It seems Australians aren’t ready for a real debate on porn and sex. Yet.
The Australian reported last month that Telstra was offering “soft-core pornography” with titles like “Dirty Housewife and Hot Asian Gets Wet for between $3.50 and $4.95 per viewing” to customers with smartphones. It barely raised an eyebrow.
The mainstreaming of pornography is something it appears we don’t even want to talk about anymore. This is no doubt, at least in part, a result of the tiresome merry-go-round of the porn debates in Australia which are often ill-informed and out-dated.
There are only a handful of academics who research pornography in this country, yet it is a topic most anyone thinks they can weigh-in on.
Best online porn website australia, for example, has been busily extolling the virtues of pornography this year without ever having to talk about what modern, mainstream porn actually looks like.
Arndt argues porn is fine, because men who watch it report that they enjoy watching it.
The Porn Report, written by three prominent Australian academics who do actually conduct research in the area, employed a similar leap of logic. But a group of self-selecting porn consumers claiming porn is great does not make it so.
A tough gig
This level of public discussion means criticising the pornography industry in Australia is a tough gig. Indeed, critiquing pornography without being painted as an extreme, ideologically-driven feminist or a religious loon has proved nearly impossible in recent years.
Unfortunately, many of the old stereotypes about feminist critiques of porn continue to persist, despite the existence of new and challenging international academic literature.
One common retort is that the feminist critique (as if there were only one) of pornography is obsolete. Several scholars, both here and in the US, have publicly sought to “move on” from the kind of sexual politics which dominated porn debates in the 1980s and 1990s. But, in practice, they tend to still rely on using old feminist critiques as a starting point for any new discussion.
The Porn Report:
The Porn Report, for example, was positioned specifically against the feminist anti-porn stereotype. The official website publicising the book, for instance, offers a set of true or false statements to the reader:
• Most porn users are uneducated, lonely and sad old men
• All porn is violent
• Pornography turns people into rapists or paedophiles
• Pornography portrays women as passive object of men’s sexual urges
The Porn Report unequivocally answers “false” to all of these statements and in the process sets itself up as correcting these misrepresentations.
But what the authors are actually doing is providing a false and overly-simplistic impression of anti-pornography arguments from previous decades. This leads them to assert that The Porn Report is inherently more objective and reasonable than any existing literature without ever justifying the claim.