A Little Porn is Good For You

PORNOGRAPHY is good for people, the academic leading a taxpayer-funded study of the subject said yesterday, as the Coalition and Labor traded jibes about an Opposition push to stop online porn reaching home computers.

Alan McKee, who with academics Catharine Lumby and Kath Albury is conducting the Understanding Pornography in Australia study, said that a survey of more than 1000 porn-users must be taken into account as Labor considers forcing all internet service providers to automatically filter hardcore porn to protect children.

"The surprising finding was that pornography is actually good for you in many ways," Dr McKee said. "When you look at people who are using it in everyday life, over 90 per cent report it has had a very positive effect."

Dr McKee said porn users reported it had taught them "to be more relaxed about their sexuality" and marriages were healthier, while porn made people think about another person's pleasure and made them less judgmental about body shapes.

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First of all, I find it quite disturbing that the Australian government would even consider such legislation. I’m sure that the right to free speech is as cherished an ideal in Australia as it is in the US, and this proposal is a drastic bit of censorship.

It’s one thing for parents to censor the internet viewing of their own young children by means of such devices as Net Nanny, but it’s quite another for internet service to come pre-censored for everyone, including adults. I can remember one local internet service in my community advertising their service by calling attention to the fact that their service was “pre-filtered” to screen out “objectionable“ material.

For one thing, adults are free agents who can decide what is “objectionable” for themselves and to simply not click on sites that offend them. Naturally, what is offensive is going to vary widely among people.

More importantly, who decides what is “objectionable” and where do they draw the line? Some of these “pre-filtered” services, especially those offered by internet providers run by religious conservatives, block access to sites advocating political opinions they don’t agree with, for example.

This kind of thing is a can of worms the Australian government really doesn‘t need to open. Adult internet users are quite capable of monitoring their own internet usage, and that of their children with software already available.

So far as my personal experience with online porn goes, I didn’t get my first computer until my son was seventeen. At that age, I figured he was old enough to look at anything on the net, so I’ve never monitored his computer usage. I know that he looks at it regularly, but that's his business.

I look at it myself on occasion, but not regularly. I prefer to go out and get the real thing, rather than spending hours looking at porn. I will occasionally watch a porn movie with one of my lovers to spice things up a bit, but not all that often. It’s no big deal, really.

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http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,10466280%255E421,00.html