Even on a subject that can generate pearl-clutching, good policy-making wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of the benefits, writes Jenesa Jeram

When I was a kid, I was the last of my friends to learn what a BJ stood for. Of course, I pretended I knew, because that’s what kids do. It’s quite possible that even if someone had educated me, I wouldn’t have believed them. Though quite frankly, I’m not sure my life has improved significantly having now learnt the proper meaning.

It appears kids today might not have the luxury of being so naïve. To steal Children’s Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft’s phrase, kids are facing an “avalanche of porn”.

The comments respond to a new report from the Censor’s Office looking into Kiwi’s porn viewing preferences using viewer stats from PornHub. It found that New Zealanders are big into step-family porn (46% of the 200 most watched videos), are not really into non-consensual behaviour (35%), nor the aggressive stuff (10%).

A recent commentary on The Spinoff, responding to the same report, calls for a national conversation on pornography, and recommends better sexuality education that accounts for what young people experience and engage with online. Samantha Keene wrote that people should not panic about the step-porn, but goes on to claim the non-consensual nature of porn should be the focus of our attention, and that “the findings about low levels of aggression in pornography from this report should also not lead us to a false sense of security about pornography”.

Of course, anything that involves risks to kids automatically raises alarms. And risks to kids almost always lead to blunt regulatory tools to solve the problem. Judge Andrew Becroft has already jumped the gun by recommending the 18-year-old “age gate” proposal as an immediate and practical step that could be taken – a policy that has caused implementation headaches in the UK. Concerns about children is also the reason the internal affairs minister, Tracey Martin, said “she would not rule out any measure, including age gates, and hoped to announce something on the matter next year.”

I have no argument with the idea of updating sex education to account for the digital era. But I will argue that the detriments of pornography deserve a bit of scrutiny before pulling out the big regulatory guns.

First, let’s look at the content of porn: is it that bad? Three studies are cited relating to the “aggression” that is apparently rampant in porn. The first, and purportedly most cited study, found that 88.2% of porn scenes contained physical aggression.

The numbers seem big. But it depends on what you consider aggression.

Spanking (35.7%), gagging (27.7%), and open-hand slapping (14.9%) were the most frequently observed physically aggressive acts. To be honest, I’m not clutching my pearls at this revelation. It’s certainly not nice and lovely in a kittens-and-ponies kind of way. But I guess, considering all the handwringing, I was expecting something a lot uglier and a lot more violent (although even the thought of gagging makes me want to sympathy gag).

Perhaps then, the problem isn’t the aggressive acts per se, but the treatment of women. But as it turns out, in most cases, (95% of the time) women reacted to aggression with pleasure or neutrality. Consent is also important: are the acts non-consensual? On this, the study did not observe depictions of rape or scenes that perpetuated the “rape myth” (in which the target first expresses pain or resistance to male dominance but eventually expresses enjoyment), a finding that is shared with other recent studies. It has been suggested that this shift has occurred because people have become more educated about women’s rights and sexual assault.

The other two studies cited showed similar results, but with even less “aggression”. The second study found that 43% of the videos in the sample included visible aggression, and the vast majority of videos portrayed consent. The final study found that except for spanking and gagging, violence occurred rather infrequently, and non-consensual sex was relatively rare.

These findings are remarkably consistent. A 2018 report (titled Harder and harder) looked at whether aggressive porn was increasing (it wasn’t), and whether viewers had a preference for it. The report found that aggression, and in particular non-consensual aggression, “were less likely to be viewed than videos with no aggression and were less likely to receive favourable reviews from viewers”. The report argues “the fact that women display pleasure in the large majority of videos, and that the majority of these pleasure displays do not follow aggressive acts, sends a message that women’s sexual pleasure is important after all.”

So, studies have found that aggression in pornography does occur but is typically not hardcore violence and is typically consensual or pleasurable. Not everyone will be convinced this is reason to relax. A related issue is how this content affects behaviour. Does the content of porn adversely affect real life interactions? And most concerningly, does it perpetuate real-life aggression and violence?

A 2009 literature review of the causal relationship between exposure to pornography and sexual aggression provides reason for scepticism. In fact, it argues that available data and extant research “seem to lead to a discounting of the notion that pornography has causally increased the prevalence of sexual assaults and rapes”. A caveat would be that the studies span a long time-range so not all of the studies in the review would account for today’s pornography landscape.

There is definitely room for more research in this area, especially given a lot of past studies on pornography and real-world effects suffer serious methodological inadequacies.  This means re-opening the hypothesis that porn causes real-world harm. Contrary to much of today’s commentary, the hypothesis shouldn’t be taken as a given.

Finally, a discussion of good policy-making wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of the benefits (or for the nerds: utility) of an activity – it’s the “benefit” part of cost-benefit analysis after all. Now, I know taking into account the enjoyment people derive from an activity has fallen terribly out of fashion in some academic/policy circles. It’s why people advocate for anti-fat and anti-sugar and anti-salt and anti-smoking and anti-drinking and anti-anything-pleasurable regulations.

Yet it has to be said: some people – perfectly normal non-threatening people – enjoy porn. Porn makes some people happy (for want of a better euphemism). You won’t necessarily see people announcing it to the nation on breakfast television or marching in the streets, but I do assure you that these people exist. Heck, New Zealand didn’t become 13th in the world per capita for frequency of visits to Pornhub by sitting on our hands. And it’s not just about men. 39% of New Zealand Pornhub viewers are women, which is well above the world average of 26%.

So if we’re going to have a national conversation about porn, let’s start by ensuring risks are given accurate weight, and the benefits aren’t thrown out the window completely.

And once that research is all done and dusted, it’s time to move on to the next big area of inquiry: are New Zealanders concealing a deeply held desire to have sex with their family members? I suggest raising that one at the family Christmas dinner.

From New Zealand’s biggest band selling out Western Springs to a landmark moment for Pasifika women onstage, these are the live events that shaped New Zealand this decade.

An anchor in the middle of the deep blue sea: Daffodils, 2014

“Daffodils should play all over the country. It should play all over the world. It resonates so strongly as a piece of our own mixed-up, precious culture, it should be our new national flag.”

So says Simon Wilson’s review in Metro of the surprise theatre hit of 2014. I was lucky enough to be in the same opening night crowd as Wilson, even the same row as him, and at the time I couldn’t agree more. I saw Daffodils another six times, across many return seasons and in at least two countries.

The show, written by Rochelle Bright, shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise hit as it was. It was a musical, and marketed as “a play with songs”, generally anathema to those who like either plays or songs. The leads weren’t huge celebrities. It was from a completely new, unproven company. It was a simple, tragic story of a couple who fell in love under slightly suspect circumstances, and whose insecurities and inability to communicate tore them apart. Swap out a few nouns, and it’s the story of basically any relationship that doesn’t work. But it was the jukebox nature of the show that hooked people – songs from the Finn Brothers, Bic Runga, The Mint Chicks – and the two titanic performances by Colleen Davis and Todd Emerson that got them coming back.

The impact of the show has dimmed a bit in recent years, with a film adaptation that quietly came and went with kind-but-not-rapturous reviews, but there’s been few shows this decade that captured audience’s devotions quite like this one yet. And even better, it captured a not-often-interrogated part of our psyche, that colonially inherited upper lip, in a way that showed the inevitable, heartbreaking consequences of repression. I remember the show perfectly well – it’d be hard not to after seeing it six times – but I remember the conversations it started among me and my friends even more. / Sam Brooks

The sun in the middle of the stars: Lorde at Spark Arena, 2013

Every now and then you get the chance to be at an event where you feel the world changing right in front of your eyes. At the edge, sun with the universe pivoting around you, that sort of thing. It’s the feeling of seeing yourself from the future, Marty McFly-style, reaching and tapping you on the shoulder and whispering, “Hey. You’re in a moment now. Buck your ideas up.” Lorde’s Spark Arena concert was one of those moments.

At the time, a free concert at Vector Arena (RIP Vector Arena, long live Spark Arena) by a then-promising, yet-to-be-super-pop-star was a cool prospect, but it didn’t quite feel like it. That venue has doomed acts before – acts who can’t fill the space with either songs or presence. But after her captivating set, there was no question that Lorde was the real deal. Even more than that, she was the realest deal – the hooks, that towering voice, the offbeat charisma. An hour later, there was no need to compare her to anybody. Every teen pop star who came after would now be compared to her, and they have been. / SB

The Spinoff’s Decade in Review is presented in partnership with Lindauer Free*, the perfect accompaniment to end-of-decade celebrations for those looking to moderate their alcohol content (*contains no more than 0.5% alc/vol). 

A star is (re)born: Rose Matafeo’s Finally Dead, 2015

Is there any comedian that had a better decade than Rose Matafeo? Like, in the world? She’s gone from doing shows at the Basement Theatre to winning pretty much every local comedy award to winning the big award at Edinburgh Fringe and is closing it out with a confirmed HBO special. That, as the homosexuals would say, is a slay. 

No, Finally Dead isn’t the show that won Matafeo the Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Award, but Finally Dead is what feels like Matafeo’s coming out and stepping up moment. A riotous hour of comedy that started with Matafeo in a coffin and ended with her triumphantly on top of a car outside the Basement Theatre. The high concept, her charisma, and every bit worked in concert with each other. She was always a star, and a must-see at every comedy festival, but this felt like the first time she owned it. After Finally Dead, all she had to wait for was for the world to pay attention. And lord, did it ever? / SB

Out not with a bang, but a press release: The final Big Day Out, 2014

New Zealand’s annual one-day festival didn’t even get the dignity of a final festival before having the plug pulled. There was no funeral, no wake, no party – it happened via press release in the middle of the year. It was a sad but not surprising end to a festival that had slowly dwindled in social relevance and commercial viability. The shift to Western Springs as a venue helped, but the very public and outrage-inflaming cancellations of Kanye West in 2012 and Blur in 2014 were just a few more shovelfuls of dirt dug from that particular grave.

Hell, the final Big Day Out had a line-up so limp that I didn’t even bother to attend; the vacuum of Blur seemed to suck all the energy out of the room. But I’ll be damned if I wasn’t out the front of a house on Old Mill Road right behind Western Springs, getting absolutely wild to Major Lazer’s ‘Pon de Floor’ as cars milled around us, trying to escape from the maw of suburban Auckland. The festival will always have a legacy in the brains of New Zealanders of a certain age and it’s one of the sad marks on this decade that it didn’t go out with a bang, a drop, or a mosh pit, but a goddamned press release. / SB

When Pasifika women get loud: Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, 2019

There’s no one aspect of Silo Theatre’s Wild Dogs Under My Skirt to point to and highlight its greatness. Everything had to be just right to work, and it was. The poems it was based on had to be some of the best in recent history, and Tusiata Avia provided. The actors had to be phenomenal, an inevitable outcome with a legend like Anapela Polata’ivao leading the cast while also directing. And the performances had to feel authentic. It couldn’t feel like a caricature of a Sāmoan woman, or a Sāmoan woman as seen through the eyes of an other. It had to be real. And it was, with its timidness, its raunchy humour, and beneath it all, the barely contained rage. Anyone wondering what life for a Sāmoan woman might be like would find out by watching Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, but it wouldn’t be a comfortable lesson. That’s what set it apart.

Perhaps the one downside is that, given the usual demographic of the theatre community, those who would’ve benefitted most from seeing Wild Dogs Under My Skirt – the women, young and old, who could compare their own experiences to those playing out on stage – were nowhere to be seen among the Q Theatre audiences. / Madeleine Chapman

The man of the decade, easily: Kendrick Lamar at the Powerstation, 2012

When Kendrick Lamar, one of the most gifted rappers of his generation, arrived in Auckland, his album Good Kid, M.A.A.D City had been heating up speakers for just under two months. His ascent had been rapid, and the idea of seeing him perform in a thousand-person-capacity room seemed like a dream. On stage, Lamar was as revelatory as his recordings. Rapping with perfect microphone control and a rare charisma, he took us on a journey from his early mixtape cuts to his thunderous radio singles.  I swear over half of the audience have dropped a mixtape since then, or at least thought about it. Kendrick’s performance inspired a whole movement in New Zealand. Ask around, you’ll see. / Martyn Pepperell

Two lawless shows: Chicago and Pleasuredome, 2013 and 2017

The two musical phenomenons of the decade linked by two people: director Michael Hurst and star Lucy Lawless.

Other than that, these things couldn’t be any more different. Chicago was Auckland Theatre Company’s best show of the decade – one that took all the resources our country’s splashiest theatre company could manage for a Lucy Lawless-led, deconstructed version of the Kander and Ebb musical. It tore the show to shreds and filled it with spectacle, nuts choreography and arrangements that were aimed at one thing: more. From the show’s epic opening blackout, to a roof-burning rendition of ‘When You’re Good to Mama’, to the sad, tapped-out conclusion, it was easily the best musical I saw in this country this decade. It sold out, extended, and sold out again. I’m sure that if we had the infrastructure to handle it, it’d still be running. 

On the other hand, Pleasuredome was a lycra-clad Icarus that flew too close to the fake Avondale sun. Ambitions were high for this immersive-ish musical that took place on the set of Evil Dead, repurposed to be some kind of alternate-universe 80s vision of New York. It had spectacle, but no skeleton to hang it on. It had the songs, but none of their original heart. It had a star who inspires endless devotion from her fans. Sadly, rather than being a nostalgic crowd-pleaser, it ended up catering largely to bewildered and boozed-up Christmas work parties. Reviews were gleefully cruel and, when the show closed, it did so with nary another mention. 

Less than two years later, it sits in the hall of fame of high-profile theatrical flops, right next to Once Were Warriors: The Musical. Long may it rest in its neon coffin. / SB

Bring it to the runway, again, and again: Femslick, 2017, and the rise of the FAFSWAG Collective

“Seeing a show like this at the Basement Theatre studio right in the middle of the unofficial theatre precinct is radical. Not only is it a world-class show that could be translated into any experimental space in New York or Edinburgh without a single note being given, but it is a show that feels no need to compromise or compartmentalise its otherness.”

I’m quoting myself, and my review of FAFSWAG’s Femslick on the Pantograph Punch two and a half years ago, here. It remains one of the most enervating and bone-shaking experiences I’ve had in the theatre – an achingly personal, vulnerable and wildly entertaining explosion of otherness. And really, this is a hat tip for that show, as strong a mainstream (or alt-mainstream, depending on how you view Basement Theatre) debut as I’ve seen this decade.

In the three years since, FAFSWAG have proven themselves as an essential part of the arts ecosystem of not just Auckland, but New Zealand. This is a community-driven, artist-led, unashamedly queer and POC collective that have made bigger inroads to cultural relevance and shaking down the foundations of the house than most of our mainstream theatres have. If it was all those things, it’d be great, of course. But on top of that, the work FAFSWAG are making is fresh, boundary-testing and just straight-up excellent.

Put simply: people of all ages and colours, from all points along any binary you can name, are excited about the next FAFSWAG show. They’re booking tickets, they’re saving the dates in their phones, they’re planning outfits. In contrast, I can’t remember the last time I heard someone get genuinely excited about the next Auckland Theatre Company show. Maybe next decade. / SB

Our biggest band rises up and wins big: Six60 sell out Western Springs, 2018

Duncan Greive wrote in 2018: Six60 announce a show at “Western Springs, an outdoor stadium in Auckland’s inner city suburbs. If it doesn’t necessarily ring a bell, that’s probably because it’s not in particularly common usage. There are very few artists anywhere in the world capable of filling it.

Over the past few years that has included The Police, Guns N’ Roses and Bruce Springsteen. Heritage megastars deep into their careers, often playing long-awaited reunions. At 49,000, capacity is just too big for all but the very biggest.

For New Zealand artists, it’s not even really an Everest – it’s just not something they would ever contemplate. You might as well talk about planning a show on the moon. Even with Six60’s immensely popular live show and dominance of streaming and radio, it remained a huge risk – a show without data points to safely predict outcomes. To put it in perspective, only one other New Zealand artist has ever headlined a show there, and that was over half a century ago in 1966, when Larry Morris pulled 18,000, according to Six60’s promoter, industry legend Brent Eccles.”

They sold it out. Then, in 2019, they did it again. Six60 and “a choir of 50,000” looks like it’s a summer perennial now, utterly unbelievable but also not nearly enough for the most nakedly ambitious band in our history. / Duncan Greive

Emblematic of a decade: Lady Gaga collapsing at Vector Arena, 2010

This one was definitely a “had-to-be-there” moment, but such is the beauty of live events. It popped up in headlines and tweets the day after, and then seemed to fade from people’s memories. But for me, it’s emblematic of the decade as a whole.

To set the scene: it’s the last song, post-encore, of Lady Gaga’s first gig returning to New Zealand since she opened for the Pussycat Dolls, on the ridiculously lavish Monster Ball Tour. It’s a stinkingly hot night, and for whatever reason, the air conditioning isn’t on in Vector Arena. She’s been playing for a good hour and a half at full energy. People in the front rows of the mosh pit have been carried over the barriers to hydrated safety.

Her final song? ‘Bad Romance’, where she starts off inside a giant gyroscope that is spinning around her.

Gaga seems a bit low energy and a bit dazed, sitting down before even getting to the first chorus. She gets a few lyrics wrong. The back-up dancers keep going, even though something is clearly wrong. Halfway through the chorus she gets to her feet, but eventually sits back down again, and then lies down.

She takes her big silver helmet off, slurring her way through the song. She is a sweaty, overheated, bewigged mess. She does the entire second verse on her back, moving onto her hands and knees for the pre-chorus, and then finally: she gets back up.

Then, the bridge. The fucking bridge. She does the choreography, walking down the catwalk to the second stage. “Walk, walk, fashion baby. Work it move that bitch like crazy.” (I’ll be the first to admit that Gaga’s lyrics do, uh, not translate well to actual text). She squats down, clearly exhausted once more. But with one last push, she shoves herself back to a standing position. She half-steps through her choreography. She finishes the song, at full, triumphant voice.

She does the fucking job. (By witness/fan accounts, what actually happened is she hit her head prior to getting onstage.)

It was a rough decade for us all, fam. To quote Blur’s ‘Song 2’: You get knocked down, you get up again, ‘cause it’s never gonna bring you down. We’ve got through elections, we’ve lived through more tweet-cycles than our ancestors did plagues, and for the most part, we’re still here. We might have worms in our brains from the internet, and we might be progressively getting hotter each summer and colder each winter, but we get back up and we sing whatever our ‘Bad Romance’ is, whatever our best self does, and we keep going. / SB