Online porn boom: Liberating minds or damaging brains?
Paul Mason (Economics editor, Newsnight) examines
how pornography has changed both in content and availability and whether changing
pornography content is affecting how we behave
It's a small industrial unit outside Birmingham
Outside, Laura Macrow, one of Britain's
most successful adult movie directors, is getting ready to shoot a car wash
scene which all concerned admit is on the traditional side of things. Man plus
woman plus sponge… the rest you can do with your imagination.
This shoot will end up on the website
of the actress, who charges a subscription to view it. But the big change in
online porn - and what's driving the political debate - concerns the rise, over
the past five years, of free sites.
Modelled on YouTube, though they of
course have nothing to do with it, the free porn sites, which are mostly owned
by one private Luxembourg-based company called Manwin, work to a different
business model.
Peter Johnson, who runs the Authority
for Television On Demand, which regulates on-demand porn in the UK , says: "The change in the business model
has meant there is an enormous amount of viewing of porn around the world and
particularly in the UK UK
Mr Johnson believes there may be as
many as 66m visits from the UK
Changing content
On sites like xHamster, also owned by
Manwin, you can click straight through - with no splash screen asking your age
- to porn that would have been seized and prosecuted in the 1970s, but which is
now ubiquitous.
Mr Johnson, who was formerly head of
policy at the British Board of Film Classification, says: "I think over
the past 15 years there has been a marked change in the nature of pornography
being offered. We're talking about a subtext of violence, hair pulling,
slapping, spitting, abusive language during sex - the very extreme gender power
relationships in which the man is all powerful and the woman is
submissive."
And it is an issue of demand as well as
supply. Once you got masses of free porn, unregulated in Britain
"Over the years I've been involved in regulating this sector,
porn producers have started off with ethos of, 'We're not going to go down
abusive route we're going to make nice pornography' and have tended to move
towards stronger and more abusive material," Mr Johnson says. "That's
where the market drives them. That's where customers appear to want more
extreme content."
For Laura Macrow, who shoots for
regulated TV and mainstream distributors in the United States
"We've had to tame things down
slightly. We've had to change because of broadcast rules, regulation rules, we
have to abide by them and follow what the regulators set us," she says.
Does she worry about the prevalence of
coercive imagery in "normal" porn?
"I'm not worried about that. In a
movie if a girl asks for that, that's a consensual act which she's wanting,
she's asked for it. If it's given to her when she's not, then obviously we'd
have to take it away in the edit. I shoot for everything on a platform and
fulfil that guideline as I don't want to overstep that mark."
Meanwhile the broadband internet has
changed porn in another significant way: interaction.
'Free to be different'
Victoria, a student, works as a webcam
performer from her bedroom in England 's
Midlands . Among her specialisms is
sado-masochism and her clients - men and women - pay by the minute to interact
with her. She says porn plays a useful social function.
"I think what I do, and what
pornographers do, is so powerful and beautiful and positive: we help people
realise it is OK if you don't want to be heterosexual. It's ok if you don't
want to have the same kind of sex with the same person for the rest of your
life. It's ok if you want to buy certain props or do things that are not openly
discussed. It doesn't make you a bad person and it does not mean these things
are bad things."
She rejects the idea that porn "objectifies" women, per
se, and though she's worried about the prevalence of coercive imagery, she says
it's a question of education and parental responsibility, not censorship:
"I don't ever claim that I help
women in what I do but I think it's wrong to perpetuate a myth that it is
helping men treat women badly. Lots of young boys do have access to porn that
is damaging to women - and all I have to say to that is someone is not teaching
these young boys that this is not real."
There are more than 3,000 women doing
webcam work on one big site alone, in Britain
Cindy Gallop set up the website Make
Love Not Porn because of a change in behaviour which she attributes to porn.
"Because we have no socially
acceptable language of sex in the real world, the language of porn has rushed
in to fill that gap," she says. "When people are engaging in sex, men
will feel an imperative to use modes of address to the partners which they hear
in porn, which are not necessarily the way you would like to use to talk to
someone they want to have great sex with."
Feigning pleasure
Gail Dines, professor of sociology at
Wheelock College, Boston, says women report peer pressure to take part in
activities, sometimes early in a relationship, that were not seen as mainstream
a generation ago, but which are performed in pornography without any prior
negotiation:
"It's having a profound impact. These young men who have been
brought up on porn sex are expecting girlfriends to perform porn sex and these
women feel often overwhelmed," she says. "When I go across the US and the UK
She cites the changing content of porn,
and its widespread availability, as the source of the behaviour change:
"Years ago when a boy, hormones
raging, would find his father's Playboy he kind of got glimpses into a world of
coy smiles, women bent over in a corn field. Today when he gets into the
internet - via a smartphone, computer - he is catapulted into a world of sexual
cruelty. There is very little soft-core porn on the internet - it has been
wiped away by the industry. It is reshaping their sexuality, their sexual
template and their sexual identities."
So does violent porn cause violent
behaviour? It's hard to find conclusive evidence in clinical research. What is
clearer is the relationship between escalating extremity of the images, and
addiction.
Paula Hall is a psychologist who treats
people for sex and porn addiction. She has seen demand for therapy take off.
"Some of the clients I've worked
with who are addicted to porn have experienced really significant consequences
as a result. Fifty per cent have lost a relationship because of it, 20% have
suffered from mental health issues, 25% have sexual dysfunctions but critically
about 20% have experienced a serious desire to want to commit suicide."
She is particularly worried about
adolescent males. "There is more and more research suggesting porn is
having a direct impact on the brain. Particularly on the adolescent
brain," she says. "We know our brains thrive on novelty. What
pornography is doing is giving us super normal stimuli, it's exaggerating what
is a natural and instinctive desire to seek out attractive natural partners,
but it is exaggerating that - the brain is becoming more wired towards those
pornographic images than it is towards partnered sex."
Victoria, the webcam performer, says
she can see signs of addiction among her clients, who are typically married
men.
"It is addictive, it has the
potential to be addictive, it's easy, it's friendly and it's warm and a lot of
these clients know when they log on, I have a rapport and relationship with
them. I think they forget how much money they spend and how much time they
spend on me as well. Do I think it's damaging? Yes, but I don't think it's my
place to tell them to stop."
Opt in plan
The government has signalled it will
require internet service providers to filter out porn, unless users
specifically opt in. Within the industry, views on this are mixed.
Laura Macrow thinks ISP opt-in and
filtering is a good thing:
"I'm not scared by it. I shoot
movies for all over the world. If people want to watch porn they should opt
into it. I don't think it will have an effect on us. You will still have the
people that are inquisitive these days and want to watch it. You tell someone
not to do something anyway they will go ahead and try it."
Victoria, who makes a living performing
via webcam, objects to the crackdown. "Porn has always found a way around
this. David Cameron needs to stop trying to control people under a banner of
protecting them. It's protecting nobody. It makes our jobs harder. It
perpetuates the idea that what is not normal is damaging."
But the current debate on opting in or
out of filters may miss the point. Never before have so many men had so much
access to imagery of feigned violence, coercion and verbal abuse aimed at
women, for free.
The absence of any firm evidence as to
its effects so far is not necessarily reassuring. For the same language and
verbal imagery is already there in the male-teen culture of computer gaming,
and - as we've seen in recent high-profile
trolling cases -
has spilled over into the social media spectacularly.
