The Spinoff’s week-long focus on pornography last month inspired the following open letter from six academics and  community educators.

November heralded a new burst of media attention on pornography under the banner of “Porn Week” – reviving overdue conversations about an issue that is ubiquitous but rarely discussed. Porn Week was directly followed by an also overdue national sexual violence conference. The conference brought together people from the community sector, government, and academia to discuss the persistent and pervasive problem of sexual and family violence in Aotearoa.

We found ourselves reflecting at this conference about the conversations that were held and the conversations that were missing during Porn Week. We learnt about the evolution of porn in Aotearoa—we heard from people who view porn, people who create it, and producers of the growing genre of ethical porn.

We welcomed this public conversation, and we were heartened to see some critical discussion about the inequities in porn, particularly for Māori. However, what was notably absent for us was the challenging (and much less sexy!) conversation about the nature of mainstream pornography, including how it portrays sex and how that might be affecting youth and wider sexual cultures.

The content of mainstream pornography

In academic corners, debate about pornography can end up focussing on the fringes of pornographic representations rather than the content considered mainstream. The conversations that flowed from Porn Week arguably offered the same restricted lens. While pornography is a diverse genre, it does have a mainstream – content that is freely accessible on tube sites like Pornhub (sites that allow users to upload content and watch films for free) and widely viewed by both young people and adults across the globe. The porn that is available on Pornhub—which recorded 42 billion visits in 2019 – typically presents highly scripted forms of sex that commonly feature dominance and submission dynamics.

In this mainstream pornography, aggression is depicted in ways that frequently suggest it is consensual (without any explicit consent), pleasurable, and indeed, desired by the person on the receiving end. Overwhelmingly, the aggression portrayed in “heterosexual” pornography – consensual or not – is gendered: it is portrayed as something done by men, to women.

Research by the Classification Office reports that non-consensual aggression is a common feature in over 30 percent of the most popular pornography videos viewed by New Zealanders. A recent United Kingdom study analysed over 130,000 titles available on free pornography websites and it found that 1 in every 8 video titles included content that constituted sexual violence. The authors concluded that mainstream pornography presents sexual violence as both a permissible and normative component of the ’sexual script’—that is, the way that sex is performed, by who, in what order, and under what conditions.

Engagement with mainstream pornography

Young people report that pornography has become a primary default sex educator in a context where relationship and sexuality education is not compulsory for all secondary school students―and is often struggling to catch up with advances in the digital world. While some young people are critical of what they see in porn, one in five young people report that they had tried something seen in porn. While this is perhaps not necessarily cause for alarm, young people themselves say they are often uncomfortable about what they see in porn, that they are not having the conversations they want and need, and that porn is shaping and shifting sexual norms among their peers. A key area of concern in relation to these shifting sexual norms is so-called “rough sex”.

‘Rough sex’ and sexual violence

Aggressive acts during sex, such as “choking”, hitting, slapping, biting, and spitting, have become normalised and glamourised –as rough sex – in mainstream movies, men’s and women’s lifestyle magazines, and social media videos, as well as in mainstream pornography.

Increasingly the concept of rough sex is presented as a sexy form of consensual sex that should be embraced to spice up our sex lives. This discourse positions sex that is not “rough” (i.e., “vanilla” sex) as the antithesis to what it means to be a desirable or adventurous sexual being. Overseas research suggests that rough sex practices such as “choking” during sex are becoming commonplace, and a New Zealand survey found that 43 percent of people aged 18–30 had experienced sexual choking. Young people in Aotearoa also report that for some, rough sex is now “expected”.

Any normalisation of choking/strangulation is concerning. While it may often be consensual, data from New Zealand surveys suggests that a high percentage of those who have experienced rough sex have had unwanted acts performed on them without their consent. Project Gender’s Online Dating and Sex Survey, for instance, found that nearly half of all people who had been choked during sex did not always consent. The dangers of choking/strangulation are rarely discussed within talk about rough sex. Choking/strangulation can produce short- and long-term injuries, especially when practiced by people without adequate understanding of human anatomy – even when it is done with consent. Choking/strangulation can also be a key indicator of escalating and dangerous violence within an intimate partner relationship.

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Pornography and violence against women

Some may argue that we need not be worried about depictions of aggression in pornography, as they are simply fantasy, with viewers able to discern between online portrayals and offline sexual activities. But trying to simply emphasise a clear distinction between “porn sex” and “real sex” (whatever that may be) doesn’t account for the way that media representations can shape our collective ideas about what is possible, normal, and desirable, particularly amongst younger viewers. More challenging questions remain: why do we tolerate systemic misogyny, sexism, and racism within media designed to sexually arouse? And do we really believe that people can critique such representations and compartmentalise them without any impact on their desires, expectations, and behaviours?

Yes, we need to talk about porn – but that must also include asking the more provocative questions about mainstream porn’s dominant messages about sex, gender, dominance, and aggression – and about the possible impact these messages may have on a generation of young viewers, some of whom are learning about sex from porn. We need to be honest with ourselves about the sexual aggression prolific in mainstream porn and situate it in the broader landscape in which it resides – a world where one in three women experiences physical and/or sexual violence in her lifetime.

Signed by:

Dr Samantha Keene – Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington
Nikki Denholm – The Light Project
Professor Nicola Gavey – University of Auckland
Dr Kris Taylor – University of Auckland
Dr Jade Le Grice – University of Auckland
Associate Professor Melanie Beres – University of Otago