The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (19 page)

So, in a funny sort of way, without porn, the internet wouldn’t be half of what we think of it now. But it’s odd because there are also a lot of people out there who actually think
the opposite is true: that without the internet, there would be no porn.

The discussion of how and whether online life affects the way we think, act, and interact dates back to long before the advent of widespread social media. People were paranoid
about its effects back when we were still using terms such as ‘cyber sex’ and ‘the information superhighway’.

It’s been a goldmine for a certain kind of person and – dare I say it? – a certain
age
of person to believe that there is a fundamental difference between information
that appears through a computer and information that is transmitted over, say, a television or radio.

While it is undeniably true that the internet affords access to an enormous variety of things at a speed that was once unimaginable, there is a point at which the discussion leaves this behind
and begins to demonise the technology itself, as if the content never existed before. It is as if all the cultural commentators of a certain age have suddenly become McLuhanites, parroting the
endless refrain ‘the medium is the message’ in page after page after grey, verbose page in the Sunday papers and on worthy ‘investigative’ shows.

And while perhaps there are interesting discoveries to come in the field of neurobiology that relate to the effects of two-way media (because, let’s be honest, the difference between the
internet and having satellite TV is that with the internet,
you
talk back to
it
), it’s far too early for the critics class to make anything sensible of it yet. Of course,
that has not stopped them from trying. Like all Constellation Makers, they too have to earn a living. Writing about the internet and sexuality is about the lowest-hanging
fruit out there. And television and the papers seemingly can’t get enough.

A common thread in almost all of the discussion of sex and sexuality is one powerful word: online. The internet, the rise of the internet, the age of the internet, its effects. When it comes to
freshening old ideas and old morality, nothing is remotely as effective as invoking ‘online’ to make tired ideas seem new again. The evolution of the internet from super-secret security
network to watershed-free media juggernaut is endlessly explored by those who know, and those who should know better. And it is blamed for nearly everything that is supposedly wrong with how we
experience sex and sexuality.

Even media outlets that try to stay on the cutting edge fall foul of old assumptions and stereotypes. In an
Atlantic
magazine article focusing on the (negative, natch) effects of the
internet, the author states, ‘The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women.’ Quite the claim. It also worries in detail about ‘the unlovely aspects of
male sexuality that porn depicts and legitimizes. The history of civilization would seem to show that there’s no hope of eradicating those qualities; they can only be contained – and
checked – by strenuously enforced norms.’
⁸⁰

This assumes two things: that only men are consumers of adult material – an easy one to disprove, had the author looked, maybe even on the internet? Also, it assumes that all men have the
same desires, and that they are all deviant, or potentially so (and implies the internet is the only place deviancy can occur). In essence, pathologising male sexuality as bad and wrong. The
flipside of this, the unstated assumption, is that all women’s sexuality is natural and pure. Takeaway message? Men: only want kinky sexbots. Women: only want gauzy butterfly love. Much of
the writing about online entertainment trades on exactly those stereotypes.

Such critics appear staggeringly uninformed about the history of porn and the internet. The
Atlantic
article claims that ‘as recently as fifteen years ago’, seeing threesomes
in porn would require ‘substantial effort’ because it was only available at ‘a Pussycat Theater, with its sticky floors’.

Seriously? There was internet porn in 1995, and it showed threesomes. I know because I saw it – so did most of my friends. (So too could have anyone who took
Penthouse
up on their 2400-baud modem offer.) But when the mainstream writers examining these issues for the mainstream media are neither digital natives nor fans of erotica, it’s no
surprise they get it wrong and rely on stereotypes instead.

Though you might hope that someone writing an article invoking ‘the history of civilization’ would be bothered to do their homework, you’d be wrong. It’s not as if it
would be a hard fact to check, after all, with the internet at our fingertips! Call me old-fashioned but I’m a firm believer in doing your research first.

Articles like these are not the only ones that get it wrong. Consider the Home Office reports on sexualisation and young people. They read like a government-produced version of middlebrow
cultural critique. They contain a lot of information, but not much knowledge. They rely heavily on irrelevant studies and disproven claims. They do not comment on any of the academic literature
– and there’s plenty – contradicting their conclusions. And they join up unrelated issues in a way that suggests imminent harm to society as a whole, in spite of data that
don’t and can’t show that.

But one thing they have in abundance? Loads of surveys and polls featuring that magical word ‘online’.

There is, for instance, a YouGov survey cited prominently in the 2010 sexualisation report. It’s in the section on ‘porn and violence’, but the survey isn’t about
violence at all; it’s about numbers of boys watching porn . . . wait for it . . . online. It claims that 58 per cent of boys have viewed pornography online, 27 per cent view it weekly, and 5
per cent every day. This is presented as
more than half of boys hooked on porn.
What the numbers actually show is more like 1 in 4, with only 1 in 20 looking at it every day. Probably more
than most of us would feel comfortable with, but still. Not even close to half.

The availability of adult material, especially via the internet, is widely believed to be morally wrong and uniquely damaging. Last year, Conservative MPs started to pressure internet service
providers into filtering porn: the so-called opt-in system. And unlike many proposals, this was one that attracted a lot of cross-party support.

HOW TO READ A SURVEY:

The 2010 Home Office report on children and sexualisation relied heavily on a particular survey which has since been widely cited as ‘evidence’ for widespread
sexualisation. What do the data really say?

Only 5% of boys we asked watch porn daily, and many of them were over the age of consent.

On the surface it might have looked like Conservative MPs Ed Vaizey and Claire Perry were bravely spearheading the campaign, boldly taking on big business, speaking for
the little people. The truth is, it wasn’t their idea. The real architects of opt-in are people you’ve probably never heard of before, but also probably should.

With all the cross-pollination of ideas between Constellation Makers and Evangelisers pulling everyone into a debate no one seems to be seriously questioning, it’s hard to see who is
pulling the strings. Partly that’s because Agenda Setters like others do the talking for them.

On 23 November 2010, Claire Perry, MP for Devizes, spoke in the Commons on the issue of internet porn, its purported effects on young people, and how the government should
address it.
⁸¹
At around the same time, the
Sunday Times
devoted several pages and an enormous magazine feature to the same topic.
⁸²

What is interesting about Perry’s contribution to the Commons debate and the
Sunday Times
feature are certain similarities in the information that was supplied and the conclusions
made. But then, that’s not altogether surprising. They were getting their information from the same source, and Evangelising the content widely.

What did Perry’s claims include? Loads of non-representative statistics, for starters. One was that 60 per cent of nine-to nineteen-year-olds had found porn online. Ages nine to nineteen?
That’s an arbitrary and very wide range. It includes people who are over the age of consent (sixteen) as well as those old enough to appear in pornography (eighteen). But the statement gives
the impression that the majority of nine-year-olds are trawling naughty websites. If Perry’s vague statistic were broken down by age, it would skew – heavily – towards the older
end.

Here again we see evidence of agendas being advanced on the back of bad science. We run up against the same problems with the data focusing on the internet as in so many tissue-thin studies:

Other bizarre, not-well-considered statistics making liberal use of broad age groups: one study claimed, ‘15 per cent of 12-to 17-years-olds have purposefully looked at
x-rated material online.’ Really? Funny, because you could also say that 15 per cent of 12-to 17-year-olds actually
are
17. Stating that a large percentage of people over the age of
consent may be looking at porn gives rather a different impression from implying that a bunch of twelve-year-olds are doing it.

And from the same study, the inexplicable use of vague definitions: ‘70 per cent of 15-to 17-year-old internet users accidentally view pornography “very” or
“somewhat” often.’ What’s ‘very’? What’s ‘somewhat’? I suspect what counts as ‘very often’ varies from person to person, but none
of us will be any the wiser, since the report doesn’t go into this.
⁸³

In what is now a depressingly predictable aside, that particular paper was produced by a company – not a healthcare or academic institution, not even a charity – whose recruitment
policies involve online questionnaires deployed by market research groups with shopping gift card incentives for participants.
⁸⁴

Perry also claimed: ‘A third of our British 10-year-olds have viewed pornography on the internet,’ which would certainly be worrying if it were true. The figure is from
Psychologies
magazine’s ‘Put Porn in Its Place’ campaign.
⁸⁵
The name alone suggests the conclusion was probably written well
before the data were collected. Despite its name,
Psychologies
is not a peer-reviewed academic journal, but a massmarket magazine rather like
GQ
or
Cosmo.
The summary articles
were written by Decca Aitkenhead, a travel writer and lifestyle commentator, not a researcher nor even a science journalist.

The poll in question contains two significant problems. First, the data were collected from a single year of boys at a single school in London. Such a small and concentrated population is hardly
representative of British children in general.

Secondly, the poll was not of ten-year-olds and their habits. Rather, it was of sixteen-year-olds and their
recollections
of the first age at which they saw porn. See the crucial
difference? Any study that relies
on such a significant gap is likely to be riddled with errors. It should acknowledge this. It doesn’t.

Comprehensive criticism of the data would also take note of the fact that no mention is made of how subjects were recruited, and whether their parents were informed. After all, academic research
would have to refer to this, to ensure required ethical standards were being met. In short, it’s not a credible or reliable figure. But this is small fry compared to the study’s greater
flaws.

Claire Perry’s comments came one day after an event she attended at the Houses of Parliament, ‘The Harm that Pornography Does: Its Effects on Adults and Children and the Need for
Regulatory Reform’. The event was organised by Safermedia, whose co-chair, Miranda Suit, quotes a particular report also cited in the
Sunday Times Magazine
feature. The article
prominently mentions ‘new research into the social costs of pornography from the Witherspoon Institute in America’.

No mention is made of the group’s purpose, their previous work, or even any of their members. It’s unlikely many of the
Sunday Times
readers will even have heard of them. Just
who are the Witherspoon Institute, anyway? Their website makes much of the group’s namesake, a Scottish Calvinist minister and signer of the Declaration of Independence. However, the
institute does not obviously appear to be either directly endorsed or funded by Witherspoon’s family.

Looking deeper, the ‘research’ turns out to be
The Social Costs of Pornography: A Collection of Papers.
⁸⁶
It includes contributions
from such notables as Patrick Fagan from the Family Research Council, a far-right American lobbying organisation. Fagan also works with the Heritage Foundation. For those unfamiliar with the
minutiae of American think-tanks, the Heritage Foundation were considered the architects of the Reagan administration’s covert Cold War operations, and were active supporters of George W
Bush’s international policy. Fagan’s other recent papers mentioned on the Witherspoon site include ‘Virgins Make the Best Valentines’ and ‘Why Congress Should Ignore
Radical Feminist Opposition to Marriage’.