Thank you very much for the invitation to speak here today. It is an honour.
I'm speaking to you today about revisualizing porn, how young adults' consumption of sexually explicit Internet movies can inform approaches to Canadian sexual health promotion.
I conducted this research study with Dr. Gahagan and two other scholars as part of my master's degree in health promotion at Dalhousie University.
Our presentations are connected. I'm going to discuss the research study specifically, and then Dr. Gahagan will present a broader analysis of pornography as a public health issue.
The most effective place to start is by reviewing the broader research that orients this work and shapes my thinking on the subject.
As might be anticipated, the research literature on this topic is complex. How ideas of pornography, sexual health, and violence can even be defined to start these types of conversations is subject to debate in the body of research on this topic. This is replicated in non-academic settings. Adding to this picture, the overall body of research findings on this topic is fuzzy.
The predigital decades of research resulted in extensive but inconclusive findings on the overall health impacts of pornography. On the topic of violence and pornography specifically, the most that definitively could be said was that for some people exposure to some types of pornography under certain conditions could increase misogynistic views. However, recently, research in this area has resurged with the emergence of highly accessible and anonymous online pornography. This is partially because this is theorized as having the potential to particularly impact youth.
Broadly speaking, current research in this area is often focused on two main areas. One is behavioural changes, which is often referred to or talked about in terms of sexual risk-taking and gender-based violence. The other area of primary focus is the psychological or physiological harms. This is often more framed in addiction and those types of discussions.
While there are some trends such as earlier engagement in sexual activities, similar to the predigital era, many of the findings are inconsistent and contradictory. Adding to this is risk and addiction-focused research. While they are the primary areas of focus, they are just part of the health impacts of the porn research landscape.
There is significant research being done from other theoretical perspectives about how pornography, either as different genres or as an entire spectrum, that is, using the spectrum of pornography as a unit of analysis, can additionally impact health, including its perceived appeals and benefits.
For instance, there's a long-standing history of LGBTQ communities using pornography to explore sexual activities in a non-heteronormative manner. Some research indicates that couples use pornography to communicate about sexuality. Even further research still shows that young people use pornography to learn about the spectrum of sexual expressions. These ideas can also provide important inroads into thinking about pornography as a public health issue.
Returning to our study, while researching the impacts of porn, as we were doing, we thought it was essential to consider both the potential harms and the negative health impacts for obvious reasons. However, we also thought it was necessary to recognize the expansive diverse nature of pornography and the range of experience that individuals may have with it.
Therefore, for our study, we thought it was more effective and more reflective of people's experiences with it to conceptualize the relationship between pornography and sexual health in more comprehensive terms.
With this information in mind, we conducted a qualitative study designed to explore the relationship between sexual health and pornography in a holistic and person-centred manner. We understood pornography as depicting sexual activities used to create excitement. Our research questions were the following: Do urban heterosexual men and women youth perceive the consumption of sexually explicit Internet movies as influencing their sexual health? If so, how? How do these findings inform Canadian sexual health promotion?
To answer this question, we focused on investigating six constructs of comprehensive sexual health—sexual knowledge, sexual self-perception, sexual activities, gendered-partner relations, perceptions of sexuality, and general well-being.
We interviewed 12 youth—six men and six women—aged 19 to 28. They had education levels that varied from high school to graduate school, and they self-identified as a variety of racial or ethnic backgrounds.
Once we gathered this data, it was analyzed both within those six measures or constructs to identify categorical findings, and then also across those six constructs, to get at larger emergent themes.
In terms of the findings, we can discuss the six measures and the three emergent themes in more detail during the panel, if there's interest, but at this point I'm going to offer a synthesis of this research as it pertains to this committee. There were two particularly notable messages out of the research.
The first one was on the individual level. It was that participants perceive pornography as having both positive and negative influences on sexual health, and these influences were viewed as being interconnected and at times contradictory with each other.
These findings or results really reflected youths' descriptions of how the health impacts of pornography can't always be defined as separate targetable effects or physical manifestations. Rather, as illustrated by the youth, sexual health includes both the biological factors as well as more complex embodiments about the wider social, political, and popular discourses about sexuality.
This aligns with other research suggesting that there aren't as many straightforward evidence-based answers as some may argue, or as maybe we would all hope, and also that sometimes, when you're coming across these very straightforward answers, it's really important to consider the perspective and the scope of the perspective used to generate them. Especially relevant, I think, for this context, it also highlights the importance of using Canadian data in a Canadian context.
The second level, and perhaps the one of most salience for this committee, is that the Canadian youth in this study actively engaged with pornography as a multipurpose, comprehensive sexual resource in a context they viewed as devoid of alternatives. The youth reported that there are limited opportunities in both institutional forms of sexual knowledge exchange and in mainstream society to really learn about the positive aspects of sexuality, and so they use pornography to fill this gap.
While they, I think very importantly, noted that this wasn't their preferred choice, because they certainly recognized the troublesome elements of pornography, it was viewed as the only choice; pornography was the singular non-judgmental, non-regulated, and non-limited sexual resource available.
This finding suggests that youth pornography consumption is related, at least in part, to challenges in accessing comprehensive sexual resources in Canada.
When we consider these findings together, they highlight that for topics such as Motion M-47 it's important to foreground how pornography, including that with violent content, is consumed alongside and in relation to other sexual content, messages, and imagery, both online and off. Pornography is part of a much wider sexuality ecosystem and not something that can or should really be considered in isolation. The public health effects of pornography are linked to the tone and tenor of the way sexuality is addressed in education, health, media, and online spaces.
The overall implication of this work is that from a public health perspective pornography is not the singular central topic at issue that needs to be addressed; pornography is rather a part of a much larger discussion about improving sexual health, especially for youth, in Canada. It begs questions such as: how can sexuality education be made more consistent, coordinated, and comprehensive across the provinces; how can gender and sexuality equity be improved at the societal level; are there opportunities for new partnerships in this regard?
This is not in any way to lessen the very important conversation that's being had here, but rather to recognize the ways in which it is really reflective of a critical need for a much larger conversation about sexual health promotion in Canada.
I'm going to leave my thoughts here at this point. The implications will be expanded upon by Dr. Gahagan. Thank you very much for your time. I look forward to the panel discussion.