RELATED: The growth of an industry
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
PORN is playing a major role in the forming of young people's sexual expectations.
A documentary from Warrnambool filmmaker Maree Crabbe shows these exceptions are unrealistic and damaging.
“Young people told me they understand porn is fake, even if the sex is real," Crabbe said.
"But they often went on to describe the ways that the porn they have seen or that their partners or peers have seen is shaping their sexual expectations and experiences.”
Porn dominates the internet, 30 per cent of all web traffic is porn related.
The most efficient drivers at the wheel of the internet are our youth. They can unlock many of the mysteries that confound their elders.
Crabbe believes tech savvy young people and the online porn overload are far from the perfect combination.
Crabbe’s documentary The Porn Factor will be screened on Thursday on SBS2 at 9.30pm,.
An advanced showing of the documentary will be at Deakin University in Warrnambool at 7.30pm on Tuesday, followed by a question-and-answer session with Crabbe.
The documentary explores the link between the sexual expectations and experiences of young people and its connection to watching porn. Crabbe is adamant the connection is not a healthy one.
She said the nature of the sexual activity in porn is giving young people a distorted view of what to expect when they enter a relationship.
“A recent content analysis of 50 of the most popular pornographic videos found that 88 per cent of scenes contained physical aggression and 48 per cent of scenes contained verbal aggression,” Crabbe said.
“Ninety-four per cent of that aggression is at female performers.
“Violence against women is a huge problem right across the world, it crosses cultural, religious, class and age divisions. Pornography isn’t the only, or even the most important, cause of violence against women, but it is one that is increasingly prevalent in our culture and it’s time we addressed it.
“What we want is for young people to have the chance to have relationships and sexuality that are mutually respectful, fully consenting and safe.
“Pornography sets them up to not have an opportunity to do that; to not capture a vision of how fantastic relationships and sexuality can be but to have this very limiting and oppressive version of sexuality.”
Crabbe delivered a sexual violence prevention project at Brophy Family and Youth Services in Warrnambool between 2002 and 2008. The need for the documentary came from her experiences during that time.
“One of the conversations I had with young people as part of that is where do you learn about sex from?” she said. “As the years went on, young people were more and more mentioning pornography as where they were learning about sex.”
*Tickets for the Tuesday screening are being sold through the Youth Affairs Council of Victoria (YACVic) for $15 and $10 concession. The link is: http://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/the-p0rn-factor-tickets-26320844354?utm_term=eventurl_text.
