The research project is not described in any detail in The Porn Report because the authors note that it would prove too academic for readers (TPR, pp. 191–192). The scaffolding of the project is instead set out in various journal articles by Alan McKee published since 2005; there is considerable repetition and overlap of the material and argument in the articles.
Prior to beginning their research, the authors of The Porn Report made two pivotal assumptions about users of pornography. The first assumption is that the voices of pornography users are not heard. Second, as a consequence, users’ “expertise on the genre” (McKee, 2006a, p. 524, my emphasis) had not been aired. In a 2003 opinion piece, Alan McKee sarcastically characterised the process of public debate and policy making on pornography as conducted with a malicious indifference to knowledge and expertise:
When considering the introduction of laws, or setting up government bodies to implement them, it’s important that the people involved in public debate, in legislation, and in enforcement, should know nothing about the area in question. Anybody who has even the slightest knowledge of it should be pilloried, insulted and excluded from the process. Obviously (McKee, 12 May, 2003).
The research project elevated the opinions held by pornography users to the status of ‘expertise’, and characterised their practices as the acquisition of valuable knowledge. This required in turn the construction of pornographic materials as harmless (after all, we do not consult racists in formulating laws against hate speech on the basis that they are involved in and know a lot about racism).
The project accomplished the neutralisation of the harm of pornography through a content analysis of 50 popular X-rated videos which were selected from Gallery Entertainment and Axis Entertainment best seller lists so as to “represent mainstream tastes” (McKee, 2005b, p. 277).12 Although the hire and sale of videos by mail is of course an appropriate place to look for ‘mainstream’ pornography, the authors nominated such videos as representative of what consumers of pornography use. They claim that it is very difficult to find what they call ‘bad porn’, and that it is anyway not the most popular type or what the ‘average’ porn user watches (TPR, pp. 172–173). This claim completely ignores the ready availability and widespread usage of pornography on popular Internet sites such as PornHub. Meagan Tyler’s disturbing analysis of reviews in the US industry magazine Adult Video News also suggests that the pornography industry itself recognises the popularity, and profitability, of increasing violence and dehumanisation in videos (Tyler, 2010).
The unsurprising ‘finding’ of the content analysis of videos as reported by McKee however was that mainstream pornography is not characterised by objectification, violence, or abuse – and that users of pornography are not thereby participating in such practices. The other major part of the research project comprised a survey designed to discern the effects of pornography on those users. 5000 questionnaires were distributed in August, 2003, one placed in every tenth catalogue of 50,000 Axis Entertainment catalogues, together with a prepaid envelope for return. Only 367 ‘valid responses’ were returned, a low rate explained by Alan McKee as “perhaps to be expected in a public context in which users of pornography are sometimes vilified as being dangerous or criminal” (McKee, 2006b, p. 36).13 An additional online survey was conducted from 2 June to 29 October, 2003,14 advertised by the authors in the media and through public debates. This online survey garnered 656 ‘valid responses’. Out of this total of 1023 survey responses, 329 respondents provided details of their identity for possible interviews. To reflect a variety of backgrounds and hence a diversity of ‘expertise’, a sample of 46 users was then chosen for face-to-face interviews.15
The ‘expertise’ gathered from the surveys and interviews covered 3 main topics: pornography’s aesthetic merits, its effects on users’ attitudes to women, and the opinions of users about the regulation and censorship of pornography. Predictably, on the aesthetic merits of pornography, its users joked about poor production values and gratuitous characters (McKee, 2006a, pp. 528–529). Other responses were also not surprising: pornography consumers believe that pornography is good for them and are opposed to censorship. In terms of attitudes to sexual equality, there was some evidence offered that some men liked to see women in control in pornographic scenarios,16 and that women more than men respond favourably to rough sex in videos.17
As I noted above, the survey and interviews were designed to fill a supposed gap in the voicing of expertise by pornography users, enabling those who (allegedly) have been ‘othered’ (McKee’s term) or made to feel like outsiders to finally break their silence and speak for themselves. As the authors admit, the survey relied on self-selected pornography users who were disproportionately well educated.18 What they do not admit is the possibility of completely different views and practices on the part of several million Australian pornography users who did not complete the research survey. On this score, the authors note, “the ethical constraints imposed by our institutions prevented us from asking people who had not identified themselves as consumers about whether they consumed pornography” (TPR, p. 193). Given the emphasis throughout The Porn Report on ethical practice, this note about ethical constraints is well-placed. However, one of the authors did ask a person who had publicly identified himself as a non-user of pornography about his use of pornography, in a way that constituted a serious ethical breach even by the understanding of ethics underlying the project and set out in the book.
On 17 January, 2007, Alan McKee wrote, on Queensland University of Technology (QUT) letterhead, to the public intellectual and then Executive Director of the Australia Institute, Clive Hamilton, who is criticised throughout McKee’s articles and opinion pieces as having the nerve to speak about or criticise the use of pornography given his own non-use of it (e.g. McKee, 2006b, p. 35). In the letter, McKee introduced himself in these terms: “I am writing as Chief Investigator on the ARC-funded research project ‘Understanding Pornography in Australia’. I work in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology.” McKee continued:
This project aims to provide an overview of the production, content and consumption of pornographic materials in Australian society.
One issue that we are addressing is the extent to which public figures involved in debates about the censorship of pornography have been exposed to pornography themselves.
I am hoping that you can provide me with some information about your own exposure to the genre?
1. How much pornography have you been exposed to?
2. What effects would you say it has had on you?
3. Has this had any effect on your position on the censorship of such materials?19
The design of the ARC-funded project at no stage involved asking public figures about their use of pornography. Moreover, the project had been completed 2 years before McKee’s letter was sent to Hamilton. After an inquiry and findings by a panel of experts at QUT, McKee wrote to Clive Hamilton on 14 May, 2007, to acknowledge that he should have consulted with the University’s Ethics Committee before writing the original letter, and “to apologise for any concerns that have been raised by the request for information.” The seriousness of this breach of ethics safeguards, and of principles of ethical research casts a shadow on the ethical bearing of the project more broadly.
Conclusion: Let’s do the time warp, again
As noted above, the importance of the survey of pornography users to the research project was based on the claim that “for some reason we [sic] routinely exclude one group of commentators who, one would think, have some expertise on this topic – the people who consume pornography as a part of their everyday lives” (McKee 2006a, p. 523; also McKee, 2005a, p. 72). This exclusion is attributed by McKee and his colleagues to the academic and media framing of pornography only as a problem of addiction. In The Porn Report, the authors ask:
Yet when was the last time that you heard anybody admitting in the media that they use porn themselves? While million
s of Australians quietly live their lives and use pornography, the only people we hear from in public debates are church leaders, social scientists, politicians and commentators – people whose claim to expertise on the issue is the very fact that they themselves don’t watch porn, aren’t friendly with anybody who watches porn, and don’t know anything about the everyday use of porn … The only porn users you ever hear from in the media are people who call themselves ‘addicts’ and are trying to stop using it (TPR, p. 25).
In contrast, my own reading of accounts in the media, and not only in the newspaper articles to which the authors refer, suggests that greater prominence is given in them to defenders of pornography like Alan McKee than to pornography ‘addicts’ (or to the victims of the pornography industry, or partners of pornography users, for that matter). In a search of Australian newspapers on the database Factiva, I found only a handful of feature articles characterising pornography users as ‘addicts’ – and in each of those articles, Alan McKee voices his own view that pornography is good for you.20
The authors of The Porn Report consider the chief obstacles to the wider acceptance of pornography as such public and scholarly ignorance, together with a religious and political repression that perhaps did flourish in their own youth. The book is framed by anecdotes from the 1950s and 1960s about the silencing and repression of sex and sexuality. Lumby recounts that she was in year 5 when she had her “first brush with the stuff,” as schoolboys on her bus read aloud passages of what she calls “pure, delightful filth” from The Joy of Sex (TPR, p. xi). Kath Albury was seven when she discovered one of her father’s Playboy magazines (TPR, p. xi). And McKee found “an abandoned magazine in the woods behind his house when he was in his early teens” (TPR, p. xi). However, the type of hippy nudity that sometimes passed for pornography in the 1950s and 1960s bears little resemblance to the gonzo porn that pervades the Internet of the 2000s (see Dines, 2010). Nor does the sex of pornography and of its users remain repressed, as the industry and its defenders continue with some fervour to complain is still the case.
Like many academic defences of pornography, The Porn Report delights in its supposed unconventionality. In fact, its argument is tired and outdated, with little bearing on the brutal reality of popular pornography today. The fact that pornography users are, like McKee himself, “intellectually competent individuals” (McKee, 2005a, p. 81) does not excuse the project’s studied indifference to the harm enacted in and by the sexual subordination and cruelty that defines modern pornography.
Bibliography
ABC Life Matters (29 September, 2008) Forum: Feminism, Raunch Culture and Porn,
AdultShop.Com Ltd v Members of the Classification Review Board [2007] FCA 1871.
AdultShop.Com Ltd v Members of the Classification Review Board (No.2) [2007] FCA 1872.
Beverland, Michael and Adam Lindgreen (2003) ‘AdultShop.com: Establishing Legitimacy with the “Virgin” Consumer’ Marketing Intelligence & Planning 21 (6), pp. 379–391.
Castles, Simon (8 October, 2006) ‘In the Grip of a Guilty Pleasure’ The Sunday Age, Melbourne, p. 12.
Dines, Gail (2010) Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality. Beacon Press, Boston; Spinifex Press, North Melbourne.
Element, Yasmin (2006) ‘The Objectification of Women in Mainstream Pornographic Videos in Australia’ EROS Magazine 7 (1), p. 7.
Gregg, Natalie (12 August, 2003) ‘Let’s Talk about Sex’ Courier-Mail, Brisbane, p. 14.
Harford, Sonia (21 March, 1998) ‘Porn: Taboo Or Not Taboo? That Is The Question’ The Age, Melbourne, Saturday Extra, p. 1.
Lord, M.G. (1997) ‘Porn Utopia: How Feminist Scholars Learned to Love Dirty Pictures’ Lingua Franca, April/May,
Lumby, Catharine (1997) Bad Girls: Media, Sex and Feminism in the ’90s. Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Lunn, Stephen (22 February, 2008) ‘Bare Facts about Porn’ The Australian, Sydney, p. 11.
McKee, Alan (2002) ‘Understanding Pornography in Australia’ EROS Magazine, 2 (3), p. 21.
McKee, Alan (12 May, 2003) ‘What Do People Like about Porn? Everyone Knows the Answer to That’ On Line Opinion,
McKee, Alan (2005a) ‘The Need to Bring the Voices of Pornography Consumers into Public Debates about the Genre and its Effects’ Australian Journal of Communication 32 (2), pp. 71–94.
McKee, Alan (2005b) ‘The Objectification of Women in Mainstream Pornographic Videos in Australia’ Journal of Sex Research 42 (4), pp. 277–290.
McKee, Alan (2006a) ‘The Aesthetics of Pornography: The Insights of Consumers’ Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 20 (4), pp. 523–539.
McKee, Alan (2006b) ‘Censorship of Sexually Explicit Materials: What Do Consumers of Pornography Have to Say?’ Media International Australia no. 120, pp. 35–50.
McKee, Alan (2007a) ‘The Positive and Negative Effects of Pornography as Attributed by Consumers’ Australian Journal of Communication 34 (1), pp. 87–104.
McKee, Alan (2007b) ‘The Relationship between Attitudes towards Women, Consumption of Pornography, and other Demographic Variables in a Survey of 1,023 Consumers of Pornography’ International Journal of Sexual Health 19 (1), pp. 31–45.
McKee, Alan (2009) ‘Social Scientists Don’t Say “Titwank”’ Sexualities 12 (5), pp. 629–646. McKee, Alan, Katherine Albury and Catharine Lumby (2008) The Porn Report. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Overington, Caroline (28 February, 2007) ‘Porn at X-roads’ The Australian, p. 13.
Parliament of Australia, Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communication and the Arts (2008) Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media Environment.
Parliament of Australia, Senate Legislation Committee – Questions on Notice, 2003–2004 Budget Estimates Hearings.
Scud, Grace (1995) Dead White Males. Autopsy, Sydney.
Symons, Emma-Kate and Kate Mackenzie (17 April, 2004) ‘Torn on Porn’s Net Effect’ The Australian, Sydney, p. 4.
Thomas, Gerald (Dir) (1967) Carry on Doctor,
Tyler, Meagan (2010) ‘“Now, That’s Pornography!”: Violence and Domination in Adult Video News’ in Karen Boyle (Ed) Everyday Pornography. Routledge, London and New York.
Williams, Linda (Ed) (2004) Porn Studies. Duke University Press, Durham and London.
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1 The Website for the book is at
2 Information drawn from the ARC Website
3 See respectively McKee (2006a, p. 523) “Alan McKee likes Big Brother, pornography, Kylie Minogue, and New Weekly magazine”, and Harford (1998, p. 1) “[Lumby] watches X-rated videos, and believes that, if exposed to them, women can freely choose the images they wish to see.” Katherine Albury has noted that she is “not a huge porn fan” (quoted in Gregg, 2003, p. 14), and her contributions to public debates on pornography are less strident than those of McKee.
4 See Lumby (1997): chapter 5 is entitled ‘Why Feminists Need Porn’.
5 This kind of juvenile punning and glib treatment of serious subjects pervades the book, echoing the language of a pulp novel by Catharine Lumby (Scud, 1995). It is odd that the popular video Hairfree Asian Honeys is not in the running for ‘best title ever’; indeed, the pervasiveness of the theme of racial subordination in pornography is not mentioned at all: see the discussion in Dines (2010, chapter 7).
6 McKee is here referring to the academic, Robert Manne, and radio host, John Laws,
as examples of ‘studied ignorance’.
7 AdultShop.Com Ltd v Members of the Classification Review Board [2007] FCA 1871, para. 62, 69–80, 174–178, and AdultShop.Com Ltd v Members of the Classification Review Board (No.2) [2007] FCA 1872 (re confidentiality orders). See also Overington (2007, p. 13), citing from the report by McKee for AdultShop.com. Beverland and Lindgreen (2003) provide a useful exploration of the organisation and early history of AdultShop.com.
8 Parliament of Australia, Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communication and the Arts (2008) Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media Environment, transcript of 29 April, 2008, p. 18 (Julie Gale), and p. 36 (Lauren Rosewarne). Submissions had also been made to the Senate inquiry by McKee, and by Lumby and Albury.
9 Senate Inquiry, p. 102. See also Attachment A: Summary of Response to Adverse Comments made in the Senate Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children, p. 104, “I am not pro-porn”.
10 Senate Inquiry, Attachment B: Responses to Adverse Comments in Order They Occur, p. 105. Such ‘arms-length’ arrangements are common in the proffering of expert evidence; however, the evidence was solicited for AdultShop.com, not by the Classification Review Board or the Federal Court, and not by the University of Sydney. Moreover, people do not usually enter into agreements to present expert evidence in support of positions or organisations to which they are unsympathetic.
11 AdultShop.Com Ltd v Members of the Classification Review Board [2007] FCA 1871, para. 177.
12 None of the videos was Australian-made; there is very little professional production of pornography in Australia.
13 This claim is also repeated verbatim in McKee (2007b, p. 35). There are many other explanations that seem just as plausible for the low return rate.
Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry Page 22