A journalist from a magazine contacted me the other day to arrange an interview about, The Porn Report, a book I recently co-authored with Alan McKee and Kath Albury that details our three year study of porn production and consumption in Australia. The journalist told me that he was also speaking to someone who was concerned about pornography.
I asked him if the expert was an male psychiatrist who was worried that a consenting adult watching consenting adults having sex on film is addictive and that the proof of this is that their brains ‘light up' in a predictable manner. The journalist said: ‘Yes. Do you know him?' I replied that I didn't but I knew the type. He went on to explain that the expert in question told him watching porn was, neurologically speaking, a slippery slope and that a taste for Playboy bunnies inevitably leads to a taste for watching naked people strangle bunnies (or something like that) .
I asked the journalist how the psychiatrist had arrived at his conclusions and whether I could read his research before he interviewed me. He told me the psychiatrist in question hadn't done any research but that he had a strong ‘hunch' that pornography was addictive and likely to lead consumers to look for increasingly violent material.
I replied that I wasn't an expert in the field of neuroscience but that, acting on a ‘hunch', I'd developed my own concerns about the number of middle-aged male medical specialists who were addicted to golf. Their interest in hitting a very small ball with a very large stick seemed odd to me. It was also a hobby, I observed, that had all the classic signs of addiction: playing golf is expensive, it involves time away from family and work, and there's little obvious social purpose, beside mixing with like-minded addicts. The journalist called me back later to check if I was joking.
One of the hazards of writing about disreputable forms of culture - from reality TV to porn - is that no-one believes there's any research to be done. The jury is in. It's obvious that its all trash. Anyone who contends otherwise must be in the pay of the corporate sector or stupefied by their connection with the very products they're analysing.
Not that I'm complaining about making a living from thinking and writing about popular culture. I'm genuinely curious about what people did and do with the stuff around them, whether it's the penny stinkers who populated the pits of the Elizabethan theatre to watch Shakespeare or the family gathered around the plasma to watch Dancing With The Stars. Strangely, for an academic, I quite like other people and I want to understand what moves them and why. When it comes to media research, I'm a lot less interested in what experts think media is doing to people than in what they do with it.
In The Porn Report my co-authors and I asked, and interviewed, 1,023 porn consumers about who they were, what they liked and how it related to the rest of their life. We including questions about how often they viewed, how much they spent on it, what impact it had on their work, family life and ability to stay in a long-term relationship and whether they'd developed a taste for violent or illegal material. We also asked them about their views on women, politics and religion.
Presumably, some of the porn consumers we spoke to could have been lying about how much porn they watch or what they like. Yet, the broader demographic picture of the group we surveyed looked a lot like an advertiser's map to ‘who buys a Holden car' (with the exception that a much higher proportion voted Green and watched the ABC or no television at all).
The problem with working as a researcher in a field like mine is that you're constantly fending off medical experts whose opinions count as fact in a way they'd be horrified by if they were dealing with drug trials. Paediatricians and psychiatrists are constantly vaulting onto the front page of our newspapers to announce the importance of banning media they've never actual done any research into that would past muster in the media studies field. Hence my fantasy of rudely interrupting their fields with amateur science.
The humanities is an inexact science, yes. But that's what I like about it. It's a field that sets us the task of thinking empirically about what it means to be human. Even in my reprobate area - the field of media studies - we live and die on the basis of our methods and our peer review systems. We have numbers and, most importantly, we have real humans who've told us what they think and do and why they do it.
Popular culture is tied up with pleasure, which is a very - well - human area. Much of my work as a media studies scholar traffics in this tricky domain.
Pleasure is something very human. It's also something that makes us very anxious about being human. The taboos on pleasure have deep religious and philosophical roots. The fear of the body and its pleasures runs silently beneath many left wing objections to popular culture. Why is it, I'd like to know as a feminist, is it still so hard to talk about what ‘positive' images of consenting women having enthusiastic heterosexual sex might look like?
We all know - or are supposed to know - that those lingerie models we see at the bus stop are sexist. But who's asking what an ad for lingerie might look like in a feminist world? Should we ban and burn it all? Or should we acknowledge, as my mate Dr Kath Albury says, that dressing up in a snug corset can be an inviting to way remind your partner that they need to wrap their penis in a condom (or their vagina in a dental dam).
Pornography, at its worst, reflects the depressing misogynist attitudes that too often frame the way women live, even in a supposedly enlightened society. There is a lot of very bad pornography. But pornography - like television, like novels, like a day playing golf - is not all the same. The good news, from our survey, is that there a lot more diversity in the kind of porn that people like and in the people who like it than you'd think if you read mainstream media.