In the 60s and 70s, the world embraced the sexual revolution, with women burning their bras, taking the pill and finally free to enjoy sex along with the blokes. Books like The Joy of Sex became bestsellers, Alvin Purple reigned supreme and TV shows like Number 96 and The Box exploded on Aussie screens in a frenzy of nudity and sex.

Of course, that was then and this is now, a time when nudity and sex are commonly censored and the risk of children being exposed to it of paramount (or should that read ‘paranoid’) concern.

In many ways, there’s a lot of confusion out there regarding whether watching depictions of sex is harmful, disturbing and responsible for the breakdown of society. In a way, these attitudes are not all that surprising when you consider that the Office for Film and Literature Classification has kept sex, and perhaps more specifically, pornography and erotica, high on its agenda of ‘must be’ censored material.

The more conservative elements of our government, lesser known and sometimes better known politicians, like Fred Niles and Brian Harradine, and others, have spent years trying to convince everyone that only a return to 1950’s repressed sexual morality will save our society from… Well, it’s not exactly clear what that will save us from, other than sexual pleasure of course, which the conservatives tend to imply is dirty and bad, even for consenting adults behind closed doors.

But what evidence is there that sex is bad or that watching it may be damaging?

In health terms, studies have proven for years that sex is good for the body, that it can help with healing, stress reduction, physical fitness – it even reduces the risks of some cancers!

However, too many of us have a sneaking suspicion, in the back of our minds or even in the forefront, that sex isn’t just naughty, it really is bad/evil/will cause you to go blind and a whole host of other little nasties that have come to us mostly thanks to bad parenting, repression tactics and a multitude of misinformation palmed off on the general public though the media.

And a lot of that anti-sex propaganda is hard to ignore, particularly when those pushing it have gone to all the trouble of presenting scientific research, empirical studies and statistics so shocking even those who enjoy watching sex can become concerned.

You know the kind of stuff I’m talking about (and you can certainly find it easily enough on the web, just ‘google’ the words ‘pornography and harm’ and you’ll see what comes up).

The main gist of the anti-sex/porn theory goes something like this: Rape statistics have never been higher, here’s the numbers; and rapists who have been surveyed all say they enjoy pornography, here’s the stats. Ergo pornography causes rape, there’s heaps of porn around, our society has become more dangerous so it’s all because of the pornography -- obviously.

Quite the neat little package really, or is it?

The truth is rape statistics have gradually increased over the last 30 years, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC), but that’s not true of everywhere. Surprisingly, in the US, where pornography is not as obsessively controlled as it is here, the rates of sexual assaults have actually decreased, from 2.5 per 1000 population (aged over 12) in 1973 to 0.7 in 2002 (US Department of Justice statistics).

However, regardless of the statistical trends in sexual assault rates, what we do know for sure is that the number of people willing to report rapes to the authorities has increased dramatically in the last 20 years. Even today, sexual assault remains the least likely violent crime to be reported, with only around 15 per cent of victims notifying the police (according to AIC’s Non-Reporting And Hidden Recording Of Sexual Assault In Australia) so imagine how often it went unreported in the past.

However, we now live in a society where rapes, sexual molestation and other sexual issues are much more openly discussed than, say, in the 50s and 60s (the golden era of morality). To begin with, this means victims of sex crimes are more likely to be aware that the things that are happening to them, or have happened, are crimes and that they’ll be believed if they do make a complaint.

There’s also a better understanding that sexual assault is motivated by power, rather than sexual attraction, and that also translates to higher reporting rates because it reduces the tendency for victims to blame themselves for a crime that they’re not actually responsible for.

With these kinds of massive changes to the knowledge base regarding sex crimes within our society, the least we might expect as a result is for the reporting of rapes to increase, though that doesn’t necessarily equate to more rapes actually occurring.

In fact, it’s very hard to know if the incidence of rape has become more prevalent than it was, say, in the 1950s, or the turn of the century, the 17^th Century or even ancient Egypt. With low sex crime reporting rates, and even lower ones in the past, the reality is we can never accurately determine if rape has become more prevalent and it’s more likely than not, that it hasn’t increased as much as the anti-sex lobby would have us believe.

Another issue that’s become part of the anti-porn rhetoric is the notion that society has become more violent in general, due to porn ‘causing’ violence, and certainly more violent towards women in particular. These are interesting ideas but have they been proven?

Assault rates do indicate violence has increased over time but women do not make up the greatest number of victims of assaults. In fact, men are most commonly the victims of assaults and, in general, the main culprit when it comes to acts of violence seems to be alcohol, not pornography.

According to an inquiry into crime conducted by the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia in 2002, alcohol use is a factor in the following:

·      34 per cent of homicide offenders and 31 per cent of homicide victims are under the influence of alcohol at the time of the murder;

·      Between 41 and 70 per cent of all violent crimes in Australia are committed while under the influence of alcohol;

·      77 per cent of street offence incidents, such as assaults and offensive behaviour, are alcohol-related; and

·      Alcohol is involved in about 50 per cent of all cases of domestic violence and sexual violence.

It would appear the conservative elements of our government and our society might be well advised to spend more of their energy reducing alcohol abuse instead of blaming pornography and erotica for all our woes!

However, since porn is their main beef, and countless government panels have certainly tried to ‘prove’ a causal link between violence and porn, it’s only fair that we explore this theory too.

So, what’s been suggested is that porn turns everyday normal, non-violent men into sexual predators and/or increases their urge to act out violently, even though a cursory comparison of the percentage of people purchasing porn to the percentage of violent criminals shoots this theory right out of the water. Let alone how that theory relates to the many, many women who also enjoy pornography – do they also become violent as a result?

Certainly many researchers have claimed there is a link between pornography and violence but none have been able to conclusively and scientifically establish such a link exists.

In 1990, the New Zealand Government convened the Indecent Publications Tribunal to explore these issues, calling on John Court to give evidence. Court, a former leader of the Festival of Light, who made his name by insisting there was evidence of a link between pornography and violence, was considered a ‘scientific’ source by the Tribunal so his evidence was automatically given much credence.

However, when specifically pressed by the Tribunal to confirm what research demonstrated the link existed, Court had to admit, “What I am saying is that we do not have evidence that there is such a causal link. I cannot sustain it from my data and I don’t know anybody who can.”

In fact, a number of other inquiries around the world have sought to substantiate the ‘dangers’ of pornography and many of them have gone on to make a finding of harm, including the 1990 NZ Indecent Publications Tribunal mentioned above, even when no scientific evidence could be found!

Even the US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who was asked in 1986 to report independently to the Reagan administration’s hearings against pornography, had to admit that no evidence of harm from pornography could be found (though those hearings also went on to find ‘harm’ where none existed and regardless of the lack of evidence).

In the end, it’s the conclusions of such hearings and tribunals that the anti-sex lobby cites, not the lack of evidence used when making their findings.

Another theory often espoused is that even if pornography doesn’t lead directly to violence, it does cause sex crimes. In the United States, treatment centres and law enforcement agencies have collected data on sex crimes for over 50 years and have used that data to substantiate whether sex offenders have become that way inclined through the use of porn. However, no correlations could be found linking the offenders’ crimes or behaviours to pornography, even after examining half a century’s worth of data.

Other research studies that have looked at the pornography intake of sex offenders have been unable to show that these individuals were ‘shaped’ as it were, by the use of porn. In fact, experts who have seriously explored the existing research, like Avondon Carol, are adamant that porn is not responsible for anyone’s descent into sex crimes and other criminal behaviour.

In a submission to the UK Home Affairs Inquiry in 1994, Carol writes, “Research into the background and behaviour of serious sex offenders has revealed that the causes of abusive/violent behaviour are found in early childhood and generally pre-date exposure to pornographic materials”. Carol also notes that serious offenders tend to “have had highly sexually repressive backgrounds.”

Having a childhood heavily laced with sexual repression seems to be a more common feature in the backgrounds of sex offenders than is sex or pornography. Dr Stephen Juan, from Sydney University, agrees and explains how this repression can sometimes manifest into offending behaviour in later life.

“We all have sexual energy, this is just part of our being because we are animals as well as sophisticated humans with culture and with high intellect,” he explains. “If you attempt to repress it [in early childhood], that energy will be channelled into other directions. For example, if a child is not allowed to explore their bodies when they’re in bed at night then what might happen is they might develop odd fixations about their own bodies or someone else’s body, like fetishes and obsessions.

“Another example is serial killers who get their sexual pleasure from raping and murdering someone. If you look at their childhoods, uniformly they come from families that are very repressive, denying sexuality, a lot of guilt, a lot of punishment as part of the childrearing. There’s a lot of spankings, of rejecting and then, as it’s impossible to shut down sexuality, what happens is it gets channelled into other areas. Occasionally that can be positive, for example a man decides, once his normal sexuality’s been shut off, to put a lot of effort into his work.

“But then there’s people like Adolf Hitler, who was incredibly sexually repressed and abused as a child, who then decides to conquer the world to make up for it. You can have that sexual energy channelled into good and bad directions but it is very, very dangerous to repress it,” he adds.

The bottom line is that there’s an abundance of research and evidence, gathered over the last 40 years, that proves without a shadow of a doubt that violent media is harmful to children, promotes and reinforces the use of violence to solve conflicts and is clearly responsible for the perception that we live in a more dangerous world, even if that isn’t so in every neighbourhood.

However, the same cannot be said of sex, erotica or even pornography, even though just as much research has been done in this area, hoping to prove that it’s dangerous.

So why is sex always, in this country, so heavily censored while violence is not? The answer has more to do with the discomfort certain individuals may feel about their own sexuality than it has to do with actual harm it might cause to the rest of us.

Sex is an emotive issue, and well it should be since sex is so often a part of emotional adult relationships. And that emotiveness will always cause some level of unrest within certain factions of the community. Expecting anything less is perhaps somewhat unrealistic in a place like Australia, where different attitudes, customs and cultures have been intertwined for decades.

However, when it comes to the perceived harms of sex, erotica and pornography, there’s so little compelling evidence of it that the only thing we know for sure is that if these are the reasons given for the censorship of sex, they are invalid and should be recognised as such.