New Zealand Pushing Toward Porn Ban With Chief Censor’s ‘Study’

New Zealand’s Chief Censor David Shanks, back in September, said that he has considered “pushing a button” to block all porn in the southwestern Pacific country of about 5 million people. And on Thursday, Shanks announced his office had completed New Zealand’s first study of online porn—and perhaps not surprisingly, he found the results “a little bit shocking.” According to a report by The New Zealand Herald, the country’s Classification Office, which is headed by the chief censor, simply looked at the 200 PornHub videos most viewed by New Zealanders. To Shanks' self-proclaimed surprise, he found that almost half of the videos eagerly consumed by Kiwis fell into the “step porn” genre—depicting sexual acts among members of blended families, or at least, performers pretending to be stepmothers, stepbrothers and so on. Shanks, however, admitted adults would easily recognize that the “step family” scenarios were “fake and contrived,” according to the Herald report. But that teenagers might be more susceptible to mistaking the fantasy scenarios for reality. Shanks also said he was disturbed by seeing the repeated scenarios in which one, usually female “family” member is initially reluctant to participate in sex acts, but “whose initial resistance is overcome through insistence and subtle pressure by the male. The actress is then portrayed as enjoying the sexual contact—female pleasure was notable in 99 percent of the videos.”  But Shanks also said that while 10 percent of the videos he and his researchers viewed contained what he called scenes of physical aggression, porn depicting supposedly non-consensual sex, or sex acts involving aggressive behavior, were not popular among Kiwi porn fans. “This level is much lower than that indicated in various international studies,” he said. While some studies have dubiously claimed that up to 90 percent of online porn videos depict “physical aggression," a study released earlier this year by researchers at Canada’s McGill University found that depictions of aggressive sexual behavior in porn are actually on the way down. The McGill study found that only 3 percent of porn videos studied in 2016 portrayed “non-consensual aggression,” compared to 13 percent in 2008. In addition, the McGill study found that porn viewers prefer scenes in which the participants in sex acts appear to be experiencing pleasure, rather than pain or other forms of discomfort. But despite its rather ambiguous findings and loose methodology, the New Zealand study may serve as a prelude to a new anti-porn law set to be introduced in the country’s parliament next year. While the law would not impose an outright ban, it would severely tighten controls on New Zealanders’ access to online porn. Photo By Tākuta / Edward Hyde / Wikimedia Commons