Health Committee on April 4th, 2017

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

There are short-term and long-term perspectives on this. The long-term perspective I would see is to simply change the acceptability of a lot of this. Clearly, everyone around this table is not accepting of any kind of harmful or degrading effects on children, but I think generally in the population that's not quite true. Perhaps that's not quite right with regard to children, but in terms of pornography in general, I think it's very common.

If you go to schools and grab a bunch of boys, pretty much all of them, as you mentioned, will have access to pornography. In some ways, I suppose, it's the same as it's been with smoking and drinking, with the age restrictions put on those. I don't think that would stop people getting access, but it's just one more block.

I think the bigger aspect is to actually change people's opinions. As an example of this, I don't know if you're aware of it, but there was a vignette that came out of the U.K. It was about sexual consent, but in terms of having a cup of tea. Basically, the whole vignette is that if you offer someone a cup of tea and they say no, don't give them the cup of tea. If you invite them home for a cup of tea and they say they'd like a cup of tea, but they get home and they don't want a cup of tea anymore, don't give them a cup of tea. Also, don't turn up at the door with a cup of tea, and don't force them to drink a cup of tea.

It's something that everybody grasped hold of because it was such a good parallel. Everyone understands the cup of tea, but it takes some really good thinking it through to understand it as sexual consent. It takes away all those aspects of, “Well...”. I've heard judges say all sorts of things in child sexual abuse cases: “Well, sex was in the air”, and this is the case of a 14-year-old, or “Well, if it really happened she would have remembered it”, or this: “Why did she go there? She knows what happens there.” All of these types of things are putting the emphasis on the person who has been violated rather than saying, “No, actually, it's the person who did that who committed the crime here—nobody else.”

I think that type of approach, a very creative approach, would certainly help as well. I think that just making sure that children have respect for themselves is a big deal. For those kids who have been abused, that's very difficult. That bar is very high to get to for them. For those who haven't been abused, it's just about making sure they know that they are in control of what they see and what they do.

[Len Webber, Conservative, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Okay. Thank you.

I'm not sure how much time I have left.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

You have one minute.

[Len Webber, Conservative, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Do you have any thoughts, Neil or Bill?

[Dr. William Fisher]

I'm very strongly in support of directly attacking the issue of sexual coercion, with or without attention to regulation of what Dr. Malamuth refers to as, and what I concur is, an unregulatable Internet. I think we can certainly all agree that there is an utterly unacceptable level of sexual coercion and violence generally, but not always, directed against women.

Then the question becomes for all of us around the table, how do we address that very directly? In studies of pornography and aggression and three-way interactions with the anti-social personality, we're making fine theoretical points that account for very little—something like 4%—of the variability in sexual aggression.

I was delighted to show my class the tea vignette. We spend vastly lopsided amounts of time directed at women, coaching them on how to modify their behaviour and constrain their lives to avoid sexual assault, and grotesquely little time directed directly at men. This is a very big issue.

I would add, I am the senior author, together with Mike Barrett and Alex McKay, of Health Canada's Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education, which was authored, I believe, in the late 1980s. I'm having a senior moment. It was designed on the basis of the best research to create an educational immunization against the lopsided sexist and gendered violence that, unfortunately, characterizes our society.

I've sometimes said wistfully that pornography does us a favour. When you see pornography you're aware that you're looking at something that nonetheless is still a little out of the ordinary. Yet when you see the routine sexism of every TV show, it doesn't raise any red flags, and that's what scares me. When you look at children's books and you see that women are inside and women don't have professions and women are ironing, that's a very big deal.

Broadly speaking, I'm very supportive of education. I'm concerned about stigmatizing sex in general, which might be an inevitable consequence of trying and failing to regulate the Internet. What do we know? We know that individuals who are most anxious about sexuality have the toughest time looking after their sexual health. So I'm strongly supportive of, and I'm happy to find common ground here with, a direct method of addressing the problem that has been lurking in the background of this discussion: does pornography cause X, does pornography cause Y? There's some dispute about that.

However, there's no dispute about the very high levels of coercion, sexism and maltreatment of women in society, and the common ground is perhaps that we could craft ways of directly addressing that, educationally and otherwise.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you.

Ms. Sidhu.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all the presenters.

Some studies have shown that viewing pornography is associated with brain chemical changes, similar to those observed in addiction. Can you discuss the current research findings regarding the potential impacts on mental health of viewing sexually explicit material? What is the effect on mental health at any age?

[Dr. William Fisher]

There is widely cited “research”, quote/unquote, in line with your statement that the effects on the brain are like addiction, such as to heroin. Perhaps the best answer to that is from Nicole Prause, who was formerly at UCLA, a neuropsychologist, who has pointed out that the effects on the brain of viewing pornography are similar to the effects on the brain of viewing a picture of a loved one. Dopamine and other chemicals are not distinctively associated with addiction or with viewing pornography. They're often distinctively associated with positive events.

You're also touching on the issue of, quote/unquote, “sex addiction” or “pornography addiction”. In fact, one of the briefs before you is by a so-called certified sex addiction therapist. I want to emphasize that the American Psychiatric Association's gold standard manual of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, edition 5, a fairly recent revision, explicitly considered and rejected both the diagnosis of hyper-sexuality and sex addiction. The American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists, the largest organization of sex therapists, has dismissed the idea of sex addiction.

Clearly, there are people who use pornography or many other things in an intrusive and compulsive way that interferes with their life, but the concept of addiction or unique neurochemical events is not one that has much support.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

What about what Ms. Roberts' statement that there is an effect on child development? What are your thoughts about that?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

I think the critical developmental point here is the teenage brain. In the teenage brain, the frontal lobe, which is responsible for all the decision-making, weighing the pros and cons of risks, that type of thing, is functioning.... Let's just say the amygdalic system—which is where all of the thrill and the dopamine rises and so on happens—is working at a much faster rate in the teenage years than the frontal lobe is. They're both still developing, but the frontal lobe continues to develop all the way through into your mid-twenties, 26, 27, 28, which is something we didn't realize several years ago and one of the reasons you tend to see teenagers taking risks. It's because, for their brain, it's more pleasurable for them to do that than to think through all the actual risks. It's possible that if viewing pornography in any form is giving them that high, that is something that's going to increase over and over and potentially lead into some more risky behaviour on their part.

Does that make sense?

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Is low self-esteem connected to those kinds of things?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

Low self-esteem? I'm not sure about that.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

In child development—

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

Well, low self-esteem primarily comes from how you're treated by your parents. That's the critical relationship that will determine your self-esteem. How your parents tell you you are is how you will believe yourself to be, so you internalize what you hear and that voice becomes your own voice. Then in the teenage years, there is more work, let's call it, on the part of the teenager in developing their self-identity and self-esteem. It's very fragile until they get to around 18 or 19, when they start to realize that they can be individual. They can have their own views, and it's okay to have those views.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you.

Dr. Fisher, in another article published in your journal on sex research, you said there is a need to improve the delivery of sex education to teenagers and young adults. How do you envision this change taking place?

[Dr. William Fisher]

I'll go back to the subject of education. I was one of the originators, with the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, of a website called SexualityandU.ca. We wished, if you will, to infect the Internet, which has some very horrific stuff, with some good stuff. This is a generation of Internet natives. We created SexualityandU.ca, and we advertised it widely, mostly on Valentine's Day. We were getting 450,000 unique visitors, for an average of 10 to 11 minutes, in English and in French, over a period of years. The site has recently been relaunched—it's now called SexandU.ca—under the auspices of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, to essentially provide relevant scripts for responsible action in teenagers, to strengthen the hand of teenagers who wish to abstain from sexual contact, and to promote safer sex, contraceptively protected sex, and, critically, consensual sex.

We have also done another project that, with apologies, is called Peggy's Porn Guide. One of my graduate students, who is very good at Internet animation, took film clips of several of the lies of pornography—that women always want to have sex or that they'll agree to do anything under any circumstance—and with an animated figure presented them to young men. The young men were asked to respond: Is this the way things really are, or is this a fantasy? Anybody who in any way believed the “lies” of some segments of pornography was sent to talk to Peggy, a buxom animated figure, who then did role reversal: for example, “How would you like to be coerced?”, etc.

I would favour adopting interactive technologies that have a very wide reach and can be done extremely well, at some cost, and then disseminated widely. It also, with apologies and respect, provides an end run. That is, I don't have to hope that a comfortable sex educator is in position in every school and in every county. I can actually monitor and upgrade the best sex education in this way. One of the things I would do is put the cup of tea on it. I think we need to develop this emphatically. There is very good research, by the way. Doug Kirby and others have done very good research on the effectiveness of sex education.

One of the things that has been going on, in addition to the unlimited access to whatever is on the Internet, is that, in Canada, there has been better sex education, which is one of the competing factors in a population-level estimate. When you think about the impact of Internet pornography, together with everything else that's going on, you do say to yourself, “Where's the beef?” If there were a significant impact on the development of norms that said it's okay to have sex early and with lots of partners, we would see a shift in that direction. We've actually seen a shift in the opposite direction.

It is okay to say that we've heard a lot, going in a number of directions, about the development of norms, what becomes normal, etc. At some point, it is also okay to say, “Where's the beef?“ Where is the dramatic change in the mores that are supposedly being conditioned? There are fragments of answers out there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thanks very much.

Now for a final question, we go to Mr. Davies.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Fisher, I think I promised to come back to you about the difference, in the research, between sexually explicit materials and violent and degrading materials. Your research, I think, has focused on exposure to pornography simpliciter. Is there a difference in your research, or in your mind, between pornography or sexually explicit material and violent or degrading pornography?

[Dr. William Fisher]

There is clearly a difference between violent and degrading pornography, and other forms of sexually explicit material, but it's not simple.

First, I would direct your attention to the fact I have conducted experiments on violent pornography. That type of pornography has not been absent either in my experimental research or in my correlational research, where I found that people with a high sex drive tend to use more violent pornography than people with a low sex drive. I conducted a study in which men were given electrical shocks and verbally harassed by a female and then shown violent pornography. We showed them classic violent pornography taken from the classic research and then we gave them an opportunity to be aggressive or not to be aggressive, by talking to the woman, or whatever. There is a difference.

I want to direct your attention to two other things, though. There is a community of folks—and we have no idea how large it is—who refer to themselves as into kink, bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism. It is one of the most completely consensual communities around. They could give us lessons on how to obtain consent, and they exclude people and ostracize them if consent is violated. There is a substantial amount of BDSM pornography or sexually explicit material that you might argue is an area that doesn't exactly conform to violent pornography.

Classic violent pornography, the lie of violent pornography—which is happily not too common but is definitely problematic—is that sexual assault works for him, because he gets sex and works for her, because she has an orgasm, and nobody gets punished. Okay? That's an advertisement, if you will, for sexual criminality. However, don't be of the school that views pornography from a monkey see, monkey do perspective. Generally speaking, the monkey has a learning history. Generally speaking, the monkey has a brain, anticipates punishment, anticipates guilt, and if the individual is very unempathetic, doesn't have a learning history of punishment, etc., then we've got big problems.

There may be big problems with pornography in a confluence model context. It may be a big problem with almost any other script for aggression, and we do not lack them in our society.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Dr. Malamuth, the last question goes to you.

I know that on pornographic films, there's often a warning that comes on the screen before the film runs. I'm going to assume that this has a very limited effect. I think the U.K. is looking at bringing in filters in an attempt to regulate what I think Dr. Fisher called “unregulatable”, the Internet.

Assuming that we can't do that, you talked about education. At what age do you think we should be starting the healthy sex education of our children, and do you see a public education role for that, as some means of trying to teach a young generation about healthy normative attitudes toward sex, if we can't ultimately control their exposure to maybe more harmful depictions?

[Prof. Neil Malamuth]

For a change, I'm going to defer to Dr. Fisher for that answer, because it's not an area that I'm particularly expert on. Recently I gave my 13-year-old son a book that's specifically designed for sex education for people of his age, and he read the first chapter, and he said he wasn't ready for that yet.

I think there are individual differences as well, but I am not an expert on that particular question.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

Dr. Fisher.

[Dr. William Fisher]

The simple answer is that it's a bit of a moving target. I've spent 30 years doing HIV prevention research in various communities from South Africa to inner cities. I've done large-scale research in inner cities where kids start wanting to have babies at 13 1/2, and obviously you calibrate education before that.

So partly it's a moving target. I would strongly suggest there's no such thing as sex education poisoning. There is no way of robbing a kid of their innocence. They'll simply tune right out. I think there is developmentally appropriate education, and it involves the sort of thing that I think Ontario is phasing in, with correct body-naming, respect for boundaries, good touch bad touch, and things like that. I think it can be effective, and I think it needs to be directed in a very specific and grade-appropriate way.

One other thing: Back in the distant past, I was able to assist with a study of about half the practising sex educators in the state of Indiana, and we found that the curriculum didn't make a bit of difference. What mattered was the teacher's comfort with the topic. So we've got to provide not only curricula, but we also have to invest heavily in staff selection and support and training. It's not fair to teachers to dump a curriculum guide on them.

The key point is let us all join in a direct attack on the unwanted potential effects of pornography. Let us all join in a direct assault on inequitable, coercive, and unhealthy behaviour, and cut to the chase.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you very much, everyone.

That concludes our session and our information.

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

Could I add something?