Porn is coming to parliament today, and I don't mean on the tablets and laptops of insalubrious researchers. The Lords will debate "the impact of pornography on society," thanks to the Bishop of Chester, who tabled the discussion. Is this just a gimmicky attempt to get some attention for our often anodyne second chamber? No, or not entirely. There are serious reasons for making a big hall of Britain's most distinguished elderly people try to bring themselves to say "bukake" for a couple of hours. Here are four reasons why, whatever the outcome of today's discussion, we badly need to bring issues surrounding legal porn into mainstream political conversation:We don't actually know what porn is
Not legally speaking, anyway. According to the Lords, in 2006 Vernon Coaker, then a Home Office Minister, acknowledged that there is no statutory definition of what constitutes legal pornography and this remains the case today. The Criminal Justice and Immigration act 2008 defines it as "An image... of such a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal" but even parliamentarians who have cited this definition have called it "debated," and it is included in the act in the process of defining what would constitute extreme, illegal pornography. It doesn't help the porn industry's opponents or supporters if we lack a definition of the product we're trying to promote or regulate.
What's legal?
Viewing, holding or being in any way involved with the production or distribution of pornography featuring anybody under the age of 18 is illegal—something of which the public is well aware, and which is also the case in other countries where porn watched in the UK is produced. Similarly, some "extreme" pornography is illegal even to view as well as produce; that includes acts involving corpses and animals, and acts of life threatening violence as well as depictions of non-consensual acts. The last one is less simple than it sounds, though—it includes fantasy acts, carried out between actors, intended to give the
appearance of rape. Then there's the porn banned from being produced or distributed by UK services in 2014, depicting allegedly "extreme" acts including "female ejaculation" and "fisting" which critics said actually form part of the ordinary bedroom lives of many Brits. As well as being controversial, that law doesn't stop anyone in the UK watching such acts, it just stops UK companies from showing them. UK obscenity law also prohibits the distribution of some supposedly morally corrupting material. There's also the key point that evidence suggests children are able to access porn regularly online despite its restrictive R18 rating. In short, the law surrounding porn is a hotchpotch which could do with simplification and reworking.
Who watches it, and why?
We don't really know. Most independent studies show that porn use is anything from quite common to almost ubiquitous among men, and still popular though (possibly—we're not certain) less common among women. Despite this, there are, as the Lords acknowledge, no official statistics on the use of porn among the British public. In terms of habits and behaviours among users of porn, we're often left to rely on statistics from porn companies themselves—the website PornHub notably
produces some eye-opening data—which is no substitute for good independent data. Given that we're talking about an activity that could be more common than driving a car, this feels like a gap in government knowledge.
What does it do to us?
Again, we're not sure, though the problem here is less a lack of research than disagreement within it. Decisive answers are lacking on all the big questions: is porn "addictive," for example? There is a wealth of stories from those who have lost control over their use of pornography and had it ruin their relationships or lives which would suggest so. But studies on the topic are more mixed. A 2013 paper for the journal
Socioaffective Neuroscience of Psychology, for example, found that subjects who felt they were addicted to pornography were in fact just people with higher sex drives, who therefore responded more strongly to the erotic imagery. Folk wisdom on the internet would have it that porn can do everything from improve your relationship to stop men ever getting an erection. It wouldn't be the be all and end all, but some solid, government-backed research to establish the effects of porn wouldn't go amiss.
