“I’m going to start with a little video clip to get us in the mood,” joked Dr. Clarissa Smith, professor of sexual cultures at the University of Sunderland in the U.K. The founder and co-editor of Porn Studies, the first academic journal on pornography, was featured in Vice last month in “The Long, Hard Work of Running the Only Academic Journal on Porn.” And Wednesday night, she was giving a University Forum Lecture called “The Place of Pornography in Everyday Life: Fear, Legislation and Research.” Thinking that the full UNLV lecture hall was about to share in the joys of porno together, I wasn’t sure whether to feel uncomfortable or excited.
Instead, Smith played a clip that belonged in a B-movie. It depicted men and women being attacked by hoards of grasping hands, pulling them down and overpowering them. It addressed how porn attacks people (apparently physically), and that we are powerless to resist it. According to this video, and to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, porn destroys our lives and is “turning kids into psychopaths.” And no, they’re not joking.
A slide from Dr. Clarissa Smith's lecture, “The Place of Pornography in Everyday Life: Fear, Legislation and Research.”
“Porn is depicted as a kind of physical thing that grabs people,” Dr. Smith said. “This is part of the problem. It’s treated as if it’s an intruder.” And in the U.K., the political debate over pornography is just as heated as the one over immigration. Smith asserted that in addition to favoring a complete ban on pornography, the government has pushed to eliminate sex education. “You don’t deal with pornography by banning it. You regulate it within the industry. You create ongoing sexual education programs that are not just for kids.”
However, the censorship is already underway in a “porn-fearing” nation where Smith said families fear that kids are "consuming porn with their corn flakes.”
Smith informed us of Section 63 of the U.K.'s Criminal Justice and Immigration Act of 2008, which criminalizes possession of “extreme pornographic images” of an “obscene character.” However, the definition of obscene here is not “deprave[d] and corrupt” like in the Obscene Publications Act; it is closer to the ordinary dictionary definition of “grossly offensive” or “disgusting.” With this loose wording in a nation characteristically traditional in its thinking, some people have been prosecuted for possessing images of ear piercings, Smith tells us.
Section 63 also states that an image is pornography if it’s produced solely for the purpose of sexual arousal. “It’s idiotic,” Smith says. “There are plenty of ways we can read all kinds of material in a sexual way without them being produced in that specific manner.” Here are just a few related legal implications:
Results from a survey about reasons for porn consumption.
1. In the U.K., you can be prosecuted for having pornographic images on your computer even if someone sent them to you in an email, or if it downloaded in the background (due to phishing sites, etc.). “This is where it gets really Draconian,” Smith chided. “You need not create anything; you only need to possess it to be charged.”
2. U.K. citizens are required to have heavy-duty internet filters that even block informational sites about breast and testicular cancer.
3. Under the 2014 Audiovisual Media Services Regulations, pornography became heavily censored. According to Independent, three banned acts were deemed life-threatening: strangulation, face-sitting and fisting. Other banned acts include spanking, physical or verbal abuse (regardless of whether it's consensual), physical restraint and, for some reason, female ejaculation. Smith believes that in the near future, the government will even censor what each citizen does on his or her cell phone.
“I think it will just get worse. It is not so much about porn, but about keeping tabs on people,” Smith says. “There are a lot of concerns about terrorism. Porn is a way in.”
On a lighter note, Smith discussed a study she's doing with two colleagues based on information from 5,490 survey responses obtained at pornresearch.org. Here are a few statistics discovered so far that really stood out:
1. Physiological desires were not the No. 1 reason people consume porn.
2. The biggest difference between male and female respondents? Men answered more frequently that they consume porn “when they feel horny,” while women more often consume porn “when they want to feel horny.”
3. Female respondents also like BDSM and kink more than men.
4. Respondents younger than 18 had response patterns similar to those 56 and older. (After deliberation, Smith and her colleagues decided not to throw away these responses.)
Smith told us that although it’s hard to get people to talk about their porn consumption habits in a very critical world, once they open up about it, you can’t stop them. “We have to have ways of imagining in life, whether it’s with porn or not,” she said. “It’s the most important thing.”
To learn more about the cocktail of politics and porn in the U.K., you can contact Dr. Smith at [email protected].
