirational ideal: ie "standards must be maintained" or "we must set standards for ourselves". In legal terms, though, community standards are supposed to reflect current standards, rather than set benchmarks for the future. This is why our team felt it was so important to conduct research that produced real evidence of current community attitudes to pornography.
     

    11/03/2008

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  • Art vs Porn?

    • The Porn Report has had great coverage so far, although I've been quite surprised by the number of interviewers who want to cover the debate around 'art vs porn'. For the purposes of our study, my co-authors & myself invited our self-nominated 'porn consumers' to offer their own definitions of pornography. One female respondent told us:

    Ever since I became sexually self-aware as a child, I was ashamed of my sexual thoughts and feelings. Seeing a wide range of pornography and reading sex-related and erotic material has helped me understand that my thoughts and feelings are quite natural. In addition, I have also been exposed to many new ideas and discovered previously unknown facets of my own sexuality. I am now convinced that the erotic arts are a form of communication essential to the human condition. In my definition of art I include everything from recognised literature to the simplest homemade erotic or pornographic literature.

    So, for this respondent, art can be porn and porn can be art. My personal definition of pornography includes all sexually explicit writing and pictures that are primarily designed for the purposes of entertainment and arousal. For me, the term is a simple descriptor, not a slur. Since porn can educate, and art can entertain or arouse, I really don't see the point of pitting one against the other.
     

    03/03/2008

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  • What counts as a positive effect of pornography?

    • I'm generally not a huge fan of the idea that we can measure the positive and negative effects of media in a clear and objective way. (For a good explanation of the issues I have with media effects studies, see this article by British academic David Gauntlett). We might assume, for example, that if porn users are seen to develop 'increased tolerance' or 'self-acceptance', that these could be universally understood as positive effects. But a person who belives that sex should only occur in the form of vaginal intercourse, practiced in a private home, between a married, monogamous man and woman who are not being filmed, photographed or observed by an audience might be very disturbed by the idea that viewing porn might lead to an increased tolerance of diverse sexual practices.

    In fact, many of our survey respondents and interviewees *did* say that porn had made them more aware and accepting of a diverse range of consensual sexual behaviours. What the porn viewers call 'tolerance' and 'self-acceptance' , porn's critics might call 'callousness' or 'desensitisation'. As we discuss in The Porn Report, some of the so-called 'negative effects' of pornography (as determined by psychologists) include an acceptance of the idea that women enjoy sex as much as men do, and the idea that sex outside of marriage is ok. Yet these attitudes are not uncommon in contemporary Australia, and are viewed as 'positive' by many of the people who espouse them.

    28/02/2008

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  • There is a big secret about sex...

    • In the final chapter of The Porn Report, each of the three authors reflected on what we had learned from the research process. I observed that I tend to agree with this quote from writer Leo Bersani: "There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it." Intriguingly, Bersani goes on to suggest that an aversion or distaste for sex can "co-exist quite comfortably with, say, the most enthusiastic endorsement of polysexuality with multiple sex partners".

    I would take Bersani's supposition a step further - I think that there are many people who feel they 'need' to consume porn, or have particular kinds of sex… even when they're scared or just ambivalent about their activities and desires.  In my experience, this can result in one of two outcomes. In one scenario, there is a brash insistence that porn is just trivial smut, that doesn't warrant serious analysis or critical attention. It's just good fun, or harmless. In this scenario, any suggestion that there may be problems with the ways that porn is produced or distributed is quickly discounted as an attempt at repression or censorship.

    In the second scenario, porn is an addictive substance, subverting and destroying the subtleties of all human feeling. It seems to me that there is an assumption here that if only the explicit sexual imagery were destroyed or locked away, all our troubling sexual impulses, attitudes and behaviours would evaporate, and our one-to-one relationships would be instantly enhanced. If I thought that banning all porn would bring an end to misogyny and sexual violence, I would support total censorship… but I'm not convinced.

    My concern is that both approaches leave the ambivalent consumer quite powerless to develop a deeper understanding of what it is that excites, comforts or disturbs them when they consume porn. Without this understanding, I'm not sure how they can change their relationship with pornography (if that's what they really want to do).  In response to my concern, I drafted a series of possible solutions for common ethical dilemmas reported by porn consumers, which appears in chapter 8 of our book.
     

    26/02/2008

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  • The Pleasure Project

    • This is a wonderful website, outlining the activities of a project dedicated to reintroducing the concept of pleasure into safer sex education.

    From the website: The Pleasure Project provides Condom Consultancy to erotic media producers, helping them to integrate safer sex elements into their films and other media – without losing the sexy, erotic edge.

    We help actors and actresses to use male and female condoms in ways that turn viewers on, and help directors and others to come up with creative ways to present safer sex without compromising the marketability of their films or other media.

    I love their work, as I have a strong suspicion that if porn performers could get really good at using condoms, lube & gloves they could make an incredible contribution to may people's sexual skillsets.

    24/02/2008

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  • Into the woods I go…

    • I'm off to the launch of the 'Fairy Tales' edition of Slit, a Sydney lesbian sex magazine. I first interviewed the editors, Domino and Meredith back in 2002, for the Understanding Pornography project. The magazine is a unique example of glossy, hard-copy user-generated Australian queer women's porn. Given that the producers and consumers of a magazine like Slit represent only a tiny percentage of the Australian market, it's fair to ask why my research focused on such a marginal form of porn/erotica. I do think, though, that Slit's DIY ethos is quite representative of contemporary trends in porn production… including the increasingly popular genres of 'amateur' and 'reality' porn. I also think Slit deliberately sets out to document the sexual and political attitudes and practices of a specific community, in a particular time and place - and that's interesting in and of itself. For more info on Slit see http://www.slitmag.org/

    19/02/2008

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  • Why research porn?

    • Since I began my research for my honours thesis in late 1996, I've been intrigued by the ways that media and popular culture reflect our culture's attitudes to sex and sexuality. When I conceptualised my thesis I thought I was going to write about heterosexuality in women's magazines. I soon became interested in men's magazines as well - and back in 1996, the only Australian men's magazines that talked about sex and sexuality were soft porn. I wound up looking at the Home Girls section of The Picture, which was the best-selling men's magazine of the day. The work I did on the Home Girls became the core of my first book, Yes Means Yes … and I became a 'porn researcher'.

    Of course that's not my total job description. My research more broadly looks at sexuality in media and popular culture, and porn makes up a fairly small percentage of contemporary media as a whole. I'm particularly interested in porn, though, because it's the only form of media that focuses exclusively on the sex and sexual arousal. When I read historical studies of porn and erotica, like Linda Williams' influential 1999 study Hard Core, I'm struck by the ways that our ideas about what counts as 'normal' sexual behaviour has shifted so much in a short time. Porn also graphically represents sexual practices and attitudes that are marginalised, if not actually stigmatised, in other forms of media. While the mainstream media still seems to think Demi Moore & Ashton Kutcher's relationship is a novelty, there is an entire (very successful) porn genre dedicated to women over 40 who not only enjoy sex, but are seen as highly desirable partners for younger men.

    It's certainly true that the vast bulk of mainstream porn reflects a view of sexuality that could only be described as homogenised - as Susie Bright so aptly sums it up, the vast majority of porn is made for straight men who are looking for an un-threatening procession of "poppin' fresh starlets sucking and fucking". But for me, porn research is not just a moral process - that is, I'm not simply for 'good' images or 'bad' images, or trying to decide whether porn is empowering or demeaning. Of course as a feminist, I'm always considering issues of power and gender, but I'm wary of closing down my thinking. So I try to look at porn in the broader context of sexuality and culture, and ask questions, rather than just passing judgement of porn's possible 'effects'. What can porn (and for that matter, commentary on porn) tell me about our culture's view of sex? What's sexy now? What's scary? What's offensive? What's boring? What's intriguing? These are the kinds of things I'll be blogging about here.

    18/02/2008

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Book available at all good bookstores 28th Feb