erotica

This page considers some questions about online content regulation.

It covers -

• what is pornography?
• is obscene material available online
• what is its prevalence
• who creates it
• who consumes it
• what is its impact

Censorship online and offline is a mechanism for restricting access to content that is deemed offensive.

Many claim that online censorship is antithetical to the spirit of the net. Others, more credibly, question whether the shape the global information infrastructure enables meaningful enforcement of rules applying to particular jurisdictions.

We've explored broad issues of governance in a separate guide. Later pages of this guide explore specific legislation, codes of practice, reports, advocacy bodies and models.

As an introduction to that material you may wish to consider several questions:

• is offensive material available online (and what is its impact)?
• what is the prevalence of that material (and can it be readily accessed)?
• can it be regulated?

    what is pornography?

Linda Williams' Hard Core: Power, Pleasure & the 'Frenzy of the Visible' (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1989) claims that

Pornography is simply whatever representations a particular dominant class or group does not want in the hands of another, less dominant class or group. Those in power construct the definitions of pornography through their power to censor it.

Sue Curry Jansen's Censorship: The Knot That Binds Power & Knowledge (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1991) argues that censorship is

all socially structured proscriptions or prescriptions which inhibit or prohibit dissemination of ideas, information, images or other messages through a society's channels of communication whether these obstructions are secured by political, economic, religious or other systems of authority

A definition that encompasses everything from assassination and the secret policeman's red pencil to the 'broadband divide' is not, perhaps, particularly meaningful. It does however highlight the interrelationships between censorship, secrecy, freedom of information and concepts such as intellectual property.

A sense of disagreements about the nature of pornography and its impacts is provided by works such as Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power (London: BFI 1993) edited by Pamela Gibson & Roma Gibson, Sex Exposed: Sexuality & the Pornography Debate (London: Virago 1992) edited by Lynne Segal & Mary McIntosh, On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality and Obscenity Law (New York: St. Martin's 1993) by Ian Hunter, David Saunders & Dugald Williamson, Gay Male Pornography: An Issue of Sex Discrimination (Vancouver: Uni of British Columbia Press 2005) by Christopher Kendall, Governing Pleasures: Pornography & Social Change in England, 1815-1914 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 2002) by Lisa Sigel, The Problem of Pornography: Regulation and the Right to Free Speech (London: Routledge 1994) by Susan Easton and Bound & Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (Durham: Duke Uni Press 1999) by Laura Kipnis. Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families (New York: Times Books 2005) by Pamela Paulis is, for us, overly credulous.

    is offensive material available online?

Unsurprisingly, the answer is yes. We've referred later in this guide to changing perceptions of what is offensive, most succinctly characterised by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's comment that he could not intelligibly define obscenity but "I know it when I see it".

There's an ongoing debate in Australia, the US and most other countries about free speech, the definition of obscenity and the nature of content that should be restricted.

In January 2001, for example, a Victorian magistrate called for bans on online publishing of bomb-making instructions. Overseas, a group of activists acknowledged that the US 1999 federal law prohibiting such publication had been a failure, accordingly campaigning for action by internet service providers.

German courts and politicians have recurrently sought to extend anti-Nazi law to other jurisdictions in restricting the online Holocaust denial industry. The French government has pressured eBay and Yahoo! to restrict online sale of Nazi memorabilia.

And in Turkey an ISP's offices were demolished after criticism that it allowed access to images of women whose arms and faces were uncovered. (Offline, South Australian police confiscated and then - oops - returned a book of Mapplethorpe photos available in other parts of Australia.)

While estimates of the size of the web vary significantly, it is likely that there are more than 500 million pages online as at mid 2000. That number is growing rapidly. The web contains text, still images, audio and video that many people would find offensive. Some of that content is illegal in Australia and other jurisdictions. Bulletin boards and other parts of the web include statements or images that are similarly objectionable.

The impact of access to that content is contentious. Later pages of this guide point to official reports and to polemics by the likes of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon.

Donna Hughes' 2000 paper The Internet & Sex Industries: Partners in Global Sexual Exploitation is one example. A somewhat more nuanced account was provided by Clive Hamilton & Michael Flood in the Australia Institute's 2003 Regulating Youth Access to Pornography study (PDF) and Youth and Pornography in Australia: Evidence on the extent of exposure and likely effects (PDF), with the former lamenting that

Children in Australia have extensive exposure to pornography. Just under three-quarters (73 per cent) of boys and 11 per cent of girls report that they have watched an X-rated video. Eighty-four per cent of boys and 60 per cent of girls say they have been exposed accidentally to sex sites on the Internet and two in five boys deliberately use the Internet to see sexually explicit material, with four to five per cent doing so frequently.

Historians would note that the 1970 report of the US Presidential Commission on Obscenity & Pornography indicated that 80% of US boys and 70% of girls had seen visual depictions or textual descriptions of sexual intercourse by age 18, and that more broadly the circumstances of most children throughout history exposed them to adult reproductive activity (often in the same room or even same bed).

The Australia Institute report commented that

In seeing X-rated videos or Internet pornography, young people are exposed to explicit images of a wide range of sexual acts that are deemed unsuitable viewing for youths under 18. There are special concerns regarding violent and extreme material on the Internet including depictions of non-consenting sexual acts such as rape and bestiality.

The research literature's documentation of significant associations between use of certain types of pornography and sexual aggression provide grounds for real concern.

Apart from the intrinsically disturbing nature of much Internet pornography, regular consumption of pornography and particularly violent and extreme pornography is a risk factor for boys and young mens perpetration of sexual assault. In addition, it may foster greater tolerance of this behaviour by others.

In promoting an article about online child porn in 2003 Michael Malone wrote that -

This is the very heart of darkness. These are images that are more than shocking and repulsive. They kill your soul, in part because you know that every poor child you see on these sites is dead, if not now at the hands of a sadist, then decades from now from drugs, alcoholism or suicide. The pictures first make you sick, then angry, and finally homicidal. If you could get ahold of the people perpetrating this, you would kill them with your bare hands. But you can't; the best thing you can do is expose them. So you go on. ... There were already certain unspeakable images so burned into my brain that, even now, I wish I could take a scalpel and cut them out. But Bob had no choice. He had to look. Only his fury and hatred of these people and his desire to destroy them kept him going — and when that wasn't enough he'd go out at night and get drunk to try to destroy the memories.

In contrast we recommend the thoughtful paper 'E-rogenous Zones: Positioning Pornography in the Digital Economy' by Blaise Cronin & Elisabeth Davenport in volume 17(1) of The Information Society, the 2001 Nordic Council Child pornography on the Internet report (PDF) and the 2002 US National Academies' report on Youth, Pornography & the Internet.

The latter considers approaches to protecting kids from net pornography and other inappropriate content and threats from online sexual predators, including educational strategies, technological tools and policy options - in particular how to teach kids to make appropriate decisions about what they see and experience online.

We've considered some security issues and statistics here. This site also features a profile on the online 'adult content' industries, questioning some of the hype about supposed facts and figures.

    what is its prevalence?

Our Metrics & Statistics guide highlights the uncertain nature of many internet statistics. Information about the nature of content (as distinct from more readily identifiable data such as the number of domains) is particularly problematical.

However, it appears that the notion of the net as awash in snuff-movies, hate sites, bestiality, child pornography and DIY explosives guides is strictly mythological.

In 1995 Time and other magazines promoted a report by entrepreneur Marty Rimm purporting to demonstrate that much of the web consisted of 'adult' material, including violent erotica. It claimed for example that 83.5% of all photographs on the net were "pornographic" and that paraphilic or paedophilic images accounted for around half of downloads on bulletin board systems.

Similar figures recur in the mass media, with Jerry Liao for example exhorting parents to "put God into the center of your family" in 2006 after asking

Did you know that there are 4.2 billion pornographic websites that is equivalent to 12% of the total websites on the Internet? That there are 372 million pornographic pages, 68 million daily search engine requests, 2.5 billion daily pornographic emails, and 1.5 billion peer to peer pornographic downloads monthly?

The Rimm report was methodologically flawed, internally inconsistent and poorly based, failures demonstrated in cogent studies by Donna Hoffman, Thomas Novak and others.

The major Hoffmann critique for example suggested that under 0.5% of newsgroup messages relate to groups that contain pornographic images and that the vast majority of web sites concern non-Adult content: everything from the New York Times (NYT) to this site or your local Airedale club. Usenet is not restricted to alt.sex; it also encompasses discussion about knitting patterns, cucumber sandwiches and the born-again.

The 1997 study by Boehringer & Harmon on A Content Analysis of Internet-Accessible Written Pornographic Depictions explored some research issues. Romin Alavi's 2000 Pornography & the Internet paper quipped that

Rimm's conclusion is the precise methodological equivalent to the following:
(a) restricting a study of printed pornography to magazines located in the "adult" area of a bookstore,
(b) finding that 83.5% of the reader submissions during a one-week period were to magazines that contained "pornographic" material, and concluding
(c) that 83.5% of all reader submissions to all magazines are pornographic.

Those studies also offered a more nuanced analysis of the distinction between commercial publishing and 'backyard' image trading by consumers, explored for example in Max Taylor's 1999 paper The nature & dimensions of child pornography on the Internet and the 2004 NZ Department of the Interior report on Internet Traders of Child Pornography and other Censorship Offenders in New Zealand (PDF).

Official and academic reports similarly debunked fears about the availability of bomb-making instructions. However, what Mike Godwin labelled The Great Cyberporn Panic of 1995 was followed by a wave of online censorship legislation (identified in the next two pages). Our assessment is that such legislation, although much derided and clearly often flawed, was an inevitable result of normalisation of the web.

It followed traditional models, with governments concentrating on 'choke points' in the information cycle. Sanctions against site operators saw them move to friendlier jurisdictions and/or screen access, pressure was placed on intermediaries such as ISPs and existing prohibitions on for example child pornography were reaffirmed.

One consequence has been that commercial erotica has effectively moved behind closed doors: access involves subscription fees and often requires use of a commercial identification service (AVS) such as AdultCheck.

That has boosted the revenue of vendors of 'adult' content services, discussed in a more detailed profile on this site. It has also reduced the likelihood of minors accidentally encountering large amounts of the more extreme erotica and increased the difficulty of assessing how much smut is online.

Estimates remain contentious but it is likely that 'Adult' content comprises less than 5% of the web (several million pages), with only a very small fraction (some analysts suggest 1%) of that figure involving prohibited content such as child pornography.



The October 2001 Web Characterisation report from the OCLC claims that around 2.5% of the 3.11 million publicly accessible sites are devoted to adult content (defined as "sexually explicit text or images"). The 2002 paper by Michael Mehta, Don Best & Nancy Poon on Peer-to-peer sharing on the Internet: An analysis of how Gnutella networks are used to distribute pornographic material covers a very small sample of video files but suggests that much P2P swapping is innocuous.

Sexual and pornographic Web searching: Trends analysis, a 2006 paper by Amanda Spink, Helen Partridge & Bernard Jansen considered studies of web search logs from 1997 to 2005, suggesting that the "level of sexual or pornographic searches" has declined as a proportion of all queries since 1997 and currently representes less than 4% of queries. Testimony by Philip Stark to the US Congress during 2006 (PDF) claimed that around 1% of sites indexed by Google and Microsoft were "sexually explicit" and that 6% of searches yield at least one explicit site. The figures were criticised by the ACLU and third parties, which noted that art work by Michelangelo would fall into the 'explicit' category and that the sample of 1,382 URLs appeared to include substantial double counting. Use of the Google SafeSearch facility more than halved the search results.

Globally, complaints to regulatory agencies such as the Australian Broadcasting Authority and to public/private sector hotlines appear to amount to a few thousand each year. Successful prosecutions or 'take down' action in response to those complaints appear to be significantly lower, broadly comparable with figures for action against print and video publications.

Exercises in quantifying the production/distribution of illicit content prior to the net are problematical. However, some sense of volumes is provided by the seizure of 324,000 'obscene' photographs in London and New York alone during 1874.

    who creates it?

Questions about the creation of offensive online content presuppose agreement about the nature of offensiveness, a problem that bedevils much media hype about the online sewer.

Some people would regard any use of 'strong language' (or disagreement with their views) as liable to corrupt or otherwise deserve suppression. We've - somewhat ruefully - dealt with an author who appears to consider that free speech is freedom to publish only highly positive reviews of that author's work, suppressing critical comment and any indication that leading academics disagree with aspects of that work.

In the Adult Content profile on this site we have highlighted some figures - which vary significantly - about the size and shape of the online porn sector, which embraces a range of commercial bodies, amateurs and enthusiasts.

    who consumes it?

The answer to questions about consumption of offensive online content is deeply disappointing to some people.

Put simply, it appears that appetites for heterodox religious content, 'alternative' political statements and erotica (including content that is publicly stigmatised or illegal) are not restricted to particular geographical, ethnic, income, age, gender or education demographics.

Consumption of 'mainstream' erotica online in advanced economies is not restricted to male teens (and is becoming less so as the overall online population normalises). That is consistent with demographics for consumption of free-to-air and pay television broadcasts and print publications.

Commercial or other access to non-mainstream erotica similarly doesn't appear to be quarantined within a particular demographic, although some demographics have easier access than others (eg because they have broadband, greater experience or online or are not on the wrong side of what we have characterised as the 'credit card divide').

A useful 2002 review of research into media violence up to 2002 is available as part of the Free Expression Project.






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