When the Guardian announced the planned launch next year of Porn Studies – the world's first peer-reviewed academic journal on the subject – there were more than a few guffaws. "You can just see a future University Challenge," wrote one commenter online. "Carruthers, King's College Cambridge, reading pornography."
"It just sounds like a highbrow wank mag to me," wrote another. "One which I look forward to perusing." Even the headline had a touch of Vizmagazine's Finbarr Saunders and his double entendres about it, suggesting it was a "new discipline" for academics.
What it concealed, however, is a bitter and contentious academic war over the status and nature of porn research, a war that is almost as bitter and contentious as the status and nature of porn itself. (...)
According to some estimates, 30% of all internet bandwidth is used to transfer porn. Each month, porn sites get more visitors than Amazon, Twitter and Netflix combined. And yet, says Attwood, in her own field, cultural studies, it's been mostly ignored. "Television, film, magazines have been studied from all sorts of angles. Something like the BBC has been investigated to death by historians, by people who analyse labour conditions, everything from accountancy to filming, but there's never been anything like that for porn.
"One of the reasons why I started thinking it would be a good idea to have a journal was meeting a French business studies academic at a conference who said, 'Oh, I've been thinking about porn in relation to business, but I can't tell any of my colleagues about what I'm doing. Where can I publish?'"
There are "tons of papers" out there, she says, though much of the current research "tends to do the same thing over and over again. It just asks the same questions. Is porn harmful? Is it linked to other things? Then it doesn't define what porn is and, if it finds the link, it doesn't really explain anything. There's a lot written and very little known."
Particularly among large swaths of the public. When I meet Attwood and Smith to talk about porn, I'm coming from a not exactly expert knowledge base. I talk later to Professor Clare McGlynn of Durham University, who has been working with the Campaign to End Violence Against Women, and she refers to a "generational" problem of awareness about porn. She's right about that. When I was a teenager the most explicit material I remember seeing was when I watched A Room With a View with a couple of friends and we paused it and rewound to watch Julian Sands emerging naked from a pond.
I know. Even to me, that feels like at least a century ago, possibly more. McGlynn says there's a profound difference between those who grew up before the internet and those who came later. "People who are my age, in their 40s, or even 30s, generally have no idea. Unless they're avid users of pornography, they just don't realise quite what's out there and how easy it is to watch. The technology has changed so rapidly even in the last few years. Most people think you have to hunt it out, or download it, or use a credit card. They don't realise it's freely available on all mainstream porn sites. Whereas young people do. All my students know exactly what's out there." (...)
"Porn is important to people on all kinds of levels, but, if you want people to be honest or to tell you things about their engagements with pornography, you have to be prepared to listen," she says. "I am politically motivated about the fact that people who look at porn are not all lizard people."
"It just sounds like a highbrow wank mag to me," wrote another. "One which I look forward to perusing." Even the headline had a touch of Vizmagazine's Finbarr Saunders and his double entendres about it, suggesting it was a "new discipline" for academics.What it concealed, however, is a bitter and contentious academic war over the status and nature of porn research, a war that is almost as bitter and contentious as the status and nature of porn itself. (...)
According to some estimates, 30% of all internet bandwidth is used to transfer porn. Each month, porn sites get more visitors than Amazon, Twitter and Netflix combined. And yet, says Attwood, in her own field, cultural studies, it's been mostly ignored. "Television, film, magazines have been studied from all sorts of angles. Something like the BBC has been investigated to death by historians, by people who analyse labour conditions, everything from accountancy to filming, but there's never been anything like that for porn.
"One of the reasons why I started thinking it would be a good idea to have a journal was meeting a French business studies academic at a conference who said, 'Oh, I've been thinking about porn in relation to business, but I can't tell any of my colleagues about what I'm doing. Where can I publish?'"
There are "tons of papers" out there, she says, though much of the current research "tends to do the same thing over and over again. It just asks the same questions. Is porn harmful? Is it linked to other things? Then it doesn't define what porn is and, if it finds the link, it doesn't really explain anything. There's a lot written and very little known."
Particularly among large swaths of the public. When I meet Attwood and Smith to talk about porn, I'm coming from a not exactly expert knowledge base. I talk later to Professor Clare McGlynn of Durham University, who has been working with the Campaign to End Violence Against Women, and she refers to a "generational" problem of awareness about porn. She's right about that. When I was a teenager the most explicit material I remember seeing was when I watched A Room With a View with a couple of friends and we paused it and rewound to watch Julian Sands emerging naked from a pond.
I know. Even to me, that feels like at least a century ago, possibly more. McGlynn says there's a profound difference between those who grew up before the internet and those who came later. "People who are my age, in their 40s, or even 30s, generally have no idea. Unless they're avid users of pornography, they just don't realise quite what's out there and how easy it is to watch. The technology has changed so rapidly even in the last few years. Most people think you have to hunt it out, or download it, or use a credit card. They don't realise it's freely available on all mainstream porn sites. Whereas young people do. All my students know exactly what's out there." (...)
"Porn is important to people on all kinds of levels, but, if you want people to be honest or to tell you things about their engagements with pornography, you have to be prepared to listen," she says. "I am politically motivated about the fact that people who look at porn are not all lizard people."
by Carole Callwalladr, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Katherine Rose
