If you picked the NZ Herald this morning, you’d have come across New Zealand’s Minister of Internal Affairs declaiming on the front page that young people are being “bombarded” by porn. Tracey Martin, who is also the Minister for Children, told the Herald that it was a “really big issue to New Zealand and we are going to have a serious conversation about it”.Martin says she supports the approach taken by the UK, which later this year aims to introduce controversial mandatory age verification for porn websites. Chief Censor David Shanks is currently conducting research into New Zealand teenagers’ porn habits, including a survey of 2,300 people aged between 14 and 17. “The question there is… when the average age to get a smartphone is 10 and a half to 11 years old, what sort of tools and restrictions can we really place on access to material that’s widely available on the internet?” he said.VICE spoke to Kris Taylor, a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland whose research focuses on the morals and ethics of pornography viewership and who was consulted on the survey questions, to get his opinion on some of the issues behind teenagers and porn.VICE: What’s your take on the move towards increased censorship of porn?
Kris: Although there’s this move towards age verification, and in the UK they also had a move towards censoring particular forms of pornography, I would suggest that these are an important introduction to a more interesting discussion. If we think through the practicalities of what it would actually take to implement an age-verification system or a censorship system, it’s pretty difficult. But at the same time what’s happening is we’re having a deeper engagement and a more interesting conversation about the role of pornography in popular culture and I think it’s a real positive that that conversation is out there.What do we know about teenagers and their porn consumption?
How do we even know that teenagers are viewing it in one particular place? We don’t know if they’re viewing it on PornHub specifically—there’s no data, partially because PornHub doesn’t include it’s viewership stats for under 18-year-olds, which is a shame. They might be viewing it on social media, they might be viewing it on Reddit, streaming services: basically anywhere on the internet and this comes back to the point of whether it is viable to put forward an age-verification thing if we don’t even know where teenagers are looking at it.We hear a lot about the harm of pornography. Is it justified?
If you have a population and there is a group who view pornography—they might have higher rates of depression. However, you can’t tease out whether depressed people just seek out pornography more frequently than people who aren’t depressed. You can’t discern in what direction the causation is heading. I would say largely, no, that there isn’t any evidence that there are any effects in terms of temperament. While there is lots of speculation about what effects it might be having in terms of mimicry and everything else, my response to that is always, why are we only focusing on teenagers? Teenagers actually make up a tiny proportion of the pornography-viewing public. There’s evidence that suggests that it’s mostly people over 35 percentage-wise: why aren’t we talking about those groups?What about frontline services who report changes in sexual behaviour?
I’m sceptical of the idea that media has more of an effect on us than, say, our surroundings or our expectations of what it’s like to be sexual or our expectations of gender. The idea that it’s some kind of singular cause that makes us behave a certain way is just little too easy.Are there potential benefits of porn for teenagers?
There’s evidence that pornography has positive effects for youth who are LGBTQI+, for example, who don’t get to see representations of their sexuality in popular culture, or it being a form of sex education for people who have no access to sex education. That’s not the fault of pornography or teenagers, that’s the fault of having no sex education available to those groups. Often people will be like, ‘Hey, pornography has become the primary sex education tool for teenagers.’ Instead of taking that to the logical conclusion—that there is a huge vacuum of information for teenagers about sex education, or sex, or how to process pornography or think critically about it—we get half-way there and then we step back because it is actually easier to say that pornography is bad than it is to say we have fundamentally failed to engage teenagers with a frank discussion about sexuality.
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Kris: Although there’s this move towards age verification, and in the UK they also had a move towards censoring particular forms of pornography, I would suggest that these are an important introduction to a more interesting discussion. If we think through the practicalities of what it would actually take to implement an age-verification system or a censorship system, it’s pretty difficult. But at the same time what’s happening is we’re having a deeper engagement and a more interesting conversation about the role of pornography in popular culture and I think it’s a real positive that that conversation is out there.What do we know about teenagers and their porn consumption?
How do we even know that teenagers are viewing it in one particular place? We don’t know if they’re viewing it on PornHub specifically—there’s no data, partially because PornHub doesn’t include it’s viewership stats for under 18-year-olds, which is a shame. They might be viewing it on social media, they might be viewing it on Reddit, streaming services: basically anywhere on the internet and this comes back to the point of whether it is viable to put forward an age-verification thing if we don’t even know where teenagers are looking at it.We hear a lot about the harm of pornography. Is it justified?
If you have a population and there is a group who view pornography—they might have higher rates of depression. However, you can’t tease out whether depressed people just seek out pornography more frequently than people who aren’t depressed. You can’t discern in what direction the causation is heading. I would say largely, no, that there isn’t any evidence that there are any effects in terms of temperament. While there is lots of speculation about what effects it might be having in terms of mimicry and everything else, my response to that is always, why are we only focusing on teenagers? Teenagers actually make up a tiny proportion of the pornography-viewing public. There’s evidence that suggests that it’s mostly people over 35 percentage-wise: why aren’t we talking about those groups?What about frontline services who report changes in sexual behaviour?
I’m sceptical of the idea that media has more of an effect on us than, say, our surroundings or our expectations of what it’s like to be sexual or our expectations of gender. The idea that it’s some kind of singular cause that makes us behave a certain way is just little too easy.Are there potential benefits of porn for teenagers?
There’s evidence that pornography has positive effects for youth who are LGBTQI+, for example, who don’t get to see representations of their sexuality in popular culture, or it being a form of sex education for people who have no access to sex education. That’s not the fault of pornography or teenagers, that’s the fault of having no sex education available to those groups. Often people will be like, ‘Hey, pornography has become the primary sex education tool for teenagers.’ Instead of taking that to the logical conclusion—that there is a huge vacuum of information for teenagers about sex education, or sex, or how to process pornography or think critically about it—we get half-way there and then we step back because it is actually easier to say that pornography is bad than it is to say we have fundamentally failed to engage teenagers with a frank discussion about sexuality.