Debunking the Porn Panic Webinar

Calls to ban ‘harmful pornography’ are rife. Here’s what teens actually think about porn, The Conversation (21 August 2024)

The crusade against pornhub is going to get someone killed, VICE (13 April 2021)

A closer look at Exodus Cry, the shady group behind Pornhub’s recent purge, SCREENSHOT Media (19 December 2020)

Inside Exodus Cry: The Shady Evangelical Group With Trump Ties Waging War on Pornhub, The Daily Beast (16 October 2020)

This Is The Way The War On Pornography Ends, ThinkProgress (8 October 2014)

An activist tried to take down trafficking on Pornhub. Did she do more harm than good?, The Independent (28 July 2024)

A Frank Talk With the Ex-Pornhub Employee in Netflix’s ‘Money Shot’, Rolling Stone (16 March 2024) [archived]

Age verification for pornography access? Our research shows it fails on many levels, The Conversation (11 June 2024)

The questions Rachel Hills didn’t ask Melinda Tankard Reist, No Place For Sheep (10 Jan 2012)

‘Porn is not a feminist act’: Chanel Contos’ book takes a stand against the porn industry, Marie Claire (22 September 2023)

The Truth About Porn [interview with Daniel Principe], Sign of the Times (16 April 2024)

Web porn: Just how much is there?, BBC News (1 July 2013)

Jenna Love: Hello. Before we begin today’s webinar, Scarlet Alliance wishes to acknowledge the stolen lands upon which we live and work. We have office locations on Gadigal land in nipaluna and in Naarm. I’m calling in from the lands of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples. Of course, we have people here today calling in from across the stolen lands of what we now refer to as Australia. Today, we’re going to be discussing some really complex issues. I think that a lot of those cannot be disentangled from the ongoing effects of colonisation.

Hello. My name is Jenna Love. I’m the president of Scarlet Alliance, and I use she/her pronouns. Scarlet Alliance is the national peak body for sex workers and sex worker organisations. We are a peer organisation, meaning that all of our staff, board, and members are or have been sex workers. Our purposes are to advance the health of past and present sex workers, to promote and protect the human rights of past and present sex workers, and to promote respect for and end all forms of discrimination against sex workers.

You’re going to hear me say sex workers a lot today. Our membership consists of individual sex workers and sex work organizations across so-called Australia. Today, we are talking about porn, which is great. I’m thrilled. I like to talk about porn. As attention very rightly turns to the current epidemic of violence against women in Australia, some people have decided that pornography is to blame.

Too many people have unquestioningly accepted and promoted the ideas that pornography directly leads to an increase in sexual, domestic, and family violence, and that young people accessing pornography is inherently harmful, yet the research in these areas is far from conclusive. In fact, there is a significant and growing body of evidence that challenges these often repeated claims. Sexual, family, and domestic violence is a serious and urgent issue in Australia, and it is deserving of evidence-based intervention not anti-porn moral panics.

Internationally, we are also seeing conservative lobby groups using porn as a smoke screen for their anti-sex and anti-LGBT agendas. For example, in the USA, we have the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which was formally known as Morality in Media, Exodus Cry, and the Trafficking Hub Campaign, and all of those have their roots in socially conservative faith-based movements, including opposing all forms of sex work and promoting anti-LGBT views.

These movements are also platformed and supported in far-right circles, including the incitement of violence against sex workers and LGBT people on the right-wing social media platform, Gab. That’s a cat. That will happen. That will continue to happen. In Australia, Collective Shout headed by Melinda Tankard Reist, a self-described pro-life feminist, is an organisation that portrays itself as a grassroots campaign movement against the objectification of women and the sexualization of girls. It is opposed to the decriminalization of sex work.

It will come as no surprise to sex workers that Collective Shout is also an ardent supporter of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, who not only opposes the rights of sex workers but also the rights of trans women, trans self-identification laws, and promotes sex testing in sports. Chanel Contos, who established the Teach Us Consent Campaign, and Daniel Principe, formerly from Collective Shout, are two high-profile consent advocates who are also promoting this porn moral panic.

Both are now the ambassadors for the federal government’s consent campaign, and both promote and publicly share anti-sex work perspectives conflating sex work with violence. While both of these activists have brought much-needed media attention to the lack of consent and sexuality education in schools, their active dismissal of the voices of sex workers and their alignment with anti-sex worker and anti-trans campaigners is deeply concerning.

It’s clear that the current debates on porn are not going away any time soon.

Today, we’re hoping to contribute some much-needed nuance and evidence to what has to date been a campaign driven by feelings not by facts. Today, we’re going to be hearing from Professor Alan McKee, Greta Desgraves, and Dr. Zahra Stardust. They are going to each have a short time to have a chat. They’re going to keep those relatively short, so that we can then open up a discussion about the points raised because we think that’s going to be the most valuable in this setting. We have received a number of registration questions, so we will start with those.

Then we’ll move on to questions that arise during this webinar, and hopefully, we’ll address as many as we can. Our first speaker today is Professor Alan McKee who is an expert on entertainment and healthy sexual development. He currently leads the $350,000 Australian research council-funded project, Improving Digital Sexual Literacy in Australia. His latest co-authored book called What Do We Know About The Effects of Pornography after Fifty Years of Academic Research emerges from an ARC grant titled Pornography’s Effects on Audiences explaining contradictory research data.

He has published books on healthy sexual development and entertainment education in journals including The Archives of Sexual Behavior, The International Journal of Sexual Health, and The Journal of Sex Research. Take it away, Alan.

Alan McKee: Thank you so much, Jenna. It’s such a privilege to be here. I’m very jealous of your cat. As Jenna said, I’m Alan McKee. I am a cis-gendered man. I’m 53 years old. I’m gay, middle-class, and Scottish. I’ve been studying pornography for over 30 years now. Oh my God. The book that Jenna mentioned ‘What Do We Know About The Effects of Pornography after Fifty Years of Academic Research‘, it’s a slim volume, very readable. I highly encourage you to have a look at it.

We spent three years, a team of us, looking at hundreds of academic research projects from across the decades on pornography and synthesising all of that data, and what we discovered was underwhelming. People who say they enjoy consuming pornography are also more likely to be sexually adventurous. That is it. What the data does not show is that people who consume more pornography are more likely to be violent against women or to have less positive attitudes towards women.
In fact, there was a landmark piece of research in 2015 published in the Journal of Sex Research called Pornography Users Hold More Gender Egalitarian Attitudes Than Non-users in a Representative American Sample. That was a huge survey representative by gender and age and location of Americans in this case looking at their attitudes towards women, whether or not they had gender egalitarian attitudes, to use the terminology. It found that the people who didn’t use pornography had worse attitudes towards women, which goes against the urban myths.

As Jenna was saying, the urban myths are just so popular and repeated so much particularly in the media that pornography is associated with gendered violence, intimate partner violence, that’s almost like a truism. It’s not actually the case. It may seem surprising. This idea that people who do not consume porn have worse attitudes towards women might seem initially surprising, but it makes sense when you understand the hidden variable, which is how religious people are because people who are more religious are less likely to say they watch pornography. Whether or not they do is another issue.

They’re less likely to tell people that they watch pornography, and they’re also likely to have worse attitudes towards women. If we are concerned about gendered violence, then starting with pornography is the wrong place to go. What are the predictors of having worse attitudes towards women, being more tolerant of gendered violence?

We ran a survey of Australian porn consumers a few years ago, and what we found was that the best predictors of having worse attitudes towards women were not how much pornography people consumed, it was being male, being older, being right-wing, being religious, living outside of a city, and having a lower level of formal education. Those are things that are actually correlated with having worse gender attitudes, not consuming pornography.

I’ll leave it there. As Jenna said, we want to keep time to answer your questions and let you lead the discussion, so I’ll leave it there and hand back to you, Jenna.

Jenna: We’re going to move on now to hear from Greta Desgraves. Greta is a sex worker, a porn performer, and activist based in Naarm. With a background in law and industrial organising, they joined Scarlet Alliance in 2022 and became our policy officer in 2023. Their areas of interest in advocacy include debunking moral panics, promoting digital rights, and ensuring that internet laws and regulation maintain privacy, safety, and community for sex workers in unceded Australia and across the world. Over to you, Greta.

Greta Desgraves: Thanks, Jenna. Today I’m dialling in from Wurundjeri country here in Naarm, Melbourne, and extending respect and solidarity to all First Nations people both in stolen Australia and across the world. When we’re talking about anti-porn ideology, we chuck around the phrase moral panic quite a lot. I think it’s worth unpacking exactly what we mean by that. The term moral panic was invented by sociologist, Stanley Cohen, to describe how the media can influence community fears and vice versa.

He describes a moral panic as having five stages. Number one, there’s a group of people or idea or thing that challenges the status quo. This could be something like a subculture, think like goths or migrant workers. It could be a newly available drug like LSD or meth, or it could just be a new way of thinking or being, like being queer or atheism. The second stage is when mass media gets a hold of this challenge and amplifies it into being a threat and a big widespread problem.

The third stage is that people become convinced that this problem is indeed big and widespread, directly impacts them and everyone they know. The threat may become part of urban legends. If you think about maybe the stories that you heard as a kid of people hiding razor blades in Halloween candy, that kind of thing. The fourth stage is that once enough people are scared of this threat, then law and policymakers can swoop in and save the day by making new laws and policies.

Then the fifth stage is that the problem is magically solved and disappears. Most of the time we never actually stopped to ask ourselves whether we actually solved a problem or if there wasn’t a problem, or at least a big problem, in the first place. The concept of moral panic is often used to explain societal reactions to both new technologies and expressions of sexuality, especially young people’s sexualities.

It’s worth asking ourselves a bit of the current debate around porn in Australia can also be seen as moral panic. New technologies and their effects on young people, especially in terms of young people’s engagement with sex and violence, have often been the subject of what we could describe as moral panics. In 1963, the documentary Perversion for Profit claimed, with total seriousness, that the availability of Playboy magazines and pulp fiction paperbacks at corner news agencies was going to make people so perverted and especially so gay that the United States would not be able to win the Cold War and communism would rule the world.

In the 1980s, VHS tapes, especially both porn and horror movies, were blamed for violent crime, especially among young people. In the UK, raids on video rental outlets, bookshops, and even private homes to look for banned video nasties were commonplace. Similarly, in the US, parents and politicians circulated lists of songs and albums to ensure that teenagers could be prevented from hearing music containing sexually explicit language.

In 1995, a bestselling Time magazine article called Cyber Porn claimed that the vast majority of images shared on incident message boards were porn, and that the sex depicted in online porn was more extreme than what was available in video or in print. Within weeks, the article was completely debunked as being based on a single-flawed study concocted by an undergrad student, which only looked at the tags used on images from private message boards rather than the images themselves, and was limited to message boards specifically dedicated to adult content.

More recently, we’ve seen similar social moral panics related to sexting, smartphones, social media, and apps like Snapchat. The current moral panic media messaging around porn states that there’s more online porn than ever before, that it’s being accessed more than before, and that the content is worse than ever before. Let’s unpack each of these. First, the evidence indicates that the proportion of porn content on the internet was actually at its highest in the late ’90s.

This is pretty explainable by the fact that the earliest adopters of internet technologies were younger people, especially young men, since that time, not only do more diverse groups of people use online spaces but also the things that we use internet technology for have diversified. It was true that in 1999, 40% of internet searches were porn related. However, that was limited to people typing something porn related into a search engine rather than measuring how much porn was actually being consumed. Current estimates from both search engine data and internet traffic analysis suggest that porn content makes up somewhere between 4% to 15% of internet material.

Number two, the idea that porn is being accessed more than before seems really intuitive because smartphone technology has improved internet access and information sharing across the world. However, in terms of actually using this technology to consume porn, the data isn’t really that compelling. Some research suggests that adult men’s consumption of porn has remained really stable since the advent of the internet having risen only around 2% from the pre-internet ’90s to mainstream smartphone availability in 2010.

The idea that somehow porn is worse than before is difficult to quantify. I think it’s something that it’s really important for sex workers to push back against. First, we don’t really have any agreement on what counts as harmful or violent when we’re talking about porn. Many researchers will include depictions of deep throat, anal, dirty talk, fisting, and spanking as violence, even if the context of this portrayal is enthusiastic consent.

The evangelical Christian lobbyists in the anti-porn industry have a vested interest in framing certain sexual practices as risky, harmful, or violent, and often those types of sex acts are the types of sex practice by queer folks. As sex workers, we can easily understand that just because I’m not personally interested in a sexual activity or wouldn’t consent to it, doesn’t mean that another person wouldn’t. I think that’s really important to keep us thinking at the front of our minds when we’re talking about porn.

That lands us on how we should talk about porn, how we should educate ourselves and others, and some possible ideas for porn regulation, which Zahra is going to talk about in detail. To round out my thoughts, number one, sex work is work, which means that porn performers and produces are sex workers. Treating any form of sex work or sex worker as inherently harmful perpetuates stigma and the whoreachy and has negative consequences for all sex workers. Number two, technology and news cycles just move extremely quickly. Today’s moral panic is tomorrow’s embarrassing overreaction. Thank you so much and back to you, Jenna.

Jenna: Thank you, Greta, for the great last line. Up next and our third and final speaker today is Dr. Zahra Stardust, who is a sex worker, writer, researcher, and porn studies scholar interested in the regulation of sexual cultures. Her work specialises in sexual media and sex tech, focusing on the politics of sexual content moderation, including the production, distribution, and regulation of explicit media and the development of community-led social justice sex tech. Her first book, Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation, and Resistance, explores the clash between Indie porn producers, governments, and big tech. Zahra is a lecturer in digital communication at QUT and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Over to you, Zahra.

Zahra Stardust: Thank you so much, Jenna, and also to Alan and to Greta. Today I’m joining you from the unceded lands of the Yugambeh people. I want to just speak briefly about the regulation of pornography and different ways that we could be investing our energies. Just to build upon what Greta was saying about moral panics and how we can trace these back through different technologies from the internet to VHS to the printing press. What keeps coming up is really concerns about the democratisation of culture and this supposedly corruptive effect when materials enjoy mass circulation.

When we look to regulatory trends, we see this really interesting strategic journey. Pornography has moved away from being described through narratives of obscenity and indecency, which were characterised by very high-profile trials in England and the US. Then you might remember the discourses around harm and injury during the ’80s when anti-pornography ordinance was proposed by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, that would have enabled women supposedly harmed by pornography to be able to sue for damages.

Then porn performers became much more vocal about our experiences on set and the anti-pornography advocates turned their attention to consumers, or what they perceived as the deleterious effects of pornography upon consumers. Now we see moral panic about porn addiction, that pornography is going to threaten relationships and coupledom. We see pornography being positioned as a public health crisis.

This preoccupation with so-called extreme pornography and the criminalization of kink. We see attempts to introduce compulsory condom use, or to fingerprint and background check performers, and most recently, to implement biometric age verification of consumers. Much of this energy is being invested in surveillance, in litigation avenues, in carceral approaches. With all of this focus, governments are really missing opportunities to listen to sex workers and to listen to young people too. We know the current approaches don’t work, either for helping consumers understand what they’re seeing, or for keeping sex workers safe and valued.

As an example, Alan and I and some other colleagues at QUT recently did some research into age estimation software because you might have heard that the government’s recently introduced a $6 million trial of age assurance technologies. We used a face recognition algorithm to examine 10,000 faces. Unsurprisingly, we found that the software worked best on white faces, worst on dark faces. Boys were more likely to be misclassified than girls, and it got people’s ages wrong by up to 40 years. Age estimation is unlikely to stop people from viewing porn, and we know that the best approach to supporting healthy sexual development is to talk soon, talk often, and talk openly with young people about sex.

Also, we’re at this time where production is increasingly democratised. Porn performers are more diverse than ever before and yet audiences are only seeing this small percentage of what is available because the distribution infrastructure is centralised among giant tech platforms. We’re not teaching young people how to find pornography that aligns with their politics, or their ethics, or their values. There’s plenty of things that governments could actually be doing if they wanted to improve people’s relationships to sexual media and these include things like strengthening anti-competition and taxation laws to prevent giant tube sites from monopolising the porn marketplace.

It includes ending discrimination against sex workers so that we can actually access reliable hosting and payment processing, and text services. It includes supporting sex worker-owned platform cooperatives so that we can have more independent material flourishing. It means also decriminalising the production, sale and screening pornography, so that in Australia we could host porn film festivals that feature local content that wouldn’t otherwise get distributed. We could encourage critical conversations between audiences and performers and producers.

Another obvious outstanding thing is governments could provide comprehensive sex education that actually speaks to the questions that young people want answered, and they could invest in porn literacy. I just want to speak for a moment about porn literacy before I wrap up. Porn literacy is a subset of media literacy. It’s about reading porn well and understanding how our sexual representations are shaped through media and culture. To do porn literacy well, you need porn performers. We know that porn performers are already frontline respondents to sexual health questions in columns, in forums, with the public resources that people have created about consent.

Porn performers are also intimacy coordinators. We’ve long been at the forefront of sex education and public health initiatives. Actually during the COVID pandemic, porn performers created COVID-safe pornographies to demonstrate how people could share intimacies whilst maintaining physical distancing. There’s lots of really great examples of sex workers leading porn literacy, including speaking at high schools alongside sexologists and sexual health nurses, and psychologists on panels about pornography. For teenagers, the feedback was that having the presence of a porn performer reduced their scepticism and lent credibility to the panel.

In Berlin, as a final example, there’s a group of porn performers who have been running sex school, making explicit videos about consent and consumer, and communication, and sexual health. A few years ago, an expert panel actually analysed sex school and found that it had the potential to support healthy sexual development. Unfortunately, last year, sex school shut down because it just wasn’t viable to continue in the current regulatory environment.

If governments are really serious about improving people’s relationships to sex and sexual imagery, then they need to look closely about how the regulatory framework deters, criminalises, downranks, suppresses indie content, and then think about what they could actually do to support audiences to develop the skills and the literacy to navigate and contextualise content more confidently. Thanks.

Jenna: Thank you so much, Zahra, and thanks to all of our speakers so far. We’ll move into a bit of a discussion section now. I’m going to throw some questions at you that have come through. Some of these you’ve seen before. We’ll probably keep it pretty not too formal. Jump in if you’ve got something to say. I’ll direct this first one to Alan, but other people feel free. What are your thoughts around the scientific claims that watching porn alters the growing brain?

Alan: Thank you, Jenna. That is a great question and another perfect example of the urban myth. There’s this idea that watching pornography actually changes the chemical structure of your brain. That comes from a book called The Brain That Changes Itself, which was written by a guy called Norman Doidge, who is a psychoanalyst. He’s not a scientist. He’s not a neuroscientist. He is not trained in the functioning of the human brain. His argument is basically that when you watch pornography, chemical tracks in your brain set up new synapses, which is true because that’s how memory is formed.

His argument is that the formation of memory is equivalent to brain damage. It restructures your brain, he says. He takes the chemical processes, the neurochemical processes by which memories are formed, and argues that that is in some way changing your brain, which it is. It’s creating a memory, but the idea that that is somehow equivalent to brain damage comes from his work. Now, his all schtick in his book is he’s very anti-BDSM, very anti-kink. The Brain That Changes Itself, he’s got this chapter where he argues, basically the argument is that everyone is born vanilla and that it is only when they see pornography that it turns them kinky.

If they never saw pornography, they would never turn kinky. Now, there’s absolutely no evidence to back that up at all. We have evidence that people who embrace kinky BDSM identities later in their life have an awareness of that earlier in their life, in the same way that people like myself, who are gay, are aware of that. Not in exactly the same way, but elements of your identity before you grow into the full-blown identity. There’s no evidence that watching kinky porn turns you kinky in the same way that watching straight porn is not going to turn me straight. I’ve watched a lot of straight porn in my life in my research, and it has not turned me straight. Yes. This idea that porn changes the structure of your brain it’s a classic example of an urban myth with no evidence behind it.

Zahra: Can I jump in there, Jenna, too, and just add a few comments about porn addiction and generally around porn consumption. There’s a very useful study by Fiona Attwood and Clarissa Smith in the UK, who are the editors of Porn Studies Journal from a project they did around porn consumption. They found that people watch porn for a range of different reasons, including arousal and boredom, stress relief, laughter, and bonding. I think it’s really important to keep all of these different uses in mind when we’re thinking about porn consumers.

Then there’s also some really great research by Nicole Prause, David Lay, and Peter Finn on porn addiction. These are clinical psychologists and scientists who have critiqued what they call the invention of porn addiction. They argue that porn addiction has no scientific basis. In their research, they find that actually the most common factor in reports of porn addiction is religiosity. They argue that when we’re thinking about people who are reporting addictive use or problematic use, that might better be conceptualised by thinking about what are their internal and external conflicts, and their experiences of what they call desire discrepancy.

For example, a person has a conflict between what they desire or they enjoy, they find pleasure in, and then how society expects them to behave. Then that becomes described as porn addiction.

Jenna: Great, thank you. Would love to know the panel’s thoughts on the latest research out of uni Melb as in Melbourne uni on strangulation and its links to porn. Did you want to start us off, Alan?

Alan: Yes. I’ll start off seeing as how I’m a full-time academic whose job is to read academic studies. I’ve had a look at that study. It’s a perfectly reasonable piece of research, so long as you don’t think it has anything to do with BDSM, or with gendered violence against women, because it’s about consensual BDSM practices. What the study shows is that large numbers of young people say that they have practised what we would call breath play, a BDSM practice that is about restricting the flow of oxygen to the brain in order to increase sexual pleasure.

Now, there are a couple of concerns about that. One is that breath play is a very sophisticated BDSM practice. Now, traditionally when people began to enter a BDSM community, it was a community and there would be mentoring and literally training sessions and workshops. If you were doing something dangerous at a play party, there would be people standing by in order to help. There’s a whole series of networks set up to manage practices that could be potentially dangerous.

One of the challenges, and something I think that we need to think about, and this goes to Zahra’s point about the importance of comprehensive age-appropriate sex education is that if people are learning about sophisticated BDSM practices through pornography, often entirely out of context, and often these are people who don’t have any links into the BDSM community, then that is not ideal. That has the potential to be very dangerous. We need better sex education.

As always the just say no approach, abstinence-only approach doesn’t work, so just saying to people, “This is bad. You mustn’t do. It never works.” What you need to do is to say to people, if you are considering these sophisticated BDSM practices, here is what you need to know about how BDSM works, how to find a community. How to get the training. How to understand the practice, how to do it safely. That would be the response rather than saying just say no.

The other thing that concerns me is that there was a suggestion in the paper that a lot of young women they were hypothesising where saying yes to this practice even though they didn’t really want to do it. There was a gender problem where young women were being pressured into doing sexual acts they didn’t really want to do. This is an ongoing problem in our culture that the way that sexuality is taught to young people is that it’s the man’s job to try and pressure women into having sex, and that’s the woman’s job to say, no, no, no, no, no until she finally gives in.

These gender stereotypes are still huge across our culture and in sex education. When we spoke to young women a few years ago in focus groups about sexual agency, they told us they didn’t have the confidence, or the language to ask for what they wanted, and they were not being encouraged and supported to develop their own sexual agency. One of the things we found was that almost none of the young women we spoke to would say that they masturbated in comparison to the young men who were all quite happy to tell us.

Only a couple of the dozens of young women would admit that they masturbated because as they told us, that’s desperate, that’s lesbiany. One of the young women said down there is for boys to touch. Now, it’s very hard to develop a sense of sexual agency, and what you like and knowing what you want to ask for if you’re not even taking sexual pleasure from your own body. The lessons I would take from that data, there’s been some kind of moral panic about it again to pick up on Greta’s line that it shows that pornography is bad.

No, that’s completely the wrong lesson. The lessons are we need better sex education, creating the lines of communication where young people can talk to trusted adults about things that concern them, number one, and number two, we need to abolish fucking patriarchy and have a culture that embraces women’s sexual agency as much as it does men’s.

Zahra: If I can just add to that as well to that report specifically, I think it can be useful to separate out strangulation from breath play, and strangulation in the context of intimate partner violence is a really serious issue, and it’s a precursor to homicide. In New South Wales, it has its own standalone offence now to recognize that it is something more than aggravated assault, but we need to recognize that breath play even when it’s done consensually, it’s not free from risk.

There’s a recent article that’s just been published last week in the Journal of Media and Culture by Giselle Woodley and Kelly Jaunzems, and it’s about teen perspectives on sexual choking in pornography. It was an ARC-funded project that interviewed teens aged between 11 and 17. What they found was that teens wanted more accessible education and resources about sexual risky behaviours rather than an abstinence-only approach. They’d speak a lot in that article about harm reduction approach.

The teens were looking for moments of aftercare, of checking in, of safe words. They also wanted videos that they could learn from, and that was an identified gap for explicit educational resources in how to perform these kinds of sexual activities in safer ways. We do see that now a lot in producers who are filming more behind-the-scenes interviews, and providing more detail around their approaches or taking a docu-porn approaches, or we hear in performer testimonials speaking about their performances afterwards.

People are doing this kind of work to flesh out. Actually, this is what’s happening behind the scenes.

Alan: Jenna, I see you’ve just drawn our attention to one of the questions that says the social media posts around this research out of Uni Melb state, “There is no safe way to strangle or choke someone.” I completely understand why people do that. Now, that’s not a factual statement. That’s an emotional statement. I completely understand why people do that. I was running some workshops recently for people who work in domestic violence talking about pornography because again they were concerned that they had heard that pornography was causing intimate violence.

We were talking about what the real predictors were, but one of the things we’re talking about was what kinds of kinky behaviour they were comfortable with their clients engaging in. Most of them they were fine like, being gay is fine, a bit of spanking is fine, but when I got to talking about breath play and sexual strangulation, it really changed the tone in the room, because for so many of them who deal with that as a form of violence, non-consensual violence, the consensual breath play was too close.

It was too close to what they saw in terms of violence and murder of women. Despite the fact that consensual play, and non-consensual violence are completely different things, it just looked too much like it, and so they couldn’t get past that emotional response. I completely understand why people would frame it in that way, but that’s an emotional reaction not a factual one.

Jenna: I’m going to move on to this one’s a bit of a long question, so I’ll read this out. Migrant porn performers who are holding a temporary visa often face concerns around a visa cancellation in Australia due to failing the character test, and decision-making based on public morality, i.e., them being in conflict with Australian community values. How can community members and allies support migrant porn performers, not only in navigating support regarding the above issues but also to support sex worker-led organisations ethically to fight against systemic oppression?

Migrant porn performers may often have multiple identities, sex worker, migrant, queer, et cetera, and so they’re more likely to face the intersection of racism, whorephobia, sexism, homophobia, et cetera. Peer support can vary based on how they prioritise their identities, and or what’s available and what they’re eligible for, so how can sex workers, migrants, and queer-led organisations better identify, and meet the needs of migrant porn performers?

Zahra: Well, I guess I’d just say more generally that porn production often requires migration, because so many places in the world porn production is illegal, and so it’s very common to travel for work. There’s pockets of the world that have more production opportunities than others, and yet travel is very risky for sex workers. One thing that I’ve noticed a lot over the last 10 years or so, is that in the discussions around what is ethical pornography, some platforms will define themselves a by what they are not.

We see some ethical porn initiatives donating to anti-trafficking organisations to try and legitimise themselves. We’re porn. We’re ethical. We’re anti-trafficking. We’re anti-exploitation. We know that there are ongoing problems with anti-trafficking initiatives and their carceral approaches, and they don’t actually deliver justice to migrant sex workers. I think that an important reflection is that our porn agenda needs to include establishing safe migration pathways and ending the border industrial complex that leads to especially Asian migrant sex workers facing immigration scrutiny for carrying things like condoms or lingerie when they’re at the airport.

The other point I just will make briefly is that there’s sex workers in many professions who have ethics admission boards, whether it’s law or nursing or psychology who’ve had experiences of having to show that we are fit and proper people or people of good character. I’m really happy to work with any sex workers who are trying to draft statements around their character or writing character references.

I think this is also an issue of building strong relationships with sex worker legal services, funding sex worker legal services, especially those specialising in migration, and building a network of people who can assist in people navigating visa application processes.

Greta: Just to add to that, the other thing, I think for allies to keep in mind is that so much of this risk is generated by biometric surveillance and data sharing between big tech and private or state actors. We all know as sex workers, especially sex workers with a large online presence that we are often test case data for a lot of big tech surveillance and biometric surveillance. This becomes very apparent when we are crossing borders.

For supporting migrant porn performers, it’s about calling for transparency around data sharing and limiting biometric surveillance by big tech companies as well.

Jenna: I just wanted to let our audience know that we have received quite a few questions coming through, and all of them are fantastic. I don’t see us getting through all of them today. What we will do is send– We’ve got them all recorded, so any questions that we don’t get to, we will send to our panellists and give them the opportunity to respond in writing.

Then we can add that to the transcript. Please know that this has not been one of those situations where you’re trying to cut out the facts because they’re all great. How can we better across all states of so-called Australia educate our representatives about how anti-porn rhetoric/moral panic about porn is weaponized in support of age verification and increased online surveillance, and how we should be concerned about the happenings of FOSTA-SESTA and KOSA in the US in relation to public and media perspectives?

Alan: That is a great question, and my answer is, I wish I knew. I’ve actually written about this in the past because for 30 years I have been making submissions to government reports. I have been trying to talk to the media about the research, and it keeps on happening that there’s no interest in the data around it. I always think of one time when a debate TV show called me up and they were looking for somebody to come on and say pornography was destroying a generation of young men.
When I said that’s not what the research showed so I could come on and say that they said, “Oh, can you give us the name of somebody who could come on and say that.” The submissions that I make to government inquiries, which always set out the research and the findings never get any traction. It’s mainly about the politics of it.

It’s the same way that sex education in schools, the vast majority of parents support it, but there’s a tiny minority of people who are very opposed, who are very vocal. It’s the same thing around pornography, although we now also have the increasing left-wing anti-pornography movement as well that’s still hooked up with the religious right to create this super group who are willing to get together to oppose porn.

It makes it very difficult to find a way in. I’ve been trying to do it for 30 years, and I haven’t found out a way yet. I’d welcome any other suggestions.

Zahra: I’ll just pick up on one thing you said, Alan, about it’s difficult to gain traction in this area because there’s no interest in it. That’s absolutely been my experience with the last 15 years or so because governments are invested in their own agendas and for them, this biometric surveillance agenda that they are embarking on is really about let’s detect pornography. Let’s remove pornography, and it looks like we’re doing all of this stuff, but not really making a dent into the issues that matter. They also have an aligned agenda at the same time. The idea to face scan people watching porn was first raised by Peter Dutton in 2019. That was the same year that the government was trying to introduce this national facial recognition scheme to be able to match people’s identities across government agencies. Often it has nothing to do with pornography. Pornography is just the mechanism through which they take an opportunity to further a larger carceral agenda. We see this, especially over the last 10 years.

One thing I wanted to mention is this exposure narrative. Kids are accessing pornography at X ages as if pornography is a virus, as if pornography is contagious. You hear the incredibly loaded ways in which these inquiries are phrased. Just last week we had the announcement of an inquiry into the impacts of harmful pornography on mental, emotional, and physical health. Before that, the report was called Protecting the Age of Innocence.

Before that, there was an Inquiry into Harm Being Done to Australian Children Through Access to Pornography on the Internet. There’s already this inbuilt assumption that A, pornography is one monolithic thing, B, that it’s inherently harmful, and C, that people just absorb it like blank slates. From a media studies perspective, audiences are not passive.

They’re thinking critically. They’re making sense and meaning from representations. This idea of childhood innocence really becomes weaponized because those innocent children that they’re speaking of include 16 and 17-year-old people who can legally consent to sex.

The idea that we should protect young people from information about sex is so nonsensical because the evidence shows that sex education can work to prevent abuse. Similarly, porn literacy can work to teach people more realistic understandings of pornography. Ensuring that people have the knowledge and skills to identify that harmful behaviour, that’s what will protect young people. I think the terms of reference and the framing is not a new thing, that pornography becomes scapegoated, and that’s a deliberate tactic to put the focus on industry rather than government. I guess from my end, the solution really comes back to porn literacy again.

Not porn literacy just for young people. Porn literacy for adults and porn literacy for politicians.

Alan: Just listening to Zahra talk has reminded me of one very positive thing that I’ve seen happening that I think does hold hope for change. That is the more sex workers who move into the academy, into politics, and into journalism, those people are going to bring a perspective that is very different from, because as we were saying before, part of keeping pornography as this strange and dangerous thing which hurts both the people making it and the people consume it relies on silencing the voices of both porn consumers and the people involved in making porn.

There’s still very few porn consumers willing to talk in public. It’s very rarely we hear politicians saying, I masturbate to porn three times a week and it’s done me no harm. That’s incredibly rare. We are starting to see more and more sex workers becoming involved in the knowledge industries in the discussion industries. I think that is making a huge difference. When we get our first sex worker prime minister, I think that’s going to make a huge difference.

Greta: Absolutely agree. I think the thing is that this shows the danger of really minimising the anti-porn ideology to just being a byproduct of evangelical Christianity or far right or conservatives. In fact, this is part of a long legacy of high-profile feminists, of family and domestic violence organizations, of sexual violence services not listening to the lived experience of sex workers and not prioritizing sex workers’ safety within their policy or practice.

I think understanding that actually these are pretty widespread ideologies that have the potential to impact the safety of all sex workers is really important.

Zahra: If I could just add, too, I think we need to remember that all of this discussion is detracting attention from something else. When the announcement was made about the 6.5 million going to age assurance trial and as part of the gendered violence initiative, at the same time, there was a lot of outcry from feminists and other frontline services about needing more funding, more resourcing. There was many First Nations women who are the most affected by gendered violence, talking not just about gendered violence, but about police violence and carceral violence and colonial violence.

We need to ensure that the resources towards gendered violence are actually going in that direction to First Nations communities to deal with a range of different things behind homicide and behind sexual violence that include racism and misogyny and transmisogyny, instead of just blaming pornography.

Also on the note of we need more sex workers in academia. If you’re a sex worker and you want to do a PhD, please come and talk to me because I need PhD students. Also my dream is to create a big sex worker research centre because sex workers absolutely are changing the voice and changing the narrative and are having a really powerful impact in this space.

Jenna: We’ve got time for one more question and some briefish answers. I think this one is very difficult to answer, but I think it may also be the entire reason that we’re here. It’s probably a good one. How do you recommend countering anti-porn narratives and arguments in DV and/or academic spaces? This webinar is probably a good start. Use this, but….

Zahra: Partly, it’s about picking the terminology and going back through the methodology, and it’s about looking at the positionality and all of these things that impact the research questions that are being asked. I think that’s an important contribution in academia. Also, it’s frustrating because we always end up on the backfoot, responding, reacting. Sex workers are always in this position of, “There’s another government inquiry. There’s another problematic report out. We have to respond to this.”

It’s constantly this. All of our energy that could be going to community building and movement building is sucked up and zapped. In terms of strategy, I think on the one hand, we need to think about where our energy is going in a positive direction in terms of the futures that we want to see, not just that constant reactivity. Although I think that when we are trying to assist people to think through their research, it does help to think through those things around methodology, positionality, terminology, and how a lot of bias gets loaded into each of those things.

More generally, I think thinking about what are the futures that we want to build with technology that are built by sex workers and what are the futures that we imagine together, and starting to build those through relationships and through mutual aid, because it’s likely that in 10 years, we will still be having the same discussions.

Alan: I would say each of us can do it within our own sphere. Those of you who are working in domestic violence or family support can work inside that industry. I can do it inside the academy. I would say that as with all behaviour change, yes and is the way to go.

We find the points where we agree. Yes, we are strongly opposed to the fact that still women are overwhelmingly at risk of violence from their domestic partners, that still overwhelmingly female sexual agency is downplayed in society compared to men. The things that we can agree on and then work out shared projects with people on how we address those in ways that actually get to the roots of the problem rather than following the urban myths. Working in our own sectors, talking to the people we know in those sectors, and finding things we can agree on to build projects from is something.

In academia, things are starting to change, not just from the work of people like Zahra coming in, but also I can see even the most serious, sober quantitative social scientists are starting to be a little bit less sex negative now. Movement happens. I might have been a bit too despairing earlier on, but there are changes and we can keep making it happen.

Jenna: I think that sex workers absolutely need to be involved in this conversation. If we’re talking about something, then the people doing it need to be at the table. The No to Violence conference that’s happening in Naarm next month has three sessions that link porn to violence against women, but has not engaged at all with sex workers. I think we all strongly believe that the FDV sector, family violence and intimate partner violence sector, needs to engage meaningfully with sex workers as partners in solving violence against sex workers, but also against women and gendered violence in our society.

Hopefully, we can continue that conversation going. I’m just going to add in that Leanne’s question says, “You’re all so, so awesome.” Thank you. I think that’s a good note for us to end things on.

Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for joining us and for listening to these really important voices. Thank you, Mish Pony, for organising this. To Zahra Stardust, Greta Desgraves, and Alan McKee for sharing their experience and knowledge with us. I hope you all have a beautiful day. Bye.