Of late I have been trying to work out where I stand in relation to porn.
My mother very clearly laid out the view of many second wave feminists for me as a young woman – porn was bad; made by men for men; subjugated women etc.
When I was a young person I remember seeing the late night soft-porn movies shown on one of the non-state-funded German television stations freely available where I lived – milkmaids in the haystack and so on. As a young person I found these exciting and also a bit funny but really just as I did the ‘photo-stories’ in a pop culture magazine I regularly bought which featured young people in (sexual) relationships. Then, to access something more ‘hardcore’ you needed to know someone who owned this stuff or be willing to go to a ‘sex shop’.
Things are different now. Porn, and not the variety of milkmaids doing it in haystacks, is available at the click of a few buttons. Three- and four-year olds can operate a mouse and navigate their way round websites created for children without too much difficulty. You can see why research has found that children and young people are accessing porn. How serious is this?
I remember hearing Clare Bale give a paper at the UK Economic and Social Research Council-funded seminar series on ‘Complicating the debates about the Sexualization of Culture’ in March 2011 which made me re-think my position on porn and young people. Clare herself started her research sure that porn was bad for young people, but now sees things in a more nuanced way. Her paper in the journal Sex Education suggests that young people recognise the difference between porn and ‘real life’ and that young people accessing ‘sexually explicit’ materials said it facilitated masturbation, satisfied curiosity, increased their confidence and knowledge or was simply funny.
Yet, recent research by colleagues in Australia – Maree Crabbe and David Corlett – whom I met at the last GEA International Conference in 2011, offers a more worrying picture: porn itself has become more violent over the last period of time; young men report that they try to replicate what they see; and young women shared experiences of being positioned as one of the female characters in porn films – which they found scary and not at all pleasurable. On the other hand, Liza Tsaliki’s (2011) research with Greek young people challenges these finding to some extent when she concludes from her survey research that, ‘although teenage girls are not as interested in pornography as boys, they do not see themselves being hurt by it’ (p. 299).
Many of us know about and lament the lack of comprehensive sex and relationships education in many of our countries, and I can just imagine the reactions of some schools to the idea that they should be addressing the issue of pornography; but there are now some resources to use. Zero Tolerance and the Women’s Support Project (in Scotland) have developed the ‘Pleasure vs. Profit’ resource and Maree Crabbe and David Corlett (together with Debbie Ollis from Deakin University) are also putting together a pornography education resource. Cindy Gallop’s Make Love not Porn initiative, which claims not to be anti-porn, just seeking to ‘inspire and stimulate open, healthy conversations about sex and pornography, in order to help inspire and stimulate more open, healthy and thoroughly enjoyable sexual relationships’ is another potential resource. What’s interesting about Cindy Gallop’s contribution is that she is a businesswoman who a) feels this issue needs to be discussed but b) is also seeking to develop such a social awareness / campaigning issue into one of her businesses. I imagine she has a way of reaching many – young and less young – given the platforms and networks she has access to. This ties into another interest of mine – different forms of feminist activism.
But for now – I think the main point I have taken away from my recent engagement with these new research contributions and resource developments, is that while we still need to look at porn critically as being a core part of our culture that makes violence against women acceptable, we also need to use young people’s exposure to, and for some their perceived enjoyment of porn, as a vehicle for engaging them in discussions around sex, power relations, gender, violence against women and girls, media literacy and so forth. It could tie into numerous curriculum areas or school priorities: e-safety, sex and relationships education, business studies (why the porn industry is so lucrative!), social studies / sociology. We need to take up the challenge of using young people’s direct and indirect consumption of porn productively to discuss their experiences and understandings of the world, which will also acknowledge them as social actors able to critically engage (and if they are less able to do this at first – will get better at through this open discussions with others!).
Claire Maxwell, GEA Executive Member
