Committee Secretary Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications PO Box 6100, Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600 [email protected] 10 March 2016
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1 Committee Secretary Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications PO Box 6100, Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600 [email protected] 10 March 2016 Dear Committee, Inquiry into harm being done to Australian children through access to pornography on the Internet I am a final year PhD Candidate studying the regulation of pornography in Australia at the University of New South Wales. My doctoral research is supervised by Associate Professor Kath Albury in the School of Arts and Media, co-supervised by Dr Daniel Joyce in UNSW Law. I write to you in my individual capacity, not representative of my institution, in regards to the current inquiry. I recommend the Committee re-visit the recommendations of the Australian Law Reform Commission 2012 report on content regulation. As classification of online content is impossible in an age of convergent media, the ALRC recommend hybrid models of co-regulation whereby independent overseers can enforce industry codes. The Australian Law Reform Commission recommends that classification of adult content is unnecessary, providing reasonable steps are taken to restrict access. Voluntary filters already exist, and adult producers are already signposting their material. A mandatory Internet filter is an unworkable response that will block important health promotion, harm reduction and educative materials. Access requirements should be consistent with the age of consent to sexual activity, and age verification should not involve consumers uploading identification that risks their privacy. I believe the issue of free online access to pornography is in substance an issue about piracy and monopolisation that is not unique to pornography. The decriminalisation of pornography in Australia would assist in reducing stigma, allowing performers to speak in dialogue with young people to deconstruct the production process. I urge the committee to re-consider the assumptions at the basis of this inquiry. Causal links between pornography and harm are highly contested. We cannot say in 2016 that anal sex is inherently degrading, consensual sex on film is inherently objectifying, or that spanking is inherently violent. Pornography is not a monolithic category, and precise and careful wording is essential to ensure law and policy have the appropriate and intended effects and do not capture unintended material. In addition, the Committee should bear in mind that young people have a human right to appropriate, relevant, targeted sex education and information, including visual material. Pleasure-based education and sexual ethics can act as a violence prevention and cyber-safety strategy. Young people are critical media consumers and engage with pornography for a variety of reasons. Any reforms should be driven and informed by young people’s experiences and needs. Please do not hesitate to email me on if you have any further questions. Yours sincerely, Ms Zahra Zsuzsanna Stardust BA (History), LLB (Hons), MA (Gender/Cultural Studies), PhD Candidate (Arts/Media) 2 1. Examining the focus of the Inquiry: Defining harm in sexually explicit media Terms of reference do not reflect evidence base The title and terms of reference of this Inquiry rely on underlying fixed assumptions about what pornography is and what it does. As it is currently framed, the Inquiry assumes that sexually explicit media is inherently harmful and that this alleged harm is actively ‘done to’ viewers, which treats pornography as a monolithic genre, young people as passive victims endangered by media, and does not reflect the diversity of explicit media and the variety of ways in which young people interact with, use and produce it. More fruitful questions for this Inquiry might have been: What is the quality and consistency of sex education young people are receiving in Australian schools? How do young people use, learn from and critically engage with media? What tools, skills, information and services do young people require to navigate risks and harms in the world, and develop healthy and respectful relationships? The answer is that sex education is inconsistent and overwhelmingly risk-focused. Despite this, young people are critical media consumers, initiating discussions with each other about the politics, aesthetics and gendered aspects of all forms of media, including pornography. Government can support young people to navigate risks, de-code pornography, develop media literacy, and negotiate ethical, respectful relationships through providing pleasure-focused information, education, conceptual tools, resources and open dialogue. ‘Pornography’ is not a monolithic category and there is no singular aesthetic, process, product or audience. Precise and careful wording is essential to ensure law and policy have the appropriate and intended effects. Pornography is not a monolithic category – its definition is contested, slippery and politicised. ‘Pornography’ is made up of mainstream, corporate, feminist, queer, ethical, alternative, amateur, independent, user-generated and post-porn content, that is screened online, on DVD, in international festivals, in feature films and in print.1 It is produced not only by companies, but by solo performer/producers, collaborative partnerships (including couples), independent producers, and as community projects. There is no single benchmark aesthetic, production value, process, product, distribution means or audience. We cannot speak of ‘pornography’ as if it is a single or unified entity or make sweeping assertions about what it is or what it does. Changes to the production and distribution of pornography with the increasing availability and accessibility of technologies (some have described this as the ‘democratisation’ of porn), mean that there are fewer distinctions between ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ pornographies, and that those terms are increasingly redundant and meaningless. Shifts towards ‘amateur’, ‘documentary’ and user- generated porn, as well as changes in labour practices thanks to feminist and sex worker interventions, mean that performers are increasingly directors of their scenes with increasing control over their representations. Although all pornography is performative in the sense that it is constructed for film, and can depict fantasy for the entertainment of the consumer, performers can also experience real 1 Biasin E, Maina G and Zecca F (eds), Porn After Porn: Contemporary Alternative Pornographies, Mimesis International, 2014; Tim Stüttgen (ed), Post/Porn/Politics: Queer Feminist Perspective on the Politics of Porn Performance and Sex Work as Culture Production, b books, Berlin, 2014; Anne Sabo, After Pornified: How Women are Transforming Pornography and Why it Really Matters, Zero Books, UJ, 2012; Taromino, Shimizum, Penley and Miller-Young (eds), The Feminist Porn Book, The Feminist Press, New York 2013. 3 intimacies on set, whether the scene is between real-life partners, friends or professional colleagues. Binary distinctions between good/bad, real/fake, mainstream/alternative, and straight/gay porn are unhelpful with such a diverse and complex genre. Sex workers have made important interventions into labour practices in pornography in Australia, demanding fair working conditions, adequate payment, control over their scenes, acts and representation, and often negotiating content shares or joint ownership of the final product, or specific conditions on how and where their scenes can be distributed.2 To ask the Committee to examine the effects of pornography upon young people is like asking the Committee to examine the effects of action films or romantic comedies in their entirety. We need to be careful and precise about definitions in policy and law-making, particularly when discussing access to and/or criminalisation of media content. Material that people use for arousal may contain no explicit images at all (footage of feet, for example), and other content that does contain explicit images may not be intended for arousal (photographs for medical training). Catch-all terminology or laws encompassing ‘pornography’ as an imagined category is too heavy handed and will inevitably be ineffective, inappropriate and unworkable. Causal links between pornography and harm are highly contested, and research is characterised by personal anecdote and selective evidence. Criminalisation causes more harm than pornography. Existing texts attesting to the harms of pornography have been demonstrated to be lacking methodological rigour. Research framed around normative assumptions that pornography is inherently harmful affects the definitions used, recruitment of participants, the questions asked and conclusions reached in studies of pornography. Academic reviews of key influential anti-pornography texts illustrate that these books rely substantially on personal anecdote, selective evidence, mass generalisations, journalistic writing and sloppy definitions, presenting the most ‘extreme’ examples as typical, and do not demonstrate best practice ethics in sex work research. 3 In their review of Gail Dines’ book Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked Our Sexuality, Amanda Kennedy and Cheryl Llewellyn write that Dines ‘gives us is ideology instead of evidence’4, and Professor of Sociology Ronald Weitzer writes that the account ‘stands in stark contrast to sound scholarly research’.5 A lack of information about how sources were collected, the sample size and representativeness, and the lumping together of ‘men’ and ‘women’ into broad categories means we cannot reach generalizable conclusions