Porno
Authors: Green Lelia , Jaunzems Kelly , See Harrison 
Published: August 2024

Is what constitutes pornography in the mind of the beholder? This issue of M/C Journal sought articles on “porno”: a deliberately informal, almost friendly, playful term for a content category which evokes many complex responses. Indeed, the categories of materials deemed to be “pornographic” offer rich insights into the cultures that classify, create, and circulate the materials that key publics consume, overtly or – more commonly – covertly. The clandestine dynamic is further heightened when the people consuming and discussing such content include those who are deemed too young to do so.
The articles collected here are an outcome of a journey which began in 2016 with a submission to the Senate Environment and Communications References Committee Inquiry into the Harm Being Done to Australian Children through Access to Pornography on the Internet (Environment and Communications). That committee prompted a return to data collected in 2010 which considered responses by over 25,000 9- to 16-year-olds across 26 nations around whether or not they had been “bothered” by accessing sexual images online. Revisiting the original reports (Livingstone et al.; Green et al.) raised a range of questions which coalesced into a grant application to the Australian Research Council, seeking the opportunity to talk with teens themselves about whether they felt they were being harmed by accessing sexual content online.
In 2018, the Australian Research Council approved funding for a Discovery Project: Adolescents’ Perceptions of Harm from Accessing Online Sexual Content (DP190102435). This research aimed to examine children's perspectives from four different countries with relatively different responses to sexual content in the original 2010 investigation. Australia, as home to the project, received the lion's share of the attention. Australian children had indicated that they were more likely than average, across the 26 participant nations, to see sexual content, and also more likely than average to be bothered by it. The other countries in the project were Ireland, Greece and Norway. In Ireland, children had been less likely to see sexual content, but also more likely to be bothered if they did so. Children in Greece, in 2010, were both less likely to see sexual content online, and less likely to be bothered. In Norway, by contrast, children were more likely to see sexual content than the average case, and less likely to say they’d been bothered. Thus, between them, the four countries covered a matrix of more/less likely to see sexual content and more/less likely to be bothered if they did so.
The ARC-funded research set out to interview 11- to 17-year-olds, and their parents and/or caregivers, about these issues. Four of the articles in this M/C Journal issue deal with aspects of what that Australian Research Council-funded research has found.
At the same time, the project raised a number of questions around how cultures, and sub-cultures (such as teen networks), consider some content to be pornographic and other materials not to be; and how the pornographic can be an important element of culture, yet very much positioned at the margin and removed from public attention. Pornography seems to be extensively talked about in civil society but, in public at least, very few people admit to engaging with it. This dynamic offers a fertile opportunity to examine the intersections of culture, media, pornography, and “what can, and can't be said, by whom”. Young people are particularly excluded from public discussions about online sexual content and yet, as many of the articles indicate, they have views and opinions on these matters that deserve consideration.
The first article is also the feature article. By Thuy Dinh, Brian O’Neill, and Lelia Green, it provides a case study of the Discovery Project’s Irish teen responses to the sexual content they encounter online. It addresses the risks teens feel they may have run in seeing “adult” content in digital contexts, and something of the events that precipitated that first experience. They also address whom they would talk to about any issues arising. The article concludes that there is a gulf between the conversations about sexual content that teens feel able to share with their peers, and what they feel able to talk about to parents and teachers.
In the second article, Debra Dudek, Madalena Grobbelaar, and Elizabeth Reid Boyd analyse Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Mist and Fury, one of the most popular romantasy novels on BookTok. They contextualise the novel in relation to adult concerns that young people are reading adult content unprepared. Dudek et al. argue that Maas's novel positively includes extended erotic scenes that represent and invite female arousal and counter concerns about problematic gender ideologies contained in mainstream pornography. Problematically, however, the novel reinforces a heterosexual romance script that says once a woman finds her soul mate, she has no need to tell her lover how she wants to be touched because he knows exactly how to please her sexually. Dudek et al. celebrate the book’s depiction of sexual pleasure without shame but draw attention to the lack of what they call a “love literacy”, which can help people communicate effectively what their desires are and how they want those desires met.
Gemma Blackwood’s article “X-Rated Indie Film and A24: Examining Ti West’s X Films” addresses Ti West’s horror trilogy – X (2022), Pearl (2022), and MaXXXine (2024). These films use the slasher horror genre to transport the audience to a fictional story set against the backdrop of the “golden age” of American feature film pornography, centred in and around the 1970s. On the cusp of the introduction of home video, which allowed viewers to consume pornography in the privacy of their own homes, this period of cinematic production allowed the emergence of what Blackwood calls a “fluid, dynamic, and independent cinema” that supported novel story lines and created a new category of film star, the adult actor.
Moving forward from Hollywood in the 1970s to Australia in the 2020s, teens are accessing pornography on their phones and computers and using it as a form of sex education. Woodley and Jaunzems argue that one of the risks of not talking to teens about the pornography they consume, and the meanings they construct from it, is that young people lack access to the repertoire of safety information and harm reduction strategies that support alternative sexual practices. Following recent publicity about potential risks and harms associated with practices of sexual choking and strangulation, it transpires (from interviews with 11- to 17-year-olds) that these practices are not solely confined to adults. Some of the teens the authors interviewed as part of Adolescents’ Perceptions of Harm from Accessing Online Sexual Content (DP190102435) are also experimenting with these behaviours. Woodley and Jaunzems argue that it is important to recognise the fact that teens consume a range of sexual content online, and that there should be more discussion about risky sexual practices and harm reduction strategies, ideally with accessible resources, rather than ignoring the issue or assuming that abstinence messages will be effective.
In “‘Firsthand’ versus ‘Secondhand’ Perspectives of Harm”, Harrison W. See and Giselle Woodley explore how adolescents express their perspectives on the potential harms associated with accessing online sexually explicit materials. The authors use interviews with 30 separate Australian teens aged 11 to 17 (with 19 of these taking part in a second interview approximately a year later) to explore a delineation between teens reflecting on their own encounters with sexually explicit material (firsthand) and teens citing harms offered by teachers, parents, and/or media (secondhand). Noting that secondhand perspectives often align with broader public discourse around the harms of teens accessing sexual content, the authors argue that firsthand perspectives that draw directly on teens’ lived experiences be emphasised when making policy. Further, See and Woodley suggest that when interviewing teens, asking them to define relevant concepts such as “harm” for themselves offers a level of agency over the terms of the debate, freeing teens to speak from their lived experience of, and direct encounters with, sexually explicit materials. Asking open-ended questions, such as whether teens see any positives in access to such content, also allows for greater nuance in the discussion and often leads to the sharing of firsthand perspectives. This article draws upon data collected for Adolescents’ Perceptions of Harm from Accessing Online Sexual Content (DP190102435).
Kaela Joseph and Ruby McCoy use their article on “Personalised Progressive Porno” to discuss the impacts of the 2018 introduction of a legal liability on the part of an online site for hosting content shared by users. Although the legislation aimed to restrict the digital exploitation of victims of sex trafficking, the effects charted by Joseph and McCoy are primarily upon communities situated in fan fiction spaces. These fan fiction sites felt required to exclude porno fan works of art, fiction, and video, with, the authors argue, a consequent closure of avenues for creators to engage in identity exploration. This exclusion particularly impacted on teens – occupied in the processes of forging their adult identity – and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and related sexual communities who used fan sites as safe spaces in which to construct stories of their own by personalising the narrative of an established cultural text to represent what might have happened if the fictional characters had been freer to explore alternative aspects of their identities. Joseph and McCoy argue that there is little evidence of widespread harm caused by porn, but some evidence of the importance of fan-produced porno for teens in LGBTQ+ communities, and for women, whose desires are not central to, or well represented in, mainstream commercial culture.
Are under-18s creating porn when they sext each other? This question, the focus of considerable international research literature on what constitutes child pornography and how these laws should be applied in everyday contexts, is addressed by Lelia Green, Jessica Ringrose, and Debra Dudek in “Australian Teens Talk about Nudes and Dick Pics”. They argue, as with other categories of content, “it depends”. In Australia, where self-authored sexual images of teens who are minors can be categorised as “child sexual abuse materials”, the context-specific reasons for youth sexual image creation are often deemed irrelevant in public debate, compared with the fact that depraved adults might illegally trade such images. Drawing upon their study, the authors show how teens clearly differentiate between contexts of consenting, private exchanges of sexts between peers, and when they receive unexpected and unwanted images (mostly dick pics) and when trust is broken through a private nude (mostly girls’ images) being inappropriately shared with a wider audience. The teens express dismay about how adults in their lives blow “sexting” out of proportion, yet at the same time they are dismayed that schools and parents often do not recognise or address the misogyny of sexual double standards, where the victim may be “slut-shamed” when sexts are “leaked” and where boys are celebrated for sexual conquests, when harmful sexual behaviour ends up being socially condoned. Teens talked about wanting supportive educational discussions around sexting and relationships, characterising their current sexuality education as mostly too little, too late, and not about the digital dimensions of sex and consent. Importantly, neither adults nor teens in the study understood the concept of image-based sexual abuse, which is where the authors argue that the focus needs to go to support youth managing contexts of tech-facilitated gender-based violence. (Data informing this article were collected as part of the Adolescents’ Perceptions of Harm from Accessing Online Sexual Content project, DP190102435.)
Debbie Rodan’s article “Casualising the Use of Nonhuman Animals’ Bodies in ‘Meat Porn’ Television Programs and Internet Sites” draws upon Carol J. Adams’s book The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), and argues that women and animals are often treated and spoken of as pieces of meat – that is, they function as “absent referents”. In exploitative heterosexual pornography, women can be dished up to the male gaze in ways that fail to recognise the sentient human being, focussing instead on a commodification of female sexuality for the titillation of the audience. Rodan uses an extended case study of Barbeque Showdown, a Netflix show, to argue that this also happens in meat porn television cooking shows, where animal body parts for barbequing are rarely named for the sentient nonhuman animal that was slaughtered to produce the ribs, the steak, the bacon. She draws parallels between the operation of patriarchal consumerism in much commercial pornography, and the operation of meat-eating societies in the BBQ cooking of meat. Rodan’s article suggests that, just as some porn dehumanises the human actors that make the content possible, so Barbeque Showdown and other consumer “celebrations” of meat culture ignore the nonhuman animal behind the pornographic representation, concentrating instead upon the appetites of the consumer.
In “The Pornification of Everything”, Jordan Schonig expands upon the argument that “porn” can be used as a descriptive suffix for many categories, in addition to Rodan’s “meat porn”, exemplifying this with terms such as “nature porn”, “trauma porn”, and “inspiration porn”. Indeed, Schonig’s inquiry begins by distinguishing between what he calls “categories of moral critique” (e.g. trauma porn, poverty porn), where “porn” indicates how people’s suffering is exploited for entertainment, and “categories of aesthetic indulgence” (e.g. nature porn, architecture porn), where “porn” indicates a kind of excess in both the consumption of attractive images and the images themselves. Schonig then examines how the usage of the word “porn” in the latter category acknowledges pornography’s status as a value judgment, an expression of one’s feeling (rather than a logical deduction) that an aesthetic object has exceeded some kind of boundary. Ultimately, Schonig demonstrates how the use of the word “porn” in even the most "playful and positive” categories like food porn, nature porn, and architecture porn nevertheless reflects how contemporary western society conceptualises pornography. This view, arguably, returns the reader to the title of this collection, to the “porno”, described above as a “deliberately informal, almost friendly, term”.
Together, these articles constitute a contemporary snapshot of the shifting cultural referent that is “porn”. As noted above, the editors are associated with and through, and this publication is an outcome of, an Australian Research Council Discovery project Adolescents’ Perceptions of Harm from Accessing Online Sexual Content (DP190102435). There were six investigators on the grant: Brian O’Neill (Ireland), Lelia Green and Debra Dudek (Australia), and three investigators not included in these articles: Liza Tsaliki (Greece), Elisabeth Staksrud (Norway), and Kjartan Ólafsson (Iceland). Research Officers on this grant were the primary interviewers and played a vital role in the creation of new knowledge. The editorial team includes co-editor Research Officers Kelly Jaunzems and Harrison W. See, both of whom co-authored articles with another Australian-based Research Officer, Giselle Woodley. In Ireland, Thuy Dinh worked as interviewer and researcher with Brian O’Neill. While the authors and editors are grateful to the Australian Research Council for funding this research, and to the Edith Cowan University Human Research Ethics Committee for the ethical oversight of the conduct of this research, this does not imply any specific support by the Australian Research Council, or by Edith Cowan University, for the findings and outcomes of this project, one of which is this issue of M/C Journal.
References
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. 10th ed. New York: Continuum, 2002 [1990].
Barbeque Showdown. Created by Daniel Calin. Season 2. Netflix, 2020-2023.
Environment and Communications References Committee. Harm Being Done to Australian Children through Access to Pornography on the Internet. The Senate, Commonwealth of Australia, November 2016. <https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Environment_and_Communications/ Onlineaccesstoporn45/~/media/Committees/ec_ctte/Onlineaccesstoporn45/report.pdf>.
Green, Lelia, et al. “Risks and Safety for Australian Children on the Internet: Full Findings from the AU Kids Online Survey of 9-16 Year Olds and Their Parents.” Cultural Science 4.1 (2011). <https://web.archive.org/web/20130720104018id_/http://cultural-science.org/journal/index.php/culturalscience/article/viewFile/49/129>.
Livingstone, Sonia, et al. Risks and Safety on the Internet: The Perspective of European Children: Full Findings. London: London School of Economics and Political Science / EU Kids Online, 2011. <https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/33731/1/Risks%20and%20safety%20on%20the%20internet(lsero).pdf>.
Maas, Sarah J. A Court of Mist and Fury. Bloomsbury, 2016.
West, Ti, dir. Pearl. A24, 2022.
———, dir. X. A24, 2022.
———, dir. MaXXXine. A24, 2024.