How porn became the norm

'Erotica' has become an acceptable part of dinner party chit-chat. Photo / Herald on Sunday

Are you reading this in a cafe? On a bus, or at home? Look around. The man (or even the woman) next to you may well be a pornography user. He's notwearing an anorak; she's not wearing fishnets? Never mind.

One in three adults – more for men, less for women – has consumed
pornographic material in the past year, if they're anything like the Australians. And the British estimate that two in five men, and maybe one
in 16 women have used pornographic websites in the past year.

In the United States, the porn industry capital, more people are logging on to get off. And the biggest online consumers are people who profess to old-fashioned family values, according to a recent Harvard Business School analysis.

One in three British office-workers surveyed last year admitted to having viewed porn on their computer at work (slightly fewer than the 56 percent who said they'd returned to work drunk after a pub lunch).

Like it or not, blue is all around you. The so-called "pornification of mainstream culture" means the imagery of porn is no longer confined to the top shelf. Porn, with its carnal playfulness, its capacity for damage and its currents of misogyny, crystallises society's broader tensions, pleasures and ambivalence around sex.

No one has done a comprehensive survey of Kiwi porn habits but research published last year in The Porn Report challenges received wisdom.

Researchers surveyed more than 1000 porn users, and interviewed 50 in depth. Fifty-six per cent of the users were aged 19-35, 77 per cent were heterosexual and 55 per cent were in a monogamous relationship.

Men outnumbered women four-to-one, but the gender gap had narrowed from 90 per cent male in a 1996 survey to 82 per cent male in this one.

More women under 40, in particular, were going x-rated, most typically alone on a DVD on their laptop at home, or with a partner.

Aucklander Sharon Jackson encountered porn at age 12, when she sneaked a Penthouse Forum magazine from her father's wardrobe. Jackson, 43, now vets porn routinely for the swingers' club she runs with husband Rod, 50. The couple also use porn as a sex aid, and sometimes for a laugh.

"I can do without watching it but I can do with watching it and it's enjoyable," she says.

"A lot of women are doing it at home on the internet while their husbands are at work."

More than half the visitors to last year's Auckland sex expo, Erotica, were women. For many, porn's stigma is as passe as Carry-on-Nurse capers.

"It's not something you lock yourself away in a darkened room to do and cringe whenever you hear anybody in the house," says Sharon.

"It's normal."

Though porn is hardly family viewing, it is moving mainstream. Legal commercial pornography covers the gamut from couple-oriented feature-length films with a semblance of plot and characterisation to the hardcore extremes of "Gonzo" or "wall-to-wall" porn.

Most heterosexual porn revolves around men penetrating women's bodies. In certain hardcore subgenres, female characters simulate discomfort, pain and fear.

Professional porn actresses command substantially more pay if they have fake breasts or agree to anal sex.

However, The Porn Report says women's growing involvement in the porn industry has improved the treatment and representation of women. Co-author Alan McKee, an associate professor at Queensland University of Technology, says Gonzo is marginal.

Yet New Zealand's porn baron, Steve Crow, believes commercial porn has become increasingly hardcore as consumers have been desensitised and need more for their kicks.

"Today it's Gonzo – all sex. It's straight into the hard sex, it's more explicit and extreme."

Rod Jackson says the market has become more segmented. "You go into your local store and they've got the young, horny just-want-to-get-off section, right through to the Adult you want to watch a movie and it might have some porn in it."

Even more difficult to get a fix on is the scope of so-called amateur porn: home-videos and more or less graphic sexual photos of everyday people posted on the internet.

"They're middle-aged people who are married wanting their 15 minutes of
fame, who are game enough to do it," says Jackson.

According to Alexa.com, which tracks internet use, New Zealand's 100 most visited sites include four porn sites. This doesn't count the amateur porn traffic on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Research into men and women's pornographic preferences has thrown up
some surprises. The Porn Report found women were more likely than men to prefer pneumatic-breasted, Barbie-Doll actresses. Men tended to go for the more realistic "girl next door" look.

McKee puts it down to women coming to sex imaginatively via romance novels.

"Women are raised to have a 'Mills and Boon' idea
about sex, where everybody is beautiful."

Unsurprisingly, women surveyed also showed a strong aversion to porn showing violence, abuse or rape.

This year, Britain outlawed the possession of "extreme pornography", defined as an act that threatens or appears to threaten a person's life, or to result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals, or that involves sexual interference with a human corpse or
animals.

Opponents complain the new law criminalises innocent people with a penchant for the kinky, likening it to banning alcohol because some people are alcoholics.

Just because a deeply disturbed person may seek out violent porn, they argue, doesn't mean watching hardcore BDSM will prime well-adjusted people to commit sexual violence.

The research into a causal link between violent porn and sexual violence is inconclusive. But anti-porn campaigners argue that degrading portrayals of women feed into a wider misogyny, which can leak into sex and relationships, or even contaminate rape trials with a "she-asked-for-it" attitude.

Stop Demand founder Denise Ritchie campaigns against sexual exploitation
of women and children. She says hardcore porn frequently "eroticises men sexually dominating women. Most porn is marketed at men. Go into a shop: it's about men masturbating to women being degraded, being touted as bitches and sluts and hoes."

Therapists say porn can interfere with your ability to sustain real intimacy in a relationship.

Auckland sex therapist Nic Beets says it is possible to blend porn with intimacy, but not common. Where only one person wants to indulge,
it requires the porn user to be honest with himself and his partner about why he's doing it, and the partner to control any gut-reaction anxiety so that the couple can figure out a place for porn in their relationship.

Another concern is that porn can distort ideas of attractive bodies and "ideal" sex, although porn defenders argue the plastic bodies and plastic sex of mainstream culture is more influential in moulding expectations.

The people in McKee's survey perceived porn's effects on their relationships and sex life as overwhelmingly positive.

"Porn was making them more comfortable and relaxed about their own sexuality, more open-minded, allowing them to talk about sexual issues with their partner, keeping the sex going in long-term relationships," he says.

But Auckland psychotherapist Kathryn Barriball is cautious. "I'm amazed at the sexual misinformation that people have. We think we're living in
sexually enlightened times, we're bombarded by sexual innuendo and imagery.

"But realistic sexual information, realistic sexual conversations? They're not really taking place," she says.

"Porn puts such an emphasis on the physical and the body, but that's only one aspect of satisfying sex. We have bodies – but we also have hearts and minds."