TRIGGER WARNING: References to rape/sexual violence and coercion.
Porn, despite its links to anxiety reduction and a healthy appreciation of sexual encounters, has taken residence as the seedy underbelly of the technological revolution. It’s even been labelled a public health hazard by politicians in Utah. But does it deserve such a title, asks Kate Demolder.
[restrict]Just last month, an Irish Mirror article with the headline “Meet the Irish girl earning up to €20k a month from her bedroom posting saucy pics – and hear what her boyfriend has to say,” connected Generation X with Baby Boomers by way of an introduction to OnlyFans. The British content subscription service allows content creators – increasingly those who align themselves with the sex industry – to earn money from users who subscribe to their content on a once-off or monthly basis. Used primarily by cam girls, models and other types of sex workers, the app – created in 2016 – saw an unprecedented surge in content creators joining in 2020. As a direct result of job losses and boredom thanks to an international lockdown, a surge in new app users followed. Build it, and, as expected, they will come.
While sexually explicit content and pornography in Ireland was already widely available (PornHub releases a Christmas advertisement every year) OnlyFans – which saw a 42% increase between March and July – has made porn more accessible than ever.
Porn use is, according to a recent NUIG School of Psychology study, commonplace among teenagers. As per the university’s Active Consent Programme, almost 60% of teenage boys living in Ireland see porn before the age of 13 while 99% see porn before they reach the age of 18. But, what does that mean for Ireland’s youths?
“People have always been interested in sex,” says Dr Kate Dawson, a porn studies and sex educator from NUIG. “Nothing is new there. But the rise in the use of porn for educational purposes could be attributed to poor quality sex education. If sex education in schools or from parents isn’t answering some important questions that young people have, they may go to porn to find out. This seems to particularly be the case for young LGBTQ+ people, who have even less relevant sex education to their lives than their non-LGBTQ+ peers.”
Dawson is a key team member for Be Wiser – the HSE funded programme targeting primary and secondary schools with sex education programmes in the west of Ireland – and is among one of the only people in Ireland conducting research on young people and their sex habits.
DESIGNER VAGINAS
“There seems to be no real negative effects [from watching porn] for the average person,” she says. “In fact, a lot of people say that porn can be a positive thing in their lives. People report it has helped them to reduce stress, relieve boredom, help them to masturbate and orgasm, mix things up in their relationship by watching porn with their partner. Completely eliminating access of extreme and illegal content to young children would certainly be a positive thing, but it’s very difficult to police the internet effectively to prevent people from seeing harmful content.”
Dawson, however, is aware of the dangers of an online sexual education. Depending on the type of porn one looks up – lest we forget Rule 34 of the internet: “If it exists, there is porn of it.” – chances are that some sort of editing has taken place to ensure a ‘perfect’ looking set of genitals. In 2017, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecology (ACOG) sounded the alarm about labiaplasty, suggesting that an excessive porn habit may be the reason so many young girls want a ‘designer vagina’.
Kate Dawson says: “The only way that we can normalise the reality of genital variation is to ensure that young people, during their important developmental years, have access to accurate information about how bodies look. As part of the Active Consent Programme at the School of Psychology, NUIG, supported by Lifes2Good Foundation, we are developing an online workshop that will support the development of healthy body-related attitudes by challenging media representations and providing teenagers with up-to-date and accurate information about genital anatomy and physiology,” she continues.
THE DARKER SIDE
The fundamental question surrounding porn is whether it has the power to encourage, normalise or even trigger acts of coercion, rape and/or sexual violence. This possibility has been explored for decades. In the 1970s, Berl Kutchinsky, a professor of criminology at the University of Copenhagen, measured sex crimes in Denmark, Sweden and Germany as they legalised porn in the late 60s and early 70s. He found no correlation between a rise in crime and decriminalisation – and in fact, some types of sex crime fell during this period.
A similar study involving more than 4,000 participants was conducted by the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee in 1995. Researchers measured the “rape myth” scale – prejudicial, stereotyped and false beliefs about sexual assaults, rapists, and rape victims. These false beliefs often serve to excuse sexual aggression, create hostility toward victims and bias criminal prosecution.
The study asked students to rate how much they agree with statements including: “A woman who goes to the home or apartment of a man on their first date implies that she is willing to have sex”. Those who watched porn accepted more rape myths compared to a control group, but only in the experimental studies. Non-experimental studies showed no correlation. So the findings were somewhat inconclusive.
ERECTILE ANXIETY
Porn is at times blamed for erectile dysfunction by way of desensitisation caused by erotica (Gabe Deem, the founder of the pornography recovery group Reboot Nation, speaks openly about his own experiences) but there is a lack of research to support this. In fact, watching porn could actually help sexual arousal, according to researchers from UCLA and Concordia University. They found that men who watched the most porn report were more sexually aroused when shown porn in the lab. This study didn’t explore how men would respond outside the lab setting, however – those results remain to be explored.
It seems, instead, that a global rise in anxiety could perhaps be more at play.
“Anxiety floods our brain with thoughts and our body with hormones (like cortisol, the stress hormone, and adrenaline),” Psychosexual & Relationship Therapist Aoife Drury tells me. “Just like standing on a stage and feeling overwhelmed when making a presentation, you may stumble over your words. This isn’t dissimilar to what is happening to your body during sex. Therefore, as a result may mean erections can be difficult to achieve or maintain.
“Porn wouldn’t be harming young people. The lack of comprehensive sex ed is. Not giving people the opportunity to learn, be vulnerable and ask questions is. Shaming, stigma and miseducation surrounding porn is incredibly damaging. I don’t see any correlation between porn use and violence, nor have I ever seen it in my practice.”
LATE, LATE EDUCATION
Culturally, Ireland as a nation has progressed an exceptionally long way when it comes to talking all things sex. Who could forget Fine Gael’s Oliver J Flanagan earnestly telling Gay Byrne that sex in Ireland didn’t exist until the Late Late Show? But for a country that previously stigmatised all things sex related, our sexual education leaves a lot to be desired. As it stands, Relationships and Sexual Education (RSE) is taught through a somewhat mechanical lens. Largely up to the teacher’s discretion – not to mention, the school’s ethos – the curriculum focuses mostly on heterosexual intercourse.
Following the repeal of the Eighth Amendment in 2018, then-Minister for Education Richard Bruton asked the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) to undertake a major review of the RSE curriculum across all stages of education to ensure it was fit for purpose.
As part of the review, the NCCA were asked to consider things like consent, contraception, positive sexual expression and sexual relationships, the safe use of the internet, social media and LGBTQ+ issues. This new curriculum – set for implementation by the Department of Education in 2021 “at the earliest” – has caused huge upset for some Irish parents, especially those who have been targeted by bogus social media accounts who falsely claim that masturbation will be taught to children as young as four.
SOCIETAL HEALING
“Young people are being let down by sex education year in, year out – and for that I totally understand the interest in porn,” says Dr Caroline West, a a lecturer and writer with a PhD & MA in Sexuality Studies.
“Porn and sex are really good tools to learn more about yourself, human nature and human behaviour. The reason I decided to go down this path was because I was always interested in why we’re all so interested in sex,” she laughs. “Whether we’re talking in a healthy way or in an obsessive manner, the power dynamics are fascinating. Growing up, I had really bad sex ed and therefore wasn’t taught about what a healthy relationship is, trauma etc and suffered as a consequence. It’s nice for me to be able to say I can help other people hopefully avoid that.”
Dr West – who hosts workshops on topics such as revenge porn, sexual wellbeing and mental hygiene – has noticed that sex education in itself hasn’t progressed in certain ways for a number of years.
“I would view sexual wellness in the same way as mental wellness and physical wellness. But, there is a lot of healing to be done around sex in our society,” she says. “It’s 2020, and people are asking the same questions they did years ago.”
Since the dawn of third-wave feminism in the 90s, groups of left-leaning feminists have produced an impressive body of literature building a case against pornography. At the same time, erotica has become more pervasive and widely accepted (recent figures showed it to be worth some $35.17 billion (€29.7b) in 2019).
According to some activists of the sex-positive persuasion, anti-pornography feminist discourse can ignore and trivialise women’s sexual agency. American activist Ellen Willis (who coined the term “pro-sex feminism”) states “as we saw it, the claim that ‘pornography is violence against women’ was code for the neo-Victorian idea that men want sex and women endure it.”
In her book Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, Dr Gail Dines explores the way porn has seeped into our lives, writing that: “what the ‘porn is fantasy’ camp misses is that porn actually works to limit our imagination and capacity to be sexually creative by delivering images that are mind-numbingly repetitive in content and dulling in their monotony”.
But, is it really that simple?
“To give the long and short of it, we don’t know exactly what porn does to the brain,” West says. “Research is quite poor, and often conducted by people who don’t have the appropriate qualifications. It’s also hard to link just porn with how the brain reacts, because you have to think of how this person is mentally, how mainstream media also plays a part, how they view things culturally etc. There are a number of external factors at play, and because of this, it can’t be viewed singularly,” she continues.
Anna Nauka, the MyMind psychologist points out that “the main impact we can talk about is how it impacts our representation and beliefs around sex”.
“The content we watch in porn shapes how we view things,” says Nauka. “The brain is like a harddrive and the more we view things the more normal they appear. Having that kind of content can be hugely positive – especially for LGBTQ+ people, who generally don’t get access to sexual education that benefits them – but people who rely on porn as an emotional regulator and soothing strategy can develop issues such as porn addiction.
“I work with couples a lot and for those who experience relationship difficulties, porn – when used in a certain way – can really help. My take on it if that ultimately, sex is pleasure. Watching sex and having sex soothes our nervous system. It’s an incredibly powerful tool to soothe ourselves. There is always a risk that it can turn into an addiction but, on its own, I wouldn’t say it’s a negative thing,” Nauka reflects.
PORN AS EDUCATION
It’s clear that children in Ireland – and elsewhere, as it happens – are looking at porn. Either by way of an innocent curiosity pique or crude methods to become educated on a subject held hostage. Seeing adult material without enough context, however, can be confusing, upsetting and even damaging.
A generation ago, accessing porn was much more labour intensive than it is now. In 2020, there is an endless stream of readily-accessible footage at our fingertips that, troublingly, can include disturbing tropes such as coercion, rape and fetishisation. To its credit, mainstream porn site Pornhub does have a Sexual Wellness Centre linked on its main page – but one would have to wade through walls of fluorescent videos to access it.
“Anecdotally, people seem to be using porn as an education tool and that’s an issue – disappointing however it may be,” Dr West says. “I think it’s such a pity we leave young people to try to figure out what these things are with no blueprints. If we were to equip them with up-to-date information, maybe some future trauma could be avoided.”
Considering the pervasiveness of porn and the rise in sex-adjacent content, simply telling young people to commit to abstinence is proven to be ineffective. Like sex itself, it deserves mature, ongoing and age-appropriate conversation. Young people are ready to have these discussions – it’s important that parents and schools are too.
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
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