The Use of Sex Videos & DVDs in Britain

Summary of Findings of the BBFC Research

Murray Perkins & Pete Johnson

October 2006

Read the paper: Research_into_the_use_of_pornography.pdf

As part of a programme of on-going research to better inform the work of the British Board of Film Classification (the BBFC), the BBFC conducted research into the use of sex videos and DVDs. The purpose of the research was primarily to assist the BBFC in its understanding of the audience for the material. In addition, it was hoped that, by investigating in detail the viewing experience and its relation to viewers’ own sexual activity, lessons would be learned regarding such practical classification issues as the relevance of dialogue and the likelihood of imitation of specific activities featured in the material. These issues play a significant part in the BBFC’s assessment of the likelihood that a particular sex video/DVD may cause harm to potential viewers, or may cause harm to society through the actions of potential viewers, factors to which special regard is given in accordance with the terms of the Video Recordings Act 1984.

The results of the research have provided support for BBFC policy in a number of areas, especially those relating to adult performers acting as non-adults, the use of dangerous objects for penetration, violent or abusive activity and inherently dangerous practices such as asphyxiative sex play . The research has also highlighted the extent to which the use of sex videos reaches beyond the stereotype of solo male masturbation.

The research is part of a series of investigations into sex works and provided background for the recent ‘BBFC Expert Consultation – Teen References in R18’ study and a similar exercise currently being undertaken with regard to scenes in which performers appear to consent to significant abuse and discomfort (outside an established sado-masochistic role play context ).

Read the paper: Research_into_the_use_of_pornography.pdf

Pornography, Rape & the Internet

by Todd Kendall
Clemson University

Published May 2006

Read the paper: Pornography, Rape & the Internet (pdf)

Conclusion
 
The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.

The results above suggest that potential rapists perceive pornography as a substitute for rape. With the mass market introduction of the world wide web in the late-1990’s, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary prices for pornography fell. The associated decline in rape illustrated in the analysis here is consistent with a theory, such as that in Posner (1994), in which pornography is a complement for masturbation or consensual sex, which are themselves substitutes for rape, making pornography a net substitute for rape.

Given the limitations of the data, policy prescriptions based on these results must be made with extreme care. Nevertheless, the results suggest that, in contrast to previous theories to the contrary, liberalization of pornography access may lead to declines in sexual victimization of women. The results in Table 7 suggest that the internet has had large effects on important social behaviors; further exploration of these effects is necessary to fully understand these results, however.

Read the paper: Pornography, Rape & the Internet (pdf)

Porn Up, Rape Down

by Anthony D'Amato
Northwestern University - School of Law

Published June 2006

Read the paper: Porn Up, Rape Down (pdf)

Abstract
 
The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.

Read the paper: Porn Up, Rape Down (pdf)

Pornography has its benefits

by Dr James McConvill
Lawyer and Principal of The Corporate Research Group in Australia.

Published October 2006

From www.onlineopinion.com.au

The sexy thing to do these days when it comes to internet pornography is to regulate. The Australian Federal Government is into it, with proposals to amend the Broadcasting Services Act to tighten internet content regulation. Federal Labor has joined the party too, with Beazley screaming out that the Australian Communications and Media Authority should ban international websites which contain graphic sexual material.

It is time for an informed debate about the influence of internet pornography in our community. Rather than regulation, what is needed is education.

If we were to stop for a moment and take the time to properly assess the community impact of internet pornography, it would soon become clear that internet pornography is not the height of evil which do-gooder parliamentarians and parental groups profess. Indeed, it is probably one of the main factors contributing to a notable reduction in violent crime over the last decade.

Our community is safer and more peaceful thanks to internet pornography. This may sound counter-intuitive, but there are recent figures to back up the argument.

In a paper just released in the United States titled Porn Up, Rape Down, Northwestern University Law Professor Anthony D’amato crunches the numbers to reach the conclusion:

The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.

Professor D’amato explains that the Internet is now the predominant way in which people access pornography, noting that purveyors of internet pornography in the US earn an annual income exceeding the total of the major media networks in the country.

The main point that Professor D’amato highlights in his paper is that there is a positive correlation between the recent explosion of household internet access in the US, and a decline in incidents of rape (measured in different ways, including police reports and survey interviews) during the same period.

According to Professor D’amato, the four US states with the lowest internet access had the highest increase in rape incidents (53% increase) between 1980 and 2004, whereas the four states with the highest internet access, experienced the largest decrease in rape incidents (27% decrease).

Professor D’amato suggests there are two predominant reasons why an increase in the availability of pornography has led to a reduction in rape. First, using pornographic material provides an easy avenue for the sexually desirous to “get it out of their system”.

Second, D’amato points to the so-called “Victorian effect”. This dates back to the old Victorian era where people covered up their bodies with an immense amount of clothing, generating a greater mystery as to what they looked like naked. D’amato suggests that the free availability of pornography since the 1970s, and the recent bombardment of internet pornography, has de-mystified sex, thus satisfying the sexually curious.

You may well ask while this positive correlation between an increase in pornography (specifically internet pornography) and a reduction in rape has been demonstrated in the United States, do the statistics in Australia present a similar positive correlation? They certainly do.

According to the Australian Crime and Safety Survey, regularly published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there has been a significant reduction in the number of victims of sexual assault since 1995, when the Internet first crept into our daily lives. The ABS statistics include both reported and non-reported incidents of sexual assault, which is important given that only one in five incidents of sexual assault are reported to police.

According to the ABS data, between 1995 and 2005, there was a drop from 0.6% to 0.3% of persons aged 18 years and over who were victims of at least one sexual assault. That is a 50%t reduction.

Importantly, in another recent ABS study, it was found that in 2004-5, 56% of homes had internet access, up from approximately 20%of homes in 1998 and 40% in 2001. Thus, access to internet pornography has become much easier for a much greater number of Australians since 1998. Accordingly, the “porn up, rape down” phenomenon also rings true in Australia.

Rather than parents and parliamentarians thinking about ways to “clean feed” households so that they become internet porn-free zones, maybe they should take the opposite approach and make internet pornography freely available not only in homes, but also in schools and public libraries. But why stop there?

If we are ditching regulation, perhaps it is time to seriously explore whether content ratings on pornographic films, magazines and other materials should also be removed. There should only be regulation if the benefits exceed the costs. Professor D’amato makes the important point in his paper that there is no evidence establishing a causal connection between a student’s exposure to pornography and any tendency to commit “anti-social acts”. So, if the only effect of consuming pornography is positive rather than negative, regulation has no place and should go away.

Potter Stewart, a former US Supreme Court Justice, once said: Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is time to be confident about the benefits of pornography, in particular internet pornography, and move forward as an open-minded, mature, peaceful society.

Why wage war on porn?

Is this a battle the FBI should be fighting?

By Brian Alexander

From MSNBC October 2005

We have the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, and now, the War on Porn.

In a recent story in the Washington Post, writer Barton Gellman revealed that the FBI has signed onto the Bush administration’s War on Porn by recruiting agents for a special anti-obscenity squad. And they won’t just be looking for child porn, either, but pornography for grown-ups, made by grown-ups, featuring grown-ups.

Critics say the specter of 10 G-Men hunched over video screens watching porn may not be the best use of the FBI’s time. Advocates say it’s long past time the government cracked down because pornography can turn people into sexual predators.

Anti-porn crusades have been tried before, of course. During the Reagan administration, for example, attorney general Edwin Meese III convened a controversial study panel to examine the effects of pornography and suggest ways to prosecute purveyors. In the end, nothing much came of it. Certain fundamentalist religious groups and strains of feminists never gave up, however, and now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, spurred by congressional legislation, has taken up the cause.

But if sources for the Post story are any indication, FBI director Robert Mueller may have a tough time finding agents who take the job seriously. Not only are they more focused on, say, rooting out terrorists and making sure CEOs don’t run off with the shareholders’ dough, but an awful lot of the FBI no doubt have some personal experience with porn.

Of course, if porn really is such a danger to society, the effort might be worth it. The problem is, the research doesn’t support the worry. And if recent studies by Danish psychologist Gert Martin Hald of the University of Aarhus stand up, it’s not likely to.

Hald recently conducted a yet-to-be-published study on the usage of porn by men and women in Denmark that showed porn has become a part of the sexual lives of most people.

In a representative sampling of 688 young people aged 18 to 30, he found that 98 percent of men and 80 percent of women had viewed porn. About half of those women used it at least once per month. Men used it much more often. About 38 percent of men used it three times per week or more, which makes you wonder what these guys do for a living.

We’re not talking Playboy, either. Hald didn’t count such images as pornography. For the purposes of the study, porn included “any kind of material which aims to create or enhance sexual feelings or thoughts in the recipient and, at the same time, (a) contains explicit exposure and/or descriptions of the genitals and (b) clear and explicit sexual acts such as vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, oral sex, masturbation, bondage, sadomasochism, rape..." (Interestingly, this is pretty close to the definition used in many obscenity statutes.)

Especially we were surprised that so many women had used pornography and used it on a regular basis, Hald told MSNBC.com. Men don’t have much room for an increase. “Ceiling effect,” Hald joked.

Men do use porn differently from women. Men tend to avoid “chick porn” that depicts deep relationships. They like porn women fast and loose and willing to go nasty, largely because men use porn as masturbation aids more often than women, who tend to view it with a partner. In fact, only 17 percent of female viewers in Hald’s study used it alone.

So if all those people are seeing all that porn, you'd think Denmark would be a chaos of sex crime. But it's not. In fact, in an influential 1991 study, Hald's (now deceased) compatriot Berl Kutchinsky of the University of Copenhagen concluded that in the United States, Denmark, Sweden and West Germany more and more porn did not equal more and more rape. In none of the countries did rape increase more than nonsexual violent crimes. This finding in itself would seem sufficient to discard the hypothesis that pornography causes rape.

But it didn't, of course, and some lab studies did show that exposure to especially violent or degrading porn beefed up male aggressiveness toward women, though a link with actual crime was tough to prove.

Eight years later, a lengthy 1999 paper by Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii's Pacific Center for Sex and Society and Ayako Uchiyama of Japan's National Institute of Police Science backed up Kutchinsky and found that more porn in Japan did not make for more sex crimes: In sum, the concern that countries allowing pornography would show increased sex crime rates due to modeling or that adolescents in particular would be negatively vulnerable to and receptive to such models or the society would be otherwise adversely affected has not been vindicated. It is certainly clear from our data and analysis that a massive increase in available pornography in Japan has been correlated with a dramatic decrease in sexual crimes."

An earlier study by Hald on the effects of porn might explain why. In this study, he exposed volunteer subjects — a representative sample larger than many other such studies — to video clips from those classics of cinema, Latex and Gigantic.

Hald's conclusions: The study failed to confirm commonly feared adverse effects of exposure to pornography on nearly all measures. More specifically, the study failed to find any immediate main or stratified effects of exposure to pornography in regard to the following dependent variables: Acceptance of Interpersonal Violence, Gender Stereotypes, Negative Attitudes Toward Women, Positive Emotionality, Rape Myth Acceptance [belief in the myth that women secretly want to be raped], and Sexism.

In other words, looking at porn did not turn men into rapists. It did not make them want to become rapists.

There was one potentially important exception. In a certain subset of people, those whose personality profiles ranked low on “agreeableness,” which Hald defines as “altruistic, modest, trusting, empathic, compliant, polite,” the porn did seem to have a moderating effect on the relationship between Agreeableness and Rape Myth Acceptance (RMAS). After performing statistical corrections, however, all previous significant moderating effects of exposure to pornography turned non-significant i.e. disappeared.

So what does that mean, exactly? I asked Hald if people who are not very agreeable come to accept the rape myth after viewing porn and might be more inclined to commit a sex crime. No. It is not a causal connection. Having a high level of rape supportive attitudes does not in and of itself lead to sexual aggression such as rape. Nor can you infer a causal connection between low agreeableness, viewing porn and having higher rape supportive attitudes. Agreeableness, he says, is but one of many factors determining the RMAS score.

So it seems adult porn consumed by adults doesn’t do much of anything other than get people worked up and make them wish their partners looked a lot more like Lexington Steele or Cinnabunz.

Well, you might say, Hald works in Denmark. And you know the Danish, all liberal and Euro and so very different from us. But Hald is now working at UCLA as a visiting researcher and, he says, I strongly believe social context [and] norms are factors influencing the effects of pornography and consumption rates.

But, he says, in both Denmark and the U.S. we see time and again high prevalence rates of porn consumption, a general lack of research showing consistent adverse effects of pornography for the general consumer, and that individual differences are important mediators of effects. Research shows that this holds true for both the American and the Danish context.

Maybe that special FBI squad should plant porn inside terrorist cells. You know, keep 'em busy.

Does Obscenity Cause Moral Harm?

Andrew M.M. Koppelman, Northwestern University School of Law

Download the Paper (PDF format) - February 11, 2005

ABSTRACT:

This essay will reconsider the fundamentals of obscenity law: the harm that the law addresses and the means by which the law tries to prevent that harm. Strangely, even though an enormous amount of scholarship examines this doctrine, these fundamentals have not been adequately addressed. The harm that the doctrine seeks to prevent is not offense to unwilling viewers. It is not incitement to violence against women. It is not promotion of sexism. Rather, it is moral harm - a concept that modern scholarship finds hard to grasp. Liberals have not even understood the concept of moral harm, and so their arguments have often missed the point of the laws they were criticizing. Conservatives have understood the concept quite well, but have thought that it straightway entailed censorship. This essay is, to my knowledge, the first presentation of the liberal argument that does justice to the conservative case for censorship. I will argue that the concept is a coherent one and that obscenity law tries to prevent a genuine evil. But I will conclude that the law is too crude a tool for the task. A sound understanding of obscenity law's ambitions reveals that the doctrine is unworkable and should be abandoned.

A guide to what is known about the effects of sexually explicit material

Commissioned for the Film Censor's office in New Zealand

January 2004

The full report is available at either of the following links:
www.censorship.govt.nz/pdfword/research_document_2003.pdf
research_document_2003.pdf

Thanks to Shaun:

It seems to draw the same conclusions we have often seen. That for 30 years the debate has gone on, yet the harm of (especially  none violent) sexually explicit material, has not been proven.

You'd think that if the harm (which is supposed to justify the repressive censorship campaigns by some people in authority around the world), was so rampant, and manifest, we'd know it by know! Surely that fact alone should close the case!

From comments near the end of the document:

For over 30 years researchers have been trying to establish whether use of sexually explicit material affects men’s attitudes to or behaviour towards women, and yet we are no closer to having a definitive answer. There is some consensus that the effects of non-violent sexually explicit material ­ if such effects exist at all ­ are less pronounced than the effects of sexually violent material.

There is some agreement that not all people are affected by sexually explicit material in the same way, and that men who are of a more characteristically masculine sex-type may be more susceptible to the effects of sexually explicit material than others. There is growing understanding that it may be the degradation within some sexually explicit material that has the effect, rather than the explicitness of the sexual content.

There appears to be no evidence that the availability of sexually explicit material leads to an increase in reported sex crimes, and any differences between sex-offenders’ use of sexually explicit material and that of other men are hard to find. Yet, against that we have moving narratives from women who have been damaged by a man’s use of sexually explicit material, and who in more extreme cases have been forced to replicate sexual acts men have seen in sexually explicit material they have used. These findings are difficult to reconcile.

Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan

Milton Diamond
Pacific Center for Sex and Society

Ayako Uchiyama
National Research Institute of Police Science

Published 1999

Read the paper: Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan

This present study concentrates on the offences of Rape, Sexual assault and Public indecency in Japan and analyzes how their occurrence correlates with the increasing availability of pornography. For comparison and as "control" measures we also look at the incidence of Murder and nonsexual Violent crimes for the same period. We particularly attend to any influence the introduction of widely available pornography might have had on juveniles.

Read the paper: Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan

This What if you went looking for the harmful effects of the very worst kinds of pornography -- and they weren't there?

That's what happened to Canada Customs when it paid researchers to study customs officials who spend up to 15 hours a week reading and viewing material that goes well beyond erotica or even so-called hard-core porn.

Noted the researchers: Their work most often focuses on materials of an extreme nature which deal with clearly unacceptable sexual activities such as incest, children in a sexual context, necrophilia, bestiality, and sex involving violence, bondage and degradation. Their study of 90 officers found:

• repeated exposure to such graphic pornography had little or no measurable harmful effect on the officers, 40% of whom were female.
   
• only half of the customs officers who regularly review graphic pornographic books, magazines and films support banning sexual materials featuring violence and degradation -- the current Canadian law.
   
• one in six of the customs officers use pornography in their private lives; nearly half have in the past.

The 1992 study's key finding of no appreciable harm from heavy porn viewing contradicts the arguments accepted by the Supreme Court of Canada several years ago in widening the legal definition of obscenity. The finding also runs counter to current social science orthodoxy -- and to the expectations of the principal researcher, Queen's psychology professor William Marshall:

There are grounds for expecting exposure to pornography to have harmful effects, even when such exposure is part of a person's job requirements. Customs officers, then, who review pornography may be expected to experience problems or to develop anti-social inclinations, and these effects might be particularly apparent among those officers who review these materials on a full-time basis.

Marshall and Sharon Hodkinson, now in law at Queen's, set out to identify these problems by asking customs officers voluntarily to complete a two-hour questionnaire. The survey used standard psychology techniques (plus some new ones) to measure factors like hopelessness and depression, satisfaction with life and job, general health, empathy and marital intimacy, the desirability of various sexual practices, views on degrading sexual practices and fears about committing aberrant sexual acts.

These results were then arranged according to the amount of time each officer spent reviewing graphic porn -- ranging from none to more than 60 hours a month. According the current theory, measurable harmful effects should have increased with more viewing.

But they didn't. In particular, the sexual functioning of the customs officers was unaffected by repeated exposure to the worst pornography.

The study notes: They are not harmed by deviant thoughts or desires; they are not worried by what they might do sexually; and they appear reasonably satisfied with their present level of sexual activity.

This finding is acutely embarrassing to an agency that bans porn on the grounds that deviant sexual behavior is causally linked to exposure. But those past findings were largely based on lab research or studies of sexual offenders. The Canada Customs project is a rarity -- a real-life investigation of heavily exposed people whose characteristics, the researchers note, do not differ significantly from the general Canadian population.